Bronek Kozka: Melancholia and Memories By Ashley Crawford
For an artist who works in the field of photography, Bronek Kozka is something of a maverick. His work, quite simply, doesn’t ‘look’ like photography. His subjects often border on the mundane; an offi ce worker, a dishevelled retiree, a nosy neighbour, but somehow he imbues each and every one with a lingering sense of mystery, as though we have entered into a scene midnarrative or blundered into the midst of someone else’s memories.
Kozka says that his work was once described as existing in a “half light,” somewhere between reality and dreams and memories, a description that he says appeals.
“We are defi ned by our past, our personal histories that weave and overlap with other individuals, events, popular culture and a raft of individual but still collective experi-ences,” Kozka says. “My intention is to connect with the viewer, to create an image or series of images that engage them and invite them to enter the image.”
This, he says, serves as a springboard into his viewers’ own recollections or memories. While some of his work clearly tackles the notion of manufacturing nostalgia, this is not his intention. “I believe that through the re-examination, re-framing and re-construction of memories and
remembered events we can shed light on who we are. While I believe this works on a personal level, I feel it is also true on a broader cultural level.”
Kozka says that his approach is to “construct” a space, an environment, which best evokes the memory he is grasp-ing for.
“I use the term ‘construct’ loosely,” he says. “I may build a set or it may involve ‘dressing’ a location… either way what you see was not there prior, it was constructed for the purpose of making the image. I believe that this very intentional ‘fi ltering’ of what is in the image and what is not, and the fact things are often built specifi cally, partially answers the question of why my work has a different feel to other types of photography.”
“Lighting is crucial,” he adds. “Probably stating the ob-vious, but I don’t just mean the lighting of my images, lighting is crucial to our lives, behaviour, well being and understanding. I use lighting to create an understanding that is at once familiar yet somehow removed. The colour, quality, tone, intensity are all-important in shaping the ex-perience.”
There is an extraordinary moment in the 1982 classic sci-ence fi ction fi lm Blade Runner when the main protagonist, Deckard says: “Memories, you’re talkin’ about memories.” Kozka responds enthusiastically to the reference. “A bril-liant fi lm on so many levels. The implanting of memories (someone else’s) in the character Rachel is interesting, as is the character Leon’s attachment to his photographs. It is this small detail that really gives insight to his humanity and the tragic nature of these characters.”
“As you suggest, my work is about illustration, more spe-cifi cally an illustration of a memory, rather than, or in addi-tion to an illustration of an event. I have no desire to make my images into something they are not, they are photo-graphs, they are not paintings, nor do they want to be (no I’m not a frustrated painter).”
That said, Kozka does not shy away from a comparison with the melancholia of a painter such as Rick Amor.
“There is something very still and considered about Rick Amor’s work. I think, in our advertising and signage satu-rated existence stillness can sometimes be confused with melancholy. In social circles if you not ‘chatting’ something must be wrong… comments like ‘you’re very quiet, is eve-rything okay?’ are not uncommon. While I see my work as very still, a stillness that holds a tension, I won’t shy away from melancholy. There is a reluctance to allow one’s self to be sad or melancholy or lugubrious, we must always ap-pear to be happy (grinning idiots), this is a social expec-tation, however it is there, it is in me, its in all of us and, fortunately, art gives a ‘socially acceptable’ avenue for this expression. The fact that people connect with this work also, to me, suggests the need of the artists to express melancholy is equally matched with the viewers need/de-sire to consume it.”
Perfect:Synthetic Theme Parks: Splendid China, Folk Village & Window of the World.
For close to 150 years a photograph’s image began as a latent view of the world, a referent of the moment, concealed until such time that the material was ‘processed’. For a period of time, this latency was the image recorded and the image remembered, a view of a moment in time that only the photographer knew existed, and that, all things being correct, a somewhat faithful reproduction of the location, event, person and/or object would be retained. This image, latent to the world, when eventually revealed, is not quite the same as the memory of that moment in time; its different, it’s a framed version, depicted through the eyes, the experience, the thinking, feeling and interpretation of the photographer who ‘captured’ it. It is, ultimately, a fake.
