Krzysztof Wodiczko

Krzysztof Wodiczko (born April 16, 1943) is a Polish artist known for his large-scale slide and video projections on architectural facades and monuments.

He has realized more than 80 such public projections in Australia, Austria, Canada, England, Germany, Holland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States.

War, conflict, trauma, memory, and communication in the public sphere are some of the major themes of his work.

His practice, known as Interrogative Design, combines art and technology as a critical design practice in order to highlight marginal social communities and add legitimacy to cultural issues that are often given little design attention.

He lives and works in New York City and teaches in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is currently professor in residence of art and the public domain for the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD).

Wodiczko, son of Polish orchestra conductor Bohdan Wodiczko, as well having a Jewish mother, was born in 1943 during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and grew up in post-war communist Poland.

In 1967 while still a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, he began collaborating with director Jozef Patkowski and the Experimental Studio on sound performances.

He graduated in 1968 with an M.F.A. degree in industrial design and worked for the next two years at UNITRA, Warsaw, designing popular electronic products.

In 1969, Wodiczko collaborated with Andrzej Dluzniewski and Wojciech Wybieralski on a design proposal for a memorial to victims of Majdanek concentration camp in Poland.

He also performed with Personal Instrument in the streets of Warsaw and participated in the Biennale de Paris as a leader of a group architectural project.

He was a teaching assistant for two years, 1969–70, in the Basic Design Program at the Academy of Fine Arts before moving to the Warsaw Polytechnic Institute, where he taught until 1976.

From 1970 until his emigration to Canada in 1977, he designed professional optical, mechanical, and electronic instruments at the Polish Optical Works.

Throughout the 1970s he continued his collaborations on sound and music performances with various musicians and artists.

In 1971, Wodiczko began work on Vehicle, which he tested the following year on the streets of Warsaw.

In 1972 he created his first solo installation: Corridor at Galeria Wspolczesna, Warsaw.

The following year he began exhibiting with Galeria Foksal, Warsaw.

In 1975, Wodiczko traveled for the first time to the United States where he was artist-in-residence at the University of Illinois, Urbana and exhibited at N.A.M.E. Gallery, Chicago.

He participated again in the Biennale de Paris, this time as a solo artist.

In 1976, Wodiczko began a two-year artist-in-residence program at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

He emigrated from Poland in 1977, establishing residency in Canada teaching at the University of Guelph in Ontario, and began working with New York art dealer Hal Bromm.

In 1979 he taught at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto and continued teaching at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design until 1981.

Wodiczko began developing his public projections in 1980 interfacing the facades of urban architecture – whether public monuments, public buildings, or corporate architecture – with images of the body to juxtapose the physical space of architecture with the psycho-social space of the public realm.

"In the process of our socialization," the artist writes, "the very first contact with a public building is no less important than the moment of social confrontation with the father, through which our sexual role and place in society [are] constructed. Early socialization through patriarchal sexual discipline is extended by the later socialization through the institutional architecturalization of our bodies. Thus the spirit of the father never dies, continuously living as it does in the building which was, is, and will be embodying, structuring, mastering, representing, and reproducing his 'eternal' and 'universal' presence as a patriarchal wisdom-body of power."

From 1981 to 1982 he was artist in residence at the South Australian School of Art (currently part of the University of South Australia in Adelaide).

In 1983, Wodiczko established residency in New York City teaching at the New York Institute of Technology, Old Westbury.

In an often cited example, Wodiczko projected an image of the hand of Ronald Reagan, in formal dress shirt with cufflinks, posed in the pledge of allegiance, onto the north face of the AT&T Long Lines Building in the financial district of New York City four days before the presidential election of 1984.

"By creating a spectacle in which a fragment of the governing body, the presidential hand, was asked to stand for corporate business," writes Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, "Wodiczko offered a suggestion about the class identity of those forces that – hidden under the guise of God, State, and Nation – are the actual receivers of the pledge of allegiance."

In subsequent projections, the artist layered iconic representations of global capitalism, militarism, and consumerism with images of fragments of the body to suggest a consideration of our relation to public space that is contingent both to history and social and political ideologies of the present.

Art historian Patricia C. Phillips writes of the artist's work: "In his public projects of the past decade, Wodiczko has conducted a series of active mediations that combine significant public sites, tough subjects, and aggressive statements that are only possible because of their temporality. He applies the immediate force of performance to social and political problems. The rhythms of extenuating events and the brevity of each installation give his projected episodes the intensity of public, political demonstrations. His thoroughly staged, illuminated images often require months of preparation, yet they seem like surprise attacks – fiercely focused parasitic invasions of renowned institutional hosts."

Perhaps the best-known and most popular intervention of this nature was performed when the artist created a projection for Nelson's column in Trafalgar Square, London in 1985.

The South African government was at that time petitioning the British government for financial support.

Wodiczko turned one of his projectors away from Nelson's column projecting a swastika onto the tympanum of the temple-like façade of South Africa House, the South African diplomatic mission to the United Kingdom.

Though the image remained only two hours before the police suspended the intervention as a "public nuisance" it lingered in public awareness much longer.

It is frequently cited at conferences, in classroom discussions, and other forum as an example of successful urban guerrilla cultural tactics – that is, art and/or performance that is waged by unexpected means for the purpose of engaging an active response.

In explaining the potential of cultural projects in the public sphere, the artist writes: "I try to understand what is happening in the city, how the city can operate as a communicative environment… It is important to understand the circumstances under which communication is reduced or destroyed, and under what possible new conditions it can be provoked to reappear. How can aesthetic practice in the built environment contribute to critical discourse between the inhabitants themselves and the environment? How can aesthetic practice make existing symbolic structures respond to contemporary events?"

For Wodiczko, disrupting the complacency of perception is imperative for passersby to stop, reflect, and perhaps even change their thinking; so he built his visual repertoire to evoke both the historical past and the political present.

The following year, he received Canadian citizenship and in 1986 resident-alien status in the United States.

Wodiczko was formerly director of the Interrogative Design Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he was a professor in the Visual Arts Program since 1991.

He also teaches as visiting professor in the Psychology Department at the Warsaw School of Social Psychology.

He began teaching at MIT in 1991, maintaining his residence in New York City while working in Cambridge, Massachusetts.