Introduction
In the first issue of “View,” we look at things: our companions which remain so close and yet at times seem so removed from our visual experience, which are hyper-visible, yet tend to be overlooked, which seem familiar and homely, but are still able to haunt us and surprise us with their uncanniness. Thus we want to inquire not only about the theoretical framing of the dialectic of the visibility and invisibility of objects, but also about historically specific practices of looking at and perceiving them.
The perspectives on these questions are first introduced in a panel discussion about Tomasz Szerszeń’s art-research project titled “You. Me. Things” which comprises a number of issues—the history of the critique of everyday life, contemplations about materiality, the phenomenology of living among things, and fantasies about the secret life of things. We approach objects in a series of close-ups that employ different theories and critical tools. We rummage through Lefebvrian concepts (Paweł Mościcki), analyze American modernist poetry and its “ideas of things” (Polish translation of an excerpt from Bill Brown’s A Sense of Things), and survey Polish consumer practices in the 60’s (Iwona Kurz), as well as the post-1989 desire to own and accumulate commodities (Magda Szcześniak).
This vast panorama invites the readers to ponder photographic journals in the context of the dispute over abstraction during the cultural thaw of the late 50’s and 60’s in Poland (Karolina Lewandowska), to discover Walter Benjamin’s obsession with toys (Adam Lipszyc), to become familiar with the discussion about object and objecthood in art and photography after minimalism (Krzysztof Pijarski), and to read about lists and their relations to memory in the texts of Georges Perec and works by Sophie Calle (Ernst van Alphen).
The "viewpoint" presents artistic works that take up critiques of visual and material culture (Tomasz Szerszeń, Daniel Malone), and proposes critical commentaries to these works (Justyna Jaworska, Krzysztof Pijarski). Our first issue ends with a series of critical snapshots, in which we turn our attention to several important texts and artworks, including Mateusz Salwa on Daniel Arrase’s On n'y voit rien. Descriptions, Łukasz Zaremba on Nicholas Mirzoeff’s The Right to Look, and Paula Kaniewska on Katarzyna Mirczak’s exhibition ether.
The focus on “things” and their ambiguous character allows us to acknowledge our own ways of seeing—not only looking at things, at their constellations and relations, but also at our relations with other people, relations that are often mediated through things, and ultimately, looking at ourselves. Such an approach still seems depreciated both within the humanities and in everyday life. The ubiquity of things need not lead to their invisibility, their utility to weariness. Their silence does not have to equal their muteness. How about, in the end, “no ideas but in things”?