Krzysztof Wodiczko
Encyclopedia
Krzysztof Wodiczko, born April 16th 1943, is an artist renowned for his large-scale slide
and video projections on architectural facades and monuments. He has realized more than 80 such public projections in Australia, Austria, Canada, England, Germany, Holland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States.
War, conflict, trauma, memory, and communication in the public sphere are some of the major themes of an oeuvre that spans four decades. His practice, known as Interrogative Design, combines art and technology as a critical design
practice in order to highlight marginal social communities and add legitimacy to cultural issues that are often given little design attention.
He lives and works in New York City
and teaches in Cambridge, Massachusetts
where he is currently professor in residence of art, design, and the public domain for the Harvard Graduate School of Design
(GSD). Wodiczko was formerly director of the Interrogative Design Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) where he was a professor in the Visual Arts Program since 1991. He also teaches as Visiting Professor in the Psychology Department at the Warsaw School of Social Psychology.
, was born in 1943 during the Warsaw ghetto uprising
and grew up in post-war, Soviet-occupied, Poland. In 1967 while still a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw
, he began collaborating with director Jozef Patkowski and the Experimental Studio on sound performances. He graduated in 1968 with an M.F.A. degree in industrial design
and worked for the next two years at UNITRA, Warsaw, designing popular electronic products. From 1970 until his emigration to Canada in 1977, he designed professional optical, mechanical, and electronic instruments at the Polish Optical Works.
In 1969, Wodiczko collaborated with Andrzej Dluzniewski and Wojchiech Wybieralski on a design proposal for a memorial to victims of Majdanek concentration camp in Poland. He also performed with Personal Instrument in the streets of Warsaw and participated in the Biennale de Paris as a leader of a group architectural project. He was a teaching assistant for two years, 1969–70, in the Basic Design Program at the Academy of Fine Arts before moving to the Warsaw Polytechnic Institute
where he taught until 1976. Throughout the 1970s he continued his collaborations on sound and music performances with various musicians and artists.
In 1971, Wodiczko began work on Vehicle, which he tested the following year on the streets of Warsaw. In 1972 he created his first solo installation: Corridor at Galeria Wspolczesna, Warsaw. The following year he began exhibiting with Galeria Foksal, Warsaw. In 1975, Wodiczko traveled for the first time to the United States where he was artist-in-residence at the University of Illinois, Urbana and exhibited at N.A.M.E. Gallery, Chicago. He participated again in the Biennale de Paris, this time as a solo artist.
In 1976, Wodiczko began a two-year artist-in-residence program at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Canada. He emigrated from Poland in 1977, establishing residency in Canada teaching at the University of Guelph
in Ontario
, and began working with New York art dealer Hal Bromm. In 1979 he taught at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto
and continued teaching at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design until 1981. From 1981-1982 he was artist in residence at the South Australian School of Art (currently part of the University of South Australia
in Adelaide
). In 1983, Wodiczko established residency in New York City teaching at the New York Institute of Technology
, Old Westbury. The following year, he received Canadian citizenship and in 1986 resident-alien status in the United States. He began teaching at MIT in 1991, maintaining his residence in New York City while working in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In an often cited example, Wodiczko projected an image of the hand of Ronald Reagan, in formal dress shirt with cufflinks, posed in the pledge of allegiance, onto the north face of the AT&T Long Lines Building in the financial district of New York City four days before the presidential election of 1984. “By creating a spectacle in which a fragment of the governing body, the presidential hand, was asked to stand for corporate business,” writes Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, “Wodiczko offered a suggestion about the class identity of those forces that – hidden under the guise of God, State, and Nation – are the actual receivers of the pledge of allegiance.” In subsequent projections, the artist layered iconic representations of global capitalism, militarism, and consumerism with images of fragments of the body to suggest a consideration of our relation to public space that is contingent both to history and social and political ideologies of the present.
Art historian Patricia C. Phillips writes of the artist’s work: “In his public projects of the past decade, Krzysztof Wodiczko has conducted a series of active mediations that combine significant public sites, tough subjects, and aggressive statements that are only possible because of their temporality. He applies the immediate force of performance to social and political problems. The rhythms of extenuating events and the brevity of each installation give his projected episodes the intensity of public, political demonstrations. His thoroughly staged, illuminated images often require months of preparation, yet they seem like surprise attacks – fiercely focused parasitic invasions of renowned institutional hosts.”
Perhaps the best-known and most popular intervention of this nature was performed when the artist created a projection for Nelson’s column in Trafalgar Square, London in 1985. The South African government was at that time petitioning the British government for financial support. Wodiczko turned one of his projectors away from Nelson’s column projecting a swastika onto the tympanum of the temple-like façade of South Africa House, the South African diplomatic mission to the United Kingdom. Though the image remained only two hours before the police suspended the intervention as a “public nuisance” it lingered in public awareness much longer. It is frequently cited at conferences, in classroom discussions, and other forum as an example of successful urban guerrilla cultural tactics – that is, art and/or performance that is waged by unexpected means for the purpose of engaging an active response.