This is not to suggest that a photograph does not contain some element of truth, it most certainly does, and I’m thinking of academic William Mitchell’s (1944 – 2010) no horse in particular analogy here (Mitchell, 1992, p. 29)
The existence of a horse means that you can take a photograph of some particular horse, but it does not prevent a horse painting from showing no horse in particular. You cannot, however, take a photograph of no horse in particular.
but the idea of a fake in and as photography provides a wonderful point of departure to more fully explore the work of Australian photographer Bronek Kozka. In Perfect:Synthetic, Kozka explores the complex synergy between the real and the fake through an indexical series of images from three theme parks located in the manufacturing city of Shenzhen, on the border of China and Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. Splendid China, Folk Village and Window of the World provide a social and architectural expose of how icons of the world can be condensed and miniaturised into a family-friendly site for leisure.
The Theme Park: Utopia or family-friendly Heterotopia?
The theme park as a site is a profound reflection on culture, history and reality. Something of a utopia, the theme park is a triumph of the contemporary mash-up; everything in one place, a metanarrative for modern life. Each park offering an interpretation of one part of civilisation, either through history, adventure, leisure or fantasy. When I think of theme parks I think of big rides, junk food and slices of a life unknown or made up, played out through characters, architecture and artifice. But are they really ‘utopian’? The word ‘utopia’ comes from the Greek ού (not) and τόπος (place), meaning a place that is not, one that is fictional, not existing, or simply just made up – in others words – a fake. At the same time the homophone ‘eutopia’ from the Greek εύ (good) and τόπος (place) presents an etymological quandary – so combined, as they are in general terms, a utopia is a good not-place. Right. Not quite a museum, the essential theme of the park defines both it’s intentions and it’s cultural, historical and practical positioning.
In the case of Kozka’s images, the theme is the world, or rather a curated version of the world. An entire park dedicated to landmarks and continents, an open air museum where the Eiffel Tower casts a shadow over the Pyramids of Giza, which are seen from a walkway over the Sydney Harbour Bridge, just down the road from the canals of Holland. Time is meaningless – a dinosaur looks out over Mount Rushmore, in much the same way that a young couple having their wedding photographs taken sit in the gardens of 18th century France – you get the idea. Traversed in 20 minutes via a driverless monorail, the park situates the visitor in a miniaturised version of a world full of prosperity and joy, in a place that is both real and fake. The other two parks, Splendid China and Folk Village (combined as one attraction) offer fully miniaturised, 1:15 scale models of China, with a central theme reflecting the nation’s history, culture, art, architecture and customs. In any one day it is therefore possible to visit the Great Wall of China, the Three Gorges Dam, Forbidden City and Terracotta Army. The sites all provide a rich context through which to explore a global experience, condensed into one or two days – but are they really utopian, do they create a sense of good fictional-place. Kozka’s photographs allude to something much more symbolic, yet also more complex than a simple ideal – the cracks appearing in the Mattahorn mountain, or the weathering of the White House, suggest something other than a mini-utopia.
So perhaps utopia is not the right word. Dystopia, or anti-utopia, seems way too negative, and possibly too political (although perhaps appropriate when considering the poorly maintained White House), and characterising theme parks of such grand reflective scale as simply sites or places limits the kind of interpretations suitable to the complexity of the images and the locations themselves.
I am usually reluctant to draw on the wisdom of deceased French philosophers, but in this instance I can’t help but think that Michel Foucault’s use of the term heterotopia is somewhat appropriate here. Foucault uses the term as a way of describing spaces with multiple layers of meaning, or spaces whose relationship to other places is not initially clear. If utopia is a good non-space, and a dystopia an anti-utopia, then a heterotopia is a non-space where things are not as they first seem. Kozka’s theme park images present to us spaces that exist, but are fake, scaled and disassociated from their actual particular space, the locations and representations constructing a juxtaposition of geographically and temporally discontinuous landmarks.
