introduction

HIDDEN MELODY /press release/

Pawel Polit


THREE ELEMENTS IN JOANNA HOFFMANN'S LANGUAGE

Grzegorz Borkowski, 2000

 

- text from the catalogue "Book And What Next", issued  by Gallery AT Poznan, 2000


"QUOTATIONS FROM JOANNA'S HOFFMANN

Anna Maria Potocka, 1997

 

- published in "New Spaces of Art", Biala Gallery, Lublin, 1997


 

 

"EPISODE"

Lech Karwowski, 1997

 

published in the catalogue of the individual exhib. "Episode. The Guide", Labirynth Gallery, Lublin, 1999


 

 

"Introduction to artist's books"

author text


 introduction

In my artistic practice I employ various media: video and digital technologies, multimedia installations, graphics and artist’s books.

My earlier realizations focused on relations between the metaphor and concreteness of a place I occupy and time I fulfil. Clock mechanisms, self-made lunettes, view-finders and compasses have often appeared in my work. Space, re-orientated by myself, no longer referred to any outer pole. It assumed a form of a closed and self-referential area, forcing the viewer to look for a point of reference in him/herself. “We are such as we know”; constructing some system of concepts and notions at the same time we create our reality. It alters according to changes in our perception and understanding.

In my work personal experiences and observations appear often in the context of scientific researches and theories. These references to science correspond with my conviction that our perception of reality is based as much on our individual sensorium as on  ideologies which shape and transform our cultural environment. Investigating them and questioning become part of creative processes and activate the individual participation in the rapidly changing world.

 “A poet in the scientific landscape” – this phrase by Nick Turvin is the most accurate apprehension of my artistic attitude.

In my work I recall ideas which have in an eminent way influenced the evolution of our consciousness as well as modern discoveries and interpretations striking at the roots of old definitions and revolutionizing our contemporary world-views.

One of the series of my works, comprising multimedia installations, graphics and artist’s books, is titled “Hidden Melody”. It refers to the Pythagorean idea of the World’s Harmony being the most pervading and beautiful concepts developed by the human mind. Expressed in consonant relations between macro and micro components of the Universe, it gave rise both to science and art. Pythagoras believed that the whole matter emanated tones, that the whole world was music. He divided it into Musica Mundana (later known as Music of Spheres) and Musica Humana (music of the human body). His model, linking in coherent way the man with the rest of his Universe, has evolved in accordance with changes in our perception and knowledge of the world.

My realizations merge the images of the inner space of the human body (gained by means of ultrasonography or magnetic resonance) with images of far off galaxies, microsounds of the blood circulation and brainwaves with records of cosmic radiations invoking the dream of Harmony and underlining the power of human imagination. In this series I was also investigating relations between sound and its visual interpretation. The music scores were often light sensitive and manipulated by the viewers.

The Cosmic Accord, according to followers of Pythagorean ideas, reverberated once at the moment of Creation (that means 3-15 billions years ago) filling the universe with the eternal polyphony. 3,5 billions years ago a new line joined in: the music of life scored up in genetic information that, with slight differentiations, is common to all life on Earth.

My latest long-term project “Life matters” was initiated during my art & science residency at the Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology in Delhi last summer and designed as artistic laboratory embracing exhibitions, workshops and lectures. It was inspired by the contemporary definition of life that associates it with genes’ replications making the rest of the organism (including ourselves) merely a part of genes’ habitat. The project poses questions about the place of life in the Universe, borders of life, time scales as well as the nature of human consciousness that makes the matter of life matters.

These two projects show the scope of my interests and creative practices that bridges micro and macro processes, computer modelling with physical environment, scientific data with everyday experiences. I often play with scales and use various materials ( digital/virtual and tangible, man-made and natural, large and intimate) to activate the reception of the piece not only on visual but also physical levels.

Drawing from scientific researches or standard models I do not illustrate them but give them another values; incorporate them into the area of personal narrations, emotions and sensibility.  In this way I want to stimulate individual imagination and reflection and make the viewer who comes into contact with my work learn something about him/herself and the surrounding world.

