2012

Book, 19,1 cm x 12,8 cm, 115 p., language : Polish, publisher : Galeria Sztuki Wspólczesnej Bunkier Sztuki, Kraków, ISBN : 978-83-62224-21-0.
Materials: Ink, paper

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. B 2027/63).

Literary synopsis

Mirage. A book of travel and social observation consisting of 50 text chapters and 50 photographs describing the adventures of a group of artists whose works allude to such historical trends of the late sixties and early seventies as conceptualism, minimalism, and land art, as well as fictitious ones (green conceptualism or the Lafayette Hills School), who are in complicated professional and personal relations (such as the romantic, torrid relationship of J. L. and A. T. Z.) and spend their time cooking, meditating, and tracing the vestiges of the work of such predecessors as the mythical figure R. (a writer, sculptor, and artist of textual interventions in the landscape) whose texts comprise the foundations of an actual book, interspersed with the hard-to-verify story of the hitchhiker M. who is going blind, and a description of the fate of the L. family, accompanied by “intermissions” in the form of excerpts from folk and country songs and instructions for works of art that can be made by the reader to accentuate the visual modules of the book, based on meticulously selected evidential material collected during a journey around the United States during the winter of 2011, 27 years after the opening of the neon installation in the Chronos and Coatlicue Hotel.

Relation of the novel to the artist’s practice

The material for Mirage was collected between December 2011 and February 2012. It consisted of email correspondence between the visual artist Łukasz Jastrubczak and the museum curator Sebastian Cichocki, in the form of a game or “duel” of images and text. Jastrubczak’s photographs were taken during the artist’s journey around the United States while Cichocki’s textual responses (treated as “curatorial guides and references”) were written in Poland and based in part on earlier texts by various 1960s and 70s conceptual artists. Responding to photographs sent by Jasturbczak through email, Cichocki was writing back the texts that were guides for the following set of photos taken by the artist, and so on. The authors had only 24 hours to respond.

Mirage was reinterpreted later as staged lectures, concerts, public readings, and finally as a movie Mirage. In Order of Appearance, where the whole book has been read before the camera (usually without understanding the meaning of the text), by accidentally met strangers. The film was shot in the summer of 2014, when Cichocki and Jastrubczak decided to go on a journey in the footsteps of theirs protagonists: the pioneer of “green conceptualism” John G. Lee, his partner Anna T. Zaloon or blind hitchhiker named Mia.

Novel's website