MS: I wanted to talk about two projects currently in formation - one in preparation for your exhibition in January 2009 at Kunsthalle Basel, 'I AM BECOME DEATH', and the other in preparation for your exhibition at the Whitechapel, London in April 2009, which revolves around the archive material for Picasso's Guernica (1937), which was shown at the gallery in 1938. My hope is that since they are not completed yet, we will be forced to consider their potential as much as their final form. Maybe we could start with the figure of Aby Warburg, who plays a central role in the Basel project, and also perhaps in your approach to forging image relationships in general. Warburg always poses a problem for students and scholars - he makes connections between things that we might think are imposed, too far-fetched, and this makes his work easier to look at as a work of art. However, I think it's also too far-fetched to categorise him as an artist rather than a scholar. How do you see him?

GM: Warburg was a real academic, but he also was built out of controversies - and this is what's so interesting about him. He created his own systems of thought. He switched tracks, from studying art history to anthropology to biology, and he sought out knowledge about the world through his very subjective experience. I'm interested in that too - and also the way in which he worked with images and language, which I find innovative and important for its time, but also for our era of image overload. The connections he makes between things that we may think don't belong with each other - very subjective scenarios - are something that I often make too. But, of course, the outcome for me is more visual than text-based, while for him the two often co-existed. Except of course when he did the Mnemosyne Atlas (1928-29), in which images have primacy, and this is maybe what I'm trying to do with this photograph. [Points to studio wall, with various images from different collections, including Warburg's, photographs from the Vietnam War and from Tate's archive.]

MS: Philippe-Alain Michaud distils Warburg's approach to a beautiful idea of the 'image in motion', and Giorgio Agamben also speaks of his 'stills charged with movement'. ¹ I'm seeing something similar here, and am really curious to ask, first, where did all these different images come from?

GM: I've been doing research at the Aby Warburg Institute here in London. I also got hold of hundreds of negatives online from a Vietnam War veteran who now lives in Denver. He took these colour pictures while he was deployed there. He actually ended up studying photography when he returned, so these may have been taken with a particular eye. I've also researched certain images from the 'The Road to Victory' exhibition, a show of photographic murals at MoMA in New York in 1942, in the thick of war, right at the moment the US joined the Allied forces. Another set of images comes from Robert Morris's work, and what interests me here is his choice to make extremely Minimal work during the height of the Vietnam War, in contrast to the more symbolic and representational works he has been making lately - that is, during the current US quagmire in Iraq. So I have installation shots of Morris's exhibition at Tate Gallery in 1971 before it was taken down - having only been up for five days - because several people were injured when he invited the audience to climb all over his work and it turned into chaos. I might remake parts of his structures in Basel.

MS: Maybe this is the place to ask where the title 'I AM BECOME DEATH' comes from?

GM: It comes from a few sources at once - it appears on the helmet of one of the characters in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (1987), but it also reportedly is what J. Robert Oppenheimer said when they detonated the first atomic bomb for the so-called 'Trinity test' in the American desert near Socorro, New Mexico: 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds'. He apparently took the phrase from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita.

MS: So it is a title in motion - you know some people might think you're making a grammatical mistake…

GM: …of course, because I'm Polish?! [Laughs.]

MS: Exactly! It definitely unravels conventional grammar. Would you say you're working with all these images and sources in the logic of Aby Warburg?

GM: We do not know the logic Warburg applied to his collections of images. Why he put these things together as he did hasn't really been justified, and we don't know the relationship between the different plates of the Atlas or what the whole of it proposes. We 'sort of' know that his Atlas was going to be a tool for him to tell a story.

MS: I sometimes wonder if his working method was so systematic - so seemingly systematic - not because he wanted to offer the world a new epistemology, but because he wanted to trace the limits of that way of constructing the world: to take it to the point where it looks like a system, but one that, when you actually try to get inside of it, is impossible to fully rationalise. Maybe he wanted us to confront the edge of reason.