In explaining the potential of cultural projects in the public sphere, the artist writes: “I try to understand what is happening in the city, how the city can operate as a communicative environment… It is important to understand the circumstances under which communication is reduced or destroyed, and under what possible new conditions it can be provoked to reappear. How can aesthetic practice in the built environment contribute to critical discourse between the inhabitants themselves and the environment? How can aesthetic practice make existing symbolic structures respond to contemporary events?” For Wodiczko, disrupting the complacency of perception is imperative for passersby to stop, reflect, and perhaps even change their thinking; so he built his visual repertoire to evoke both the historical past and the political present.
In this way, Wodiczko’s visual repertoire for his projections expanded beyond the body (ears, eyes, and hands as indicators of human sensibility) to include chains, missiles, tanks, coins, cameras, boots, swastikas, guns, candles, food baskets, and corporate logos. “In these projections,” writes Kathleen MacQueen, “the artist alternates between symbolic, iconic, and indexical images – the principal relations an image can have to its subject, according to the writings of Charles Sanders Peirce – that is, predicated on a cultural reference, a physical resemblance, or a physical relation respectively. In many instances they scramble all relations: the hand, an index of the body – someone’s body – is also an iconic representation of communication that might symbolically represent an open or closed ideological position.” The reductive, visual signs monumentally-sized to fit the facades on which they are projected, are not meant to read as logos for a political agenda, instead they suggest a perceptual contradiction to disrupt the kind of assumptions that beset the casual passerby.
Wodiczko’s visual interventions into public space are intended to alter what Jacques Rancière
would later term the realm of the sensible. When the public views its urban monuments with sidelong glances out of the corners of its eyes, it accepts the monuments as natural and uncoded. By intercepting vision with projections, Wodiczko replaces an unconsidered reception with a critical one. This is the lesson of the Russian Formalists
, of Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt and of Friedrich Nietzche’s understanding of Goethe
’s belief that knowledge must quicken activity rather than lead to complacence.
The artist began to integrate direct activism into his projects in the late 1980s with his vehicles and his instruments, articles of design that would act as band-aids – not only healing social wounds but perhaps more importantly calling attention to them.
Wodiczko created Poliscar in 1991 as a kind of “command center” for communication and community activism – a vehicle equipped with first-aid supplies, video and radio transmission equipment, and tools for everyday survival, it could support legal, medical, and social crisis aid, the mobile units ranging from three to ten miles from a base station. Poliscar was a technological design for the disenfranchised public of the polis
or public sphere. Later Wodiczko would merge his vehicles with his projections when working with war veterans (see “Recent Work”).
’s statement, “the streets our brushes, the squares our palettes.” ‘‘The Personal Instrument’’ consisted of a microphone, worn on the forehead, which retrieved sound while photo-receivers in gloves isolated and filtered the sound through the movement of the hand, which was then perceived discriminately by the artist, perceptually confined by the sound-proof headphones. By emphasizing selective listening, vital (under authoritarian restrictions) to a Polish citizen’s survival, Wodiczko intimated the prevalence of censored speech, registering “dissent of a system that fostered only one-directional critical thinking – listening over speech.”
After his work with the homeless community in New York City and Philadelphia, Wodiczko returned to the possibilities of smaller, personal instruments as conceptual and functional objects to offset the problems of communication for urban migrants. Initially based on the iconic staff of the wandering prophet, the Alien Staff (1992 and its variant, 1992/93) was designed to mediate conversation between aliens (the juridical term designating all immigrants whether of legal or illegal status) and the franchised population of an urban environment. The staff not only presented an object of curiosity to passersby, causing them to interrupt their pace long enough to ask questions, it also became a repository of narrative recording and objects both sacred or necessary (e.g., green cards or family mementoes) to the lives of the immigrants. Influenced by Julia Kristeva
’s Strangers to Ourselves (1991), Wodiczko developed new equipment in 1993 that focused even more directly on democratic speech rights for the performative stranger. Mouthpiece (Porte-parole) was intended to act as a protective zone so that the immigrant could expand her narrative outward into a collective experience thereby pulling her out of isolation. The video technology, to be worn over the mouth, makes strange the familiar thereby creating a point of entry for passersby to enter into conversation with the immigrant. Between 1993 and 1997, thirteen culturally displaced persons used variants of the Mouthpiece in Paris, Malmö, Helsinki, Warsaw, Amsterdam, Trélazé, and Angers.
In this way, Wodiczko continued in his testimonial video projections to respond to the needs of urban society’s marginal citizens who frequently survive outside the usual boundaries of juridical and social resources. In 2001, he merged the means of his instruments with the purpose of the projections in his Tijuana Projection executed for InSite 2000. In this public intervention, women working in the “maquiladora”
industry of Tijuana
, Mexico wore media technology designed to project their faces onto El Centro Cultural as they spoke emotionally of incest, police abuse, and work place discrimination in real time. As participants, their parrhesiatic speech
was courageously offered at great risk to themselves for the purpose of moral and political change. Through the video projections, Wodiczko continues to develop the potential for aesthetic practice to effect social change as part of a wider discourse on agonistic pluralism prompted by such influences as Chantal Mouffe
and Ludwig Wittgenstein
.
