ADAM MICHÁLEK

Buckaroo of the Month

Department of Body Design

As part of your work, you created your own method – the ‘Gott-form’. Could you describe how you work with it and what purpose it serves? Doesn’t using such a self-enclosed artistic system also run the risk of making the work incomprehensible to anyone but yourself?
The Gott-form is, of course, my brainchild – it was created from reading novels of the past two centuries, and its essence lies in addressing derivations of reality. As part of this creative project, I have been focusing on memories, so I work with a reality (being in the USA), derivations of that reality (pictures from the USA, my memories) and secondary derivations of that reality (memories of others, tied to photographs and souvenirs from the USA). The Gott-form provides a theoretical framework for my work, it gives everything a sense of order and meaning. It may paradoxically seem that the work becomes closed to the public, but my actual experience with the Gott-form proves that while the work becomes less comprehensible to the bubble of working artists, it in fact becomes more legible outside of it. I think that is great (laughs).

In your text, you describe the places and fragments of your memory that pertain to your stay in the USA. Did you ever think about returning to those places and seeing to what degree your ideas reflect reality? Or is it more important for you to leave them opaque and secret?
I would like to return there and see what has changed (and whether the reality is different from my memories). I would like to see everything as I did when I was a kid, but I would like most to relive that experience of discovering a new world; a world that is old but seemed new to me.

A particular kids’ motif that surfaces in your work is dinosaurs. What other things do they symbolize for you? And how is their “return” significant for this installation?
Dinosaurs are a key moment from my childhood – colorful, plastic figurines that were immensely valuable for a kid with no toys. This idea converged with reality a month ago when my brother informed me that we used to get them in kindergarten for good behavior. I remembered how I would steal them and how I had a bad conscience because of that (laughs)! They resurface in my graduate work as a visual and significant feature, firstly colored by crayon, and secondly as a metal silhouette. This represents the crossroads between reality and how we remember it.

photo: Polina Davydenko