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| Greetings From Jerusalem Avenue
public project
2002, the artificial palm tree placed at the intersection of Aleje Jerozolimskie (Jerusalem Avenue) and Nowy Swiat (New World) streets, Warsaw, Poland |
Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue (public project)
[conversations about the palm tree]
Joanna Rajkowska talks to Artur Żmijewski
1. Tell me something about your trip to Erec Israel. Was it a special one? If so, then why?
It was a trip without a purpose. When the purpose of the trip is not specified the view on many things clears up (is subject to clearing). You are simply a newcomer and not an artist with the mission to make an exhibition, as is mostly the case. You don't move within an artistic ghetto, you simply wander here and there. Israel was special also because it evoked so many hell-born emotions. I remember my arrival in Jerusalem and that weird situation in Faisal, a little hotel. In there was a glass encased tea room, with the music implanted from the West, where everybody gathered; a very cool place. But Moby, when form the windows one could see Israeli helicopters hovering over Bethlehem, sounded strange. It was an island floating over Eastern Jerusalem, the island where one smoked szisza, eat guacamole and felt growing separation. I didn't feel myself a part of that tea room. The people on the street seemed somewhat closer to me than the globetrotters from the hotel.
I remember the arrival of the Arabic to English interpreter who was working in the camps for the Palestinian refugees who projected something totally different. He projected total helplessness. When I talked with him I felt the inability to gather together what he experienced in some coherent system. One experience was subject to one logic, the other one to a different one. Those logics were conflicting and I felt like they ploughed in my head separate channels that like parallel lines couldn't cross each other. What to do with that? A stay in the country like Israel - as you get acquainted with ever larger number of facts - is ever less understandable. I also remember the feeling of a vehement protest in Mea Sharim, a district of Orthodox Jews. I didn't care that it was very much alike Polish stetl. I looked at the women who were pale like vampires/ghosts and men glancing at me with aversion. I didn't understand the rules of that world and felt that they aim at the rules of my world, piercing them, as if they laughed at them. That protest was so strong, so toxic one that I got an idea: to lie down on the street, across the sidewalk. Only when you made the picture as some Chasidic Jew who wanted to hit me (still flat on the sidewalk) with his cane, I got over it. And, finally, fear. I didn't fear anything concrete: suicide assassins or bombs. I felt fear because fear was in the air. I remember the first evening in Jerusalem on a bed in Faisal Hotel under a blanket that stunk terribly with human sweat. I couldn't sleep and couldn't move. I was completely paralysed with fear. I felt that my skin, in the way of osmosis, absorbed fear from the environment and that I would explode soon.
2. The palm project was created as a result of a joke, an unserious question: what would it be if a row/line of palms appeared on the Jerusalem Avenue, just as on the streets of Jerusalem. Can you assign - as in the case of the palm - a "monumental" scale to such small imaginations? I think that your other works were also created as the result of such small caprices of your imagination. A small one is important. Why?
You know ... sometimes even children are created from small caprices of one's imagination. I trust those thoughts that push you out to a different orbit, make me feel as if I were in some movie. No mater if they are small or large thoughts. Most often they happen to me in the presence of somebody, during a conversation. Something activates inside of me then. A small wave into the cosmic space. I observe how that someone reacts, whether he/she lets herself/himself be lifted by that wave. Outside that, one has to verbalise that wave then, somehow make it real. A then - such thought grows inside of me as some bubble or I forget about it immediately.
When the palm was created we were writing about Israel; it was hot and somehow chaotic. I really forced my brain to invent the end and, as I remember, that wasn't the first idea. But then, I short-circuited inside and the frames of memories from Warsaw and those from Jerusalem, for example from the plaza in from of Faisal, where we lived, superimposed on one another. And one more frame: a postcard that you found in the Old Town district in Jerusalem. There was a bald hill and on it a rachitic, poor palm. And below, a sign: "Greetings from Hebron" or simply, "Hebron", I don't remember for sure. It impressed me. It looked as if it were printed in Poland, somewhere in the 80s.
A monumental scale of the project results exclusively from the size of the misunderstanding, from the size of the area beyond comprehension; but that's what the palm is about.
3. Aleje Jerozolimskie (Jerusalem Avenue). You used to live at that big street in the very centre of the city, you lived through various things there. That's the name that is close for you. Tell me about that closeness.
Up to one moment, that closeness was very painful. I tried not to pass by that area, since it was beyond my power not to look at the windows of the flat where I used to live. And when I looked at those windows, it was painful. In 1999, I found that flat at Aleje Jerozolimskie and I wanted to live there with my husband. Later, while living in it, I decided to divorce him and lead the life that would be different from the one I had till that moment.