 

 


"Hidden Melody"

 /press release/

Pawel Polit, 2002

Hidden Melody

Harmonia Mundi. Excercises in Perspective

Kingsgate Gallery, London 

21 Sept. - 06. )ct. 2002

 

 

This exhibition will present a new multi-media installation by the Polish artist Joanna Hoffmann. The show proposes a concise articulation of Hoffman's artistic endeavors, featuring her interest in interdependence between sound and its visual form. Harmonia Mundi. Exercises in Perspective integrates variety of media which the artist has been using so far: photography, artist's book, object, sound and video.

 

Hoffmann's work investigates the problem of relativity of dimensions, permeability of human and cosmic scales. Recognizing the cardiogram line and the sound of heartbeat as the essential marks of the human existence, she relates them to phenomena described by physics and astronomy. In her works, Hoffmann inscribes the event of heartbeat in circular movements of planets, pursuing the Pythagorean idea of Harmonia Mundi. Repetitive structures of her sound and video pieces parallel the inertia of physical bodies.

 

Harmonia Mundi. Exercises in Perspective juxtaposes visual elements with musical piece combining computer stretched sound of the heartbeat with sounds of planets as recognized and written down in the form of musical notation by Johannes Kepler. The viewer is invited to produce photographic prints of Kepler's notes, facing the cardiogram line drawn on the gallery walls and experiencing the organic reverberations of the sound of the heartbeat. Inserted in the exhibition is also a new video by the artist in which acoustic and visual waves are juxtaposed with ultrasonographic image of the inside of the human body.

 

The title of the exhibition refers to the problem of perspective, crucial in the visual arts since the early Renaissance. As the new technologies increasingly introduce new modes of understanding and experiencing the world, this subject seems to be especially relevant nowadays. In the age of virtual reality there seems to be no other stable point of reference than ourselves and our imagination.

 

Pawel Polit

Art critic , curator at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw        

 

 


 

THREE ELEMENTS IN JOANNA HOFFMANN’S ARTISTIC LANGUAGE

  By Grzegorz Borkowski*

W.Einthoven's invention of 1903 of a device recording human heart activity under the guise of electrocardiogram enabled to visualise one of the most meaningful processes occurring inside the body. Keeping in mind research-oriented and diagnostic importance of this method, we should not forget that it also introduced new, easily recognisable factor to the domain of visual language. For many persons it is just a sign of life that is typical for heart-powered creatures. Those who perceive electrocardiogram as entirely unique signature, characteristic for a given being, and a sort of a recorded life-moment of this being, belong to minority. Correct recognition of these two overlaid elements is possible for insightful observer. It is only possible if one juxtaposes various recordings gathered in various moments of a given person’s life. Similar state of affairs is to be found in the field of arts, where comparing of several works by one author allows grasping interrelations between general creative stance and detailed qualities of works. Motive and notion of cardiogram appears in Joanna Hoffmann's work throughout several years' creative period. For the first time, they could have been used in installation shown in Potocka Gallery in 1996. Walls of two gallery rooms have been lined with black rubber strip, which reproduced the cardiogram recording. The strip was burdened with little stones in one room, and weights in the other room. Simplified image of individual blood pulse through employment of gravitational forces has been encoded into a given space, typically used for art. presentations. Cardiogram as a form used by medicine - delineated onto minute scale on paper - was not present directly, but as a kind of visual matrix rooted in collective memory. It is important to note that a small book which consisted of only two pages (pages were simultaneously the cover of the book) accompanied this individual exhibition. Elastic band, which limited the angle of possible opening of the book, has been mounted onto the opposite inner pages. This line was also a segment of the copy of authentic cardiogram inserted inside the book. In last several years, some of Joanna Hoffmann's artist's books were closely related to her spatial works that, as Jerzy Ludwinski noted, they constitute a kind of installation resume for this artist. Admittedly, they often serve as a condensation, shortened transposition of the idea of an installation instead of its description. Hoffmann's installations, ephemeral out of necessity, could be also treated as momentary appearances of books scored for gallery space.  We can enter this score, or version, not only mentally but also physically. It is noteworthy to recall one of "One-sided Thoughts", noted by Joanna: Book is a piece of space which is filled with individual time. Therefore, I think that artist's books belong to a category of source reality in Hoffmann's works. The individually created source reality is much more basic than artist's spatial realisations. The contents of each book reflect one specific idea, one mental experience presented with rigorous precision, like in a deduction of a mathematical formula. The sensations connected with opening books, leafing through them and touching them are counterparts of the acts of entering and moving in the installation space. With delicate premeditation, Hoffmann's books register these facts until the near annihilation of the recording contained therein. "Music for inert repetitions" is a book of undeveloped photographs which are gradually  being developed during their examination. Readers' fingerprints are easily discernible on the pages of this book. They document the act of reading and involuntary interference of the watcher into the contents of the tale that gradually vanishes but is deposited in the memory. It is memorised that the pages contained uniformly spaced musical pentagrams, each with one short recording of an electrocardiogram of a single heartbeat. Two recognitory codes of individuality are being juxtaposed here: fingerprints and pules lines.

