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Andrzej
Jackowski
in Brighton studio
1992
Photograph by
George Newson |
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Interview
by Gabriel Josipovici
Originally published Modern Painters Spring 2001
Gabriel Josipovici Andrzej,
I want to start by asking you about a little etching you gave
me back in 1977, when we'd just got to know each other and you
were still at the Royal College. Do you remember? It's a tiny
thing: a fireplace with a convex mirror above it and a long
table in front of it flush with the bottom edge of the picture,
and a man leaning against the table. It's in my bedroom and
I often look at it when I wake up, and it seems to me there's
a great continuity between that and your most recent work. Do
you feel this too, or does it seem to you that your work's changed
a great deal over the past twenty years?
Andrzej Jackowski I think
since coming across the Italian Metaphysical painters Carra
and Sironi, and Morandi, I've been quite consistent in using
everyday objects like tables and beds in ordinary rooms, in
a limited, austere repertoire. What has changed is the sense
of how much detail to use. In my more recent works there's less
detail and more of an evocation of place through colour, pattern
and rhythm.
Gabriel Josipovici Was
the discovery of Carra and Sironi a revelation, then? Did it
suddenly help you see what you could do?
Andrzej Jackowski Before,
as a student at Falmouth, I was interested in Tantra and in
using graphic images as a focus for thinking. Then I broke away
from that.
Gabriel Josipovici Was
that when you turned to film-making?
Andrzej Jackowski That
was even further back. At art school in the late '60s and early
'70s there was this feeling that you weren't allowed to tell
stories in paintings. There was abstraction and only abstraction.
With the films - which were very simple, people in rooms, little
things happening, the camera panning round, discovering objects
in the half-light - I was able to start telling stories again.
But then I realised that painting can do that as well. And painting
has a stillness, an ability to plunge down vertically - you
can let time unfold and bloom in a painting. And then later
when I went up to the Royal College I began to feel that my
work was too serious. I wanted somehow to get hold of my inner
world from a different angle. I didn't feel authentic doing
my Tantric stuff, so I tried painting with my left hand, and
then I started looking at Dubuffet and art brut. Dubuffet was
a revelation. But then I realised that sort of thing wasn't
me either. I couldn't simply be naive. I couldn't cut out chunks
of myself and return to innocence. It was amazing to see that
art brut work in Lausanne - I'd gone there on a scholarship
from the College - but it was coming back and seeing the Balthuses
in Paris that was the really important thing about that trip.
Just a couple of them, at the old Musˇe d'Art Moderne, but there
was such a sense of space there and this elusive mixture of
the real and the dreamlike.
Gabriel Josipovici At that
age, at that moment in an artist's life, there's a desperate
sense that somehow one has to find a way forward, one's so open
to everything.
Andrzej Jackowski That's
true. It was a kind of fever. I remember that desperation, trying
to find the right way, rushing from one thing to another. I
suppose Balthus and the Italians and Rousseau - Balthus was
influenced by all of that, obviously - gradually made me feel
I could use space again, put figures back into space, into a
familiar environment. Dubuffet was all rather flat and decorative,
and this was like coming back to myself, my world.
Gabriel Josipovici Can
we go back to your remark about the stillness of painting, the
sense of digging down vertically. I was listening the other
night to a new piece by Judith Weir, it was part of a series
of Millennia] concerts where a contemporary composer was commissioned
to write a work in dialogue with some earlier piece. The piece
in question here was a wonderful medieval work by Pˇrotin, and
Weir said in conversation beforehand on the radio, that she
felt plainchant was very important in that it allowed one to
focus and concentrate, that too much later music was dispersed,
it rushed forward too quickly and was swallowed up by time.
That sounds very much like what you're saying about the possibilities
of painting as opposed to film.
Andrzej Jackowski I suppose
this went back to the Tantric images. But they were too alien,
not close enough to home. With the discovery of Balthus and
the Italian Metaphysicals I began to see that there are some
figures, bits of furniture and so on, that could act like a
lens for me and draw me on. They lead to a gathering of forces,
of energy, into a few simple elements. I had a dream last night
of a broken plate and things being put together again - that's
also part of the work of painting for me. I had another image
as I was driving here. It was like suddenly when the sea goes
down and you see islands rising out of the mud of your thoughts
- you can hop from one to the other. I see the figures and objects
of my paintings as things I can use to stand above the chaos
of unformed thoughts and anxieties which always whirl round
me. But I haven't answered your question.
