Wilhelm Sasnal: Part III

III. Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Your Grievances

Wilhelm Sasnal addresses the influence of music on his artistic development and walking the line between the trivial and significant.


Untitled (2001), acrylic on canvas, 153 x 180 cm.

ART iT: You make both paintings and films, but to what degree do you consider them separate practices?

WS: I consider them separate practices, but my reliance on intuition links both painting and filmmaking for me. Intuition is about a way of seeing, or the way I crop the image. So when I do the films, even if I’m working with a team of people, I still hold a camera.

ART iT: The similarities are not merely visual though. I feel your paintings have a musical quality to them in the way that they combine aspects of representation and abstraction – in addition to the fact that you have painted images of musicians and album covers – and that suggests another parallel with your films, a kind of audio-visual approach.

WS: Actually, my interest in art started through music. When I was 14 or 15 I was really into Metal music and then gradually explored more alternative genres. It was through this exploration that I began to see how music and what you might call the “apparatus” of music are connected to art and the “apparatus” of art.
At the same time I began to realize I had a basic artistic talent, redrawing the covers of records. It was common then for students to have leather bags with a flat cover over the back, and that cover made a great surface for ballpoint pen drawings. I would make the shadows with the pen and then use a razor to scratch in the light, so I could achieve a really nice effect. I did many of those backpack drawings for myself and for my friends.


Stereolab (2000), oil on canvas, 52 x 48 cm.

ART iT: What kind of music was making it into the country at that time?

WS: Culturally Poland was different from other Eastern Bloc countries because the government was relatively liberal, even though it was behind the Iron Curtain.
Obviously, this was before the Internet, and we learned about music through friends or from the radio. The radio stations in Poland actually broadcast really good stuff and we were quite up-to-date with what was happening outside of the country.
The stations would broadcast whole records at a time and the DJs would even let listeners know when they could turn their cassette tapes to record the other side of the vinyl. There were also these stores to which you could bring your blank cassettes and then tell the staff which records you wanted to have recorded. Quality was an issue though because sometimes by the time you had your own recording it was already a fourth- or fifth-generation copy.
That’s how I learned about music, and probably what I was listening to was not so different from what people on the other side of the Curtain listened to. I remember very clearly that when I was 15 I heard Bauhaus for the first time and started listening to them as well as Joy Division and other UK bands from the ’80s.

ART iT: With all these re-recordings of recordings, maybe that’s where your interest in double mediation comes from, making paintings of images and films of videos?

WS: Maybe. I remember also that at the music stores you could buy photographs – real, black-and-white photos that had been developed at a lab – of the record cover and the titles of the songs, which you could then insert into your cassette case. It was really hand-made.


Untitled (2009), oil on canvas, 50 x 40 cm. Courtesy the artist, Anton Kern Gallery,
New York, and Rat Hole Gallery, Tokyo.

ART iT: That brings me back to your untitled Elvis film. I had never heard Elvis’s version of “Unchained Melody” until I saw the film, with Elvis seated at a grand piano on stage before an adoring crowd, sweating profusely and singing into a microphone held by an assistant. There’s a maudlin element to the scenario, but seeing it in your work it gave me this idea that even a Pop song can become an event, and even a commonplace image can communicate a specific situation.

WS: I believe that visual art can chew over everything again and find new contexts for it. Art is an experimental field for the other disciplines like music and film. Divisions between Classical and Pop are totally obsolete. When you find the proper context, something can take on meaning.
It’s similar to one of the paintings on display at Rat Hole Gallery with the woman’s legs sticking out from behind a bush. The image is of a sculpture I saw recently, a fake, plaster sculpture at a garden at this place where I go for holidays. I saw it hidden in the bush and it intrigued me. In a way it’s a trivial, stupid image but it can take on meaning if you look beyond that first glance.

ART iT: I guess part of it is also coming to terms with the redundancy of images, and the idea that we’re more conscious now than ever before of how difficult it is to make an actually new image. The same applies to music too. There are only miniscule variations between all these different songs, or between the Righteous Brothers’ version of “Unchained Melody” and Elvis’s version.

WS: Yes, it’s like walking along the edge of a cliff. You have to find your own way. If you stay away from the edge then you’ll be safe but you’ll be among the crowd, no different from anyone else. If you go too far over the edge you can fall down.
The mainstream is overflowing to such an extent that the edge is really just a tiny sliver of space. When you are right on the edge, it’s dangerous and challenging, but that is where the most crucial and significant things happen. I think there is a certain perversity in it.

ART iT: I had this dream the other night that I was on board a crashing airplane, and for some reason it seems like a good metaphor for considering the velocity behind art, what gives a painting or film its presence.
In my dream as the gravitational pull kept getting stronger and stronger I was very calm and, realizing I only had 30 seconds or so to do something, began thinking about the members of my family and saying to each one “I love you.” Of course in the airplane as I say “I love you,” they’re not going to hear it, but it was important for me to speak it at that instant.
So in a sense at the right velocity something that is banal or pointless can become almost heroic.

WS: I know what you mean. It’s like with a sunset, it’s beautiful, yet in certain images it’s just kitsch.
By the way I have had many dreams about plane crashes, not as a passenger but as a witness. These dreams always took place in this district where I lived in my youth. I know it’s quite terrible but it was very fascinating to see those dreams, very important for me. I have painted airplanes many times as a metaphor, I guess, for the achievements of humanity. But as you say about saying “I love you,” it depends on the circumstances.
That’s how to approach the edge and to find your own way along it. When you say, “I love you,” it can sound banal but on the other hand it can also sound dramatic, and then be true, just as with a sunset.


Cover Image: Untitled (2007), oil on canvas, 160 x 200 cm. Courtesy Naomi Milgrom Collection, Australia, and Sadie Coles HQ, London.

Based in Kraków, Wilhelm Sasnal is represented by Sadie Coles HQ, Foksal Gallery Foundation, Hauser & Wirth and Anton Kern galleries. He has had solo exhibitions at international institutions including the Zacheta National Gallery of Art (Warsaw), the Swiss Institute (New York), Douglas Hyde Gallery (Dublin), Vanabbe Museum (Eindhoven) and M HKA (Antwerp). In 2006 he was awarded the Vincent Van Gogh Biennial Award for Contemporary Art in Europe.

Unless otherwise noted, all images courtesy the artist.

Intro Part I Part II Part III

Copyrighted Image