Joanna Hoffmann's artistic language, apart from cardiograms and undeveloped photographic paper includes one typical element, which hasn't been mentioned yet. It is the sound of heart beating, which is being transformed in a multitude of ways. Its semantic message is certainly similar to cardiogram lines, but sound is present in space in a different way than the graphic sign. it makes its appearance in installations as an integral element, simultaneously modifying the situation of presentation of artist's books and stimulating viewers to  ponder the surrounding space. It was the case of work "Music of Spheres", shown in Ujazdowski Castle in an exhibition on conceptual reflection. Processed sounds of heart beating were associated with the work of Johannes Kepler, who tried to find the acoustic equivalents of the Solar System planets. Each of the planets was depicted by a separate book placed on a special pedestal equipped with sound-emitting loudspeaker concealed inside. Acoustic sphere was permanently present, while contents of the books made themselves familiar only after the viewer decided to look inside. Two orders of perception could have distinguished. Sound and the totality of spatial arrangement were creating environment for "reading". It was also a model depicting the situation of reading person, always immersed in a certain set of individual and external contexts. In this case, the author tried to  partially determine these contexts, connecting the act of reading book with the reading of the complex surroundings. In Joanna Hoffmann's work entitled "here and now", spatial object for reading and turning in one's hands, the distinguished position of "and" is really curious. We won't find it between "here" and "now", but at the top of two connected bases, on the staircase pyramid created by the remaining words. This conjunction mark-out resembles statement attributed to Heidegger. He was alleged to say that in the title of "Sein und Zeit", it is the "small" word in the middle that is the most important"

Grzegorz Borkowski, 

art critic and curator at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, text from the catalogue "Book And What Next", issued  by Gallery AT Poznan, 2000 

 


 

„Quatations from Joanna Hoffmann”

 

Maria Anna Potocka

Text from the Catalogue „New Spaces of Art, Installations of the 90-ies” Biala Gallery, Lublin 1998.

 

One can say that reality means „everything”.

Nobody has an access to it fully , nevertheless everybody in some way is able to get nearer to a slightly different fragment of it. But even the areas we can approach are rather small. Some things have to be ignored or  at least they must wait. The rest is subjected to selection in order  to define the world in which we move about.

 

„Objects appear or become present in the area of my language by themselves. I do not choose them but rather notice them and undertake decisions.”

 

The process of defining the shape and the symbolics of one’s private world is especially visible in artistic decisions, mainly because they do not enter relations with practical matters. Decisions serving the everyday life are deprived of  such a clear authorship. Most of them are attributed to (account for) specified functions or aims. In art, where something like a function or aim does not exist, each choice has  an individual designation, a declaration of interest, weight, uncertainty, strength and many other possibilities.

