JAROSŁAW KOZŁOWSKI
EVERYTHING BUZZES APART FROM WHAT BUBBLES. EXCERCISES IN DECLINATION

In Jarosław Kozłowski’s most recent project, the intrusive buzzing and inarticulate gurgling  of the media babble is reflected in the soundless passing of verbal slogans across standard flat-panel displays. With their recurring messages, the chaotically scattered displays visualize the media noise of stereotypes repeated over and over again. Just like the public media, these electronic broadcasts convey mental clichés present in language: POLES – POOFS – POVERTY, MAFIA – MAGGOTS, DEMOCRACY – DEVIATION. Snatched from public discourses, taken   out of context, the endless words and phrases passing before our eyes reveal the persuasive rhetorics of media language.

Kozłowski previously analyzed the ambiguous role of the mass media in his Rhetorical Figures series (2006-2009) where, despite juxtaposing various media, such as newspapers and electronic displays, he refused them the capacity to communicate. The panels displayed a short text, ‘No news from…’, which was followed by a name of one of twenty three cities, ‘from Moscow to Johannesburg and Sydney’, reflecting the artist’s categorical opposition against the media brouhaha, the power and politics of the media, with their extremely politicized rhetorics.

Recycled News (2009), a work comprising hundreds of newspaper pages painted over with watercolours, asked crucial questions about living in the media reality. Coming from various parts of the world, the newspapers, regardless of their place of publication or political standing, were always framed in the same way, subordinated to an aesthetics of rhythms  and repetitions, and, most importantly, always equally illegible. By covering entire pages with watercolours the artist not only questioned their credibility, but also exposed the aestheticization of the media. The concentration of multi-language titles, with its message of mass distribution of information, provoked questions regarding the limits of the mediatization of the contemporary experience of the world.

In his latest project, created specially for the exhibition at the State Art Gallery in Sopot, Kozłowski uses the contemporary technologies of mass communication in an equally wayward manner, transforming information media into means of conveying the ideologization  and banalization of public discourses. In several earlier works, installing the LED-displays  on building walls (Lublin, 2009), in streets and shops (Belgrade, 2006) or in exhibition spaces (Istanbul, 2010), Kozłowski presented them as media of non-infomation.  In Everything Buzzes Except Apart From What Bubbles, they become the media of disinformation and manipulation.

The artist, usually maintaining a distance towards the surrounding reality and opposed to any artistic declarativity, has for some time now been referring directly to the realities at hand. In European Standards (2009), he sarcastically quoted the language  of the political, social and cultural standards in slogans embroidered on canvas tapestries. In his latest project,  just as in works from several different Standards series, he adopts the position  of an ironist who, as he says himself, ‘uses sarcasm, mockery or ridicule rather than patronizing or moralizing’. That which ‘buzzes and gurgles’ in the texts displaye on the panels has been subjected to declension exercises, written out to several dozen wall charts. Inflected for case or person,     the various words become elements of a grammatical analysis. With his sarcastic sense of humour, Jarosław Kozłowski, a master of analytical reflection, of logical and linguistic games in conceptual art, turns the rhetoric of media language into the logic of its grammar.