APPRECIATING CONTEMPORARY ART

Wojciech Bruszewski: Yyaa (1973)

Masterpieces of modern/contemporary art #12

Wojciech Bruszewski: Gramaphone (artwork) (1981) (nothing directly to do with the film Yyaa)

(The idea behind this series is to let the individual artworks speak directly to us from their own mysterious realm, rather than interpreting and ‘explaining them away’ in conventional terms.)

Honestly hard to know what to say about this 5 minute short film without spoiling and deflating it in some unintended way.

Scholarly discourse and exegesis is available — a highly detailed book in pdf by Janusz Zagrodzki in Polish and English and free to download — and this study is absolutely the real deal in terms of finding ways to analyse and expound on Yyaa for an audience of serious film students (having to write essays on it, and so forth), but this adds nothing — for me at least — to the essential experience of Yyaa itself. It only manages to downgrade it by turning it into a series of concepts.

There are at least a couple of versions of Yyaa out there, one shorter than the other, but the full and complete…