GM: I've had to deal with the fact that this system seems to be a system for no one but himself. So I don't think that his aim was to reveal something to an audience, to other people; the system was there for him to be able to continue to collect information - for him to have a playground for study, for undergoing a very personal development with different projects, different ideas. From what I know, he found it very difficult to give lectures and write full texts, to edit his thoughts into something that was a real 'message'. All his writing consisted of little notes on pieces of paper that were scattered around and then the person who was looking after his archive had to structure it - but it was and still is chaos. Today there are hundreds of handwritten notes that haven't even been typed up, and certainly not translated. And this also applies to his trip to the US in 1895-96, when he went to visit the Hopi tribe, which I'm going to do myself, as well visiting the Vietnam veteran in Denver and taking in Election Day in Washington, D.C. I was recently talking at the Warburg Institute to a new archive curator, who knows just about all there is to know about the archive, and is currently editing a book on Warburg's trip to the American Southwest.

MS: …on Warburg's research on the Hopi Snake Dance?

GM: Not specifically - that's my own interest or one of my entry points into his work. Warburg used various images of the Snake Dance to give a famous lecture in 1923, called the Kreuzlingen Lecture after the hospital in Switzerland to which he'd been committed at the time. He gave the lectureto prove to the doctors that he was sane enough to get out. Fritz Saxl, his assistant, helped him gather the materials. It was a success - he was ultimately released. But there is more myth than fact to this account. Warburg never actually saw the Snake Dance himself when he went to the US; rather, he saw the Kachina Dance ritual. There are a lot of mistakes being made - people on Google mixing up two very different rituals. He only saw the Snake Dance in photographs, and collected images representing it in his archives - like that one for example. [Shows an image of Hopi priests dancing with snakes in their mouths.]

MS: You've mentioned in a different context that the Snake Dance is key to the 'I AM BECOME DEATH' project.

GM: What's interesting is that Warburg talked about the Snake Dance through very subjective means. He was in a mental institution, he wanted to get out, he had been there for two years. He suffered from delusions, paranoia and fear - afflictions that go under the umbrella of a schizophrenic condition. And when it came to giving the lecture, it was a very personal self-healing act because he drew parallels between his own mental illness and the construction of myth and ritual. So in a way his giving this lecture was a ritual,

like the Snake Dance, which is meant to ward off bad weather or evil spirits. The lecture was also a performative act rather than a simple text to read, as it was accompanied by a series of slides. In my project I'm adopting a similar approach. I want to act on material that I don't have full knowledge of, and it is a concern for me that I don't know so much about it. Because of that, I'm doing this trip through other people's memories or experiences. In a way, I'm going through a ritual as he did, but perhaps even more elaborately because I'm tracing back his trip to Arizona and overlapping it with various other things that are not directly related to Warburg.

MS: I'd like to talk explicitly about your work as a construction of knowledge - maybe knowledge of people who have themselves encountered the limits of knowledge. It circles back on itself because we don't really know much about these figures and what they thought - maybe not because we cannot, but because we have a mental block in the way that we understand the term 'knowledge'. I'm intrigued by this process of a journey or a trip - how do you construe knowledge as something that moves beyond going to the library and reading what someone has laid out for us?

GM: I'm scared of reading other people's conclusions. With Aby Warburg that is impossible because most his writing is not translated into English, and the material that specifically interests me tends to exist only in German. The notes that he made in his diary from the trip to the US are very fragmented, and normally say things like: 'It was an interesting day.' That's it. There were observations in his correspondence with his parents and girlfriend at that time, and of course those aren't translated either. Warburg didn't write much in-depth correspondence, just short notes, so you have to assume a lot of things. When you undertake any sort of historical study, you have some documents which state the facts, and then you are obliged to assume other things, which aren't evident or proven. So each time you delve into the archive, you can undermine the stories that have been established by others in the past and create your own interpretation of it.