The role of art in understanding and confronting conflict becomes an increasingly significant aspect of both Wodiczko’s aesthetic and pedagogical practices. This is true in his continued work with immigrants and his recent work with war veterans in the Veteran Vehicle Project as well as his public lectures and teaching seminars worldwide including his seminar on “Trauma, Conflict, and Art” for the Warsaw School of Social Psychology. Recently, Wodiczko has also created projections for the interiors of cultural spaces as a metaphor for our psychological isolation from broader social and political experience. His 2005 exhibition at Galerie Lelong in New York City, If you see something…, his 2009 installation in the Polish Pavilion for the 53rd Venice Biennale, Guests, and his 2009-2010 interior projection at the ICA Boston, …Out of here, all position the viewer in relation to the consequences of global capitalism and the conflict produced as a result of the inequitable distribution of resources and opportunities. Krzysztof Wodiczko believes in the necessity for intellectuals to participate actively in society forging, as critic Jan Avgikos points out, “a commitment to resistance and truth-telling that, while often derided as outmoded or impossible, remains a basic human impulse.”
Presentation slide
A slide is a single page of a presentation. Collectively, a group of slides may be known as a slide deck. Historically, a slide was created on a transparency and viewed with an overhead projector. In today's digital age, a slide most commonly refers to a single page developed using a presentation...
and video projections on architectural facades and monuments. He has realized more than 80 such public projections in Australia, Austria, Canada, England, Germany, Holland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States.
War, conflict, trauma, memory, and communication in the public sphere are some of the major themes of an oeuvre that spans four decades. His practice, known as Interrogative Design, combines art and technology as a critical design
Critical design
Critical Design, takes a critical theory based approach to design. Popularized by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby through their firm, Dunne & Raby. Critical design uses designed artifacts as an embodied critique or commentary on consumer culture...
practice in order to highlight marginal social communities and add legitimacy to cultural issues that are often given little design attention.
He lives and works in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
and teaches in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge is home to two of the world's most prominent...
where he is currently professor in residence of art, design, and the public domain for the Harvard Graduate School of Design
Harvard Graduate School of Design
The Harvard Graduate School of Design is a graduate school at Harvard University offering degrees in Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning and Design.-History:...
(GSD). Wodiczko was formerly director of the Interrogative Design Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
(MIT) where he was a professor in the Visual Arts Program since 1991. He also teaches as Visiting Professor in the Psychology Department at the Warsaw School of Social Psychology.
Early life
Krzysztof Wodiczko, son of Polish orchestra conductor Bohdan WodiczkoBohdan Wodiczko
Bohdan Wodiczko was a Polish conductor and music teacher.He was the father of the Polish-American artist Krzysztof Wodiczko.-Footnotes:# - References :*...
, was born in 1943 during the Warsaw ghetto uprising
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was the Jewish resistance that arose within the Warsaw Ghetto in German occupied Poland during World War II, and which opposed Nazi Germany's effort to transport the remaining ghetto population to Treblinka extermination camp....
and grew up in post-war, Soviet-occupied, Poland. In 1967 while still a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw
Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw
Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw is a public university of visual and applied arts located in the Polish capital. The Academy traces its history back to the Department of Arts founded at the Warsaw University in 1812. As a separate institution it was founded in 1844 during the Partitions of Poland...
, he began collaborating with director Jozef Patkowski and the Experimental Studio on sound performances. He graduated in 1968 with an M.F.A. degree in industrial design
Industrial design
Industrial design is the use of a combination of applied art and applied science to improve the aesthetics, ergonomics, and usability of a product, but it may also be used to improve the product's marketability and production...
and worked for the next two years at UNITRA, Warsaw, designing popular electronic products. From 1970 until his emigration to Canada in 1977, he designed professional optical, mechanical, and electronic instruments at the Polish Optical Works.
In 1969, Wodiczko collaborated with Andrzej Dluzniewski and Wojchiech Wybieralski on a design proposal for a memorial to victims of Majdanek concentration camp in Poland. He also performed with Personal Instrument in the streets of Warsaw and participated in the Biennale de Paris as a leader of a group architectural project. He was a teaching assistant for two years, 1969–70, in the Basic Design Program at the Academy of Fine Arts before moving to the Warsaw Polytechnic Institute
Warsaw University of Technology
The Warsaw University of Technology is one of the leading institutes of technology in Poland, and one of the largest in Central Europe. It employs 2,453 teaching faculty, with 357 professors . The student body numbers 36,156 , mostly full-time. There are 17 faculties covering almost all fields of...
where he taught until 1976. Throughout the 1970s he continued his collaborations on sound and music performances with various musicians and artists.
