I first learned of Krzysztof Wodiczko and his work when he came to speak at the MFA. A friend and I escaped the Museum School during our lunch break to hear him talk. At the time (I think it was the middle of junior year), I was having serious doubts (again) about art’s ability to make an impact on people at all and whether I would be able to do anything meaningful or relevant to society as an artist. Seeing Wodiczko’s work helped mitigate these doubts a great deal, if not put a decisive end to them.

Polish-born artist Krzysztof Wodiczko is best known for his large-scale video projections of everyday people onto monuments and other public edifices. These projections often portray these ordinary volunteers candidly telling stories of their lives and experiences, usually centered around painful ordeal or personal suffering. His work has been installed and shown in public spaces in over a dozen countries, ranging from the town squares of authoritarian governments to right here on our National Mall in D.C. Wodiczko also designs technological devices or machines worn on the body that help construct situations in which people can share their personal stories with others.

Nearly all of Wodiczko’s work follows a socio-political theme. For instance, in his monumental projections work, he chooses to film people whose lives have intersected with war, conflict, homelessness, social inequity, gang violence. In all these works, the melding of private and public spheres is immediately obvious.

Imagine the face of someone, who could be anyone, looking plainly out at you from the pinnacle of the Washington Monument at night. You can hear every tremor or modulation of his voice through amplified loudspeakers. It is surreal, otherworldly, and you cannot pull away. The video is simple and raw, as is the sound recording; the viewer is made immediately aware that this is not a film but a snapshot of someone’s personal reality, magnified and displayed. But the display does not feel invasive; it’s a willing participation. Watching these works, (and not to make light of them) you feel somewhat like you have been invited into the home of a minor diety to listen and to their tale and share in a common humanity.

Not all of Wodiczko’s work about personal storytelling involves monumental projections. The melding of public and private can happen on a more intimate scale. During his talk at the MFA, Wodiczko described a project he did where he equipped a young Japanese woman with a device that continuously filmed her eyes. This video stream was them fed to a LCD monitor worn behind her back. The woman, a volunteer, had experienced a personal tragedy when her father left the family and created a gaping wound in her life. In Japanese society, young people are often expected to hide and suppress their personal feelings, especially with regard to delicate family problems. Equipped with this machine, which allowed her to make eye contact without showing her face, she mustered up the courage to approach strangers and tell her difficult story. Wodiczko filmed the young woman approaching a trio of wealthy businessmen not unlike her ex-father, and she began her story with her back turned towards them so they could only see the video stream of her eyes. It was not long before their eyes clouded with tears in sympathy and sorrow for her. The story allowed her to both reach out and fulfill a personal emotional need, and, just as importantly, break through the culture of silence encouraged tacitly by her society and her peers.

There are several things that really impress me about Wodiczko’s work: one is the use of technology to utterly surprise people and fundamentally reconfigure the way people interact. It has extraordinary possibilities for breaking through social norms that can be damaging if taken too far. Another is his ability to get ordinary people involved, empowering them to become the storytellers and art-makers, while Wodiczko plays the role of an enabler or mitigating factor. It’s telling that he calls his own work “interrogative design.” Finally, the public response. I am used to people drifting through art galleries with a dazed look on their faces, clutching their rented audio guides like it was their last lifeline to a world that makes sense (in many cases it is). Well, Wodiczko’s work can be experienced without any audio guide or degree in art history; all you really need is a human heart. That said, it is also neither trite nor catered towards the lowest common denominator. It just gives you a lot to think about in its simplicity and straightforwardness. Documentation of Wodiczko’s work shows viewers of an unexpectedly wide-ranging demographic in various states of awed attentiveness, some obviously fighting back tears, others with brows knitted in thinking. The emotional impact of his work is huge, and I really believe that what impacts the heart ultimately impacts the mind.

Given all this, you can imagine how happy I was to see that he had new work up at the I.C.A. I went with Yang and Joel yesterday to see it and, in classic Wodiczko fashion, it gave us moment for pause. Wodiczko’s work here, titled Out of Here: The Veterans Project, consisted of 2 parts. One was a series of outdoor video projections and amplified audio depicting the words and voices of medics, soldiers, and others involved in the Iraq war. The other was an indoor projection that transformed a darkened gallery space into a convincing interior of an abandoned warehouse. The projections show only a ring of high windows with dirty glass, beyond which the inscrutable sounds and images of a civilian-military confrontation play out. Like a miniature movie with an ambiguous plot, it dares the viewer to imagine the consequences and fill in the blanks of what it means to be in a war.

The latter part of this series was for me more interesting. It really did feel a bit like you’re standing in a warehouse in Iraq, but with a thick veil thrown around all your sense of comprehension. It conveys the confusion, doubt, and fear of war better than any news report of “events in the region” ever could. I had a hard time snapping out of that state of mind even walking out of the Wodiczko gallery into the adjoining one (which contained a show of really academic, self-referential painting-photographs on wood panels… A jarring contrast to the evocative, emotionally charged and frankly accessible work I just walked out of.  Sorry, but after Wodiczko, I honestly did not particularly care for its impassive pretensions.)

There are those out there who applaud art for art’s sake. There are those out there who prefer formal explorations of color, shape, and material. Personally, I have grown more and more to prefer art that espouses a a message grounded in the concrete, whether this is found in nature or human affairs. I also like art that could be simple without being simplistic. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything at all against art that is intentionally ambiguous or multi-layered in its message, or that references the art world in a self-aware way (I do find Jeff Koons’ antics hilarious and noteworthy). Nor do I always rule out art that seeks to stretch the boundaries of representation or process or whatnot. But it takes a certain perceptiveness and intellectual talent to create art that has reach, that can influence people in a way that leaves them feeling like something was revealed to them, rather obscured from them, when they leave the gallery. That’s the kind of art I learned that I wanted to make in junior year, when I heard Wodiczko talk. Coming back from the I.C.A. yesterday, I was reminded again of why I went to art school, what I got out of it, and what I have to keep doing, even as I work my daily job as a commercial designer making everyday practical things.