Out of Here

Krzysztof Wodiczko was born in Poland in 1943, during the Warsaw ghetto uprising – a fitting start for an artist whose great subject is the trauma of war and conflict. In 1980, he began projecting large-scale images onto architectural facades and public monuments. Staged in cities around the world, these ephemeral spectacles are acts of political engagement. Ordinary folk – people from the neighborhood – star in the projections; their hands, faces, whole bodies flicker across the grandiose architecture of power: government and corporate buildings.

A 1986 site-specific piece called The Homeless Projection: A Proposal for the City of New York, for example, cast images of the homeless onto the public statuary of the then-gentrifying Union Square.

In 1999, Wodickzo focused on the hands of survivors of Hiroshima and projected them along the riverbank below the A-Bomb Dome. Speaking in an Art 21 profile, he said of this work, “The river was where people jumped to their death because they thought that it would help them to cool their burns, but in fact it only contributed to a quicker death. Those are the events or scenes recalled by some of the memorial projection participants and artists who were speaking through the building, as if they were the building, looking at the river and seeing all of this again – the bodies floating, the people jumping in. At the same time, the river continues its flow as if nothing has happened. There is fresh water coming. The river is like a tragic witness – but also a hope – because it’s moving.”

In 2001, video projections of the women who work in the maquiladora factories played on the façade of Tijuana’s Centro Cultural, their testimony of exploitation, sexual abuse, and violence shared with an audience of more than 1500 of their fellow citizens. [For an idea of what this work looked like – and how Wodiczko works – watch this Art 21 excerpt.]

The Veterans Project
This month, Wodiczko brings his singular vision to Galerie Lelong in New York, with …OUT OF HERE: The Veterans Project. In the intimate projection of Flame that has been installed in the front gallery, the image of a candle flame flickers with the voices of veterans’ tales of Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s a quiet piece, with the flame responding to the men’s mumbled memories, and it stands in introspective contrast to the larger, more dramatic scope of …OUT OF HERE in the back gallery. [To hear Wodiczko on Flame and see what it looked like in a 2009 projection at Governors Island, click here.]  

At its start, …OUT OF HERE resembles a modest version of Monet’s Waterlilies. Projected across the tops of three walls of the darkened gallery is a band of windows. They’re grimy, but we can see blue skies and billowing clouds and the sounds of the street make their way inside. We hear kids playing soccer outside and women talking to one another – is it Arabic?. A truck – a Humvee? –  stops nearby. From a passing radio, we hear Obama speaking about the war. Suddenly a soccer ball shatters one of the windows. A helicopter approaches, the whirring is almost soothing but its shadow across the sky strikes an ominous tone in what has seemed simply a lazy, summer’s afternoon.

Suddenly, the peace is broken. Another window is shattered, this time by sniper fire; smoke billows up from an IED explosion; and throughout we hear the voices of fear – those of soldiers and civilians alike.

A child is hit. We hear the voice of an American medic, urging his comrades to get the kid, and we hear also the panicked orders to “get out of here.” And so the wounded child is left behind.

What that summary doesn’t capture, though, is how little we really know about what is happening. The scene transpires in what seems both an eternity and a millisecond, and throughout, I struggled to understand. Who was out there? Was one of the soldiers hit as well? What the hell was happening?

The genius of Wodiczko’s staging lies in the way he limits the information we receive. Standing in the darkened gallery, we see only hints of the skirmish outside (the billowing smoke, the shattered windows) and hear only the confusion of combat (the gunfire, the panicked voices). From these fragments of information, we construct a narrative – but it proves as confused and unresolved as the combat itself.

What is the tale that’s told? An ambush shatters the peace of an otherwise ordinary day. A child is killed in the crossfire. A patrol of soldiers retreats. Standing there in the blind space of the gallery, we really don’t know much more.

Except that, in the way of video loops and wars, the sad saga will repeat, over and over and over.