 

„ the starting point is always to a some degree of a mess, due to a chaos of information and experiences. Maybe repeating elements, creating a narration of links (...) is a never-ending attempt of ordering, an effort undertaken always from the beginning, again and again.”

 

All of us have to mark out an area of privacy, no matter if this delimitation serves everyday life or art..

This act divides people into two different groups. The first one is unaware that any choice has already taken place . Such people function convinced that their life or art touches upon the whole world. With such an assumption it is easier to believe in the rightness of one’s point of view, in the truth of one’s knowledge.

Those who belong to the other group are conscious that their existence  embraces only a fragment of the world  and that it ensues from particular choices. Thus all conclusions and reasons are loaded by something especial, something that is inside us.

Such awareness brings criticism but also an interest in others’ views.

 

„Much more important is the quality of experiencing and the relation with that which is not myself.”

 

Sometimes other  points of view complement our own observations, and treated as a selection from reality are incorporated into our private areas. Joanna Hoffman is a person and artist who is conscious of her private area.

 

„I think that we are stuck in  and contribute to a reality in which nothing is given, is all-ready existing. Everything is being constructed.”

 

Many artists have such consciousness. But usually it is kept aside their main subject matter, though it serves their methodology , increasing the prudence of creative decisions.

The awareness that we see only a small fragment ( which itself may contain omitted places) that we „see” it through devices parameters of which are different from those used by others, increases caution in judging, in coming to conclusions, in falling into certainty.

In the case of Joanna Hoffmann, the consciousness of representing an individually constructed world serves something more than an outlook on life. It constitutes the main place her creativity pivots around.

The choice of such an area of creative concentration  implies a particular attitude and behaviour. Trying to describe this attitude one should adopt some order, but to tell the truth no hierarchy or sequence has raison d’etre here.

Nevertheless, one can start the description by underlining  modesty , which in a natural way issues from the fact that we have only  limited fragments of the world in our disposal and to extend these resources is difficult.  But modesty has also its limits. It manifests itself in not expressing assertions to become obligatory outside.  What is revealed comes rather in the form of denouncements. Such modesty, when the threat of  somebody else’s intervention appears, can evolve into a kind of obstinacy The strength against somebody else’s opinions and interference arises from the conviction that within one’s private world one is the main expert.

An attitude strongly concentrated on the private structure of reality may also contain some disbelief in the possibility of communication. If this disbelief assumes the character  of assumption it can have many artistic consequences. For example, the rejection of finishing sentences and the elimination of  things of secondary  importance from the work which then underlines the „symbolic readiness” of indispensable ones.

Arranged in such a way, objects of more or less the same  level of necessity acquire a particular weight.

 

An object always has its meaning, its identity, though difficult to grasp /to perceive/. Maybe entangled in so many notional or linguistic texts, existing and constantly being  created, it has itself disappeared somewhere.

So what is the meaning of an object? It seems that the meaning of an object lies in its concreteness.

 

In Joanna Hoffmann’s installations, these „heavy” , concrete objects, in which one should search for full meanings, are integrated by some „course”. The line of this course depends on the architecture of the place where the situation happens. And this line decides that the obtained whole is possible only in this place.

 

„Joining objects, either by a background or lines, comes perhaps from a fear of loosing them within the space. Unlinked they are endangered by the state of weightlessness, inertia,  disappearance.

Maybe the majority of our vital  energy is used for this constant process of uniting, bounding together objects, people, ourselves....”

 

Such is the first impression. It results from a conviction that things came first, and a linking line appeared afterwards. It seems that these are objects which are connected, that after having been chosen they got comprised by some line’s course. Thereby things are considered to be of most importance. But there is a possibility that it was the other way round, that first there was a line, some undisturbed course, some pure idea, for example an idea of a book, and then objects occurred, and hung on this course, forcing it to submit to the load, burden, weight,  or they made  their way into the middle of the idea, deforming its evidence

The assumption that the line was primary implies some initial perfectness ,  something simple and continuous that, due to  events we experience,  was subjected to tensions, weights and went out of its way.