As heterotopian spaces they exist much like the seventeenth-century cabinet of curiosities (although seriously over-sized), the icons and landmarks presented in these images exist, but they are not the ‘real’ version in the sense that they are not where they belong, providing an experience that is only partly grounded. As interpretations of the real, they become mediated through, what human geographer Denis E. Cosgrove calls a ‘… subjective human experience in a way that neither regions nor area immediately suggest’ (Cosgrove 1984, p.13). In this way the sites act as a repository, a collective accumulation of the memories and experiences of the people who visit the park.
This way of seeing is also at the core of how art historian W.J.T Mitchell considers landscape – as a medium, a way of relating culture and place, and a way of understanding the relationship between landscape and the process of forming identity. ‘Landscape is a natural scene mediated by culture. It is both a represented and presented space, both a signifier and a signified, both a frame and what a frame contains, both a real place and its simulacrum (Mitchell 1994, p. 5). Kozka takes this notion of the mediated space and applies a distinct observational juxtaposition between what we think we are seeing and what we know we are seeing. Skyscraper apartments behind the Taj Mahal, palm trees next to the Mattahorn – a disconnection of site and space that creates its own version of curiosity.
Kozka’s photographs provide a clear and emotionally detached insight into the theme park as a heterotopian space. Through serial imagery and photographic convention, he presents a survey of the strange relationship between the real and the fake, the site as visited and the landmark remembered. The use of the formalist traditions of landscape photography is evident in the attention to detail, clarity of focus, the tonal treatment of spatial relationships and the 5x4 aspect ratio.
Images such as The Mattahorn distort the expectation of this formal photography in the way the huge mountain only just manages to sit above the bushes and palm trees. Not quite to scale, yet one of the tallest, and deadliest mountains in the European Alps, the fragility of the cracked and dirty mountain here represents what is so captivating about the work – that how we either remember landmarks, or think we remember them, is disrupted by the very idea that they are part of a theme park. There are several ways Kozka might have shot this mountain, yet by choosing to position it timidly peering out from beneath a manufactured natural environment, suggests a desire to frame it as an other space, one not quite real, but subversively confusing in its presentation.
His attention to size and scale help to reinforce this sense of the other space. In each of the images we assume that our viewing position is the same as the photographers (it usually is), and in this case; front on, standing height and as seen by the tourist. Yet the scale tricks us, some appear as aerial shots, others like we are half way up climbing the Great Wall of China, and others still as though we are impossibly floating mid-air in front of the Taj Mahal, just above the tree line.
Ultimately the success of this work lies in the abstraction of reality – some of the images look like they are photographs of the real thing, some clearly fake, and eventually we start to wonder what is real and what is fake – if this is a theme park, then is not the entire world one big family-friendly heterotopia? If this is fake, then what is authentic?
Dr Shane Hulbert
Deputy Head, Discipline (Art) RMIT University
The Audacity of Imagination (or how to construct a visual narrative) by Dr. Shane Hulbert
Australian artist Bronek Kozka’s photographs from the series Remembering what never happened are complex, presenting a somewhat disconcerting entanglement with reality and what we might perceive as being the situation, or moment, we are looking at. The images are large and detailed, a moment in time that, subversively historical (check out that huge mobile phone), unfold over the course of an evening, allowing us to bear witness to what appears to be a high society night of flapper frivolity.
Kozka is fascinated with memory, obsessed with it. As an artist, he creates moments, often through serial imagery, that play out a time in his life that define experiences that are also common to many – dinner at a suburban Chinese restaurant, awkward teenage groping in the back of a station wagon, uncomfortable family dinners – moments that, while not exactly ours, are familiar in ways that relate to our own experiences. In Remembering what never happened, memory, and its relationship to how we attach ourselves to certain moments in our past, is a principal motif for the work, acting as those fulcrum events that leave lasting impressions.
