Vernissage: January 31, 2020 at 6 PM, GGM1,
Dates: 03.07.2020 – 29.08.2020
Venue: Gdańsk City Gallery 1, Piwna 27/29 Street, Gdańsk
Artist: Marek Wodzisławski
Curator: Gabriela Warzycka-Tutak
Graphic identification: Marcel Kaczmarek
The World Turned Inside Out
“To others, the universe seems decent because decent people have gelded eyes. That is why they fear lewdness. They are never frightened by the crowing of a rooster or when strolling under a starry heaven. In general, people savor the ‘pleasure of the flesh’ only on condition that they be insipid.”
Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye*
Absolute pleasure, bliss. Affirmation. Elusive, non-verbal, half-liquid, spilling out in the landscape, inundating cities like thick fog.
The geometry of the sky and the sun often prevents us from seeing the nuances. After the sunset, the body can finally liberate itself from the pressure to trace the sun, it can go into the state of transgression.
Liberation from the rein of physiology, hormones and physics allows the tide of bliss to flood the head, without looking back. Stunned, it falls into the arms of abyss.
Do you desire me, will you eat me? Eat me… “… we devour each other, while being irrevocably doomed to being devoured ourselves. Our destiny is to exist owing to nourishment in the form of other creatures, and to become nourishment for others.”* A cosmic feast in an instrumental relationship, in which you hear: I WILL EAT YOU, while the words EAT ME are echoed in bliss.
The bull was distrustful, the fight took a sluggish course.
Jouissance is a lens that allows us to see the world gone monstrous. It is a critical passage, untouchable in its sacredness, that tells the story of a world greater than the human world. The story of a place situated somewhere on the peripheries of culture for many, unknown from direct experience, but visited in the imagination, where the human – animal border becomes slightly blurred. Human being becomes nothing more than one of a great many species.
In an era brimming with images, ideologies, consumption, overproduction of thoughts, actions, words – what do we consider a taboo? What does the dimension look like that we are unable to wade through? It often happens that, in our thoughts, we move on the forbidden side, we teeter on the edge, straying, sliding into the night.
How nice it would be to see the sun in profile.*
* Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1987), 48.
* Jolanta Brach-Czaina, Szczeliny istnienia, Metafizyka mięsa (Warsaw: PIW, 1992), 226.
* Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories, trans. Chris Turner (London, New York: Verso, 1990), 203.