Gabriel Josipovici You've
started to. Clearly the image and its setting are crucial. But
how do you select the right image? Sometimes - perhaps your
Fir Tree is an example - you seem to think that what you're
after is some kind of Jungian archetype. My own feeling is that
your work is actually quite odd and idiosyncratic, and that
if it's archetypal at all it's not because the image is an archetype
but for all sorts of other reasons. Take one of your most successful
paintings, The Tower of Copernicus. This empty space. These
odd items taken from photos of the camps, a perfectly ordinary
stool, shadowy walls... Do you feel there's a problem there?
I mean, do you sometimes think: great, this really is an archetypal
image, and then the picture just doesn't work, while at other
times you allow yourself to follow directions which don't seem
very propitious at first and yet suddenly start tapping powerful
sources?
Andrzej Jackowski I was
quite keen on Jung up to the time of discovering Dubuffet and
art brut. There was a feeling around at the time that the Jungian
way was the right one if one wanted to deal with images. But
then I realised that it was the ordinary everyday world, if
it was cooked in the right way, that would deliver what I was
after. The transformation was the important thing - what Freud
called the dream-work. And, looking back, that was the big change
in the mid '70s when I was in my second year at the College,
this feeling that it was the concrete here and now, me sitting
at this table, me drawing, if I could - this word cooking keeps
coming to mind - if I could transform it through work on it,
that would be the way to bring out this sense of being archetype
is the wrong word.
Gabriel Josipovici But
are there certain images which you've since started to work
at with excitement and then found they didn't yield that sense
of being?
Andrzej Jackowski Yes.
Perhaps. The Flying Man. It's OK but it got too fairy-tale-like.
Gabriel Josipovici And
too closely bound up with a literary source?
Andrzej Jackowski Yes.
Bruno Schultz. An interesting example of what we've been discussing.
You feel, I know, and perhaps I'd agree, that he's gone too
far transforming the everyday into something too legendary and
surreal.
Gabriel Josipovici It relates
to what you were saying about Dubuffet. One can't go back to
childlike innocence. It feels false. There has to be something
tougher, some awareness of the adult world, its limitations,
losses.
Andrzej Jackowski Perhaps
that's what was lacking. When you can go anywhere and do anything
it all becomes too arbitrary. When you have to work with this
actual table, this bit of wood, with time, gravity, you and
me talking, then it establishes boundaries, and that shapes
it and moves one on.
Gabriel Josipovici Can
you say something about The Tower of Copernicus?
Andrzej Jackowski That's
where it really started for me. In one sense it too had a literary
source, but it wasn't exactly that, it was Arthur Koestler's
account of the early scientists, The Sleepwalkers. There was
just one phrase there that struck me: 'Copernicus lay in his
bed and watched the stars'. And it shot me back to my own lying
in bed - I was seven or eight - and thinking about the overwhelming,
frightening, but exciting immensity of it all. Why are we here?
Where are we? What's it all about? And at the same time other
elements of the painting were waiting in my notebooks. I had
a photo of Rudolf Steiner's studio, and Steiner working on a
sculpture of Christ. It was a closed space, I opened it up to
the stars, but there was this sense of a huge figure of Christ,
some steps... But then suddenly - the spark that brings things
together - I emptied the studio in my mind and made it into
Copernicus's tower where he worked. And I had this photo of
a little hut on wheels used in a concentration camp by Jewish
prisoners, used in mockery really, there was a man tied to it,
soldiers standing around, a kind of mock sacrifice seemed to
be taking place - but I saw this hut as a kind of container.
Then, working on the painting produced the shadows - because
initially there was Copernicus standing by the little hut and
I had all sorts of cosmological signs - stars, planets - but
in the end that wasn't relevant and it was the hut and the shadows
and the sky that became central. So I took Copernicus out. It
was just before Christmas, I remember, and after Christmas I
came back to the studio and looked at it and I thought: it needs
something else, it's all there but it needs something alive,
wandering about this space - and we had a cat and I thought,
that's it, a cat. But it had to be quite still -
Gabriel Josipovici That's
what cats are so good at.
Andrzej Jackowski Exactly.
The sense that all the world is in their stillness. Alertness.
And that's what finally brought it all together. In about three
weeks. And I sent it off to the Tolly Cobold and it won first
prize.
Gabriel Josipovici It's
because you remembered your childhood sense of wonder at the
world and its immensity, and still retained it, because it still
needed expression, that all these different elements were drawn
into the painting and found their right home there.
Andrzej Jackowski It was
a big picture for me. From it all sorts of things grew, for
quite a few years. Gradually the hut became a boat, and the
two big boat pictures were quite successful, I think. Originally
the boats were used for burial, going into the other world,
but for me what was important was the reverse, not dying but
coming alive, it felt like a womb opening or a fruit shedding
its seed - something exotic and sensual.