The digital dwelling
Central to all the images in the series is the house. Presented as the kind of contemporary, pastiche house, the kind that wins awards for architects – wanting to be a lived in space, humanised and an integral part of the narrative, the centre of everyone’s enjoyment. But it simply can not be any of those things because it is a fake. Constructed not from bricks and glass, but from digital bits and code, lit by a lighting effects program, rendered in 3D from a CAD drawn file, all computer generated, all from Kozka’s imagination. I wanted to say memory, but then it is a house from a party his parents told him about that he did not attend – he never actually saw the house to reimagine it. The house is a memory hand-me-down.
Even the development stage for the realising of the house was faked. Kozka, in collaboration with Melbourne architectural firm Cox Architects, employed the firm posing as a ‘real’ client. Following a period of ‘role-playing’, a design brief was developed based on the imagined desires of one of the (yet to be photographed) characters. The firm, who were in on the act, played along and made the house using 3D construction and renders.
Pictorially, initially, the images appear like advertising shots, perhaps for perfume, maybe for champagne, yet there is something compelling about the adumbration of the location, a place where face-to-face human conversations exist in a space designed for such things – around the pool, on the balcony with cityscape views, in spaces that inspire and encourage conversations to flow. And it could also be assumed that these conversations were overheard by others at the party, a synchronous event. Yet the opposite is true, the conversations existed as asynchronous, indeed the entire photographic images are asynchronous – each a discrete element of the scene following from the last, in the ultimate antispatial location.
The human experience of place is central to ways that people live in the world, a way of seeing the world mediated by the culture to which we belong. Author Tim Cresswell, in Place: A short introduction suggests that place is the internalisation of our world, positioning landscape as something the viewer is outside of and external to, while a place is something to be attached to, or inside of (Cresswell 2004). In Space and Place: The perspective of experience (1997) human geographer and philosopher Yu-Fi Tuan outlines this relationship between humans and the spaces we inhabit as personal experiences and constructed realities, grounding ourselves into a scene in relation to how we are positioned:
When we look at a country scene we almost automatically arrange its components so that they are disposed around the road that disappears into the distant horizon. Again, almost automatically, we image ourselves travelling down that road; its converging borders are like an arrow pointing to the horizon, which is our destination and future (Tuan 1997, p. 123).
This concept of place extends beyond the simple idea of viewing, to a phenomenological approach, a complex understanding of existence and experience – how we see, know, perceive and understand our world. Thus, being in the world, being in ‘a place’ is an acknowledgement of being human, our perceptual connection to that place, and that place’s extrinsic connection to us.
So how does one consider a place that is not real, a place that is a hand-me-down memory, constructed from bits and bytes? At a time when cyberspace creates cyber places, responding to human connections to virtual sites connected by glass cable, with no central or physical manifestation, requires a different way of thinking about place.
Perhaps it is in academic William J. Mitchell’s 1995 book City of Bits: Space, place and the infobahn that the most relevant and valuable ideas on place in relation to the digital realm, and the fake house, this digital dwelling, are to be found. Mitchell eloquently presents supermodernity as a network of information and binary code that globalises place as a virtual city interconnected by the information superhighway. Beginning with how physical infrastructure, such as fibre optic cable, is connecting our physical world, Mitchell then presents a new kind of place, one that is inhabited by humans, but does not exist anywhere other than in cyberspace. Borrowing terms from DNA science (‘Recombinant’ architecture) and computer programming language (‘Soft’ cities), Mitchell lays out a possible future for humans that includes both physical, but increasing more common, virtual places. Anthropologically, the virtual spaces create culture, they exist and they create communities. Yet we must ask, how can an environment with no smell, temperature or physical space, be considered in terms of its culture or indeed its ‘place’ in the world? The answer lies in how humans create social groups independently of place, and the fictional narratives created.
