The Casting Lukasz Gronowski - The Casting
Mały Salon 13rd of June - 27th of August 2006
Zacheta National Gallery of Art

curator: Joanna Sokolowska

Łukasz Gronowski collects and presents in his films short scenes played out at his request, with people singing their favourite songs or clapping their hands to the rhythm (the video series Simple Stories). The repetition and re-contextualisation effect reveals the conventional and abstract nature of familiar and already defined situations.
The situation arranged by the artist for the Zachęta exhibition has been inspired by the way the media and the marketing industry format people´s behaviour and gestures. At the same time, it disrupts those conventions by appropriating them and demonstrating their conventional nature.

The project, which consists of a casting and an exhibition, initially follows the mechanisms typical for the film industry. The first stage - the distribution, by e-mail, on web portals, and across Warsaw, of an announcement about a casting for an `art film´ - triggered off a process characteristic for the typical situations created by the media. The magic of the word `film´ worked, and the response went beyond any expectations. Many candidates mailed in their photos, CVs and extensive personal information, even though the announcement did not request such data. That part of the Casting revealed just how desperately people were to promote their own person and gain a media presence, and also how deeply they were convinced about their uniqueness and exceptionality.

The casting itself resembled a selection procedure in the vein of those employed by acting schools or film/commercial producers. Filmed by the artist, the candidates had 15 seconds each to perform tasks presented to them in the form of printed commands. Some of the commands requested demonstrating simple gestures or emotions whose representation is well rooted in culture, such as `smile while nodding your head,´ `cry over your fate,´ or `show repentance.´ In the camera´s presence, they brought to mind the typical, familiar repertoire of soap opera actors or reality show participants. Other tasks, however, involved less typical notions and situations that were more difficult to act out, such as `censor yourself.´ They confused the participants by referring to familiar but ambiguous notions, e.g. `adopt a civic posture,´ which, following a moment´s hesitation, was interpreted by most participants as saluting or standing at attention.
At the end of the casting, the artist informed selected candidates that they had already performed in a film that would be assembled from the documentation footage.

The film presented at the exhibition shows reshuffled fragments of the scenes played out by the candidates, with the command boards out of the frame, so that the viewers have to guess themselves what task each of the `actors´ is performing. Thus the viewer is also pulled into the behavioural coding and decoding game.
Virtually all of the scenes played out by the casting participants revealed the power of the media-promoted behaviour models that rule the collective imagination. At the same time, the situation arranged by the artist introduced confusion and revealed the difficulty of translating text commands into gestures, facial expressions, and body language. It manifested a tension between the acting present in every ritual and pose - and the unpreparedness for unfamiliar situations and a desire to master them.

Gronowski´s project is like a virus that penetrates an efficient system to call its logic into question. Using the instruments of economics and mass-media entertainment and marketing, i.e. domains able to absorb and appropriate virtually all gestures, the Casting sends us to the process of the blurring of the line between the private and public spheres, and the commercialisation of seemingly personal affectations. Individuality, gestures, forms of behaviour, especially those emotionally charged, become a commodity and an element of existential marketing of perpetual self-promotion. In this spectacle, the division between reactions and personal experiences, between social rituals and the acting out of model situations known from the media, is blurred. At the same time, the Casting shows that those gestures still possess an abstract, unknown potential and that they evade semantic identification if used in a distorted way and archivised from a distance.

Joanna Sokolowska