Untitled (“Wars” I)
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- Untitled (“Wars” I)
- 1994
- color photograph mounted on aluminium
- 43,2 × 47,7 cm
"Untitled (Wars I)" is a studio photograph of assorted tableware seen from slightly above the eye level. In the foreground, an aluminium kitchen fork, with one of four tines broken, rests face down and diagonally towards the viewer; to the right of the fork, a simple white mug with a dark-blue lip and aluminium teaspoon set horizontally on top of it, casting some shadow on the fork; in the middle ground and just off the centre of the picture, a white ceramic dessert plate with dark blue rim and illegible dark blue logo; and in the background, another mug, plain white and tapered from the base up to two thirds of its height, for a comfortable grip. As the picture planes recess, the objects represented fade out of focus—the mug in the rear nearly blends with the warm grey backdrop, while objects in the foreground are more prominent (though still slightly blurred) and sit on a white surface—which is the same roll of studio backdrop paper, expanding to the foreground, just lit more brightly. But even this attempted phenomenological description of the spatial arrangement of objects—that quiet vertigo of a still life that "Untitled (Wars I)" is—cannot make up for the palpable lack of drama in this mundane display of inexpensive utensils, with their discreet small signs of wear.
WARS was the name for the dining cars on the Polish People’s Republic trains, still in operation during the country’s transformation to a market economy in the 1990s: in their cosy interiors, bar stools with light brown textile upholstery were installed at long tables covered with white tablecloths, the widows adorned with curtains emblazoned with PKP, the Polish State Railways logo. The menu boasted staple dishes, including scrambled eggs on bacon, tripe stew, sour rye soup and tea served in glasses.
Neither an honest—and back then, too early—confession of ostalgia (fetishized twenty years later in art exhibitions, fashion and reeditions of socialist era design objects targeted at global hipster buyers), nor an earnest critique of image politics along the lines of the Pictures Generation artists and their post-structuralist interpreters, Uklański’s photograph is perhaps a minor monument to immigrant memory, worn to the point of erasure; or it pictures a slippage in that memory, a fugue.
Uklański produced the photograph in New York in 1994 (he arrived in the city in 1990, following two years of studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw), while working for a commercial product photography company, where he mastered the skills required, and then used them for a different purpose. At that time, he also studied in the sculpture class of Haans Haacke at Cooper Union and was mentored by John Baldessari during a residency he was offered at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He also attended an Art Administration course at New York University and was successively commissioned as a photographer to document the content of Andy Warhol’s “time capsules”—610 boxes filled with artworld printed matter and other source material Warhol collected daily and deposited in sealed boxes during the last 13 years of his life. Around that time, Uklański produced a group of faux-promotional photographs—half-empty tall glasses, stained with tea and with sugar cubes placed on saucers; a child happily smoking a KINGS cigarette (which was actually a brand of bubble gum); and finally the WARS photograph.
Interestingly, the type of tableware he assembled in "Untitled (Wars I)" seems more typical for Bar Mleczny (“milk bar” in Polish)—a state-run chain of city diners serving nutritious and hearty breakfast and lunch dishes at very affordable prices. But "Untitled (Wars I)" was produced in New York and for international audience, unfamiliar with nuances of socialist design, as a new brand—offering nothing, in particular—a promotion fully voided of consumer product, and therefore producing an ultimate desire. Uklański used those photographs performatively and in context: he ran the faux cigarettes-for-children advertisement in Göteborgs-Posten (a Swedish daily) as an art project that nevertheless had an appeal of a real ad; he pasted his promotional pictures among commercial advertising on walls in his East Village neighbourhood; and he rearranged products on Walmart shelves to document the emergence of a new, distorted order. Those guerrilla-style activities in the realm of commercial products and images paved the way for a more profound engagement with photography in service of the spectacle, seen, for example, in Uklański’s ongoing project Joy of Photography, which consists of photographs subjectively retaking or riffing on genres, themes and styles of historical and contemporary photography, realized using a variety of photographic techniques and technologies, from daguerreotype to digital. A.S.
WARS was the name for the dining cars on the Polish People’s Republic trains, still in operation during the country’s transformation to a market economy in the 1990s: in their cosy interiors, bar stools with light brown textile upholstery were installed at long tables covered with white tablecloths, the widows adorned with curtains emblazoned with PKP, the Polish State Railways logo. The menu boasted staple dishes, including scrambled eggs on bacon, tripe stew, sour rye soup and tea served in glasses.
Neither an honest—and back then, too early—confession of ostalgia (fetishized twenty years later in art exhibitions, fashion and reeditions of socialist era design objects targeted at global hipster buyers), nor an earnest critique of image politics along the lines of the Pictures Generation artists and their post-structuralist interpreters, Uklański’s photograph is perhaps a minor monument to immigrant memory, worn to the point of erasure; or it pictures a slippage in that memory, a fugue.
Uklański produced the photograph in New York in 1994 (he arrived in the city in 1990, following two years of studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw), while working for a commercial product photography company, where he mastered the skills required, and then used them for a different purpose. At that time, he also studied in the sculpture class of Haans Haacke at Cooper Union and was mentored by John Baldessari during a residency he was offered at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He also attended an Art Administration course at New York University and was successively commissioned as a photographer to document the content of Andy Warhol’s “time capsules”—610 boxes filled with artworld printed matter and other source material Warhol collected daily and deposited in sealed boxes during the last 13 years of his life. Around that time, Uklański produced a group of faux-promotional photographs—half-empty tall glasses, stained with tea and with sugar cubes placed on saucers; a child happily smoking a KINGS cigarette (which was actually a brand of bubble gum); and finally the WARS photograph.
Interestingly, the type of tableware he assembled in "Untitled (Wars I)" seems more typical for Bar Mleczny (“milk bar” in Polish)—a state-run chain of city diners serving nutritious and hearty breakfast and lunch dishes at very affordable prices. But "Untitled (Wars I)" was produced in New York and for international audience, unfamiliar with nuances of socialist design, as a new brand—offering nothing, in particular—a promotion fully voided of consumer product, and therefore producing an ultimate desire. Uklański used those photographs performatively and in context: he ran the faux cigarettes-for-children advertisement in Göteborgs-Posten (a Swedish daily) as an art project that nevertheless had an appeal of a real ad; he pasted his promotional pictures among commercial advertising on walls in his East Village neighbourhood; and he rearranged products on Walmart shelves to document the emergence of a new, distorted order. Those guerrilla-style activities in the realm of commercial products and images paved the way for a more profound engagement with photography in service of the spectacle, seen, for example, in Uklański’s ongoing project Joy of Photography, which consists of photographs subjectively retaking or riffing on genres, themes and styles of historical and contemporary photography, realized using a variety of photographic techniques and technologies, from daguerreotype to digital. A.S.