MS: Do you think that as an artist - as opposed to, say, an archivist or a historian - it's easier to activate this type of knowing?

GM: Definitely. It's just a proposition and not something that is then published as: 'Okay. From now on we'll be told at school X, Y, Z.' It's quite an amazing feeling when you are able to play with this kind of information and create a narrative in the place of a previous narrative, or where there simply wasn't one. You project something - you project yourself.

MS: On occasion I've attended seminars in a postgraduate programme led by Irit Rogoff at Goldsmiths College [in London] called Curatorial/Knowledge. It's another place where I see the very notion of knowledge being reformulated: the moment you put two words together in this way, you propose that the 'curatorial' to some extent is epistemological. I think of your work in this sense of the curatorial, but this is not to say that you operate as a curator. I'm still trying to formulate a question about your role ... while trying not to fall into clichés of 'the artist as curator'.

GM: This attempt to qualify me as a curator is another instance of the need for some kind of systematic categorisation in art practice. The notion of curating that is attached to my work is not created by me, it's created by people who interpret my work and somehow try to have a quick insight into the process.

MS: Perhaps that is because your work emerges at about the time of this rise of the curator as a distinct type of cultural agent.

GM: Exactly. This was the time when the courses began in London at the Royal College of Art, and later at Goldsmiths. They produced a new generation of curators who studied curating rather than art history, philosophy or poetry. At that time, lots of artists were working in this vein also, on quasi-curatorial projects, especially here in the UK, but maybe they didn't present it as a separate practice. This type of work is about applying yourself to certain situations in which there is an accumulation of knowledge or information represented in the form of artwork, etc., and about displaying this material in a way that will affect subsequent readings. Anyone could do it - a curator or an artist. Artists like to do it partly to gain more control over the reading of their work.

MS: Although I think there is a difference in terms of who is entitled to have more poetic licence. For example, the perceived neutrality of the curator is just one of the many things that came to a boil in documenta 12 (2007). Roger Buergel and Ruth Noack's choice to use colours on walls and forge relationships between works from vastly different cultural contexts based on their thesis of the 'migration of form' was seen as overbearing or too literal, even neo-colonial (this is going by conversations). I must admit that I'm torn, because I agree with some of the criticisms but also think there is a need to project more onto works rather than to neutralise them with our respect. I think the most interesting works and the most interesting artists can handle it - even crave it. I'm curious about how you perceive the constraints in dealing with other people's work as part of your own artwork?

GM: In a practical sense, for me at the beginning it was all about negotiating with living artists about what their expectations were about their work, and how their work could become part of my work. Often this was based on trust - I had to reassure them to give me the freedom to use their work. As a curator, you have a slightly different responsibility, even if you negotiate. Now I'm working increasingly with dead artists, and here there seems to be more freedom. Or, if a negotiation takes place, it's with a curator, a collector or a keeper of the work. So now I have to make a moral decision about how to deal with other people's work, and this is often very complicated.

MS: What might be interesting for artists in working with you is that they can step outside of the black-and-white systems: the white cube and the black box of art installation. For instance, in the elaborate architectural structure you created for your exhibition Sleep of Ulro (2006) at A Foundation in Liverpool, there were 101 constraints in the form of particular, even peculiar and interconnected spaces. In a white cube, the space is often drained of tensions, or there is an attempt to neutralise them.

GM: This is the question that I'm facing now, for the exhibition at the Whitechapel.

MS: The project about Picasso's Guernica...

GM: Exactly. I now know that I am getting the tapestry from the United Nations building in New York - a copy of Picasso's painting made in 1955 that was covered up when Colin L. Powell, then US Secretary of State, made his bogus plea to invade Iraq in 2003. The Rockefeller Foundation, who own the work, have just agreed to the loan, a possibility that I never really believed would happen, though I also never wanted to doubt could happen. It's a hugely political thing for them to have agreed to lend this, because of its recent history and because I'm borrowing it for one year, which means that it will be away from the UN for a long time. In a way, that's the work. But, of course, I'm physically bringing this tapestry to the Whitechapel, and it will relate to the entire archive they have of the exhibition of Picasso's real Guernica there during its international tour in 1938, and of another attempt to bring it back to London when it was en route from New York to Madrid in 1981.