In 1971, Wodiczko began work on Vehicle, which he tested the following year on the streets of Warsaw. In 1972 he created his first solo installation: Corridor at Galeria Wspolczesna, Warsaw. The following year he began exhibiting with Galeria Foksal, Warsaw. In 1975, Wodiczko traveled for the first time to the United States where he was artist-in-residence at the University of Illinois, Urbana and exhibited at N.A.M.E. Gallery, Chicago. He participated again in the Biennale de Paris, this time as a solo artist.
In 1976, Wodiczko began a two-year artist-in-residence program at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Canada. He emigrated from Poland in 1977, establishing residency in Canada teaching at the University of Guelph
University of Guelph
The University of Guelph, also known as U of G, is a comprehensive public research university in Guelph, Ontario, Canada. It was established in 1964 after the amalgamation of Ontario Agricultural College, the Macdonald Institute, and the Ontario Veterinary College...
in Ontario
Ontario
Ontario is a province of Canada, located in east-central Canada. It is Canada's most populous province and second largest in total area. It is home to the nation's most populous city, Toronto, and the nation's capital, Ottawa....
, and began working with New York art dealer Hal Bromm. In 1979 he taught at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto
Toronto
Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...
and continued teaching at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design until 1981. From 1981-1982 he was artist in residence at the South Australian School of Art (currently part of the University of South Australia
University of South Australia
The University of South Australia is a public university in the Australian state of South Australia. It was formed in 1991 with the merger of the South Australian Institute of Technology and Colleges of Advanced Education. It is the largest university in South Australia, with more than 36,000...
in Adelaide
Adelaide
Adelaide is the capital city of South Australia and the fifth-largest city in Australia. Adelaide has an estimated population of more than 1.2 million...
). In 1983, Wodiczko established residency in New York City teaching at the New York Institute of Technology
New York Institute of Technology
New York Institute of Technology is a private, non-sectarian, co-educational research university in New York City. NYIT has five schools and two colleges, all with a strong emphasis on technology and applied scientific research...
, Old Westbury. The following year, he received Canadian citizenship and in 1986 resident-alien status in the United States. He began teaching at MIT in 1991, maintaining his residence in New York City while working in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Projections
Krzysztof Wodiczko began developing his public projections in 1980 interfacing the facades of urban architecture – whether public monuments, public buildings, or corporate architecture – with images of the body to juxtapose the physical space of architecture with the psycho-social space of the public realm. “In the process of our socialization,” the artist writes, “the very first contact with a public building is no less important than the moment of social confrontation with the father, through which our sexual role and place in society [are] constructed. Early socialization through patriarchal sexual discipline is extended by the later socialization through the institutional architecturalization of our bodies. Thus the spirit of the father never dies, continuously living as it does in the building which was, is, and will be embodying, structuring, mastering, representing, and reproducing his ‘eternal’ and ‘universal’ presence as a patriarchal wisdom-body of power.”In an often cited example, Wodiczko projected an image of the hand of Ronald Reagan, in formal dress shirt with cufflinks, posed in the pledge of allegiance, onto the north face of the AT&T Long Lines Building in the financial district of New York City four days before the presidential election of 1984. “By creating a spectacle in which a fragment of the governing body, the presidential hand, was asked to stand for corporate business,” writes Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, “Wodiczko offered a suggestion about the class identity of those forces that – hidden under the guise of God, State, and Nation – are the actual receivers of the pledge of allegiance.” In subsequent projections, the artist layered iconic representations of global capitalism, militarism, and consumerism with images of fragments of the body to suggest a consideration of our relation to public space that is contingent both to history and social and political ideologies of the present.
Art historian Patricia C. Phillips writes of the artist’s work: “In his public projects of the past decade, Krzysztof Wodiczko has conducted a series of active mediations that combine significant public sites, tough subjects, and aggressive statements that are only possible because of their temporality. He applies the immediate force of performance to social and political problems. The rhythms of extenuating events and the brevity of each installation give his projected episodes the intensity of public, political demonstrations. His thoroughly staged, illuminated images often require months of preparation, yet they seem like surprise attacks – fiercely focused parasitic invasions of renowned institutional hosts.”
Perhaps the best-known and most popular intervention of this nature was performed when the artist created a projection for Nelson’s column in Trafalgar Square, London in 1985. The South African government was at that time petitioning the British government for financial support. Wodiczko turned one of his projectors away from Nelson’s column projecting a swastika onto the tympanum of the temple-like façade of South Africa House, the South African diplomatic mission to the United Kingdom. Though the image remained only two hours before the police suspended the intervention as a “public nuisance” it lingered in public awareness much longer. It is frequently cited at conferences, in classroom discussions, and other forum as an example of successful urban guerrilla cultural tactics – that is, art and/or performance that is waged by unexpected means for the purpose of engaging an active response.
