Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West

by Pyzik, Agata

  One exhibition press release on late Soviet underground lists combinations of “hoop petticoats made of climbers’ blankets and French lace, uniform tunics boasting open backs, and skirts with folds suspiciously reminding of draperies.” And as we can see later, this initial fresh amateurism was changed into professional, capitalist fashion, as if it was from the beginning only there to attract the West. Vivienne Westwood, who allegedly said “there could be no fashion in the country of sickles and hammers”, together with other Western designers, was coming to the specially organized shows. Slavonic women were becoming Miss World in a timely moment: Aneta Kreglicka in 1990 and Bronya Dubner becoming Alternative Miss World 1998.

  2.13 Made in Poland frontman Rozzy at Jarocin 1985 photographed by Tomek Barasiński

  It’s obvious by that by the late 80s everybody was sick to death of the system, especially if they were a young intellectual dreaming of having a band. But the brutality of the year 1990, when so many promising bands vanished overnight, because the contracts and previous system turned out to be not valid anymore, shows the darker side to it. Though several groups had records released, one group, Made In Poland, had their 1985 début pulled, and now we can only speculate whether it was for the nihilistic, anti-state lyrics. One of the most interesting groups never even had their records released, caught inbetween the two regimes.

  Virgin Mary does the splits – the world falls in!/The communion of holy white wafers of snow covers her eyes and face/ The world of white altars – cemeteries of paradise. This is not, surprisingly, from any Norwegian death metal band, but a song called Snow Queen by the Polish new wave group Wielkanoc (Easter, or Great Night, to render its double meaning) from the small Polish industrial town of Lubin, in Lower Silesia, who lasted less than 3 years and were killed, alongside with so much of what was interesting in the Polish alternative scene, just after the collapse of communism around 1990. Dziewczyny Karabiny (Girls carbines) was never actually released before 2010, and compiles live recordings from the festivals where the group wowed the public and critics, such as Jarocin in 1988, or from the Rozgłośnia Harcerska radio show (known for its support of progressive groups in People’s Poland) the same year. No wonder they did – live Wielkanoc was a knockdown combination of the moody and the unpolished. Even today it is amazing, how such sophisticated groups were possible in the suicidally grey Poland of the 1980s. As young people from a small industrial town, they knew they had to invent a world around them to have anything on their own. Pretty much, you could say, as did the post punk bands of British industrial areas, but they certainly didn’t have the Citizen Militia running at them with truncheons after the gigs.

  What is greatest in Wielkanoc is probably the unmatchable energy of the playing and real provocation in the lyrics. Kasia Jarosz was a truly charismatic vocalist and lyricist, introducing to the nearly all-male Polish scene a rare, assured yet raw female presence, and giving the censors lots of work. Regular meals/Warm checked blankets/Speedy sidewalks/Slit-eyed spiders/Rainy alleys/Train station open/public toilets/female male copulate/The promised protein/no-man’s protein. Nobody at that point dared to sing about grim sexuality in communist Poland like this, and there’s definitely no sadder elegy for a spared sperm on the toilet door in any music.

  The album’s publication after so many years comes as a part of a wider retrieving of the lost legacy of the Polish punk scene by the same people who were engaged in the volume Generacja. Dziewczyny Karabiny tells a fascinating story of the functioning of the new music under the decaying socialist regime. Mainstream and alternative meant something completely different in this economy, where every small dom kultury had a certain budget they had to spend, and frequently supported young rock bands, running alongside the first attempts to capitalize on the music by the more commercial bands of the era. And the fact 1990 destroyed such a rich musical culture only adds another fascinatingly ambivalent layer.

  1990 killed many interesting bands who identified with the previous era of resistance. Now Poland was drowned with the hideous poor quality clones of the Western bands and our music industry in a way still hasn’t got out of that crisis, in which it resembles the rest of the world. The Curtain was the dam which was protecting culture from money being the only reason it was made. With the obliteration of political tensions, and especially in the newly democratized countries, nihilism, punk, angularity, difficult obscure lyrics, weren’t welcome, opening an era of the new Paneuropean post-socialist realism, in which everything was beautiful.

  Goodbye, Berlin

  A similar recuperation has happened to many ex-revolutionaries, especially Slovenians Laibach, initially a protest-conceptual band, which invisibly changed its strategy from political and conceptual to purely conceptual, becoming ritual Slavonic clowns for the more edgy and demanding crowd. But how can any of the surviving post-punkers still maintain any menace to the public sphere?

  Every movement that tries to perpetuate itself, becomes reactionary – so said no one other than Marshal Tito, repeating Marx. Ask Laibach fans what they think about it, I wondered one windy night in March 2012 at the sinister edifice of Tate Modern, where the band were to perform a show of ‘Monumental Retro Avant-Garde’, watching them monochromely clad in black leather ankle-length coats, white shirts with omnipresent medical looking Malevich crosses, thigh-high platforms and officer boots. The discipline of a Laibach fan is military, not only to get the quickly disappearing tickets. Like mercenaries for hire, wristbanded, we queued, surrounded by men in black. As long as it is for fun and we don’t really have to worry about the rise of the far right sure, why not!