This version gives less liberty to the choice of objects . On the whole they are imposed by what happened previously. The act of forming looses its freedom; as if „something” uses us to form itself. This „something” is most often the past remembered in a particular way.

 

„Choice of elements is made by intuition. Maybe they open my instinct, the instinct of reading the reality in which I live, work, grapple with. What is being constructed is a particular situation - visualisation /demonstration, confrontation of a process of thinking harnessed in the process of intuition.”

 

Objects which influence the course of the line or intervene in the content of a book are dictated by intuition, past, events, memory. Thus they cannot be freely chosen, they must derive from the inside of a private world and refer to its borders. They have to describe this world and interpret its principles. They are both the content and its translation.

 

„Inner spaces are open for co-creation, for a dialogue; being realises itself in what is open by dialogue.”

 

In a situation where the appearing object has such a wide and open function, it cannot represent or tell anything - it can only signal. Best if it does not allow any verbalisation or description of the signal. In this way we „derive” some meanings  which we do not name or define. Only when these meanings gain some constitution , can we afford to increase the sharpness of comprehension.

We can compare this to the reception of a sentence. Senses of words are „derived” but not deciphered. Only a jointly elaborated meaning is getting opened.

This is the best way to approach   works composed of many elements; to search only for those meanings which come out of the arrangement of particular things. For various reasons, it might happen that we will not encounter such meaning, and then we will find ourselves among autonomous objects which seems to have no reason to be so close to each other.

Objects constructing a new meaning can be very distant from matters and  passed events to which they somehow refer. Best when the private past of the work cannot be reached at all.

Objects created or arranged by Joanna Hoffmann keep this distance. One can feel private references behind them but one cannot reach them. Thanks to this, they allow for being filled with someone else’s privacy and do not disappear in the attractiveness of biographic explanations.

One has to have a great sense of balance to keep one’s private area unrevealed while observing it intensely and to signalise constantly its existence through non - revealing,

This perpetual taming of life can arise from a particular treatment of art.

 

Art is for me a form of being.

Art allows me to penetrate /to find my way/ into the matter of life through a different door,  the door which, set ajar, offers the freedom of cognitive imagination.

 

*Quotations marked in the text were chosen by me from the conversation with Joanna Hoffmann.

Anna Maria Potocka is an art critic, the Chief of Polish Section of AICA

 

 


EPISODE

„(...) Sometimes we get an impression that we can hear a clear sound of a tight string. Thin as a spidery thread, too transitory in its flickering to be seen, it is set into resonance by the will of self-preservation. This gentle resonance attracts our attention. Blurred at the beginning, almost indistinguishable from noises, it slowly acquire acuteness as new concretions, approximations and variants appear. They are bearing an image of identity, a knot joining different perspectives and time courses.

This process can be observed in the work of Joanna Hoffmann. Here everything has its reason..

Causa materialis are ash, wax, sand, paving stone, brick...in natural colours of grey, ochre, sepia - casts, imprints, traces, destructs - elements and remnants of something that once had a form. Now - crippled - became a container, a casket with a double bottom, protection, veil. They conceal objects:  a watch, compass, magnifying glass, book, record, scale...This is the way the first tension arises - between the matter in the state of disintegration, decay, distraction and objects of  a highly complicated and organised body. They designate some points, centres - to notice them one has to stop, concentrate, read their function and behaviour within the whole structure.

The effective cause could be expressed in the question: Is a „stable behaviour” of a subject possible? Can a subject be still a unity despite the fact that everything which he/she considers as his/her own can be exposed to distraction, abstraction, joined into another - biological or ideological - narrative.  Is it possible to objectifies the subject,  reduce  to singular behaviours, functions, relations?

Whatever the Self (here - Joanna Hoffmann) generates seems to have a narrative character. But it is not any particular story. The aura of used materials and objects does not suggests any strictly defined theme of narration - it becomes its symbol.

