Wilhelm Sasnal
'Let Me Tell You a Film 2007' reads the title of Wilhelm Sasnal’s 16 mm film on view at the Polish artist’s third solo exhibition at Anton Kern Gallery. Sasnal is better known for his paintings, 11 of which were on display, but he described the film as the lens through which the entire exhibition should be viewed. Indeed the film’s titular emphasis on telling – on the self-consciousness of presentation and the distance this implies – connected what might otherwise have been a disjointed assembly of works devoted to a variety of subjects and executed in the artist’s typically broad-ranging compendium of styles.
Opinions differ over Sasnal’s painting, but this exhibition was a highly orchestrated affair deserving serious consideration for its conceptual ambition and the intelligent way it used film to reflect on the medium of painting and vice versa. The point is less that the paintings are cinematic – although Sasnal incorporates extreme angles, cinematic lighting and, in two cases, references to movie screens – than that the use of film as a framing device shifts the focus from specific subject and style to the act of seeing and representing in general. Sasnal has explained that he prefers to be considered an image-maker rather than a painter or filmmaker per se, and it is this emphasis on the phenomenon of perception, as well as on its failure, that runs throughout his work.
The subject of Sasnal’s film, and the method of its execution, assumes special relevance in this context. In fact, the film is a product many times removed from the 1961 Polish movie on which it is based – a fictionalized account of a historical event in which a railway worker accidentally sold industrial methyl alcohol as vodka, causing widespread illness, blindness and death. Sasnal videotaped his television screen during a recent broadcast and then edited the footage down to an 11-minute silent version, to which he added his own awkwardly translated English subtitles.
Finally he transferred the video version to 16 mm. This series of multiple translations put many ideas into play, including the artist’s stated attraction to the phenomenon of a nation ‘under the influence’ as an allegory for both altered perception generally and for the more specific social dynamics of communist-era Poland. Sasnal’s version isolates scenes from the original film that emphasize thwarted vision: people standing against obscured windows, close-ups of faces staring anxiously off camera. His decision to present the subtitles against occasional monochrome frames, as in old silent movies, reinforced this sense of temporal and spatial removal and interrupted meaning. So did the artist’s only imagistic alteration: the superimposition towards the film’s end of a billowing black liquid that obscured the characters’ faces and that reappeared in altered form in several paintings.
The degree of connection between the film and the paintings varied. The first work encountered on leaving the screening room was 'Photophobia' (2007), which offered a kind of bridge between the filmic and painterly realms. The luminous, mostly white canvas interlaced with washy yellow and violet strokes evoked the after-effects of staring directly into a light source, presumably that of the nearby film projector. Other works were altogether different in subject and style: an untitled 2007 painting of an anonymous apartment complex executed in wide, dry strokes overlaid with the black liquid seen in the film, for example, and a thickly painted, ghost-like rendering from 2006 of the ubiquitous Starbucks logo partially restored to its ‘origins’ as a Moby Dick masthead. Several paintings made more concrete reference to the film: a starkly beautiful image of a golden sun seen through a field of silhouetted grain (a reference to grain alcohol), and two ink-on-paper posters (2006) pairing images of grain and black goo with the title of the original Polish feature, 'Today’s Story'.
Sasnal’s predilection for diverse styles and obscure, multi-layered references can be taken as a frustrating exercise in self-indulgence. Or it can be seen as an earnest attempt to impart meaning in meaninglessness. (A rare one-night screening of Sasnal’s short films, including 'The River', from 2005, in which the artist invited a motley assortment of garage bands to improvise heartfelt performances based on the rhapsodic texts of a found picture book about the Mississippi, was instrumental in demonstrating how well he can carve meaning out of very little.) Indeed something of content emerged in this show’s very failure to cohere, in its inability to take a clear view on the present or past, its ultimate refusal to tell ‘today’s story’. Sasnal’s images do not describe what we experience so much as how we (or rather he, since this is very much his vision, his film, his story) encounter our world: with a level of uncertainty and through a shifting and somewhat clouded lens.
