“Stories create more stories”

Meta is a collaboration between art-agenda and TextWork, editorial platform of the Fondation Pernod Ricard, which reflects on the relationship between artists and writers. In the latest addition to the series, Marta Dziewańska considers her work with Jagna Ciuchta in the context of storytelling and exchange.

“Storytelling,” wrote Hannah Arendt, “reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.”1 In her essay on the writer Isak Dinesen, she opposes storytelling to conceptual thought. Storytelling, she argues, “recollects and ponders” rather than putting forth a notion of truth as revelation. In my writing and curating, I try to do the same. I’m not interested in describing, defining, or explaining; in hiding behind the artist, or disguising myself as some omniscient sage. On the contrary, I see my work as storytelling. First, I need to understand the artist’s language, and then think of my reaction to it: propose my own story.2

This was the case in my text devoted to the work of Jagna Ciuchta. I was not familiar with her work, knew little about her artistic language, and the pandemic prevented me from meeting her in person. We saw each other a couple of times online and I was sent catalogues, texts, and exhibition photographs. Using these, I had to look at/read her work with my own language; a vocabulary comprising different constructions, with a completely different semantic field. This sort of translation—conducted in the knowledge that there is no such thing as full understanding or indeed full translatability—is not a static situation, one in which the artwork is a fixed point which must be captured and given account of. The same was true for me. I do not approach the work with a pre-determined, impermeable vocabulary, with ready-made definitions or determined templates. Just like Ciuchta, who constantly establishes dialogues with other artists through her artworks and accompanying histories in order to generate new meanings, I perceive my writing as another level of this multilayered, multilingual, and polysemic exchange of stories.

It is perhaps abusive of me, not to mention vain, but I cannot think about (my) writing other than as a way to challenge and complexify the works/practices in question. I am interested in contexts and parallels that not only unveil hidden or unnoted qualities, slippages, unexpected meanings, and contexts, but also open up the works to new meanings. This is what I like about curating and writing on art: the possibility not only of being surprised by what one (including the artist) did not expect or what was invisible from a given perspective, but also this constantly open possibility of expanding and updating the meaning of art.

The artwork is a place where contradictory ontologies meet. It produces a double (at least) temporality: presence and representation, changing and enduring, assembly and disassembly exist within it at the same time. It is an aporia that encourages discussion, illuminates various perspectives and invites storytelling. There is no room for overly easy, mechanical answers or simplistic dichotomies dividing reality (and imagination) into precise and disjointed before and after, inside and outside, reality and projection, same and different. Nor is it about right or wrong. There’s no final synthesis or conclusion on the horizon. Instead, there is constant referral, transposition, and pointing ahead: stories create more stories.

Meaningful critical writing/curating is both a dynamic and a creative participation in the artwork. For critics, it is also a way to complexify and update one’s own language through dialogue and the exchange of stories.