| What is Earth Symposium took place at Orensanz Foundation on May 8 in New York City. For this symposium, What is Earth, I wanted to share with you some of my thoughts about the topic of “earth.” I didn’t talk about the globe versus the universe, the astronomical, mathematical, physical, or chemical, factors related to the dimension, shape, and structure of the earth, for example. Nor did I talk about issues that preoccupy our thoughts today. That is, the issues of disasters, escalating military conflicts, abuses of human rights engineered by states, terrorist organizations, or domestic situations, global economic calamities on the scale not experienced before, which surely will require interventions to radically refocus and reinterpret those problems. |
Wlodzimierz Ksiazek
What is Earth Symposium took place at Orensanz Foundation on May 8 in New York City.
For this symposium, What is Earth, I wanted to share with you some of my thoughts about the topic of “earth.” I didn’t talk about the globe versus the universe, the astronomical, mathematical, physical, or chemical, factors related to the dimension, shape, and structure of the earth, for example. Nor did I talk about issues that preoccupy our thoughts today. That is, the issues of disasters, escalating military conflicts, abuses of human rights engineered by states, terrorist organizations, or domestic situations, global economic calamities on the scale not experienced before, which surely will require interventions to radically refocus and reinterpret those problems.
My remarks tackled issues of my personal attempt to find ways to understand the world, to try to understand my position in the world, and by that, to keep reminding myself that there is a reason for our existence in this particular time/space, and that there is a hope for more clarity of comprehending the sense, aura, the idea of earth in the light of evolution of evolving history. An attempt to understand is an intellectual concept, since we know that our planet is a mysterious formation so enigmatic that so far nobody can figure out from where it arrived, for what purpose and how it was made. However, as long as we are intellectually and artistically creative, new discoveries will emerge. And we just may keep coming closer to grasp what is unattainable—to answer the simplest and the most important questions: Was it possible? Is it possible? Will it be possible?
With these basic questions, we are in a similar situation to Veronique, the main character in Krzysztof Kieslewski’s film The Double Life of Veronique, who, after a long, complicated, meandering, confusing, annoying process, finally detects and finds the Puppeteer, the man, the symbol, and metaphor, and her link to her “double,” only to be challenged by his asking, “If it was possible? …. Whether it was psychologically possible?”
The case of “possibilities” cited here from Kieslewski’s film, of course, is an example. We face those questions in a variety of shapes and forms related to all the issues we can possible imagine, in sum, related to one idea: the idea of the possibility to understand.
Let me now present you with a quotation from Michael Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge, which I’ve found to be very much apropos to what I’m trying to articulate in relationship to strategies of the quest for understanding.“For many years now historians have preferred to turn their attention to long periods, as if, beneath the shifts and changes of political events, they were trying to reveal the stable, almost indestructible system of checks and balances, the irreversible processes, the constant readjustments, the underlying tendencies that gather force, and are then suddenly reversed after centuries of continuity, the movements of accumulation and slow saturation, the great silent, motionless bases that traditional history has covered with a thick layer of events.…
“And the great problem presented by such historical analyses is not how continuities are established, how a single pattern is formed and preserved, how for so many different, successive minds there is a single horizon, what mode of action and what substructure is implied by the interplay of transmissions, resumptions, disappearances, and repetitions, how the origin may extend its way well beyond itself to that conclusion that is never given—the problem is no longer one of tradition, of tracing a line, but one of division, of limits; it is no longer one of lasting foundations, but one of transformations that serve as new foundations, the rebuilding of foundations.…
“In short, the history of thought, of knowledge, of philosophy, of literature seems to be seeking, and discovering, more and more discontinuities, whereas history itself appears to be abandoning the irruption of events in favor of stable structures.”
As an artist, I do my research and go through the design process and production of my artwork, taking into my artistic laboratory selected fragments of a larger body, as some tissues to be analyzed under a microscope. In that sense, I am able to use that information, which emerges in the process of construction of my painting to function as a vehicle for my artistic expression, my artistic commentaries, and my interpretations.
My paintings, large-scale compositions made in oil and cold wax on canvas or in encaustic technique and my paintings as an installation represent examples of my artistic research of the last several years, and are governed by similar quests, hesitations, even anxieties to those articulated similarly by historians, philosophers, and scientists. Continuing attempts of trying to grasp and express through my art and the process of creating—the world which surrounds me and the earth I am part of—give me an optimism that my work will continue to engage, and therefore, to endure as part of the evolving history of art, history of culture, history of earth.