The weight of those decisions frightened me. The reaction for them was a growing separation from everything around myself; I had to move out. Since then, Aleje Jerozolimskie constitute for me a threshold area, a private custom clearance from one life to another.
They are also, as in a different dimension, a sign of our history: through the capital city of a large country in the Central Europe runs a wide artery: Aleje Jerozolimskie. Its name is so knitted together with our culture that nobody hears/comprehends it, nobody hears the meaning of it. I think that's very good.
4. Do you think anybody in Warsaw remembers the meaning of that name?
I don't think so. That's a strange story. In 1774, August Sułkowski established a district for Jews in the area of today's Towarowa street: a new Jerusalem. Its inhabitants very quickly became an uncomfortable competition for the local merchants and craftsmen. Sułkowski was sued by the Warsaw magistrate. It demanded liquidation of the new Jerusalem. On January 23, 1776, the goods were confiscated and the houses of the district were razed to the ground. That is what I at least read in the books *. That history disappeared in the see of Polish calamities but the name remained.
Reportedly, the people from Między Nami cafe started to hear/comprehend the name of that street when they saw the post cards with the palm titled: Greetings from the Jerusalem Avenue".
5. By placing such a large, exotic tree in the middle of the city you transfer from that tropical world something that you miss here in Poland, is that true? Something from there? What is that?
I miss the diversity of that world. A miss the Jews whose absence is evoked by the name of that street in an obvious way. Not some small group of assimilated people. I miss the people whoa are, in the very meaning of that world, different, demonstrating their being different without embarrassment, but also without aggression. I miss both the Jews and African, black people in the same way. I miss the energy of the emigrants who decide to leave everything and start their lives anew; their restlessness and strength. Maybe because of those longings I feel so good at the Bazaar Europa**. Poland is hopeless as regards that issue. A white Catholic society, similar behaviours and similar convictions. Terrible is that quiet understanding, that "normalcy". There are no minorities or majorities, whatsoever, there is only a richer or poorer homogenised mass. Maybe that's where Polish racism and intolerance come from. I don't say that Israel is the land of tolerance; I think that it is also a racist country, only in a different way, for other reasons... Outside that, Israel is in the process of forming itself all the time, in any regard. It is a country in which every thinking man has to ask himself fundamental questions.
I also miss the tension. I miss the communication with the rest of the world so obvious in Israel. Poland is a ghetto in so many regards that sometimes I lack the air.
I plant the tree and treat it as en element of communication between the people, communication that is not verbal or intellectually engaging. Just like in the Diary of Dreams, I don't want the people to "understand" one another. I think that's impossible. I want them to BE next to each another. Under the palm tree.
* Jarosław Osowski, Warsaw and its streets. On the origins of the names, 1999.
** Bazaar Europa is a huge black market in Warsaw
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The excerpt from the interview accompanying the "Open House" project at Casino Luxembourg, Luxembourg. 06.2002
Bettina Heldenstein - "(...)Your recent creation is becoming more and more "monumental" and related to the public space, isn't it? Are the Palm tree project and the projects you proposed for "Open house" like trying how far you can go with institutions? Bringing enormous artificial palm trees from Las Vegas to install them in Poland is already now provoking a big debate in the polish press, far before the project is even realized. Is this debate and your presence in medias an important part of your whole work? I am thinking also of your "satisfaction guaranteed" project, where you sold yourself literally as an artist (with your biography, with your body etc.) through consumable, commercial products. Is it like using the system, exposing it and taking profit of it at the same time?
Joanna Rajkowska - The palm tree project ("Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue") is monumental, because the level of stupidity and absurd is quite high. This is just a monument for a general crash of logic. It must be big. The debate in media is not a part of my work, but consequently it is a result of work in the public space or with people. I knew, of course, that public project must have provoked a wave through the media, I simply didn't realize it would be so hard for me to deal with it. I am working in a public space because the direct confrontation with people that don't have brains trained in art is crucial to me. To watch how they break the problem and see that some new thought, new vision is possible, how they are kicked out of the thinking routine is what confirms the very sense of my activity. The more I am tired and angry at the situation in my country, the more difficult are my projects. It is not that I am testing the patience of the cultural institutions. I just feel such pressure to get over this dense, slow, conservative human mass, to stir in brains, that it pushes me to do things in the proper - I mean - in the public scale. Satisfaction was born out of pure frustration. Since the society refused to buy my thoughts, why not to sell them my brain, my neurons - I thought. It has a substance at least. I was using the language of marketing, of commodities, so, obviously I was selling and exposing myself (with pretty bad side effects). You are right, I am using the system and I am taking profit of it at the same time. Or rather - I am using the language of the system but what I am saying - I hope - is like a virus."
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