Love of the invisible girl
Works from 1990 - 1999
In 1997 Zuzanna Janin made one of her invisible self-portrayals. Sweet girl (Zuzanna) is not so much an image as an after-image of the artist’s figure. Her figure is modeled from a copper wire net. Sometimes Janin covers the wire figure with a layer of cotton candy. Later, when the cotton candy dries off, it shows again the wire skeleton covered with a candy sediment. Then a figure of the Sweet girl is constructed again from the empty space circumscribed with copper wire. It’s a trace in space, which the artist would fill, if she would stood in place of her sculpture.
Zuzanna Janin works like a photographer, who cruises with a camera around an object, which she wants to depict. She seeks new perspectives, angles and close-ups. What she is trying to capture is her own image. Zuzanna Janin’s art is like a project of reconstructing a subject – finding a self-image among thousands of others. A photographer captures objects’ images. Zuzanna concentrates on the invisible, because invisibility is a domain of imagination. She agrees with Lacan, for whom “imagination is a sphere of primal identification with the self-image (a child sees its own reflection in the mirror and therefore gains an identity based on its mirror representation).”
Whole series of work compile for Zuzanna’s self-portrayal. She presents it in a number of shows and in various forms – from dispersed fragments she builds a three dimensional (and unfinished) representation of her identity. Each one of those projects presents one of its many aspects. The artists seeks for it in her body, in surrounding space, sexuality, femininity, family relations, smudged traces of existence and finally in her desires. Images, which reappear in Janin’s works have a common denominator: balancing on the edge of visibility. Works’ matter is only a starting point – a language, that changes an elusive and blurry existential experience into a discourse of consciousness.
Zuzanna Janin started sketching her self-portrayal from the familiar places. In the first half of the 90s she created a cycle of Covers for her apartment and studio – places important for her identification as an artist. Covers made out of nylon and silk were like negatives of dwellings, translucent packages for space. In Covers Zuzanna talked about specific places, but she represented their immaterial element – space, which was objectified and shown as an object.
In a series of Armours she used the same strategy to describe her own body. Zuzanna modeled spatial reflections of fragments of her figure in sheets of glass-paper, making a sort of package (armour) for her own body.
In a cycle Follow Me, Change Me, It’s Time Zuzanna superimposed photos laminated in transparent plastic. The photographs showed fragments of bodies (arms, legs, bellies) not only her own but also of other women from her family: grandmother, mother, daughter. Layers of superimposed photos form sequences that spread not only in space but also in time. The time captured in the representation stretched over generations of women related to the artist: emotionally and genetically.
In other works Janin fixed elusive traces of individual existence by laminating cut off nail, drops of blood, hair, bits and pieces of skin or even layers of make-up taken off her face, which looked like her mask or reflection (similar to Saint Veronica’s shroud...).
In an installation What Hell, What Heaven Zuzanna used a machine for producing artificial fog. Enclosed gallery spaces were filled with a thick fog. The floor was covered with sponge. A video projection accompanied some of the “fog shows”. Blurry, deformed film presented a dancing figure of the artist. Some other time a lightbox, plexiglass wall was arranged, on which Zuzanna displayed names of all the people she had met in her life (and was able to remember).
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In see-through sculptures from the Real Virtuality cycle a shape is modeled from a net of welt brass rods. These figurative works represent people and objects: artist’s own figures, her legs, hands and hips – often over scaled and enlarged. Just like in the case of Sweet girl wire skeletons are covered with a cotton candy body. At times they are accompanied by video projections. The cycle’s title recalls the three dimensional coordinates web, that defines virtual objects created in the computer’s memory. The recollection is correct, except the relation between virtuality and reality is exactly opposite than the one on computer screen. Virtual reality is a theoretical reality, that at least potentially might exist. Real virtuality is a hypothesis (image, representation) that becomes flesh.
Zuzanna Janin’s works can be understood as various ways of visual self-recognition. This discernment has its own narrative: it starts from the places, continues in the continuity of generations, in memory, returns often to the body issues, passing of time, finally achieves the figurative representation. Where is it going to fulfill? It seems that in love, as all the traces lead right there. In her most recent work a love discourse has taken a central place. Zuzanna collects all the elements of this discourse. Out of copper wire she constructs fragments of love’s body: see-through “really virtual” tongues, hearts, heads of the kissing lovers, their hips during the intercourse. She describes a dialectics of sex and emotions by screening a porn movie on the big, see-through heart. She depicts intimacy, innocence and kinkyness: collecting leaflets advertising prostitutes, which she exhibits with her nubile daughter’s drawings and her own intimate pictorial diary titled: homefuckingiskillingprostitution.
She builds towers out of engagement rings fixed on the plexiglass rods (Ring Towers) – melancholic monuments to the girly romanticism. Finally she makes a true love declaration, which is the essence of it all: she laminates aches in the shape of the inscription “I love you too.” Roland Barthes has written in his “Fragments of love discourse”: “....by saying I love you I keep on repeat it, like Nietzschean fool, to everything within the perception of my love.” Love is a desire, a desire for the Other, and desire – as psychoanalysis proved – a fundamental of consciousness. Zuzanna Janin attempts to find an image of her own Self. “When is this Self born? When a man moves from a contemplation of a subject, in which he looses himself to Desire. When through Desire he is being back in himself.” Zuzanna Janin recognizes her own image in love. We, on the other hand, recognize ourselves in her story. A mythologized portrayal of Zuzanna is open for our projections, it becomes a frame in which a viewer can place his/her own image.
Stach Szabłowski, Trans. Ewa Kępa
Annotation
1 Roland Barthes Fragmenty dyskursu miłosnego, Warszawa 1999, s.147
2 Michał Paweł Markowski Dyskurs i pragnienie. Wstęp do: Roland Barthes Fragmenty Dyskursu Miłosnego, Warszawa 1999, s.12
