Artist finds dad, and himself, in Cold War archives
Lars Jan never knew much about his father. He was a hard man to get answers out of. The birth dates on all his documents were different. He wouldn’t talk about brothers or sisters. He was a Polish immigrant, but he’d never say where, exactly, he was from. Jan doesn’t even remember him having a friend.
“He was a mysterious figure in my life,” Jan says over the phone from Los Angeles, where he’s based. “He was a void in my life.”
By the time the man, Henryk Ryniewicz, died in 2009, he and Jan, who is now 40, had been estranged for nearly a year and a half. But it was this relationship — however strained — that inspired Jan’s multimedia piece “The Institute of Memory (TIMe).” The work is scheduled to be performed twice this weekend as part of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ spring Transform Fest.
“(TIMe)” is based largely on troves of documents Jan gathered, after much research, from disparate sources. The process began organically, over the course of several trips to Poland.
Late at night, a couple drinks
in, he’d always find himself circling back to his father and talking to artists there about the man he hardly knew. The stories Jan remembered, the artists told him, weren’t so unusual. Another broken Polish man born of a broken time — he lived through World War II and the Cold War — took most of what he knew to the grave, Jan says.
They did, however, point Jan to something called the Institute of National Remembrance, a sort of clearinghouse for the information the government had collected on the public during early attempts at espionage. And there, Jan found 200 pages of information they had kept on his father.
Much of what he found was transcripts of wiretapped conversations — mostly innocuous conversation with women, talking about preparing sausages in the background. Another set was of communiques between Soviet agents who thought his father worked for the CIA and were hoping to flip him.
Jan got a third set of documents from his father’s physicians. It was a cache of hundreds of pages from more than 90 doctors that described the “breakdown of his mind and body over his life.”
The themes Jan gets at in “(TIMe),” however, aren’t just to do with his father, though certainly “part of it is a little bit of a ghost story,” he says.
The records he received from doctors described a man who was clinically paranoid, mentally unwell and, later in life, diagnosed with schizophrenia. It’s also apparent to Jan that his father was very possibly a CIA operative. (His U.S. citizenship was authorized by an act of Congress and sponsored, Jan says, by one of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s right-hand men.)
This is all to say that while Jan explores his father’s life, he also explores the man’s paranoia, and how he might have inherited some of that. “Somewhere along the way, I realized it wasn’t his paranoia that I was questioning, but my own — and is paranoia the right word?”
Jan also considers what it means that people routinely package their lives online today, ready for state snooping. Jan wonders if something is lost between the analog ephemera he’s scraped together of his father’s and the sort of archives, almost assuredly digital, that he’ll leave for his own daughter.
All of these themes are tied together in Jan’s multimedia approach to storytelling and performance art. A large feature of the show is a “kinetic light sculpture” he made that follows the floor plan of his father’s apartment as he remembers it. The sculpture responds to commands tapped out on a typewriter — the sort his father used to type letters to him on — as another nod at moving the analog to the digital.
The piece is largely abstract and full of abstractions, Jan admits. A necessity.
“I know so little that it had to become abstract and nonnarrative,” he says, “in order to attempt to aspire to the texture of the state he might have been in.”