In explaining the potential of cultural projects in the public sphere, the artist writes: “I try to understand what is happening in the city, how the city can operate as a communicative environment… It is important to understand the circumstances under which communication is reduced or destroyed, and under what possible new conditions it can be provoked to reappear. How can aesthetic practice in the built environment contribute to critical discourse between the inhabitants themselves and the environment? How can aesthetic practice make existing symbolic structures respond to contemporary events?” For Wodiczko, disrupting the complacency of perception is imperative for passersby to stop, reflect, and perhaps even change their thinking; so he built his visual repertoire to evoke both the historical past and the political present.
In this way, Wodiczko’s visual repertoire for his projections expanded beyond the body (ears, eyes, and hands as indicators of human sensibility) to include chains, missiles, tanks, coins, cameras, boots, swastikas, guns, candles, food baskets, and corporate logos. “In these projections,” writes Kathleen MacQueen, “the artist alternates between symbolic, iconic, and indexical images – the principal relations an image can have to its subject, according to the writings of Charles Sanders Peirce – that is, predicated on a cultural reference, a physical resemblance, or a physical relation respectively. In many instances they scramble all relations: the hand, an index of the body – someone’s body – is also an iconic representation of communication that might symbolically represent an open or closed ideological position.” The reductive, visual signs monumentally-sized to fit the facades on which they are projected, are not meant to read as logos for a political agenda, instead they suggest a perceptual contradiction to disrupt the kind of assumptions that beset the casual passerby.
Wodiczko’s visual interventions into public space are intended to alter what Jacques Rancière
Jacques Rancière
Jacques Rancière is a French philosopher, Professor of Philosophy at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris Jacques Rancière (born Algiers, 1940) is a French philosopher, Professor of Philosophy at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee...
would later term the realm of the sensible. When the public views its urban monuments with sidelong glances out of the corners of its eyes, it accepts the monuments as natural and uncoded. By intercepting vision with projections, Wodiczko replaces an unconsidered reception with a critical one. This is the lesson of the Russian Formalists
Russian formalism
Russian formalism was an influential school of literary criticism in Russia from the 1910s to the 1930s. It includes the work of a number of highly influential Russian and Soviet scholars such as Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov, Vladimir Propp, Boris Eichenbaum, Roman Jakobson, Grigory Vinokur who...
, of Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt and of Friedrich Nietzche’s understanding of Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German writer, pictorial artist, biologist, theoretical physicist, and polymath. He is considered the supreme genius of modern German literature. His works span the fields of poetry, drama, prose, philosophy, and science. His Faust has been called the greatest long...
’s belief that knowledge must quicken activity rather than lead to complacence.
The artist began to integrate direct activism into his projects in the late 1980s with his vehicles and his instruments, articles of design that would act as band-aids – not only healing social wounds but perhaps more importantly calling attention to them.
Vehicles
While the artist had produced his first vehicle in Poland with additional conceptual versions designed when he lived in Canada, it was with his Homeless Vehicle Project of 1987-89, that he redirected “attention from the work of art as dissent to the work of art as social action: in this case, the discussions and design collaboration with members of the homeless community to develop both a physical object and a conceptual design that would make their participation in the urban economy visible and self-directed.” The Homeless Vehicle Project was both symbolic and useful: the artist’s first work to use a collective process to legitimize the problems of a marginal community “without legitimating the crisis of homelessness.” While the public was cautious, the operators of the vehicles took the project seriously. According to Wodiczko, “You see this in certain gestures, certain ways of behaving, speaking, dialoguing, of building up stories, narratives: the homeless become actors, orators, workers, all things which they usually are not. The idea is to let them speak and tell their own stories, to let them be legitimate actors on the urban stage.” The attention to testimony as a transformative process while still tentative in the Homeless Vehicle Project became a significant performative process in the artist’s Instruments and eventually part of the his projections as well.Wodiczko created Poliscar in 1991 as a kind of “command center” for communication and community activism – a vehicle equipped with first-aid supplies, video and radio transmission equipment, and tools for everyday survival, it could support legal, medical, and social crisis aid, the mobile units ranging from three to ten miles from a base station. Poliscar was a technological design for the disenfranchised public of the polis
Polis
Polis , plural poleis , literally means city in Greek. It could also mean citizenship and body of citizens. In modern historiography "polis" is normally used to indicate the ancient Greek city-states, like Classical Athens and its contemporaries, so polis is often translated as "city-state."The...
or public sphere. Later Wodiczko would merge his vehicles with his projections when working with war veterans (see “Recent Work”).
Instruments
Krzysztof Wodiczko created the Personal Instrument in 1969, his first conceptual design work taken into the public sphere. Though he had a degree in industrial design and created popular electronics for a Polish manufacturer, his design philosophy was influenced by Russian constructivism epitomized by the poet/artist Vladimir MayakovskyVladimir Mayakovsky
Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky was a Russian and Soviet poet and playwright, among the foremost representatives of early-20th century Russian Futurism.- Early life :...
