Piotr Uklański
Constantly bending genres, expertly switching between different media and techniques, a chameleon-like figure imitating postures of the artworld’s actors (and once even directing his own feature film, “Summer Love” (2006), promoted as “the first Polish Western”), the artist Piotr Uklański explores the aesthetics and politics of the contemporary spectacle, its attractions, fads, and vanities. A medium to which he has often returned over the decades has been photography, with all its promises and ramifications. In 1997, having emigrated from his native Poland to the United States and immersed himself in the universe of commercial imagery, the artist
embarked on his wide-ranging project “The Joy of Photography,” named for the Eastman Kodak handbook that has helped generations of amateur photographers master the techniques necessary for the putatively perfect (or beautiful) shot. By 2007, this project had already been ten years in the making—with the practices advocated in the Kodak manual gradually becoming obsolete due to the widespread use of digital photography. The fifty photographs in the book “The Joy of Photography” testify to the artist’s ambivalent stance toward the production of images, an attitude that oscillates between fascination and (self-)irony. Uklański’s photographs—either meticulously constructed or carefully chosen from existing stock images including both archival and contemporary, commercially available pictures—serve as means by which to understand mechanisms of aesthetic seduction and the production of desire. His artwork “The Nazis,” which shares its title with his artist’s book published that same year by Editions Patrick Frey in Zürich, was first shown at The Photographers’ Gallery in London in 1998. It is a grid of uniformly sized reproductions of promotional images showing international actors playing Nazis in Hollywood films and B-movies, images that were originally intended for cinema lobbies, for the press, and as cinemagoers’ trophies. This work came to serve as an effigy of sorts, sparking outrage at a subsequent exhibition by Kunst-Werke Berlin that culminated during a later presentation at the Zachęta Gallery in Warsaw when an actor who could not get over the shock of being confronted by an image of himself in the role of a Nazi literally slashed it with a saber. In 2015, the Metropolitan Museum of Art focused on the photographic practice of the Warsaw- and New-York based artist in its exhibition “Fatal Attraction: Piotr Uklański Photographs,” which was accompanied by the presentation “Fatal Attraction: Piotr Uklański Selects from the Met Collection.” The artist’s own photographs, juxtaposed with photographic works from the collections of the Met, were arranged along the themes of life and death, erotica and masquerade, and—ultimately—the joy of photography. For documenta 14 (2017), Uklański conceived the project and photo book “Real Nazis,” a late and much-needed sequel to his 1998 work showing Nazis played by actors. This work once again consisted of portraits of men and women in Nazi uniforms—but this time around, they were all real Nazis. W.S., A.S.
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