In The Culture Industry, the German theorist Theodor Adorno notes that depictions of violence in cartoons and films can be a tool of social control: the audience learns to enjoy the spectacle of violence Mickey Mouse suffers in a slapstick routine and so “learns to take their own punishment.” To undo this condition of mass masochism would be, as the Polish artist Krzysztof Wodiczko phrases it, to “un-war” ourselves. That’s why Wodiczko projects videos of PTSD-ridden veteran testimonies onto statues of statesmen, gives body parts to massive public buildings, and equips drones with displays of fluttering human eyes. He dreams of encasing the Arc de Triomphe in metal scaffolds.
Krzysztof Wodiczko: The Art of Un-War (2022), a new documentary by Maria Niro, presents a vital retrospective on Wodiczko’s expansive career from post-WWII Poland to the present day United States. Following several of Wodiczko’s large-scale public projects in London, Hiroshima, and New York, Niro’s explosive and fluent visual language easily lends itself to one of Wodiczko’s most prominent themes: the simultaneous deconstruction of the human body and political myths.
For Wodiczko, memorials disabuse the real memories of bodies that are never fully released from the rhythm of war. He made images of body parts into wearable technology, and transfigured buildings into bodies. His piece The Personal Instrument (1969) delivered only filtered sounds to the wearer—a tongue-in-cheek device of selective listening that mechanized the widespread censorship in Poland. Similarly, 1993’s Mouthpiece, a communication device meant to be worn directly over the mouth, was meant to help immigrants communicate on their own terms in Rotterdam. In Hiroshima and Tijuana, Wodiczko projected video testimonies of atomic bomb survivors and women workers onto large public buildings, their distorted body parts flanking the silent buildings as they recount traumatic memories of war, sexual abuse, and domestic violence. The Hiroshima projection was a political act for pacifism and the Tijuana projection hoped to intimate the violence against women in Mexico. In all of these installations, Wodiczko tirelessly gave voice, gave bodies, and gave stages to the voices of the oppressed.
There is something very 2010 in how the documentary—and Wodiczko himself—narrativize the latter’s art as acts of radical resistance. Back then, progressives still halfheartedly believed in institutions: speech-acts and symbolic resistance seemed useful for political change, and being subversive was sufficiently radical. Both Wodiczko’s work and Niro’s storytelling embodies the artistic temperament of the European avant-garde that slowly became mainstream in the decades after Francis Fukuyama published The End of History (1992). While the progressives of that era struggled to present material political imaginaries against the totality of liberal democracy, they rebelled against “Authority” and “Institution” as concepts in and of themselves—symbolic rebellions that were not altogether irreconcilable with Fukuyama’s promises. It was the time of Occupy Wall Street, Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, and V for Vendetta (2005), before class consciousness became more ubiquitous in America and when college-educated Americans were just waking to the economic nightmare that awaited them. In music, there was a perpetual teenage rebellion on display, for which Green Day was theory and the bygone Nirvana was praxis. With the Iraq War in the background and third-world conflicts such as the Somali and Yemeni Civil Wars not yet readily transmittable by social media, the younger radicals of this era turned to art as a means to raise awareness and agitate—to share in Wodiczko’s commitment to breaking down “the symbolic war machine.”
Wodiczko belonged to that generation of post-WWII European intellectual exiles—Ilya Kabakov, Hans Haacke, and Christian Boltanski, to name a few—characterized by a cosmopolitan, multilingual, anti-authoritarian, and progressive character. They lived everywhere and found a home nowhere in the West, their hearts still harboring a begrudging faith in utopian democracy and a gratitude for the relative freedom of speech and movement they eventually found in these Western liberal democracies. Upon arrival in the United States, Wodiczko readily started working against the inequalities of the societies that welcomed him, though not entirely without hiccups. In the 1980s, propelled by a gut-reaction to homelessness in New York City, Wodiczko integrated the Lower East Side’s houseless population into his art by giving them utility carts called Homeless Vehicles (1988). Niro’s documentary acknowledges the project as impractical.
In retrospect, it’s impossible to separate Wodiczko’s compassionate naïveté from the deep-seated humanist impulse that courses through all of his work: his belief in the power of people talking to one another and opening up their eyes to the unjust reality of the world. In Wodiczko’s lifetime, the voices of the oppressed—the refugees, the homeless, and the veterans he worked with—went from being silenced to willfully ignored in the liberal democracies that gave artists like him the freedom to work and a platform to speak. Between the culture wars that made millennials apathetic and Gen-Z manic-depressive, the Western public has learned to compartmentalize artworks like his. Reactions to Wodiczko’s work nowadays evoke the “interpassivity” that Mark Fisher discusses at length in Capitalist Realism, the process by which art performs a catharsis on our behalf and allows us to keep consuming without impunity. In the United States, Wodiczko’s art is beloved by socially conscious Ivy League graduates (he taught at Harvard and MIT) and other disaffected intellectuals that drift toward the metropole of New York. Contemporary public art in the United States resembles a protest that everyone can go to, just as social media bombards us with images of violence that we can close out and walk away from.
Wodiczko is immensely well-read (he cites Julia Kristeva, Russian formalists, and of course, Bertolt Brecht among his influences) and believes resolutely in art’s ability to mobilize. As a documentarian, Niro faced a similar dilemma to Laura Poitras in her recent film All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022), a documentary about Nan Goldin’s protests against the Sackler family. How do you tell the story of an artist who eschewed institutions only for their work to become enshrined in them anyways? How could art—or anything—heal or liberate us today while we witness a genocide in real time and have exhausted all manners of public protests and symbolic resistance? How do we un-war ourselves?
It’s impossible to look back on Wodiczko’s monumental career without feeling a deep-seated sense of pessimism. As the genocide in Gaza worsens, I couldn’t help but wonder what Wodiczko, who taught as a professor of Interrogative Design, thinks about the non-ending realities of war his students can choose to receive daily on social media. When Wodiczko broadcasted a swastika on the South African embassy in Trafalgar Square in the 1980s, the political implications of his work was immediate. But a state of paralysis permeates today’s calls for peace. Today’s wars are structurally immune to postmodern deconstruction. Waged at once by military industrial complexes and discursive processes of manufactured consent, today’s wars are everywhere and nowhere, both a parallel world and an expanding totality. These impenetrable wars can’t be ended with symbols alone, if they can be ended at all. We may witness, we may protest, but we are nevertheless complicit, like those drones of Wodiczko’s with human eyes. The legacy of Institutional Critique beats on—boats against the current—into a pond carefully diverted away from the warring oceans of the world.
Krzysztof Wodiczko: The Art of Un-War screens this evening, October 20, at Anthology Film Archives. Wodiczko and director Maria Niro will be in attendance for a Q&A.
