accompanying events
Maurycy Gomulicki
‘I am interested in categories such as pleasure or ecstasy’, Maurycy Gomulicki (born 1969) declares when asked about where the idea for Pink Not Dead, his 2006 exhibition at the CCA Ujazdowski Castle, came from. The project, his most spectacular one to date, reflects the wealth of Gomulicki’s inspirations and the specificity of his strategy, as he transformed gradually from a graduate of graphic arts at the Warsaw ASP and a painter into an artist-photographer, artist-archivist, artist-as-anthropologist, finally artist-as-curator. Using the Benjaminian term, we could describe Gomulicki as a cultural producer. Engaging artists from various countries of the world, gathering and exhibiting highly diverse material devoted to the modernism- and high-brow art-condemned colour of pink, Gomulicki conducted an immensely refreshing procedure of reinstating the pink ecstasy. The orgiastic opening and the consecutive events – a review of pink movies, pink performances, or even a series of pink lectures – were a violation of good taste and established hierarchies for some, and a transgression and restoration of authenticity to contemporary art for others. The exhibition, shown previously in Mexico City, where Gomulicki has been based for years while remaining permanently in touch with his home country, was an artistic project, a curatorial one, but also a research one and a social one. Stimulating imagination by combining these completely different contexts appears crucial for Gomulicki’s strategy.
Pursuit of pleasure and a predilection for challenging the existing framework of the artistic discourse were also present in Gomulicki’s earlier projects, such as Vaginettes (1999) where the artist analysed a sexual (sexist for some) view of psychedelic, quasi-abstract motifs, vagina-shaped pink mandalas. The Vaginettes formed a kind of atlas that, on the one hand, suggested the possibility of making unemotional comparisons between the objects of fetishist fantasies, and, on the other, pulled the viewer into a kind of ambiguous game. It is worth noting that Gomulicki is interested in both erotically arousing the viewers and in provoking a cultural reflection on desire, independent of sexual and cultural preferences and habits. Interestingly, Gomulicki’s activities, encompassing not only a play with desire in the asexual, by definition, space of the gallery, but also a play with aesthetics in the anti-artistic space of the sex shops (Mexico City, 2005-2007), have still not been interpreted in a satisfactory way from the point of view of gender or queer theory. The latter would be encouraged both by the artist’s own androgynous image and by numerous exhibits shown in Pink Not Dead. Looking at Gomulicki’s art in retrospect, we can notice an evolution of forms revolving around the categories of pleasure and ecstasy, present already in his photographic series shown in the 1990s in, among other things, the ZPAF-CSW Mała Galeria, which betrayed a fascination with dolls, parts of the body, especially the female one, pinpointed by the artist through extreme close-up, an attempt to enter and de/code the corporeal code of desire and fantasy. A vision of reality whose main principle is pleasure is not confined to objects of overtly sexual or aesthetic connotations. This is proved by Gomulicki’s passion for collecting things. He gained notoriety as early as in the 1990s as a fan of ‘cult objects’, and the centrefolds with selected fragments of his collection (from ‘artificial fly agaric mushrooms’ to ‘military phantasmagorias’), published first in Machina and then in Fluid, returned as actual objects in exhibitions such as S.I. Witkiewicz. Philosophical Margins, Beyond the Red Horizon, or Pink Not Dead, as well as in anthropological projects exploring the universe of funeral fantasies (Funebre, collaboration with Jeronimo Hagerman), or devoted to the exploration of the cities of Mexico (ABC DF, 2005) and Warsaw (Project Warsaw, 2000-2007). The collection of objects and an archive of images, but also of fragments of texts, memories, and notes, eventually evolved into a weblog (pinknotdead.blox.pl), set up by Gomulicki in 2006 and serving as a platform of communication, sharing, and expansion of this entropic collection in a pink counterpoint. Gomulicki’s actions with found material can be viewed as a peculiar, visual, form of the psychoanalysis of culture. In this context, there is nothing surprising in a transition from sexual ecstasy to the ecstasy of power, which, in Gomulicki’s case, assumes the form of a fascination with the quasi-erotic aesthetics of the symbols of totalitarian regimes (inspired, in turn, by mythology or religious iconography). Already in Pink Not Dead a phantasmal, or pornographic, shift was taking place, reflected in the presence of pink mosaics formed with small swastikas, and of the neon SS shaped like two pink strokes of lightning. This peculiar desublimation of artistic libido reveals its subversive nature as soon as the audience realises it has found itself in an ecstatic trap of desire and power. A recognition of the pleasure principle makes it easier to understand the reality principle. These themes of Gomulicki’s practice are developed more fully in a projection of images found on the web called The Best of the Rest (2007), of which the artist himself says it is the ‘result of searching for the extreßßme in the universal space of image exchange. It presents the most absurd, most amazing, most bizarre, most wonderful, most horrible, most funny – the instantly recognisable codes of attention/availability. It is an attempt to get closer to the universal alphabet of the image’.
Gomulicki is also interested in literature and film. He pursues his fascination with literature, which is a family tradition – his great-grandfather, Wiktor, was a poet, novelist, first translator of Baudelaire, grandfather Juliusz Wiktor was a passionate literary scholar – in the project Spring in the Library (2005-2007) which subordinates the realm of fiction and knowledge contained in books to aesthetics. Film, in turn, represents the field of a collecting and artistic passion, expressed in works created together with Mexican artist Ilian Gonzales. Pieces assembled with archival footage (Mystic Dramatic Corporative, Male Fantasies 5, 2004) as well as semi-documentaries (Male Fantasies 3, 2004) turn out to be jocular, and yet insightful, analyses of the way fantasy functions and the way it is used by both the movie industry and the state’s ideological apparatus. The artistic gesture exposes the purpose and method of the constructed message (here, Gomulicki proves a heir of the neo-avantgarde’s critical approach), without depriving the viewer of the pleasure of participating in a spectacle and without ceasing to ask about what is really important.
Adam Mazur