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"Those who make it impossible
for unity
to develop are the makers of angels."
- James Joyce
The iconographic motif of a multiple portrait appeared and was often
taken up by artists in the first decades of the 20th century (for example
by W. Szpakowski, 1912, by Witkacy, 1917, and by Marcel Duchamp, 1917).
The concept of that kind of portrait work was the direct result of the
cubist breakthrough which sanctioned the presence of many points of
view, placed the object analyzed in a context and released its meaning
in this way. The philosophical sanction for the portrait was supplied
by phenomenology which - through Kant - became the direct legacy of
the concept of the Carthesian "cogito". Phenomenology proposed transcendental
subjectivity a priori and enclosed the world within the perspective
of intentional cognition. Many artists took up this kind of portrait
for purely aesthetic reasons but for most of them it became an important
part of their individual existential experience. The multiple portrait
as a model of an internal relation (the man and his epiphenomena, facing
only himself in an intimate space), during which the identity of the
subject was being negotiated, helped to picture two different observations.
On the one hand it visualised the impossibility of the cognition of
"the one truth" about ourselves - if it exists at all. On the other
hand it showed man's personality as a bunch of different selves and
justified this vision as the closest to the truth. Undertaking the iconographic
motif of a multiple portrait as a figure of the continually repeated
question of identity, Barbara Konopka denied any value of such a kind
of cognitive relation (directed internally), which she deemed too autistic.
Thanks to the redundance of the modified version of the portrait the
artist shows its mechanism as a stuffy space for the production of a
split personality - as the slit between the cognitive subject and its
object (which are supposed to be identical in this case) where the "I"
is wrought. "[...] Even when the other is only me, me playing the part
of another "me" in a double role: of the sender and of the receiver.
Between those two roles, between me and the others (even if I am "them"
myself), a split appears which makes any completeness of identity quite
impossible."* The abovementioned split becomes the internal space for
the ever repeated attempts at constructing the identity of the subject.
The real world becomes only an element of the internal psychomachia
within this space. The solipsistic relation is the reason why man as
a being for himself is not able any more to enter the optimal interpersonal
relations. The on-going privatization of society and the separation
of man from other people lead him to create his internal space of the
superego, where he feels an exile. "[...] Those people in the restaurant
car thrived on the idea that each of them was an island that ought to
be respected and that one does not enter into relations with one's neighbours
with impunity. That is why they said nothing to one another. But in
spite of that their silence contained many fearful, funny and exalted
conversations - which were internalized. Our imagination contains numerous
real and imaginary creatures which we create and recreate, form and
transform without end. We do not talk with the other any more - we conduct
a dialogue with the other within us."** When Barbara Konopka exorcises
the "I" in a multiple portrait she gives up the prerogatives of the
subject lost in the nuances of its own interior in order to introduce
the figure of a binary man in her series of digital photograms called
"Illuminations. On-line.". The binary man becomes the material used
to form virtual subjetivities in their relation with the exterior, with
the other, not with the I-dentical. Konopka presents the binary man
as a double being, empirical and transcendental, made up of two bodies
- the physical and the media body. The physical body shown within the
pluralism of the elements of its non-semantic speech, without channeling
the meanings, loses its untouchability as "God's creation", the carrier
of universal laws, and may be freely transformed (interference in genetic
information, plastic surgery, sex change operations). The media body
came into being thanks to the dispersion of digital technologies of
carrying and processing information, as the extension and intensification
of man's communicative and perceptive abilities, creating space for
the continual interphase with the exterior. The binary man as a set
of analitically atomized physical and mental elements forms the potential
for the constitution of subjectivity. It is the frame in whose space
osmoses and interphases take place and where ephemeral identities crystallize
as the result of contacting any given other. Similarly, as in the case
of Barbara Konopka's multiple portrait in the series of digital photograms
"Illuminations. On-line.", she makes use of well-known iconographic
motifs in order to get her own message across. The presentation of the
Vitruvian man, as an ideal of European humanism, sanctioned the homogenous
construction of man and the world, the absolute truth, contained within
every human being. The binary man breaks the Vitruvian model, creating
its own space of relations with the world, each time different ones,
setting the horizon for the existence of the rhizome, the play of difference
and repetition (the artist inscribes herself in this way into the perspective
of the philosophy of anti-humanism). The second icon is a kind of a
pastiche of a well-known image which announces the presence of mankind
in outer space. B.K. shown as an empirical and transcendental double
(the physical body and the mental epiphenomenon) symbolically annexes
space and lays down the borders of the territory in which the creation
and processing of information takes place (the mediatization of its
ephemeral subjectivities). Constant movement, nomadic dismemberment
and the location in space makes the binary man a phenomenon which constantly
improves and broadens its communicative potential. The possibility of
permanent transgression and personality transformation denies thinking
in terms of identity-as-foundation. The emanation of this presentation
in the space of the gallery situates the audience within the net of
interactive relations. The curious absence of the work (the media and
the physical body broken down into elements and reduced to the imaginary
field of interphase) - osmosis, contact - is a proposition that the
work be constituted as the annexation of new dimensions and connections.
The author evokes two spaces where identity is structuralized. Internal
space in the multiple portrait and external space in "Illuminations".
Thus she closes the horizon of human experience. Similarly, the Deleusian
perspective points to the model of osmotic dependence between two types
of man's consciousness, represented on the one hand by the rhizome and
on the other by a tree/root. The centric model, directed inside (a tree/root)
introduces the principle of identity as the place occupied by a god
or man. The model of the rhizome constitutes the type of existence as
continual coming into being which is by definition a plurality, an irreducible
multiplicity. "[...] The rhizome is not one which can be dychotomically
divided, One as a subject, an image or a world, and it is not the diverse
which is the consequence of the One. Multiplicity is devoid of an object
and a subject, it only possesses determinations and dimensions (i. e.
the lines of segmentation and stratification), there is no unit of measure
here, or numbers as the principle of order among elements, the multiplicities
are defined by the exterior, by the lines of outflow or de-territorialization
which add a different dimension to the given one."***
Łukasz Ronduda Łodz, 21st August 2000
(translated by Maciej Swierkocki)
*M.P. Markowski, "Efekt inskrypcji.
Jacques Derrida", p. 396
**Tadeusz Komendant, "Wladze dyskursu" ("The Powers of Discourse), Warsaw
1994
***Bogdan Banasiak, "Ogród koczownika. Deleuze - rizomatyka i nomadologia"
("The Garden of a Nomad. Deleuze - Rhizomatics and Nomadology"), "Colloquia
Communia", 1988, vol. 1-3
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