In the beginning was the Big Bang; At the end It will be Megahit .In the beginning was the Word; at the end, it will be the Internet. In the beginning, dinosaurs inherited the Earth; at the end, the Earth will be strolled by Bigfoot, the Black Monk, Diablo, and a Jedi Knight.

The one who foretells such an apocalypse doesn’t speak about the end of the world, he speaks of our imagination. For now, I will preface by saying that this is exactly how I see Marcin Zawicki’s art – as a serious play with our ideas of the human world. In the essay I will explore what, according to the artist, inhabits our imagination, and also, how I understand megahit, in the context of his earlier works. I will avoid technical analysis of painting and references to aesthetic conceptions. I will curb my tale to a couple of plots related to the ways of representing what is human and what’s post-human.

WORLD FULL OF THINGS

The first striking feature of Zawicki’s early paintings is their deliberate overabundance: crammed, tight, and overloaded.

What accounts for this overflow?

One of the paintings in the “Lunapark” series shows souvenirs for sale: plush toys, little hearts, ducks, baby giraffes. The seller, standing in a characteristic servile hunch and with folded arms, is turning to the people looking at his stuff. It was he who organised this hodgepodge of goods: yellow, pink, turquoise teddies, together. Cuddly toys, small, medium and large, according to their size.

Similarly in other paintings: horses on a carousel, plush toys crammed into a glass cube, carriages of toy trains. There are always too many objects in relation to the context: the carriages are empty, nobody rides the carousel, teddies are never fished for. This discrepancy between the intended play and the pattern of behaviour gives a chilling effect.

The discrepancy between the multitude of toys and EN the emptiness of the situation creates the feeling of excess. A human has created these objects, collected
and arranged them one by one, but the human is absent. The human-being cannot be inside of this overabundance, engage, belong.

Maybe because everything in this world is not only excessive but also artificial: playing has been trans- formed into toys, religion has turned into little Buddha figures, art has taken the form of plastic Marlin Monroe and nature has changed into the horses on the carousel. Nature, religion and art have been transformed into objects to be looked at, giving pleas- ure, being purchased. Assembly-line models have reached the amusement park. This is the artificial hell where feeling pleasure is a forced duty. That’s why the people standing in front of the stall offering plush toys, don’t seem like the participants of the amusement: their bodies are withdrawn, disengaged, like the bodies of those visiting a museum.

Here’s a sad paradox: the painter has shown the people who have so thoroughly tamed everything which is interesting, different, and other, that nothing attracts them anymore. They can no longer participate in their lives, thus even this amusement they can only visit.

WORLD OF OVERFULL THINGS

In subsequent series, Zawicki focused on how hu- mans transform their bodies – especially how men do it. He depicted – slightly akin to Zbigniew Libera in “Urządzenia korekcyjne” (Corrective Devices, 1989) or similarly to Dorota Nieznalska in the memorable “Pasja” (Passion, 2001) – the stages of surgical cor- rections of body (Before/After, 2011) or the work of aestheticising the musculature (Muscles are Very Important, 2011; Boys, 2011).

In this way, nature proved artificial – created at every step, surgically corrected, painstakingly modelled, and always judged by the criteria of beauty. These were bodies in all kinds of situations and contexts, variously dressed and posed, but al- ways seen from the outside. This seems to be the origin of this radical idea in Zawicki’s work: to look inside. To pierce the skin, remove the surface, and part the bodily layers.

The concept emerged in the series of paintings: “The Fall” (2013). And then nature was revealed as something dark. This term “dark” (loosely referring to Timothy Morton’s conceptions) doesn’t point to any specific features. But at the same time, it recalls a lot of them. “Dark” means weird, incomprehensible, odd. Escaping thorough cognition. Not beautiful.

“Dark Nature” appears in Zawicki’s work as a new embodiment of the excess. And it has a striking effect. We look and wonder : what is this? What exactly is this? At the top of the painting there is some kind of creature (A frog? Dragon? Lizard?) with a huge hole in the belly. The edges of the hole are overgrown with plants, so the belly has not been cut. It isn’t childbirth either. The artist doesn’t show a violent act on a living creature, nor a natural one.

And yet we are looking at the mythical beginning, an act of creation, an event the size of the world’s birth.

Here, from the belly, a disorderly representation of life spills out: plants, fruits, flowers, skeletons of animals, miniature lizards, an elephant, sea creatures. It’s as if life has spilled out of the cornucopia. There is no order or pair. This is neither Noah’s Ark nor Mendeleev’s table, so we will not find here either the representatives of all the biological kingdoms, or a complete scientific classification. This is rather the gesture of a demiurge, an act of a god amused with his power to create. The demiurge behaves like a child-god, who cannot distinguish between discovering and creating, getting to know from calling to being. So he invents nature from memory, from observation and imagination: from this dissected animal a child’s cosmos emerges, where plants and vegetables fall down next to animals and skeletons.