’s statement, “the streets our brushes, the squares our palettes.” ‘‘The Personal Instrument’’ consisted of a microphone, worn on the forehead, which retrieved sound while photo-receivers in gloves isolated and filtered the sound through the movement of the hand, which was then perceived discriminately by the artist, perceptually confined by the sound-proof headphones. By emphasizing selective listening, vital (under authoritarian restrictions) to a Polish citizen’s survival, Wodiczko intimated the prevalence of censored speech, registering “dissent of a system that fostered only one-directional critical thinking – listening over speech.”
After his work with the homeless community in New York City and Philadelphia, Wodiczko returned to the possibilities of smaller, personal instruments as conceptual and functional objects to offset the problems of communication for urban migrants. Initially based on the iconic staff of the wandering prophet, the Alien Staff (1992 and its variant, 1992/93) was designed to mediate conversation between aliens (the juridical term designating all immigrants whether of legal or illegal status) and the franchised population of an urban environment. The staff not only presented an object of curiosity to passersby, causing them to interrupt their pace long enough to ask questions, it also became a repository of narrative recording and objects both sacred or necessary (e.g., green cards or family mementoes) to the lives of the immigrants. Influenced by Julia Kristeva
Julia Kristeva
Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, psychoanalyst, sociologist, feminist, and, most recently, novelist, who has lived in France since the mid-1960s. She is now a Professor at the University Paris Diderot...
’s Strangers to Ourselves (1991), Wodiczko developed new equipment in 1993 that focused even more directly on democratic speech rights for the performative stranger. Mouthpiece (Porte-parole) was intended to act as a protective zone so that the immigrant could expand her narrative outward into a collective experience thereby pulling her out of isolation. The video technology, to be worn over the mouth, makes strange the familiar thereby creating a point of entry for passersby to enter into conversation with the immigrant. Between 1993 and 1997, thirteen culturally displaced persons used variants of the Mouthpiece in Paris, Malmö, Helsinki, Warsaw, Amsterdam, Trélazé, and Angers.
Recent work
While working on Porte-parole in Europe, Wodiczko received an invitation from the filmmaker Andrzej Wayda to participate in an urban festival in Krakow using for the first time powerful Barco N.V. video projectors. Working with the Women’s Center, he merged for the first time the testimonial work that had evolved from his work with instruments with the visual impact of his well-known large-scale public projections. Testimony of domestic abuse spoken from the City Hall Tower created shockwaves in an overwhelmingly Catholic culture of denial.In this way, Wodiczko continued in his testimonial video projections to respond to the needs of urban society’s marginal citizens who frequently survive outside the usual boundaries of juridical and social resources. In 2001, he merged the means of his instruments with the purpose of the projections in his Tijuana Projection executed for InSite 2000. In this public intervention, women working in the “maquiladora”
Maquiladora
A maquiladora or maquila is a concept often referred to as an operation that involves manufacturing in a country that is not the client's and as such has an interesting duty or tariff treatment...
industry of Tijuana
Tijuana
Tijuana is the largest city on the Baja California Peninsula and center of the Tijuana metropolitan area, part of the international San Diego–Tijuana metropolitan area. An industrial and financial center of Mexico, Tijuana exerts a strong influence on economics, education, culture, art, and politics...
, Mexico wore media technology designed to project their faces onto El Centro Cultural as they spoke emotionally of incest, police abuse, and work place discrimination in real time. As participants, their parrhesiatic speech
Parrhesia
In rhetoric, parrhesia is a figure of speech described as: to speak candidly or to ask forgiveness for so speaking. The term is borrowed from the Greek παρρησία meaning literally "to speak everything" and by extension "to speak freely," "to speak boldly," or "boldness." It implies not only...
was courageously offered at great risk to themselves for the purpose of moral and political change. Through the video projections, Wodiczko continues to develop the potential for aesthetic practice to effect social change as part of a wider discourse on agonistic pluralism prompted by such influences as Chantal Mouffe
Chantal Mouffe
Chantal Mouffe is a Belgian political theorist.-Work:Chantal Mouffe studied at Louvain, Paris and Essex and has worked in many universities throughout the world . She has also held visiting positions at Harvard, Cornell, Princeton and the CNRS...
and Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He was professor in philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1939 until 1947...
.
The role of art in understanding and confronting conflict becomes an increasingly significant aspect of both Wodiczko’s aesthetic and pedagogical practices. This is true in his continued work with immigrants and his recent work with war veterans in the Veteran Vehicle Project as well as his public lectures and teaching seminars worldwide including his seminar on “Trauma, Conflict, and Art” for the Warsaw School of Social Psychology. Recently, Wodiczko has also created projections for the interiors of cultural spaces as a metaphor for our psychological isolation from broader social and political experience. His 2005 exhibition at Galerie Lelong in New York City, If you see something…, his 2009 installation in the Polish Pavilion for the 53rd Venice Biennale, Guests, and his 2009-2010 interior projection at the ICA Boston, …Out of here, all position the viewer in relation to the consequences of global capitalism and the conflict produced as a result of the inequitable distribution of resources and opportunities. Krzysztof Wodiczko believes in the necessity for intellectuals to participate actively in society forging, as critic Jan Avgikos points out, “a commitment to resistance and truth-telling that, while often derided as outmoded or impossible, remains a basic human impulse.”
