Kuba Bakowski's Other Flying Objects

"What's that?" a frightened voice keeps asking in a loop in Kuba Bąkowski's video work. On the screen, in a dark void, a pungent, purple cloud appears - and starts growing. The short film, lasting some 15 seconds, brings to mind the images of man's confrontation with the Unknown, or perhaps even Alien, according to the "close encounters" iconography defined by science-fiction film. In fact, the Air Sculptures and Other Flying Objects exhibition as a whole is a reference to SF. Presenting art in the science fiction convention, Bąkowski, like the genre's authors, looks ahead, entering a space of futurological speculation. SF authors create simulations, anchored in the present, of the future development of civilisation and culture. Bąkowski does the same, building a vision of the future for his own use and placing himself within his own hypothesis. The thus constructs his private science fiction, sending himself off into the future, which becomes a working model for recognising the author's position in the present.
In his works, usually video installations, Kuba Bąkowski explores the area between reality and its media representation. In this grey zone of collective experience, discerning between the real and the mediated and simulated has been increasingly difficult. The border area of fuzzy ontology and fluid definitions has been growing wider and wider, something that has been noticed not only by Bąkowski but by virtually all cultural critics, notably Baudrillard. Bąkowski feels at home here, playing out, with a perverse sense of humour, the ambiguity and fuzziness of the notion of reality, in an era in which reality has been almost completely devoured by its own media representations and digital look-alikes.
One of Bąkowski's greatest fascinations is television, the omnipresent, all-penetrating picture that can be received literally from the air. He has explored the phenomenon in a number of works using "snow," the image generated by a TV set not receiving any logical signal, as well as test cards, the abstract, geometric patterns used to regulate the TV picture, and broadcast during the night break. In a way, test cards are the essence of television - the time when they are broadcast is the moment when the medium stops transmitting its usual information feed, a moment when television suspends its intermediary function and shows itself. The night hours, during which TV stations broadcast their tuning signals, whose patterns in most cases (also with the Polish broadcasters) are mandala-like circles, is also a time when television reveals its meditative potential. Bąkowski exploits it, for instance, in the installation TV Mandala. The work's central element was a natural-size photograph showing the author lying on the floor in the position of a yogic asana. On his bellybutton, ie in the place where, meditation practitioners believe, one's energy is concentrated, a video projector was mounted. It projected on the ceiling a rotating image of the TV test card - an electronic mandala that could be interpreted as an emanation of the meditating protagonist's mind.
Among the artist's most interesting projects was TV Zero Zones, where Bąkowski penetrated into an actual on-air television broadcast. The work was a collaboration with TVP, the Polish public TV. In October and November 2004, Bąkowski every night visited the TV screens of the viewers of the TVP 2 channel. He would appear after the day's schedule had ended, performing simple physical exercises, rolling on a wheeled office chair, or doing the yoga asanas, all against the background of the test card mandala. TV Zero Zones was Poland's first project that used television not as a medium but as the fabric of a work of art itself. The work was the fulfilment of a dream to enter the non-physical space of TV transmission, the realization of a phantasm to get through to the "other side of the mirror," whose role was played here by the TV screen.
The desire to get to the other side of the line separating reality from its simulation is also present in the Air Sculptures and Other Flying Objects exhibition. This time, the line runs between the present-day media-, technology-, and information-defined civilisation and its hypothetical future expansion. The shape of Bąkowski's futurological vision is influenced by the sci-fi culture, which is both the inspiration here and the object of pastiche. The artist himself appears in the exhibition through a self-portrait; he was the model for the human figure in the work Boy and His Dog. The hyper-realistic sculpture shows a wanderer taken straight out of a cyberpunk dystopia. Dressed in an anti-radiation suit and carrying oxygen tanks, the figure may be the survivor of a global ecological disaster, or even a cosmic hobo wandering through the solar system - in the company of a dog, of course.
