Walking Through Clear Water

by Krzysztof Honowski

Walking Through Clear Water is a sequel to A Pool Painted Black. While the ideas in these works were first explored through a performance, here they were developed into an installation.

This work explores the intersection of heteroglossia and opacity, or how to transmit and memorialise a multitude of voices, without giving everything away.

It develops on the conceptual focus of the performance works A Pool Painted Black and Kustom Kar Kommandos Karaoke, dealing with the ambivalent idea of how that which is consigned to the dirt will one day be reclaimed and renewed. The neglected object is transformed by the very moment in which it is unearthed.

The title of the installation is taken from the book Walking Through Clear Water In A Pool Painted Black by Cookie Mueller.

The work comprises 3 LED Lightboxes, 3 framed colour photographs, a single channel sound work, 1 neon element, 300 Litres of earth, Chris James dark pink light filters, and 1 piece of fool’s gold acquired in Athens, Greece.

Walking Through Clear Water was developed on site at the Flex Zone in Cologne and was on show there from 19th to 22nd October 2017.

“This system of economic agency is one of the least recognised facets of camp and yet, as Andrew Ross has pointed out, it’s a key point of difference from kitsch and one which defines its queerness. Kitsch carries class associations – it is lower middle class, middle of the road bad taste that thinks it’s good. Camp, by contrast, is a defiant tool used by those oppressed and labelled as deviant: it knowingly revels in and highly prises vulgarity and poor imitation. Such transvaluation is, perhaps, one of the ways in which cultural identity gets made. A community invests importance and meaning in things which may or may not reflect their broader material and symbolic currency, or at least not be understood by those outside the group. But just as Honowski mines his references for associations with one community or another, he can’t fail to know that camp no longer belongs to the queers. From the moment Susan Sontag scribbled her notes, camp was already the province of heterosexual sitcoms, Saturday night television and jokey birthday cards. Widespread recognition and understanding drains subcultural practice of its subversive potential: camp has long been dead. Indeed, the camp of Bidgood and Anger, are doubly degraded. Photographs displayed in Walking Through Clear Water show crystals surrounded by dirt, marble and flowers: suggesting the funereal and moribund, but also the possibility of transformation and rediscovery.”

- Paul Clinton, Muddying the Waters: Misunderstanding, enlightenment and value in the work of Krzysztof Honowski

You can read Paul Clinton’s essay about the exhibition here.