2011
Video and Photography

Jankowski was invited by Susanne Pfeffer, then curator of KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, to contribute to the publication My Work and Me, focusing on the relationship between artists and their work. Jankowski responded in the form of a movie, in which he was interviewed about his work by a journalist, played by Pfeffer. In the interview, though, the questions alreadycontained the answers, so Jankowski need only reply, »Yes.« It’s as if the interviewer understood Jankowski so well that he didn’t even have to mediate: the perfect interview. A similar situation occurs in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1968 film about the Rolling Stones, One Plus One, when Eve Democracy is interviewed by a journalist in the forest. So too, we see Jankowski wandering among the trees, followed by Pfeffer and a camera team – the video pretends to document its own making;  the onscreen camera team is actually comprised of actors, and there isn’t any film in the camera. The questions, prepared in advance by Pfeffer with some instructions from Jankowski, address his relation to his work as well as art in general. They discuss communication, irony, improvisation, and risk. The interview becomes a description, an interpretation, and an artwork in its own right. Filmed in one shot and not edited in any way, the film lasts as long as a 16-mm film roll, approximately ten minutes. In the publication My Work and Me, Jankowski’s film was documented via photographs of the script, documentation of the production, and a picture of the roll of film.