Trzymać się faktu albo „Miłe złego porządki” Artura Żmijewskiego
Matters of Fact or Artur Żmijewski’s “The Pleasures of Ordering Evil”

Summary/Abstract: In the introduction to his latest project, The Pleasures of Ordering Evil, Artur Żmijewski writes about the violence that happens around us and leaves traces-effects – in bodies and landscapes, in nature and human faces. Żmijewski seems to say that violence is omnipresent and all-powerful. In the text, I take up the challenge posed by Żmijewski and ask the question whether all kinds of violence should be equal and considered as equivalent? I argue that violence should be taken out of the banal formula, i.e. we should not so much reveal violence but rather the “triviality of violence” should be extracted from the violence of the world. I ask also the question: how to talk about violence and how to represent it? In order to answer this question, I juxtapose Żmijewski’s project with the paintings of Francis Bacon. In the works of Bacon and Żmijewski we encounter violence which has two different meanings: violence understood as banal aggression and violence understood as starting a process. The latter is beneficial. Finally, I put forward the thesis that realism is no longer valid today. Only “matters of fact”, detective archiving of material facts has power. To start thinking, we need more than realism, i.e. the force of fact. Perhaps Żmijewski offers us a kind of “practical realism” or “agential realism” showing our entanglement in the world.

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