Belonging, community & fictional narratives
Putting the (fake) house aside, the other core component of the work is the role of narrative in presenting events and circumstance. What makes humans unique from other animals is our ability to gossip about each other and to transmit information about things that do not actually exist. Take, for example, a group of 50 people – a medium sized organisation. Within this group, there are 1,225 possible relationships between individuals, and even more complex multiple person relationships (three or more people). One of the principle reasons a group this size can function is through gossip and the telling of stories about each other. These can be simple stories that reinforce relationships, help people to cooperate, cause people to fight or simply to understand where they are. However, there is a limit to the size of a functioning group, and sociologists generally agree that this maximum is around 150 individuals. Beyond that, and people are not able to intimately know, or effectively talk about all the individuals in the group (Harari 2011)
In order to create communities, make cities, and build civilizations, we create fictions, social contracts or imagined realities. We hypothesise common myths or stories about things that are constructs – laws, religions, things that are not tied to any singular event or interaction between individuals in small groups. In effect, we create narratives to help us cooperate, become a society and to flourish.
Many of us are read stories from a young age, and our early existence in (and of) the world is formed through a relationship between things we experience, to the stories we are told. Through this, we set up vast imagined realities and situations that imprint on our perception of life – through play, and the acting out of our childhood stories, we develop our sense of place and belonging, and how we exist in groups and establish relationships.
Stories are complex and they are powerful.
So what ‘never happened’….?
The notion of narrative, and the imagined realities is evident in all the images in Remembering what never happened, however in Dispute the ambiguity of this also creates the kind of tension that is the strength of the work, essentially, just whose story are we looking at. Who is in dispute with whom? The women in the background look both indifferent and engaged at the same time, and the man and women (perhaps the obvious antagonists for this image), with their backs turned and their eyes shifting, could easily be ‘in dispute’. However, the image shifts into complexity when we consider the formal photographic devices; lighting, composition and time. The overwhelming blue suggests calmness, but also a subtle awareness of something changing as it (the light) changes from blue to neutral the higher it is in the image. The framing is meticulously constructed, no one is in contact with anyone else, all individual (presumably single?), the central figure being the women in the rear in the short skirt, contrasted with the foreground women – three against one, the attractive, well-dressed man gazing into the distance (perhaps the external city-scape view is more compelling than the beautiful women?) Is there someone else we cannot see? Finally, the timing is still and staged, that moment when the four guests are all looking somewhere, it is not so much a new moment, but rather a paused moment, one where I can study the scene, like an anthropologist, and since no one is looking at me, there is no sense of urgency or anxiety. Everything is so nice and so comfortable – but it is meant to be an image about dispute. I am so confused! But then that is the strength of the image, maybe the dispute is with me, as the viewer, and my own recollections of discomfort at the party where I just did not fit in – we all want the beautiful people to like us, and cringe at the idea of somehow being (politely) snubbed.
The confusion is perhaps the best part, and it lies in how the work was made. Following the role-playing at the architect’s, Kozka then exhaustively photographed each of the characters, using either friends or employing professional models, with either a blue screen or a black / white background, in various poses and expressions, looking in different directions and, crucial to the project given that none of the final images had been visualised, alone.
In the 2014 Electronic Arts’ game The Sims, the publisher claims that ‘You create’ and ‘You control’, ‘… create any Sim you can dream up. Plan their lives, pick their friends, make enemies, and watch their hilarious stories unfold’. (origin.com)[i]. In a process more aligned with playing a game of The Sims, rather than taking a photograph, Kozka set up a workstation with three monitors in his studio (the only real place), and selected a scene from the virtual house, which was then photo-realistically rendered. One opposing side monitors he placed all the images of two characters, then, using their expressions, gestures and attitudes to inform and realise a story, he constructed the image.
The result of this, perhaps ironically, is that no one seems to really like each other. In each of the images, people are talking, smiling, laughing, but what is missing is some sense of connection. What could be causing this? They are in an amazing location, they are all attractive and accomplished (not or), and they appear to be the kind of people whose lives others aspire to have. Yet the melancholy is increasing pronounced the more the narrative unfolds. Despite everything they have, they are, each of them at different times, looking at something else – searching, seeking, longing. An attractive man is talking to an attractive woman, but looking somewhere else, an attractive woman is talking to an attractive man, yet her mind is on something else, the central story seems to be one of longing. The only image where this is not explicit is A successful older man talks to an attractive woman while standing by the pool, yet the woman is looking off into the distance, he is central to the frame but she is off to the edge, moving away and increasing the already significant distance between them, and his body language, combined with his deadpan expression, all tell a story of disassociation rather than connection. We presume, through the title and first impressions, that the older man is attracted to the woman and attempting to impress her, yet nothing in the image’s reading leads to this conclusion.