And perhaps this is what Zawicki’s changed attitude to nature is all about. So if in “Lunapark” we saw nature ground and turned into a commodity by humans and in the “Muscles” and “Boys” we saw nature modelled and tuned to the current canons of beauty, then we

now see nature untamed and unusable. Clever and sly, Zawicki doesn’t show that nature – unlike these silly animal figurines at the amusement park – is actually beautiful. He doesn’t place images of hu- manity’s destruction of the environment before our eyes. Instead he shows nature as something that escapes being known, commodified and sold. His nature contains this unpredictable everything.

In a simple sense, Zawicki is right. Wouldn’t an X-ray of one’s internal anatomy show a jumble that doesn’t quite match the body’s external shape? Laparoscopy is even worse, revealing, let’s say, the abdominal cavity from the inside. From there we can see wavy plains, sudden hills and unexpected hollows, layers of tissue against each other, soft and long tubes, rolling chunks of flesh and fluids. And microscopy? A smear of our cells seen under a microscope shows that we are teeming with tiny creatures, minerals and fungi. Or when operating between near and far vision: the porous surface of the Moon viewed from hundreds of miles will resemble a microscopic image of human internal organs.

This similarity between human and non-human or- ganisms was played out in “Sporysz” (Ergot) series, where the titular fungi, magnified and transformed in painted representations, proved to resemble the human brain and its appendages looked like human hands. This is how the idea of overabundance was fundamentally reversed: in “Lunapark” it concerned the excess of too many objects in too tight a space, in critical art – referring to body, muscles and boys- it spoke of the power of canons of beauty. In “The Fall” this idea came back depicted as the excess inside of every being. And that changed everything.

Previous overcrowding was caused by the excess of things gathered around something. This new one comes out of something. The former was created by humans, the latter belongs to nature. Discovering it, means that nature is not natural any more. It features excess not harmony. It is characterised by weirdness, not beauty. But why, one might ask, why in this crowd, there are objects/beings so distant? From the dog cut open- let’s look at one more painting from “The Fall” series – plants shoot forth, tubes, a ball, heads of other animals…

This is something more than just crowding – this is the coexistence of elements so extremely diverse that the distance between them cannot be bridged otherwise than by accepting nature’s inherent other- ness. Is this what Zawicki means – showing nature as alien to humans? Yes and no.

WHAT CAN BE

Nature and humans are not completely alien to each other, because Zawicki never depicted the inside of a human as different from that of a dog. And yet the artist uses strangeness. He evokes the feeling of strangeness towards our ideas about na- ture- our ways of defining and representing it. The artist doesn’t claim to have discovered the mystery of the structure of living creatures. Rather, in a grotesque mode – which doesn’t exclude awe- he reveals the imaginations, for which the boundaries between human and non-human, organic and arti- ficial, living and dead, are not obliging. That’s why, from the strange “frog” or “dog” incoherent and incompatible sequences spill out. In other words, for Zawicki, each creature can contain the entire cosmos within itself.

Every being is made of the basic elements of the cosmos- this idea was postulated by the Greek phi- losopher Anaxagoras, who lived in the fifth centu- ry bc. Zawicki referenced this idea in a series of paintings entitled “Homoiomerie” (2015/16). In its basic meaning Anaxagoras conception means that the entire universe and every being in the universe consists of the same elementary particles, which the philosopher called “seeds”. Thanks to them, the world is homogeneous and unchanging. But the world is also diverse. For example, a human is a human, and a dog is a dog, because they maintain the proportion of the seeds corresponding to each species. The species exists because something – for

Anaxagoras, this was Reason – guides these seeds, giving purpose to their existence. If this Greek philosopher had seen Zawicki’s painting he would likely be terrified. And he certainly wouldn’t want to support his creative work. But Zawicki never declared that he wanted to create a series illustrating Anaxagoras’ ideas. Painting is not philosophy, but it is speaking which precedes philosophy. It is a pictorial writing depicting what can be expressed through images. Painting doesn’t insist that its existence is meaningful, or its message is coherent. It practices philosophy on the border of what makes sense and what can be expressed. It presents reality not as it is, or should be, but as it can be.

This is Zawicki’s pictorial writing – a letter made of the hieroglyphs of nature. Here are the stems, tall letters of mushrooms topped with caps, sullen stones, slightly curved snails, sea urchins spiked in all direc- tions, squid arms. What does this letter say? That there is no order in the cosmos, that the similarities between elements do not constitute meanings, that based on succession we can not predict the contin- uation of the sequence. Order when understood as meaningful, succession is an illusion. Moreover, only a few elements give the impression of independent beings, so nature is as rich as it is dead. It seems like a collection compiled by a child who picked up from the beach and put in a bag, everything that was in sand and was a feast to the eyes. And carefully spread it all out on canvas. And then mixed it all together.