WE are unable to possess symbols, but we can combine them. What’s more - we do it constantly.  Some people claim that they represent  something we should integrate with. This integration implies the merger into some great age-long history, into a stream of the ”universal”, where our home is meant to be. Thus we are „at home” each time when we allow ourselves to join something more general, something that overpasses us, something we are all immersed in.

Joanna Hoffmann’s treatment of space results in compositions which are equally delicate and vulnerable as our Self endangered by the heavy machine of destruction. Threads of different stories, narratives and symbols seem to meet each other at points where some distinguished  elements evoke a concentrated and  active look. These threads transform the point of  their intersection into a centre of subjectivity.

Space and time are essential here. Since we have no access to other dimensions which could join  all these „lines” existing in the space of intuition rather than in the physical world , we assume the presence of the centre rather than we see it.

The time of existence of substances varies despite the fact that one conceals the other.

Elements arranged within the ”closed by walls” space require a panoramic look., a sweeping glance along its own „horizon”, but then  they provoke to come closer , change the accommodation of the pupil to another distance and scale.

Touch of the matter. The aesthetics of a trace, allusion, suggestion.

These constitute only a part of the structure of Joanna Hoffman’s installations,

This structure eludes descriptions. Otherwise what would be the sense in realising it?

Even if such an analytical description appears - it can not introduce the unity. However, being truly equivalent it could  evoke such intuition. But then we would be dealing only with its aesthetic and not with subtle orchestration of space made by Joanna Hoffmann.

 

Lech Karwowski, an excerpt from the catalogue of Joanna Hoffmann,

“Episode. A guide for”, Lublin BWA,1999.

 

 

 


 

 

Remaining a medium of a language particularly reach in cultural codes, the art-book does not limit itself to the traditional form of a book but opens an area of multi and inter-media (using D.Higgins's term)activities. Yet regardless of the form the book assumes, its essence is based on the episodic character both of its time and of its space.

In her famous text "On Photography" Susan Sonntag recalls Malarme's words: "Everything in the world exists only to find its end in a book".This end however, is a very special one. It results from our fear of disappearing, of the state of distraction, weightlesness, inertia. It is a consequence of our constant need to order, link together things, matters, people, ourselves. Thus this end is a never ending sequel of openings which activate time and space, motif and context, introduce animation and methamorphosis.

Experiencing a book (both on mental and sensual levels) is not separated from a biographical time, and as such leaves traces both in the viewer and the object created only to stimulate his imagination and sensitivity. In most of my books, their content transforms or vanishes. It is not however a "destructive power of time" but rather filling some area of time with presence - an active form of being. In my book "here and now" a double pyramid, made of computer-printed words "and" , whilst opened reveals the light-sensitive inside. It contains spirals composed by handwritten words "here" - "now" mirroring each other. The more illegible words become, the more visible become fingerprints of readers. A similiar situation appears in the series of music scores titled "Music for inert repetitions", based on a graphic record of one heartbeat scanned into a stave. Each book-music score composes one of many possible modules of narration. Here the light sensitivness of material makes the notation changing, disappearing, "living" just as the sound to which it refers.

In many art-books, their physicality constitutes an important part of their content. A book is an object that occupies the place in space and simultaneously becomes a metaphor for places we seek for and carry in ourselves. Two compasses, inbuilt in my "Brick-case", influencing each other suggest the beginning and the end of this wandering.

"How little time we have to fulfil ourselves, how little ourselves we have to fill up time". This text inscribed in one of my dated books expresses the anxiety which accompanies many of us. The present we are living through constantly disperses itself and directs us to other, not-utterly-recognised presents. Hence, according to some, "there are no books but only one Book", according to others "there is no one Book, there are only books". These opinions meet in the consciousness that each of us has an access only to a little fragment, in each case different of the reality, which he shapes and share with. Sometimes using the medium of a book.

 

Joanna Hoffmann, 2000