A hacker in the garden of Art
After an unexpected removal from the garage in Chmielna, Monika has found a new place for her activity, literally and figuratively out: in the gateway of the ART gallery. In the area in-between, on the fringes of art.
Monika refers to her gallery as a “hybrid’, taking a leap into the sphere of the grotesque. The grotesque is a female tautology. It contains subversive potential, disrupting the framework of what’s constant and unalterable in art, forever fixed by the claims of the Logos. In the case of the ZOO gallery that potential is revealed by the way, indirectly.
The ZOO gallery, invented by Monika, is completely disinterested. Her invitations to show are disinterested, free of the relation of power inherent in the relationship between artist and curator. Such activity is by definition potentially subversive. I might repeat after Helene Cixous that Monika is building a new place for the ZOO gallery “in order to wipe everything out, smash into pieces the existing institutions, blow up law and laugh her head off about “truth”. (is that not the “emergency exit” of the Ministry of Culture officials?)
Monika does not create a hierarchy or a system, doesn’t classify. In the small area in Chmielna, free of the discourse of power, various languages coexisted, from pop-cultural pastiche of religious art to comics and storyboards. Her language, the language of her text – to quote Cixous again – does not enclose, or transfer, or stop; it enables. She gives: I perceive Monika’s project in terms of the “economics of gift”, and not the male-centered economics of exchange, as she “doesn’t >know< what she gives, does not measure her gift; she doesn’t do it in the hope of receiving something in exchange and doesn’t give what she hasn’t got. She gives more; without the assurance that she will get something back, however unexpected. She adds something to life, to thinking, to change. That calculation can not be made with economic concepts.
So what is the status of the ZOO at the Art gallery, which is subject to the rules of the marketplace? The latest show, as the author herself says, sums up nearly two years of the ZOO’s activity in Chmielna. Apart from the artists originally associated with the ZOO, Monika Zawadzka, graduate of the department of graphic arts of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, has invited two collaborators of the Art gallery: Agnieszka Brzeżańska, with her creative dialogue with pop culture, and Tomek Karabowicz, who paints unsettling pastiches of the Neue Sachlichkeit, seemingly very correct (he does the most traditional genre of painting there is – portrait), close to the poetics of gueer.
Monika’s decision to appear in a space that’s alien to her on principle, not underground, not off, and Wojciech Tuleya’s decision to invite her artists, are on both sides gestures of transgression and of risk. Monika’s graphic, cold, computerish work, indifferent to commercial success, encounters and clashes with the seductively pretty work of the artists associated with the Art gallery. Yet it is exactly the two curators’ decision to cooperate that exposes both the stereotyped quality of such thinking, and the points the two have in common.
Monika’s gesture can be compared to that of a hacker. According to Ewa Witkowska, “the word was introduced in the 1960s as an approving and appreciative term for people who find gaps and errors in computer operating systems.” The ethics of the first hackers was based on disinterestedness. “Hacking” is also a mode of thinking that “breaks into” a system and questions its credibility. In this sense, writes Witkowska, the term “hacking” is close in meaning to “deconstruction”, with an additional, subversive touch.
Monika’s work as curator and graphic designer in one person is some sort of game patching from the area of female digital art, unrestrained by any form of discipline. It consists in introducing changes into the original codes of computer games and thus giving the games a new meaning. “Thanks to some companies allowing access to the source codes of their games,” writes Ewa Witkowska, “patches (also known as skins, wads, mods or shapes) have come into being: additions to existing games, changing their original code, creating new elements of graphics, sound etc.” Thanks to the creative cooperation and courage of two people so far moving in different and alien spheres, it has turned out that in the seeming monolith of a commercial gallery there is room for playing with codes, for questioning the one established model of art and its audience.