Gabriel Josipovici So the
introduction of the hut was in a sense chance - you felt you
needed it at that point and it was there - but in a sense, too,
it had been waiting and there was a necessity about its introduction.
And then its possibilities expanded. But didn't its introduction
coincide with your new-found interest in your roots? in Poland
where your parents came from and in the refugee camp outside
Crewe where you grew up?
Andrzej Jackowski I'd been
to Poland as a teenager, but you're quite right.
Gabriel Josipovici I remember
your showing me photos of that camp. The snow. The wooden fences
and buildings. And that little boy in his cap, dark against
the snow. It could have been anywhere in Northern Europe, but
you said: That's me in the camp outside Crewe.
Andrzej Jackowski But you
know I never feel nostalgic when working with the past. I feel
on the contrary that I'm more present when past and present
are there together. When you forget the past you become a thinner
person. I've always tried to bring the parts of myself together.
Gabriel Josipovici That's
what you were saying the act of painting does for you. The image
of the broken plate and the islands. And I couldn't agree with
you more. My last novel was called Now, and it had an epigraph
from Emily Dickinson: 'So instead of getting to Heaven, at last
- I'm going, all along'. In other words the present moment is
just as much Heaven (or Hell) as what we get to at the end,
is in fact the only Heaven or Hell. But at the same time to
live with no sense of the past is to live an empty present,
which is what the heroine feels is happening to her. We need
to be open to the present but not emptied of the past.
Andrzej Jackowski Yes.
It's like with the boat. It's archaic, mythical, but it's also
Brighton, the curve of the bay as you look down on it from the
racecourse. So with the camp images, they're not just about
the past, they're about the present too. Though the camp is
in a sense the garden out of which it all grew, it Is itself
being fed all the time by the present.
Gabriel Josipovici This
takes us back to what we were saying about images, and which
are charged and which aren't, and cooking them in the right
way.
Andrzej Jackowski You can
only use them when you're ready. I had this photo of the excavation
of the boats in Denmark for years, and it was interesting to
me or I wouldn't have kept it, but at a certain moment it became
imperative to use it. Suddenly it evoked that tingle at the
back of the neck that makes you know something is alive. Or
take the boy standing by the altar - the table. It's a first
communion. I'd had the picture for twenty years and liked it,
as I had myself taken first communion as a child, but it was
only then that I was able to use it.
Gabriel Josipovici Isn't
it strange. I found this when I was writing the novel about
Bonnard. It came very quickly, in one great surge, as if it
had been waiting to be written. There was a daughter there who
never existed 'In real life', but I always knew she had to be
there, and pretty central. Where did she come from? Nothing
autobiographical, certainly, and yet I knew her better than
I knew myself, her sense of exclusion from her parents' closeness,
everything. Of course, she has a function in the novel: her
sense of exclusion mirrors the mother's, and both mirror the
reader's. But why was she waiting to emerge? Would she and the
rest of the novel have lain there unspoken and unspeaking forever
if I hadn't chanced upon a radio talk about Bonnard and his
wife's compulsive need to wash? I suppose one must make use
of what one can and the great artists are those who are able
to make use of more of what is there in all of us than the rest
of us.
Andrzej Jackowski Yes.
Kafka's letter about art being like the axe to break the frozen
ice around the heart. Certain images or bits of writing free
one, open one up, and then all sorts of connections start to
take place. We create a new space in our heads to live in, which
grows and changes.
Gabriel Josipovici I want
to move now to something slightly different. So much art today
is about using oneself, feeding one's art with one's life. What
interests me much more is the reverse: what does art do for
one's life? What I've always admired in you is that though you've
been through hard times you've always just kept painting away,
never complaining. How has the making of art helped you cope
with the vagaries of life?
Andrzej Jackowski Well,
as you said in that radio interview the other day, one puts
one foot in front of the other and moves on. Art becomes like
stepping?stones: one can move forward and avoid the water. As
we were saying about bringing the past and the present together,
I feel I won't sink as long as I paint, and will be able to
live my life.
Gabriel Josipovici When
ones dispersed and loses touch with oneself - that's what's
so anguishing.
Andrzej Jackowski Did you
see that programme about Tracey Emin? I found some of her earlier
work quite interesting, but the notion of naming something -
this is what I did, who I slept with - or pointing to the evidence
- this is the bed I slept in etc. - doesn't evoke anything in
me. As if it's the first image that comes to mind and it's immediately
accepted; there's no work on it.