The staged tableaux
Of course the idea of the staged tableaux is a familiar trope in contemporary photography. I’m thinking here of Canadian artist Jeff Wall (b 1946), whose work is a combination of scenes from everyday life; like spilling milk, or a surreptitiously raciest gesture of giving someone the finger, through to unreal scenes played out in complex staged environments. Wall’s photography makes methodical use of the pictorial devices of framing, time, subject and operator. Wall operates on two specific areas – one being that the artifice of the photograph is made explicit through the unreal nature of his stories, this is sometimes obvious, sometimes subtle, and an acceptance, maybe even a reliance, on the possibilities made available through digital post production. The second is the meticulous staging of an event or moment that seems less than staged, almost casual in its appearance. Combined, these two areas of concern in his imaging create a complex relationship between the photographer as operator and viewer as spectator. We know we are looking at something, we suspect that something is not quite right, but only once we really peer into the image can we see what we suspect, that the scene and the unfolding is just not quite right.
Realism, although a clear strength of the medium, is not really Wall’s aim, employing actors and digital manipulation, he creates images that challenge our perceptions of photography. In Dead Troops talk (a vision after an ambush of a red army patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, Winter 1986) from 1992, he creates a desert scene from an ambush in Afghanistan, using actors, staged lighting, set building and digital effects. Montaging the same actors into different locations, the dead soldiers appear to be talking with each other, either unaware or disinterested in their own deaths. Like a museum diorama, the scene looks authentic but is clearly a fake.
Take this one step further - does it matter that we know it is a fake? The title claims both - dead troops talk, which they generally do not do, but we also get the real event data, right down to the date. So if the event really did happen, is not Wall’s photograph simply a play on what happened, adding that extra dimension of what friends and family wish dead troops can do, and that is not be dead?
Kozka, an admirer of Wall, takes this notion of the artifice in a slightly different direction, by staging a scene or moment in time while completely doing away with the need to find or even physically construct a location. The house, the digital dwelling, borrows its realism from Kozka’s memory of being told about a house, and transforms this, through what is clearly desire and Kozka’s ‘dream home’ (maybe he was not role-playing with the architect). Borrowing from Wall’s casual approach to the picture, and the representation of fake moments, events or locations, Kozka sets up a scene in which everything is fake; the location, the story, the people, even the view, combined and constructed to create ‘something’ that never happened, yet holds within its imagery a compelling memory or desire to wish for memories like this.
In staging Remembering what never happened, Kozka has reconstructed an imagined reality in which to explore collective memories. Yet the house does not exist, the actors where never there, the entire event manufactured – a story that never really became a reality for Kozka. But that did not stop it from becoming a fiction for him to use to create an imagined reality, one that plays out an event in a way that explores our own anxieties and trepidation, and ultimately contributes to our ongoing myths about who we are, where we are, and just how do we belong.
Dr Shane Hulbert
Associate Professor of Photography
Deputy Head of School, School of Art
RMIT University
References
Cresswell, T (2004) Place: A short introduction. Blackwell, London
Tuan, Yu-Fi (1997) Space and Place: The perspective of experience. University of Minnesota Press, Minnesota
Mitchell, W (1995) City of bits: Space, place and the infobahn. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Harari, Y.N (2015) Sapiens. Harper Collins, New York
Wall, J (2007) Jeff Wall: Selected essays and interviews. The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Origin EA website
[i] The Sims is a life simulation game, currently in version 4, and one of the best-selling video games of all time. https://www.origin.com/en-au/store/buy/sims-4/mac-pc-download/base-game/standard-edition?utm_campaign=origin-search-au-pbm-g-sims4-p&utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=google&utm_term=the%20sims&sourceid=origin-search-au-pbm-g-sims4-p&gclid=CLrZpouev8sCFQsDvAodXU0O6w accessed 14/03/2016