Prizes and awards
- 2009 Golden Medal “Gloria Artist” from the Polish Ministry of Culture for his exceptional contribution to Polish culture.
- 2009 Medal for the Contribution to the Promotion of Polish Culture Abroad from the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
- 2008 Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture.
- 2007 Katarzyna Kobro Award of the Polish Cultural Institute.
- 2005 College Art Association artist award for a distinguished body of work.
- 2004 Kepesz Award from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
- 1998 4th International Hiroshima Prize for his contribution as an artist to world peace.
Selected publications, essays, and interviews by the artist
- 2009, City of Refuge: A 9/11 Memorial. Edited by Mark Jarzombek and Mechtild Widrich. London: Black Dog Publishing.
- 2009, “Designing for a City of Strangers” in The Design Culture Reader, edited by Ben Highmore, Routledge.
- 2008, “Questionnaire: Krzysztof Wodiczko.” October 123, “In what ways have artists, academics, and cultural institutions responded to the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq?” (Winter 2008): 172-179.
- 2003, “Creating Democracy: A Dialogue with Krzysztof Wodiczko” by Patricia C. Phillips in Art Journal 64, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 33-47.
- 2003, ”The Tijuana Projection, 2001” in Rethinking Marxism 15, no. 3 (July 2003): 422-423.
- 2002, “Instruments Projections Monuments” in AA Files 43: 31-41.
- 1999, Critical Vehicles: Writings, Projects and Interviews. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999.
- 1997, “Alien Staff, Krzysztof Wodiczko in Conversation with Bruce Robbins.” In Veiled Histories: The Body, Place, and Public Art. Edited by Anna Novakov. New York: San Francisco Art Institute and Critical Press, 1997.
- 1990, “Projections.” Perspecta 26, Theater, Theatricality, and Architecture (1990): 273-287.
- 1988, “Conversations about a project for a homeless vehicle.” October 47 (Winter 1988): 68-76.
- 1986, “Conversation with Krzysztof Wodiczko.” With Douglas Crimp, Rosalyn Deutsche and Ewa Lajer-Burcharth. October 38 (Winter 1986): 22-51.
- 1986, “Krzysztof Wodiczko: Public Projections.” October 38 (1986): 3-22.
Selected catalogs
- 2009, Guests/Goscie. With John Rajchman, Bozena Czubak, and Ewa Lajer-Burcharth. Milan and New York: Charta.
- 2005, Krzysztof Wodiczko: Projekcje Publiczne, Public Projections 1996-2004. With contributions by Anna Smolak, Malgorzata Gadomska, Dariusz Dolinski, et al., The Bunker Sztuki Contemporary Art Gallery, Krakow.
- 1998, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art, July–September.
- 1995, Krzysztof Wodiczko: Projects and Public Projections 1969-1995, De Appel Foundation.
- 1995, Sztuka Publiczna, Center for Contemporary Art, Warsaw.
- 1994, Art public, art critique, Paris.
- 1992, Public Address: Krzysztof Wodiczko, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
- 1991, The Homeless Vehicle Project. With David Lurie, edited by Kyoichi Tsuzuki, Kyoto Shoin.
- 1990, Krzysztof Wodiczko: New York City Tableau, Tompkins Square, The Homeless Vehicle Project, Exit Art, New York City.
- 1987, Counter-Monuments: Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Public Projections with Katy Kline and Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, List Visual Arts Center.
Selected critical and scholarly studies
- 2009, Eva Marxen, “Therapeutic Thinking in Contemporary Art or Psychotherapy in the Arts” in The Arts in Psychotherapy 36: 131-139.
- 2008-09, Ewa Lajer-Burchardt, “Interiors at Risk: Precarious Spaces in Contemporary Art” in Harvard Design Magazine 29 (Fall-Winter 2008-09)
- 2008, Dora Apel, “Technologies of War, Media, and Dissent in the Post 9/11 Work of Krzysztof Wodiczko” in Oxford Art Journal 31, no. 2 (June 2008): 261-280.
- 2008, Rosalyn Deutsche, “The Art of Witness in the Wartime Public Sphere” in Forum Permanente, transcript of the Tate Modern lecture, March 4, 2005.
- 2007, Tom Williams, “Architecture and Artifice in the Recent Work of Krzysztof Wodiczko” in Shifting Borders, edited by Reid W.F. Cooper, Luke Nicholson, and Jean-François Bélisle, Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
- 2006-7, Lisa Saltzman, “When Memory Speaks: A Monument Bears Witness” in Trauma and Visuality in Modernity, edited by Lisa Saltzman and Eric Rosenberg, University Press of New England and in Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art, The University of Chicago Press.
