On the one hand, an almost romantic sublimity, on the other hand a trivial everyday; a heavenly solemnity of swirling clouds against prosaic painstaking diligence. The American Plan by Anna Orlikowska is stretched between these two extremes. They describe the experience that the artist shares with the audience.

This experience is also dual. It refers to the artist’s stay in the US and it is an answer to her experiences, so it refers to what’s individual. On the other hand, it also refers to what is general – the phenomenon of serial killers strongly associated with American culture, or rather to the myth accompanying this phenomenon. This last experience however is far from a confrontation with some exposed, more or less successfully, monstrosity of this phenomenon. On the contrary – the artist performs its separation, uncovering the plan, or rather the schedule, of a crime. Its precise planning and painstaking diligence in realizing the plan.

The artist presents a model of the first floor in the house built in Chicago by H.H. Holmes, the first recognizable serial killer. On this house’s ground floor there was a commercial space, while the second floor included the owner’s apartment. The first floor full of alleys, corridors, rooms with no windows, muted spaces, doors opened only from the outside, was the place of Holmes’es victims‘ execution. The artist reconstructs the floor’s plan based on the materials available, in almost abstract, white, mysterious spatial composition. Showing how planning a crime also includes a very precise architectural plan.

The labiyrinthine space of the building’s first floor is reduced to the dimension of little corridors that could have been hollowed by insects. Orlikowska matches the model with two large-format video images. In one of them an ant laboriously drags the food found, while in the other we can see majestically swirling clouds. The composition of these images is a confrontation, doubling the naive imagination of a crime, being the basis for the myth and worship surrounding serial killers. An imagination assuming that, a serial killer simply fulfills his desire, giving up completely on the rule of reality (holding in check the desires of most of us). The project indicates, that fulfilling desires requires an amazing diligence, even more so if they are forbidden. And it is the diligence that is the most incredible and perverse in the American Plan.

curator: Kamil Kuskowski, cooperation: Jarosław Lubiak

Actual Art Zona / Zona Sztuki Aktualnej
Tymienieckiego 3, Łódź
www.zona-art.pl