Boy and His Dog resemble characters from post-apocalyptic anti-utopia movies in the vein of the Mad Max, stories whose protagonists live in a post-catastrophe world, recycling the remnants of a fallen civilisation and building peculiar hybrids of advanced technologies and primitive, improvised survival techniques. The question of technology plays an important role in many of Bąkowski's works. The artist often reaches for a convention that could be described low-tech cyberpunk: the human being is in a state of symbiosis with technology here, while at the same time being oppressed by it. Importantly, the world of technology manifests itself in Bąkowski's art in its non-advanced version, in the shape of simple instruments and household appliances - like in the video installation Aviation Tests where two people (including the artist himself) try to fly using a vacuum cleaner and hairdryers as propulsion engines. Bąkowski uses similarly profane means to build for Air Sculptures and Other Flying Objects a flotilla of interplanetary spaceships, probes, and rockets. The miniature spacecraft are built with drugs - tablets, pills, antibiotic capsules, and other medications. The household medicine cabinet assumes cosmic proportions. And vice versa, interplanetary scale gets reduced to the personal dimension - a ready-to-hand armada of pills and tablets that can be swallowed at any moment.
In the work The Light One In the Air (the only non-premiere work shown at Air Sculptures.), Bąkowski pays an ironic homage to Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, an icon of the ideology of technological progress and human expansion. The Light One In the Air is one of the eponymous "air sculptures." The astronaut's nonexistent body (as was revealed in 1984, his body never found from the plane crash that killed him) is recalled here through a T-shirt bearing his image. The empty shirt is filled with air being pumped by a small electric fan, making the impression that someone has it on. Bąkowski invokes Gagarin's spirit - or perhaps only manipulates the viewer, skilfully pulling the strings of imagination. And indeed, we find a cord in the Light One In the Air installation, exposing the artist as the "master of puppets." The cord is tied to the T-shirt, right where Gagarin is baring his teeth in a smile. The cord's other end, of course, is held by the artist, made present by a small photo hanging on the wall.
Another important part of the Air Sculptures and Other Flying Objects exhibition is an accompanying project, carried out in Warsaw's public space, called Earth Museum on Eros 433. It consists of three posters displayed on the city's citylight advertising panels. Bąkowski uses here original NASA material: photographs, made by the space probes Galileo and Pioneer, showing several solar-system celestial bodies photographed from close (on cosmic scale) distance. Bąkowski adds to those images his own short texts that change the scientific material into a futurological vision - the advertising posters of the era of space travel. Bąkowski's works are ads from the future, futurological speculations approximating facts from the civilisation's hypothetical future - events such as the opening of an Earth Museum on a distant asteroid, the reconstruction of one of Mars's moons, or the opening of a new spatio-temporal channel.
Bąkowski's exhibition can be interpreted as a test of imagination potential. To what extent is our imagination, stirred up the artist, able to transform nothing into something - for instance, patterns of antibiotic pills into spaceships, or an abstract, mobile image into a UFO apparition? To what extent are we willing to succumb to the illusion present in the artistic game, the suggestion that there exists something that doesn't (yet) exist? Bąkowski shifts to the field of art the questions asked by SF authors: does the spatial and temporal distance achieved by science fiction create an interesting perspective for observing the "here and now"? Can a techno-civilisation afford metaphysics - and to what extent can science play its role? Bąkowski uses one of the most popular sci-fi strategies, which is to intensify existing trends and take the civilisational narrative further. Science fiction creates the possibility of designing the future on your own. Kuba Bąkowski takes advantage of this possibility by constructing a private futurology. This is a speculation on an (even more) advanced civilisation, but built using simple, "household" means - in Bąkowski's space opera, space capsules are made with cardboard, spaceships with pills, and sci-fi visions are generated on a simple PC computer. The artist doesn't attempt to conceal the "special effects" used in the exhibition, wilfully reveals the mechanics of his science-fiction simulations. Air Sculptures and Other Flying Objects is a hybrid exhibition in which references to the tradition of contemporary art (eg modernist, sculptural geometric abstraction, or classic video art) overlap with clichés borrowed from sci-fi culture and pastiches of SF conventions. Avantgarde and modernist art meets SF in a common fascination with modernity and progress. Bąkowski is as much fascinated with civilisational and technological progress as he is worried by it, because constant progress threatens to leave the individual behind and alienate him from the present. The artist's reaction is to run forward. He builds his own future, thus regaining an at least illusion of being in control of the ever more elusive reality.

Stach Szabłowski

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