MS: So before it went to New York, Guernica made a visit to the Whitechapel. How was it originally installed?

GM: The original Guernica, when it was at the Whitechapel towards the end of the Spanish Civil War, was installed on a wall with a podium and microphones in front. It was used as a propaganda tool to get people to go and fight against the Fascists. But also it was there for the trade unions in East London, it was there for the Communist Party...

It was a really open propaganda symbol rather than an artwork, and it was definitely not brought there as part of an art exhibition.

MS: And the tapestry?

GM: The tapestry was made in 1955 for Nelson Rockefeller, who had it in his house until his death in 1979. It was loaned to the UN Security Council in 1985, and it has been hanging in its Manhattan building since then - on the second floor just outside the Security Council entrance. In January 2003 the tapestry was temporarily covered with a baby-blue curtain (according to a UN spokesman, because blue was more appropriate as a background colour for cameras than black or white) to serve as the backdrop for Powell's speech about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, in which he asked for the UN's approval to start the war. This ultimately resulted in the attack the US and UK launched on Iraq on 20 March 2003, which was called 'Shock and Awe'.

MS: That's a loaded context. How do you plan to install this in the gallery?

GM: The space of a white cube is a very charged scenario - what do you put there? How do you tell the story? Do you talk about the original and the copy? Do you talk about Guernica and Modernism? Do you talk about the politics of the Spanish Civil War or the artists involved in this conflict? Do you talk about the wars that have happened subsequently, during our lifetime? This tapestry has to do with all these issues. If you think about the impact of Guernica, there are no comparable works, no other work that could add something in this respect. So I am thinking that I should just show that and nothing else. Not create a story as I normally do, but make a gesture of bringing in something that carries with it hundreds of stories and unleash them. Two curators at Whitechapel tried in the past to bring Guernica back to the Whitechapel: Nicholas Serota and Bryan Robertson. Robertson tried to organise exhibitions with Picasso and Serota tried to bring Guernica when it travelled from New York to Spain in 1981, but didn't succeed. I've somehow done it, but now that I'm bringing in the tapestry it comes with an entirely different myth attached to it. And I have decided that this may be enough, that I don't have to add another set of visual messages. But I am proposing many talks and workshops that will produce lots of things that could subsequently become part of the Whitechapel Guernica archive. I would like to create a situation in which the archive opens up to a new experience, different from the one the gallery understood and framed.

MS: So rather than curating Guernica, you would curate its archive, which remains to be displayed at some future date...

GM: I would activate a new situation where information is being collected and new knowledge is being built. This knowledge will then remain and be added to what was there previously. So maybe what I started with - working against the idea of the white cube - may in fact prove that in certain situations the white cube is unavoidable. Not only that, it is the best solution. If you are attempting to find the meaning of something, this universal and open context can be useful.

MS: I'm tempted to end here. But I'm also haunted by this image of Guernica with the microphones in front of it - first in London and then when Powell stood with his back to the work concealed behind a curtain.

GM: Maybe an interesting thing to add to your visualisation of Guernica in its original display at the Whitechapel Gallery is that if you wanted to come and see the painting and you didn't have the money to donate to the fund in support of the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War, you could give your boots instead. There was a pile of boots in a corner of the gallery waiting to be sent to Spain for the combatants. How could I replicate that in my exhibition? In the present context we have lost the ability to comprehend the reality of war. We can only interpret it on the basis of an image rather than personal experience. We use war to talk about other things rather than war. In general, these 'things' could be called humanity.

— Monika Szewczyk