Gabriel Josipovici I suppose
the answer such artists would give is that the whole notion
of delving in, of painting as excavation, is somehow passˇ,
a Western obsession with subjectivity that we've at last got
away from, a mere massag ing of the ego.
Andrzej Jackowski All work
on oneself is that, in one not very important sense. But all
good art changes us in some small or big way. It's not just
a mirror.
Gabriel Josipovici You
presumably have a lot of students who work like this or produce
videos of bits of their lives and stop there?
Andrzej Jackowski Well,
because in Brighton we're a painting school, we don't have video
students. But I don't think what we're talking about is primarily
painting versus video. Seeing some of Bill Viola's work has
been a moving experience for me.
Gabriel Josipovici Or Bruce
Nauman?
Andrzej Jackowski Yes.
I don't know if you saw the installation show at the Tate that
Stuart Morgan did? With Louise Bourgeois, Beuys, Palka - he's
Polish, marvellous. It connected on a deeper, more complex level.
With a lot of English artists it's thin soup. The intent's nice,
it's witty, but I need something more nourishing.
Gabriel Josipovici Do you
get it more from writers and filmmakers than from contemporary
artists?
Andrzej Jackowski Very
few painters really speak to me now. Some sculptors, like Beuys
and Bourgeois. But a theatre director like Kantor seems to give
me what I seek, what I'm drawn to. He uses the past, of course,
he was much more bedded in reality than Schultz -
Gabriel Josipovici Absolutely.
I was bowled over by his last piece, about his father during
the war. The entire cast under that black blanket at the end
Andrzej Jackowski The other
person I've recently been excited by is Pina Bausch.
Gabriel Josipovici The
boundaries are growing blurred, aren't they? Dance, theatre,
performance art, sculpture
Andrzej Jackowski I've
not seen Pina Bausch live, only a video of a piece called 1980.
A boy with a bowl eating porridge, speaking Polish - she uses
the stories of her dancers, blends them into something strange
and powerful. The boy eats slowly and the dancers come in and
it changes into something quite erotic and then changes again.
Always the dialogue between childhood and adulthood, how our
sophisticated dances have their roots in children's games, how
our patterns of thinking, and moving even, are set very early.
Gabriel Josipovici And
Tarkovsky? You used to be passion ate about his films.
Andrzej Jackowski I haven't
seen any for some time. But many of his images have stayed with
me. Horses in a field. Milk splashing onto a table. Mirror's
my favourite. And lvans Childhood, about the boy going between
regiments in the war. And Stalker
Gabriel Josipovici Which
I couldn't bear. So solemn and pretentious.
Andrzej Jackowski Yes.
It can get like that. But the images. Using a puddle with a
few coins and photo graphs in it. The ride on the train as a
way of passing into different time zones
Gabriel Josipovici And
yet - and you seem to feel this too - the stories he uses don't
quite work in many of the films. And marvellous images aren't
enough. We're back to what you were saying about the need to
tell stories and the difficulty. How do you feel about the connection
between the stillness you say you seek in painting and the urge
to tell stories?
Andrzej Jackowski That's
a difficult one.
Gabriel Josipovici Yes.
Andrzej Jackowski It's
something Bacon has talked a lot about. He calls it illustration.
But there's good and bad illustration, it seems to me, and it's
nothing to do with detail. Lucian Freud has some very elaborated
images but very powerful. And Bacon, in his later work, which
is very empty, very bare, still too often only produces illustrations.
So what's the secret?
Gabriel Josipovici In fiction
it's the tyranny of the anecdote. Yet of course fiction isn't
about nothing either; it's not just a formal procedure, not
even in Flaubert or Robbe-Grillet. It's again this mysterious
thing of what makes one thing good, true, profound, and another
superficial, slight. I went to see some of those short Beckett
pieces at the recent Barbican Beckett Festival. And they were
just like late Bacon - parodies of Beckett. Yet if he hadn't
done them then perhaps the better work, magical pieces like
Footfalls, would never have surfaced. There's a biographical
element in Footfalls, of course, Beckett's mother walking up
and down, up and down, at the top of the house, but transformed.
Andrzej Jackowski That's
it. It's not whether it really happened or not - as you said
about Bonnard's daughter. Sometimes you have to invent something
to take the place of something else, something that wont or
cant be said. It's sensing which images to use. There's a warmth
about the right ones.
Gabriel Josipovici Does
that call forth a corresponding warmth in you? People have often
talked of the richness and vibrancy of your canvases. Are the
two related?