This is the last painting in the series. It was created by some childish gesture of mixing, smearing, bum- bling – a joyful and slightly capricious act finishing this work-and-play experience. With this gesture, Zawicki emphasises a certain change: throughout the entire series of paintings, nature becomes less and less sharp, gradually losing its figurative character. It becomes slightly blurred. Paintings feature smears, stains, streaks. Some shapes resemble a liver or a heart. Contrary to his earlier perfectionism, serving the purpose of bringing out the individuality of every creature, now the artist introduces conglomerates

– some colonies made of plants, mushrooms, shells, and snails tangled in strange arrangements, as if someone bundled them and blurred the boundaries between them. Their shapes are no longer so distinct. If previously any creature cut open by Zawicki proved to be stuffed with a collection of unpredictable beings, then in “Homoiomeria” at the end of the sequence of metamorphoses, there is exactly this, a mixture – a cosmic nebula from which something can emerge again. What is this going to be?

This question leads us to megahit.

COSMIC LUNAPARK

The world of Anaxagoras was unchanging because it was governed by Reason. Every creature was born and died, but the world was homogeneous and unchanging. People gave birth to people, from trees there were trees, water gave life to water. But for Zawicki a frog gives birth to an elephant, fish and a skeleton. This world is not governed by reason, nature or god. There is no order here, allowing us to predict the continuation. That’s why the end is as probable as continuation, a catastrophe as possible as avoiding it. So if this is how this little world is turning, it means that there is no natural rhythm. In its pres- ent there is as much potential for the end as there is for lasting, which the artist does not weave into any coherent interpretation. He suggests symptoms, which we can develop at will, attributing a painting with a combination of any other.

If we start with the “bang” then we can continue with the catastrophic plot. We should realise however, how panically we react to the world today. It is enough to see peeling paint, empty postindustrial landscape or some twisted pipes to jump into post-catastrophic narratives. Our imagination moved to the other side of our modern optimism: in the 19th century forests falling under human hand, and smoke covering the sky were treated as the proof of our gradual mastering of nature and the industrial conquest of the world. Today the pride has been replaced by panic and its siblings – doubt, anxiety, disgust, trauma.

On these emotions Zawicki performs a simplifying operation: he cuts imagination and pulls out its res- idents – products of culture making their way into our fantasies from postcards, comic strips, movies, novels. They are cobbled from our hopes and fears, likes and dislikes. They are mysterious, non-human, extraterrestrial. They don’t seem to be dangerous. They don’t want to buy us, colonise, devour. So, what are they doing on our planet?

They are watching us. This is the most disturbing feeling one can get during our everyday activity – that it is not only us looking at things, but also that the things are looking at us. But here, at the exhibition, it is even more interesting: we didn’t come to see, but we had been gathered to be watched. We are the exhibits in the “Humankind” exhibition, being viewed by non-human beings.

But because these creatures were invented by our imagination, we didn’t pass the boundaries of our planet Earth. We are still stuck in our heads, know- ing however, that we are stuck there. For the time being, thanks to Zawicki’s exhibition we realised that we came back to the amusement park. Though, the roles and positions have changed. Now we are the moving plush toys and those non-human creatures- like some clients or the ruling class – stand and look at us, parading among them. Their faces don’t show interest or amusement. Rather they express distance and a bit of weariness.

According to Zawicki, this is probably how our im- agination works. Under the pressure of our current fears, the imagination breeds the creatures which could help us to see and understand our position. But because it was us who previously created those beings, our imagination cut open doesn’t give birth to anything other than what was already put there by our culture. We wanted to look at the stars, but we gaze in the mirror. We were so successful at populating the cosmos with various creatures, that we managed to turn it into an amusement park. In consequence, we cannot be surprised by this cosmos anymore. We have transformed the strange into weird, and the weird into domesticated.

Our problem today – this is how I dare to summarise both Zawicki’s entire oeuvre and the current exhi- bition – is not that nature, and our imagination have become alien to us. Quite the opposite: Zawicki’s paintings and installations show that we have tamed what was alien. We have forced the incomprehensible phenomena to take the form of Luke Skywalker or Lord Vader. The result proved to be profound: we are gradually losing the ability to see ourselves from the perspective of the otherness. Even the climate catastrophe has been consumed by panic. We can be afraid, but we can’t use our imagination to transgress our fears. If we want to change anything in our un- derstanding, and inhabiting the world, we must dream bolder dreams and open to deeper fears. That’s why we need someone like the author of the “Megahit”

– a serious mocker, a playful catastrophist, an art- ist-explorer, a child playing with cosmos. We need a creator able to mess with our heads and unveil the limits where our imagination got stuck.

Przemysław Czapliński