The presentation of the sculptures created by Michał Jackowski, the winner of the Audience Award at NordArt 2022, is prepared under the title “Antique Games” and exhibited in his individual Pavilion, designed especially for NordArt 2023.
The works presented at NordArt 2023 fall within the genre of postmodernist game (or play) of the sculptor with both ancient forms, as well as those borrowed from 20th-century popular culture around the world. They resemble a morality play, embedded in an artistic form, through which the artist is asking questions about universal values and principles constituting the basic foundation of discovering the truth about a human being.
It is an attempt to visually describe the contemporary culture, dominated by consumerism (or consumptionism), related to the utilitarian approach towards the world and hedonistic materialism, which, in turn, results in nihilism following slowly in their footsteps.
The artist draws the viewer into a search for the road to morality, understood as a formal set of norms and laws, as well as emphasizes the significance of the autonomy of the human being/person as an axiological value.
The inspiration for the authorial concept of the substantive “message” of the Michał Jackowski Pavilion was the group of six statues by Michelangelo Buonarroti, created in the 16th century for the tomb of Pope Julius II. The four “unfinished” (non finito) marble sculptures of Slaves by Michelangelo, in which male nudes barely emerge from the blocks of the Carrara marble, were carved around 1525-1530 and at present they are exhibited in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence.
Due to their seemingly unfinished sculptural form, they are interpreted by art critics as a conscious form of artistic expression. However, the substantive message transpiring form Jackowski’s project at NordArt 2023 was influenced the most by two other sculptures by Michelangelo, carved around 1513: The Dying Slave and The Rebellious Slave, which are currently on display at the Paris Louvre.
Jackowski’s sculptures are located in the space of the three rooms of the building designed in accordance with the enfilade system and based on a Greek temple. The sculptures are accompanied by multimedia projections in the metopes of the frieze and in the niche at the end of the last room.
By combining the sculptures with the projections, the artist created a very coherent narrative, proposing an ironic game of decoding traditional myths as metaphors alluding to contemporary consumerism.
Jackowski’s offer to the contemporary post-modern viewer consumer (who often exhibits a predilection for deconstruction) is that of immersion into the process of interpreting new meanings encoded in the figurative compositions made from the Carrara marble and cast in bronze – yet based on the ancient Greek and Roman tradition.
The biggest sculptural composition in terms of size, located in the middle of the “temple,” is entitled Sticky Pink and it depicts the pleasure of the meeting between Man and Man: a male and a female, sculptural “masks” or faces joined with each other through their eyes. The faces are placed on the opposite ends of the extended chewing gum (composed in the pop-art convention).
Despite the outward interpretation mentioned above, the artistic substantive message of the whole composition, so dominant in Jackowski’s works, is the suggestion of a very characteristic consumerist attitude in its eternal lack of fulfilment – since it is a quest that cannot be satisfied. The work refers to experiencing a sense of painful ambivalence, expressed in the consumer’s pursuit of the maximization of pleasure, who is simultaneously aware that in the end, no matter the effort, the horizon of gratification is unattainable.
The multimedia presentation, embedded in the architectural structure of the exposition, underscores the message in a very suggestive way. It shows a person/male nude who, initially enjoying a hedonistic and pleasure-oriented play with the pink matter, becomes overwhelmed under the pressure of greedily collected impressions.
Finally, he is being gradually ensnared by the said matter, turning into the form of a cocoon, becoming a contemporary version of Narcissus, enchanted by his hedonistic, egocentric, narcissistic and consumerist “I.” It is a state in which, as Zygmunt Bauman wrote in his work Globalization of 2000, “desire does not desire fulfilment. On the contrary, desire desires desire.” This desire, illustrated by Jackowski with an essentially postmodernist game or play with the forms, both ancient ones and those drawn from 20th-century pop culture, especially American, becomes a forceful morality play.
The busts placed in the four corners of the main room of the Pavilion: Why She…, Dreaming of Him, Yesterday and Narcissus refer directly, through speech bubbles, to the greatest masters of American pop-art, with Roy Lichtenstein at the head. In a similar vein, the sculpture Fast Food invites the viewers to visit the temple. It has a wooden head of the antique Venus, like a roll of a fast-food sandwich, stuffed with an English newspaper and set in a nest of salad made of bronze American one-dollar bills. It evokes the sculpture Floor Burger created by Claes Oldenburg in 1962.
The same one-dollar bills appear in the exceptionally expressive sculpture entitled Boom, made from the Carrara marble and bronze. The banknotes serve as a metaphor of the contemporary consumer, with his unappeasable and destructive demands referring the viewer to the insatiable hunger of Erysichthon.
The “transfigured” temple – the temple of consumerism, dedicated to Man and telling the story of the human being in the contemporary world dominated by consumption, is opened and closed by two pairs of sculptures. Two torsos (seemingly suggestive of jigsaw puzzle blocks), female and male entitled The Body Facade (Woman) and The Body Facade (Man) are inviting the viewers to enter the temple. Made with the Carrara marble and gold-plated on the inside, they are placed in the vestibule of the temple.
Further, the exhibition is closed by two male busts (also in the form of jigsaw blocks with gold-plated insides) located in the third and last room of the temple. They are made with black and white marble and are entitled Empty Gold and Empty Gold Black. They seem to refer to the figure of the ruler of Phrygia, Midas, with his fatal “golden touch,” but at the same time touch upon an essential issue in the modern world, that is the discourse on the new multiculturality, postcolonialism and sexuality in a pop-art manifestation. They might indicate new vectors of inspiration and directions for Jackowski’s subsequent “antique games.”
Prof. Jan Wiktor Sienkiewicz
Curator
