Text by Cathie Pilkington
August 2021
Agnieszka Szczotka, Just because your chicken dances upon impact it doesn’t mean it is still alive, 2021
HD video, colour, silent
25 min 21 sec
Courtesy the artist
The title of Agnieszka Szczotka’s single-screen video projection, Just because your chicken dances upon impact it doesn’t mean it is still alive (2021) references how the body’s nervous system still functions for a period of a time after decapitation. I have been familiar with this concept since childhood. During the war, my Dad was evacuated from Manchester to a farm in Oswestry, North Wales. He remembers vividly watching a headless turkey running several laps of the yard before it fell over and was prepared for his Christmas dinner. He has recounted this story to me many times over the years.
Szczotka’s projection presents a living head (the artist’s) enveloped by black space, with the weight of the head supported by anonymous hands. During the twenty-five minute duration we witness, in slow motion, the subject’s hair being completely shaved off by another pair of hands, which enter the black frame stage left, operating a pair of clippers. The precise framing and intense presence of the head-object returning the viewers’ gaze delivers a powerful tension that mixes vulnerability with brutality. As we witness the head-as-object being turned by the supporting hands to give the clipping hands access to every side of the skull, there is a heightened awareness of skin moving on skull. The eyes are open and look directly at the viewer, who is implicated in the scene as a voyeur. Occasionally the eyes close to an internal world but although this head remains silent, this is no Sleeping Muse*, this head has a brain that wants to kick ass.
This formidable work took centre stage in the artist’s recent graduation from the Royal Academy Schools. It was projected onto a large screen in a blacked-out room. Always confrontational, precise, compelling and deeply conflicted Szczotka’s performances, video, photography and text works delight in resuscitation — of bodies, memories and histories. If, as Mike Kelley suggests in his essay ‘Playing with Dead Things’ (1993), ‘the first corpse was the first sculpture’ perhaps Agnieszka Szczotka could be described is a living sculpture or an exorcist?1
1 Part of the catalogue for The Uncanny at Gemeentemuseum, Arnhem, the Netherlands for Sonsbeek 93, 1993.
Her staging and mediation as the subject-object is always acutely materialized and often darkly humorous. In another recent video performance, Menstruation Cottage (2020) Szczotka invokes the spirit of Winnie from Beckett’s Happy Days (1961) who, buried up to her neck in sand, is kept busy and distracted by rummaging for various objects in her handbag. In Szczotka’s performance she sits in a flamboyantly patterned suit, in a makeshift shelter in a London scrub land, ranting about her period. Amongst other miscellaneous items she has with her in her bag to alleviate her cramps she pulls out a copy of the anthology Art in Theory, tearing out the pages to use as a sanitary towel.
In Szczotka’s hands, objects and ‘things’ are always used as stand-ins for the body. And the body is often in pieces. Another recent performed text Jane (2021) (which takes its title from Paul Delaroche painting, The Execution of Lady Jane Grey (1833)) opens with Oskar Kokoschka’s famous Alma doll speaking in the first person. Kokoschka, despite his disappointment with the formal qualities of this strange furry doll stuffed with horsehair (which he had specially commissioned as a stand-in for his ex-lover), drove this ‘silent woman’ around Dresden, taking her to the opera. ‘Unable to tell your story is like a living death’ states Szczotka in Alma’s voice before her decapitation by Kokoshka.2
2 Quoted from Rebecca Solnit, 'Silence and powerlessness go hand in hand – women’s voices must be heard', the Guardian, 2017
This performance continues with another resuscitation — the bloodied head of lady Jane Grey speaking out beyond the constraints of the painting, addressing her executioners:
‘I will come for you one day
When you feel safe
Even if you’re old
And I will hunt you down
You hateful stupid fuck
Because I’m not Ofelia, but Medusa’
In her performances Szczotka uses herself as a living object, a tiny frame with a mighty voice, she is a self-portrait, a stand-in, an unreliable narrator, an embodied rebuke. And in the context and backdrop of the Royal Academy, where I have witnessed her work developing over the past four years, she has been an ambivalent, anarchic and brilliant presence. Other works have seen her striding across the board room table in a hot pink suite and stilettos, wearing googly eyes on her arse and being captured on CCTV flashing the mighty antique cast of Hercules in the RA vaults. Even when delivering such a one liner, the power of her delivery is crafted with pathological repetition, formal restraint and precise distillation which is evident in Just because your chicken dances upon impact doesn’t mean it is still alive.
*There is something about this work that brings me back again to Brâncuși’s Sleeping Muse (1910). Both works share the preoccupation with the head as object and perhaps the knowledge that Brâncuși obsessively returned to this theme again and again over a period of twenty years makes me think of Szczotka endlessly reworking and honing her practice and process.
Yet despite their central shared motif, these works are motivated by radically different drivers. Brâncuși turns his muse, Baroness Renée-Irana Franchon, into an object, a head, complete, serene and unharmed by its separation from its body — a self-sufficient archetypal modern form, or, in his own words 'complexity resolved’.3
3 full quote: 'simplicity is complexity resolved', explaining the 'simple' purity of form of his sculptures.
Agnieszka Szczotka is her own muse, both subject and object held in dynamic tension. Her living head-object is vulnerable and complex, part and whole, victim and aggressor, a silent woman confronting her audience. She will not settle and become serene; she has too much on her mind and in her body that she must not let you forget.