Spectrum Spotlight: Fatal Attraction

Piotr Uklański's Solidarity (Untitled [Solidarność]) in the Great Hall. Photograph by Wilson Santiago

«Douglas Eklund, curator in the Met's Department of Photographs, recently spoke with me about the special exhibition Fatal Attraction: Piotr Uklański Photographs, on view through August 16.​»

Christopher Gorman: Piotr's Solidarity [Untitled (Solidarność)] photo is on view as part of the show. Tell us about this work and the unique place where it will be on view.

Douglas Eklund: Piotr came to the United States in the early 1990s, as soon as the Berlin Wall came down. He made this work for an exhibition in Poland in 2008, returning to the Gdansk shipyard where the first non-Communist labor union was formed nearly thirty years before. By incorporating the dispersal of participants in this "living photograph" alongside the movement's original logo, Uklański shows the inevitable slide of one system into another, from collective organization to the supremacy of the individual.

The original piece Piotr created was a monumental diptych of two color photographs each measuring fifteen feet across. We did not have room in the main exhibition space for such a large piece, so we thought originally of putting one half of the diptych on each of the coat check walls. Showing this work in one of New York's great public spaces—art's own Grand Central—would, we thought, cause the viewer to reflect on their own place in the crowd when faced with two insufficient choices that continue to vex not only Poland but the United States as well. Because we now show ad banners in the Great Hall on those walls, we came up instead with the idea of printing them as banners of the kind that would be carried at political rallies and "skying" them high above the visitors' heads.

Christopher Gorman: How did Piotr select the works from the collection for Fatal Attraction: Piotr Uklański Selects from the Met Collection?

Douglas Eklund: Piotr would comb through the Met's online collection database at night and each morning I would get a list of works that he would like to see. We then made appointments in the various departments' study rooms. Occasionally the curators would suggest works from their departments' holdings, as was the case with the incredible Fragment of a Queen's Face from the Department of Egyptian Art. We came to them originally wanting to request a relatively modest little object, but their department head felt it was not an important enough work and offered the "jasper lips," as it is known around here, for inclusion. It had not occurred to me to even ask for the loan of one of the Museum's great treasures—so it was all the artist himself in terms of what got in and what didn't, except when a curator proposed something we overlooked and it worked with the concept of Eros and Thanatos.

Piotr Uklański (Polish, born 1968). Untitled (Yellow Sky), 2000. Chromogenic print; 53.3 x 80.6 cm (21 x 31 3/4 in.). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Private Collection

Christopher Gorman: Piotr's work emerged in the early years of widespread digital photography. You are on Instagram. Do you see any heirs to Piotr's style on the platform?

Douglas Eklund: I am on Instagram, but I don't use the palette of preprogrammed photographic effects that they offer. Piotr has called such things [a] "nostalgia for the present" that always happens with the importation of novelty—i.e. the way that a culture of buying and selling liquidates everything in its path to make way for new objects to consume. So, if you consider Instagram just the most current version of amateur photography that stretches back to the turn of the twentieth century, there is a parallel to Piotr's [The] Joy of Photography series, but his version is highly ironic—straining after the sublime, but limiting himself to the recipes in Eastman Kodak's cookbook of technical mastery. I don't know if when he began the series, in 1997, he was thinking, "Oh, this analog method of 'crafted' photography is about to be replaced, so I will memorialize it." It's more about pointing to the fact that in American capitalistic culture even our moments of pleasure, communion with nature, and self-expression are preprogrammed into us, and then sort of turning that back on itself to make beautiful images from the most redundant kinds of subjects (waterfalls, sunsets, and the like).

Christopher Gorman: A short film is going to be produced during the run of the exhibition. Can you tell us about it?

Douglas Eklund: Well, I'm not sure if it is going to be a film anymore, but I had the idea of commissioning a Freudian psychoanalyst to do a "reading" of Piotr's artist-selects installation. I got the idea after seeing the salon wall of photographs take shape, and how he wanted to force the works together into innumerable possible narratives on the subjects of sex and death that could be created by the viewer as they scanned every which way. If a shrink asked you to make a narrative out of the arrangement, he or she could do an interesting preliminary work up . . . so it's like a Rorschach blot of images, which fits with the Eros-Thanatos concept that Piotr chose, a Freudian concept. Instead of doing the film, which would require a lot of resources from around the institution in a short amount of time, Piotr has found a psychoanalyst to do a reading of the whole Gilman show that will be in the form of an essay.

Related Links
Fatal Attraction: Piotr Uklański Selects from the Met Collection (March 17–June 14, 2015)
Fatal Attraction: Piotr Uklański Photographs (March 17–August 16, 2015)