  In the Turbine Hall, Albert Speer-like as ever, they showed typical communist agit-prop for an hour, after a conference that was taking place all day in the Tate itself, where Laibach themselves were discussing their status as the walking work of art. But as became clear during this show of Monumental Retro Avant-garde, it was exactly this strong insistence on their origins in art and their relation with the art world, that in the end, instead of adding another layer of meaning, turned back on them. The problem with many groups of ‘conceptual’ provenance is that they overtrusted in irony, overidentification, ‘intellectualization’ as if it was in any case a road to artistic success. The knowing kitsch, vanity and irony, implied by the NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst) movement is precisely what is pre-empting the possible ideological menace both politically and as objects of art. The questioning of ideology and post-modern mindset of NSK (which included artistic groups such as IRWIN, Novi Kolektivizem) begs the question as to whether by questioning the political order of the 1980s the group was yearning for the early communist collectivism or merely was embracing the Western version of capitalism.

  When the Fab Four, or rather the inter-generational combo, retrospective also in terms of line-up, entered the stage and began their freak show, the latter seemed more possible. The monumental Intro was stupendous, and then they go nostalgic – fittingly with the Retro-Avant-garde in the title, they played a bunch of songs from the early postpunk period as a reconstruction of historical performances at Music Biennial Zagreb ’83 and Occupied Europe Tour from the same year. Milan Fras has the lowest, darkest and most piercing of basses – not surprisingly, Laibach did an opera once – and the first five or ten songs sung in Slovenian possess a dark, menacing, almost chthonic power, culminating in Mi Kujemo Bodosnost (We’re Forging the Future), which, accompanied by the images of gigantic factory hammer and machinery, provokes instantly the opposite thought: No, you actually aren’t anymore! Because if this is just a joke, irony, they don’t really mean it, what is actually the point? The constant references to industry, which shaped their youth and pervades especially their early work, can be now rendered only in an aestheticized form in a former power station turned gallery.

  More Slovenian songs, like Smrt za Smrt, cues applause and sing-alongs from the Slovenian community in London by my side. Like on every cult band gig, there was a strong sense of a ritual going on be
tween the band and the crowd. Everything seems synchronized. A spectacle is a spectacle and Laibach are better at it than anyone else. We watch Yugoslavian newsreels, party meetings, fragments of Leni Riefenstahl and Yukio Mishima’s Patriotism, Stalin and Tito speaking over the scene, which is decorated with a deer’s head. When Laibach were asked about their political views at a press conference when touring Poland during the late Martial Law in 1983, they replied “we are communists”, much to the organizers and crowd’s dismay. The band’s excavations when they started in the late 1970s/early 1980s, were not intended to call the late Tito’s (the marshal died in 1980) socialist Yugoslavia ‘Nazi’, ‘fascist’ or ‘Stalinist’ – rather, as eternal pranksters and born postmodernists, they wanted to wind up 1980s Slovenian society by quoting its 1940s and 1950s past. The aim always was to shock and repulse.

  Whatever works: in 1983 it was communism, in 1987 it was “songs for Europe”: a Nazified Queen’s One Vision, Geburt Einen Nation and Opus’ Life is Life. That was probably their peak and the songs of course appear in the gig, as carefully planned encore. Not only did it work at the time as a wind-up, it was really touching upon unhealed traumas and real shame in the country: the Nazi era or collapsing communism. Laibach were the anti-Kraftwerk, a projection of Ian Curtis’s turned real. In the Turbine Hall in 2012 they were stripped to what they have always been, fancy dressed pranksters, a pantomime without much reference to what is now happening in their country: a sharp recession after joining the Eurozone and mass protests. In them, we seemingly cherish everything that is disturbing in art, from Wagner to Leni R. to Syberberg. But here, we can start asking questions, whether they really could be put in the same line? There’s nothing they can do to still shock, cause resonance, even if they did a Socialist Realist album on how their native Slovenia is now in crisis after it joined the Eurozone. Instead, they did a soundtrack to a film about Nazis in space.

  Equally telling is the example of Einstürzende Neubauten. Their music embodied a vision of post-war West Germany: their name was a blow to the post-war policies. Their aesthetics evoked Entartete Kunst, Cold War, DDR, Berlin Wall, overcoming of the past, decomposing cityscapes, fall of industry, Cage, Stockhausen, trash, punk, destruction, morbidity, dada, and in general the bleakest unfulfilled promises of modernity. You can’t think of them without seeing the cityscape of Berlin, which was their site of creativity/destruction, and indeed they contributed to its lasting image as infinitely edgy place of experimentation, even if it bears little resemblance to the current reality. They also pressed heavily on the “Ostalgic” buttons, having had played in Berlin’s Palast der Republik in 2004 shortly before the venue was demolished for purely ideological reasons, again, as a part of “overcoming the past”.