- 2006, Mark Jarzombek, "The Post-traumatic Turn and the Art of Walid Ra'ad and Krzystof Wodiczko: from Theory to Trope and Beyond" in Trauma and Visuality in Modernity, ed. Saltzman and Rosenberg.
- 2005, James Leger, “Xenology and identity in critical public art: Krzysztof Wodiczko’s immigrant instruments.” Parachute, July 28, 2005.
- 2002, Andrzej Turowski, “Krzysztof Wodiczko and Polish Art of the 1970s” in Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art Since the 1950s, The Museum of Modern Art.
- 2002, Rosalyn Deutsche, “Sharing Strangeness: Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Aegis and the Question of Hospitality” in Grey Room 6 (Winter 2002): 26-43.
- 1998, Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics, The MIT Press.
- 1993, Denis Hollier. “While the City Sleeps: Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin’” in October 64 (Spring 1993).
- 1989, Patricia C. Philips, “Temporality and Public Art.” Art Journal 48, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 331-335.
- 1987, Ewa Lajer-Burchardt, “Urban Disturbances.” Art in America (November 1987): 146-153, 197.
- 1986, Rosalyn Deutsche, “Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Homeless Projection and the Site of ‘Urban Revitalization.” October 38 (Fall 1986): 63-99.
Films and video
- 2005, Susan Sollins and Susan Dowling, series producers. Art 21, Art in the Twenty-first Century. Season Three. Alexandria, VA: PBS Home Video.
- 2000, Yasushi Kishimoto, Krzyszto Wodiczko: Projection in Hiroshima, 70m/color, Ufer! Art Documentary.
- 1991, Derek May. Krzyszstof Wodiczko: Projections. Ottawa, Canada: National Film Board of CanadaNational Film Board of CanadaThe National Film Board of Canada is Canada's twelve-time Academy Award-winning public film producer and distributor. An agency of the Government of Canada, the NFB produces and distributes documentary, animation, alternative drama and digital media productions...
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External links
- Krzysztof Wodickzo is represented by Galerie Lelong, http://www.galerielelong.com.
- Harvard GSD Faculty profile, http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/people/faculty/wodiczko/index.html.
- Maria Hinojosa: One-on-One: Krzysztof Wodiczko, WGBH Boston, February 2, 2010, http://www.wgbh.org/programs/programDetail.cfm?programid=12.
- The Callie Crossley Show, WGBH Radio, February 10, 2010, http://www.wgbh.org/programs/programDetail.cfm?programID=855.
- BUniverse – “Art, Trauma, and Democracy: Immigrants and Veterans” – Krzysztof Wodickzo shares several short videos depicting immigrants and their feelings about living in a land that is not their own, Institute for Human Sciences, Boston University, December 3, 2009, http://www.bu.edu/buniverse/view/?v=1lV8st9M.
- City as Stage, City as Process – Krzysztof Wodiczko, Porous City – November 20, 2009, MIT Tech TV, http://techtv.mit.edu/videos/4516-krzysztof-wodiczko---porous-city.
- ICA Boston, Krzysztof Wodiczko, …Out of Here: The Veterans Project, November 4, 2009 – March 28, 2010, http://www.icaboston.org/exhibitions/exhibit/wodiczko/.
- The Odysseus Project – “Krzysztof Wodiczko’s The Veterans Project,” – Marijke, October 28, 2009, http://odysseus.nervegarden.com/2009/10/28/krzysztof-wodiczko-the-veterans-project/.
- Fact TV – “The War Veteran Vehicle” – Liverpool, Ireland, September 2009, http://www.fact.tv/search?content_search_simple=true&content_wordss=wodiczko&submit.x=0&submit.y=0.
- Interrogative Design, http://interrogative.mit.edu/about/.
- The 53rd International Art Exhibition in Venice, Polish Pavilion, “Guests/Goscie”, http://www.labiennale.art.pl/.
- BOMBLive! – “Krzysztof Wodiczko.” – Interview with Giuliana Bruno, Sculpture Center, Long Island City, October 29, 2007, http://www.bombsite.com/issues/0/articles/3209.
- Polish Culture – “Krzysztof Wodiczko” – 2007 profile, http://www.culture.pl/en/culture/artykuly/os_wodiczko_krzysztof.
- Polish Cultural Institute – “Krzysztof Wodiczko” – 2005 profile, http://www.polishculture-nyc.org/index.cfm?itemcategory=30817&personDetailId=74.
- Art 21, Season 3 (2005), Episode: POWER; interviews and videos, http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/wodiczko/
- agglutinations.com – “Interview with Krzysztof Wodiczko: Making Critical Public Space” – Elise S. Youn and Maria J. Prieto, April 11, 2004, http://www.agglutinations.com/archives/000035.html.
- “Interview with Krzysztof Wodiczko.” – with Dan Cameron, excerpts edited by Jacques Strapp with permission of the authors, 2001–2002, http://www.art-omma.org/issue7/text/KWodiczko_interview.htm.