Andrzej Jackowski Yes,
of course. And it doesn't come straight away. It has to be worked
at. Slowly. Eliminating the initial image. Getting rid of what's
false. The first one's just the door into the room. Then you
enter the room and find another door and another room beyond
it. Sometimes it gets too complex and you have to go back to
something simpler - you've overcooked it and can't save it,
its lost. This is what I envy writers for - you can always go
back to an earlier draft; a painter can't, the earlier draft's
lost for good.
Gabriel Josipovici On the
other hand what I feel with writing most of the time is its
thinness. You can't show the work on it as you can in painting.
But sometimes I feel that the tension between the form and the
material does generate a kind of density, richness, and sometimes
one has to accept that thinness is what the thing is going to
be about, and try to convey through that a sense of what is
missing - as I was saying about Now. Then what the piece is
really about is the silence at the end, when you've read the
last page and put it down but not closed it. Could we move on
a bit, though, and talk about the larger context? About English
culture? We both feel like resident aliens here, belonging and
not belonging. We've talked about this often enough. And about
our sense that there's something missing in current English
culture. Why do you think that is? You've grown up here, after
all, and I haven't. Yet I sense in your work something that
for want of a better word I'd call a European quality, that
I warm to.
Andrzej Jackowski There
was a review of my work recently by John McEwen, in which he
talked about my Polishness. As if that somehow made it safe,
other, of no relevance to what was going on here. By describing
me like that I felt he was avoiding any real engagement with
my work. He'd labelled me and that was that.
Gabriel Josipovici Jackowski
has nothing to do with us. But art is a human activity, not
a national one.
Andrzej Jackowski Yes.
In Europe certain things are accepted as a way of thinking,
a basis from which to start. Whereas in England they're dismissed,
if they're seen at all, as 'avant-garde' or just uninterestingly
foreign.
Gabriel Josipovici Why,
do you think?
Andrzej Jackowski I really
don't know. It's true I was brought up in this country, but
living in the refugee camp till I was eleven makes me feel more
Polish than English. I'm pretty much bedded down in something
else.
Gabriel Josipovici It's
funny, we both live here and work here but don't feel particularly
at home here. Yet we wouldn't be more at home elsewhere. Were
not exiles, like Nabokov. You may feel more Polish than English
but you don't feel Polish. But why do you think England is so
resistant to the things that really interest and move us?
Andrzej Jackowski It wasn't
the case in the time of Shakespeare, was it? When did it happen?
Is it the war, do you think?
Gabriel Josipovici The
Napoleonic wars, perhaps, and then the industrial revolution.
I feel English literature up to Wordsworth is a European literature,
though it can be extremely local, and all the better for it.
But from 1815 on it becomes 'English' in a new sense and it
loses me. And these 'Victorian values' are what people want
to go back to today, not just Thatcherites but all those novelists
and readers who hanker after Dickens. I'm sure you're right
about the war though. The trauma of that led to a kind of pulling
back. They'd protected their shores from invasion. The only
country in Europe not to suffer the horrors of occupation, collaboration,
all the rest - Switzerland is a different case. Those horrors
forced people in Europe to think more deeply about what it is
to be human. Of course it was wonderful what Britain did - without
that neither of us would be here to talk about it. But culturally
what seems to have happened is that a sort of Little Englander
feeling gained ground. And an embracing of American culture
that has remained innocent and locked into an ideal of Progress
that denies the tragic. Graham Greene caught that wonderfully
in The Quiet American. So perhaps in both countries there's
been a sort of cultural amnesia. A rejection of all that modernism
stood for, a nostalgia for Victorian values and Christmas puddings.
And when Dada is regurgitated in present?day art everyone here
is amazed and impressed - what a sensation!
Andrzej Jackowski What
we're upset about is a cultural climate which ignores or belittles
the things we're interested in or feel to be part of us.
Gabriel Josipovici I don't
want to go along with the Alvarez theory that only repressive
regimes produce great art. But there is a sense in which English
culture, post-war, has repressed the tragic. I love the work
of Israeli writers like Yaakov Shabtai and Aharon Appelfeld,
not because they deal with the war or the Holocaust but because
they have a large vision of man, they are concerned with what
I feel are serious things. And they don't moralise. As the current
Iranian cinema, for instance, which, strangely, is so vital,
doesn't moralise. English and American artists, on the other
hand, can be funny and clever, but it's all so ironic and so
moralistic. In your terms it's too thin to be nourishing. But
let's not end with these generalisations. A new millennium has
dawned, but for you as for me, I suppose, there are only the
old problems you've been struggling with all your artistic life?
Andrzej Jackowski Yes.
I've recently started doing some drawings where space is being
pushed back more. I feel I have to bring in the street somehow,
to diversify and let new images carry me, and a more open space.
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