  They were the part of the Nachgeboren (‘born later’, after Brecht’s famous poem), stylistically put between the Darmstadt school of Serielle/Elektronische Musik and the Kosmische-Krautrock eruption. Yet today, I’d put my money rather on dance-rhythm oriented bands, like D.A.F., Grauzone or Palais Schaumburg. DAF, the leather clad techno nemesis were consciously referring to the Soviet Bloc in their aesthetic (as in the socialist realist cover of their album Die Kleinen und die Bosen), while their fascist-homosexual entourage was a million times more disturbing and politically dangerous. Neubauten never were a band of tunes, they were a band of style, more like a conceptual theatre of method actors or performance artists, a cabaret in a post-Baader Meinhof house of fear, where Berlin was re-enacting the German trauma through their driven shows. With their name calling for ‘new buildings’ to collapse, they were the model for a post-68 disillusioned generation lost in the ashes of history, unsettled by the uneasy peace West Germany had made with its past.

  But it is this cultural meaning that today serves the art world so well. They keep being referenced by the new generations of visual artists: in 2007, Jo Mitchell performed ‘Concerto For Voice & Machinery II’ at London’s ICA, a reconstruction of an infamous Neubauten-related performance at the same venue in 1984, which caused some riots and destruction. Namechecking Heiner Müller, Diamanda Galas, Dadaist performances, cabaret and non-Western practices, it is clear that what Blixa Bargeld was absorbing was not identical with his creation. Maybe this is what has become of many of those bands, now titillating exactly for what used to be subversive and revolutionary. Today it seems the most ‘subversive’ thing is not to quote theory, but to risk one’s own back at a demonstrations. As the music industry is now anything but what it was 20, 30 years ago, finding itself in the greatest financial crisis, now the art world is its only chance, subsuming the radical chic of punk. The new Bowie album can be hardly purchased in a record shop (as they keep shutting down for good), but he could be seen on dozens of silver screens at a bigger-than-life V&A David Bowie Is exhibition, which sold 50,000 tickets before it was even opened. The man, aptly, didn’t come – but who would like to attend his own funeral?

  O Mystical East

  East European Orientalism

  Oh mystical East,

  You’ve lost your way

  Your rising sun shall rise again

  My Western world gives out her hand

  A victor’s help to your fallen land

  This is my Western promise!

  Ultravox, Western Promise

  To despair is to be Romanian

  “It’s awful to be Romanian; serious people smile at you dismissively. When they see you’re smart, they think you’re a cheat.” – so wrote the philosopher and essayist Emile Cioran in his diary in 1933. While Cioran may not be the best name to be associated with, because of his various involvements with Romanian fascism, his position faithfully and possibly most fully shows the place of an intellectual or an artist from the periphery, when he comes to the West. As a result of his feeling of insignificance, he decides to shake off all the signifiers of his previous existence: his language (he writes entirely in French, an act, some say, of “unwriting” his previous Romanian books) and dreams “to become a stranger”, resisting the “temptation to exist”. “All my life I wanted to be something else, anything but that I already were”. Being and exile is now a vocation, and he starts specializing in theorizing this position. Was part of that a shame because of the specifically brutal forms that anti-Semitism and the Holocaust took in Romania, or really, something so petty as a self indulgent, self-regarding, solitary cry of “me me me” sounding there, in the dark? Definitely a sense of shame at one’s crimes can be transformed into less officially disturbing senses of shame. One may think there’s something wrong with their looks, with some small elements of their appearance. With their brains, talent, skills. Provinciality is part of them.

  3.1 FEMEN, on their annual protest against the regular summer hot water switch off in Kiev.

  “To despair is to be Romanian”, “I’m ashamed to be a Romanian.” “Romania will never become a culture (nation).” “They can’t blame anyone but themselves for being a total historic failure.” It recalls the complaints of many bourgeois intellectuals, incapable of contributing to their own culture. But also it’s said with the exasperation of someone whose ego doesn’t allow him to withdraw for a bit and think that he and his experience may not be representative.

  At the same time, this man, whose aphoristic writing never achieved nor strove to find a traditional coherence of prose, is perfectly attuned to the smallest shivers of his soul that provoke his weird logorrhoea. But it was precisely Cioran’s capability to endlessly dwell on the catastrophe that made him, despite or maybe because of his uprootedness, good material for a post-war thinker “of ruins”, of a fallen civilization, and of the margins – his own marginality helped his writing talent to flourish. If you construct your whole life as an exile in the world, then you model it as sick, and then you parasitically live off the sickness. A weird hubris is feeding this as well: everything, starvation, blasphemy, only not to become a “poor, unknown stranger”. This was a fear of another exile, a poet, who we couldn’t polarize enough aga
inst Cioran, the Shoah survivor and a fellow Romanian (although not of choice) and Jew, Paul Celan. Living at the very same time in Paris, Celan had similar thoughts and anxieties, feeling trapped within a world that was meaningless to him, with his language for his only homeland – and that was German, which precisely was the most sublime tool of his torture. He never could write in any other language, but thanks to this he is now a poet of the canon – would that be the case, if he had chosen to write in Romanian or in Yiddish?