by Pyzik, Agata
They took up the task of testing democracy: it was the system on trial, exposing the fact that the choice between one oppressive system and another is not really a choice, at a moment when the majority of society regarded liberalism as the only option. By self-exposure (such as Kozyra, who posed as Manet’s Olympia while suffering from cancer) or assuming the role of a perpetrator (Żmijewski asking a former concentration camp prisoner to “renew” the number tattooed on his arm), critical artists were frequently becoming the object of harsh, politically motivated censorship and hostile social ostracism by the right-wing press. Gallery closures were common, as was the removal or even destruction of work. The most famous case of censorship was the 8 year long trial of Dorota Nieznalska, concerning her 2001 work Passion, where she put a photograph of male genitals onto a cross. She was finally cleared of the charges, but this trial remains a reminder of the abuse of free speech in Poland.
Yet history didn’t stand still, and when a new leftist circle, Krytyka Polityczna, was founded, Żmijewski started to criticize this kind of art for being self-indulgent and for its lack of visible political success. Critical art had not disrupted the system, it was claimed. Worse, it had become a playful, attractive gallery object, all the more pathetic given its initial ambitions. In 2005, Żmijewski became an art editor at Krytyka Polityczna’s journal, where he published his manifesto, ‘Applied Social Arts’, which prompted fervent debate about the political impact of Polish critical art. Interestingly enough, at the same time Żmijewski was accusing his peers of political indifference and lack of taking serious risks, he, Kozyra and Pawel Althamer were becoming renowned names, appearing frequently in international art magazines. And exactly when a new generation of artists born in the 70s and 80s entered the scene and were cutting off from the “critical” generation, they, to whom Bałka also belongs by age, had started to get the official nod: there were huge retrospectives for Libera and Kozyra as well as big group shows in the key Polish art institutions. Apparently, they no longer threatened the establishment, they wouldn’t shake Poland. But was this really the case? In this one sense Żmijewski was wrong: critical art was capable of political agency, because it provoked national debates that redefined the status quo.
Yet the appearance of Krytyka Polityczna and Żmijewski’s manifesto instigated polemics within the scene itself. Artists who obviously had strong political agendas weren’t used to inscribing themselves strongly on the “left” or any other political side, as that language was a taboo in post-communist Poland. Not all of them were happy with Żmijewski’s manifesto, as other, less obvious elements played a role: Krytyka and Żmijewski were in Warsaw, the capital, where all the cultural capital went, unlike some other critical artists, and in the new Poland the rest of the country was becoming increasingly marginalized and, in effect, was turning to reactionary politics.
Żmijewski, as if in an act of expiation for his previous, not engaged enough art, responded with a number of socially engaged works: he filmed dozens of demonstrations, rallies and protests for his ongoing series Democracies; in his Work series he filmed people doing particularly unattractive, numbing jobs: a cashier in a hypermarket or a street cleaner. Then the Smolensk catastrophe happened. Żmijewski then responded with a film about the mourning on the streets of Warsaw, Catastrophe, which studied the behavior of the crowd that stood in front of the Presidential Palace brandishing a giant cross, raising all kinds of social tensions. Żmijewski himself chose provocatively to side with the religious crowd, presenting them in a positive light, rather than the counterdemonstration there, whose marchers, yearning for a secular country, called for the release of city space from the church’s domination.
Żmijewski’s aim is always to provoke the viewer into recognizing his own political choices, yet someone less sympathetic could also see in this a search for ‘sensation’, simply some good and provocative material. I sympathize more with the actions in public space of the “post-critical” artist Joanna Rajkowska, who often comes into spaces between conflicted groups, and tries to mediate between them. Some of places she chooses formerly belonged to one ideology, and later were obliterated. One such space is the square in the former Warsaw ghetto where the contemporary Israeli trips come to the Synagogue, and a nearby church was selling anti-Semitic brochures. In this toxic area Rajkowska built an artificial pond, a so called ‘Oxygenator’, that was mainly used by the formerly neglected pensioners living nearby, who were suddenly enjoying public space, and created a different view for the Israeli teenagers on their compulsory Holocaust trips to the “land of death”. Despite the pond’s popularity, city authorities objected to prolonging its few months existence. Later they built a typical, much less inviting or original pond there, which is hardly used as much as its predecessor.
4.3 Pussy Riot perform in front of a Moscow cathedral.
The art historian Piotr Piotrowski calls this gesture “agoraphilia”, an obsession with the public space and the community(ies) it’s evoking, and which for long had no right to exist. Yet, in so doing, Polish critical artists neglected many other groups, like the new underclasses, which also emerged after ’89 and went unnoticed or kept going, yet were crushed in the new economical reality.
An “Impact on Reality”
Joining the international circuit contextualized Polish art. Globalization runs deeply into our part of the world as far as economic aspects are concerned: we inherit post-Fordism and crises, but in even more blatant forms. Becoming part of the same processes, the art of the former East went through a hastened course of all the currents that omitted it in the past 50 years, gaining some of the new ambivalent consciousness or making critical art which then becomes part of the market. Yet there must persist still something of a myth of the East, since many of the interesting artists emerged from its politically unquiet clichés, and what’s more, make art which exactly fits into those expectations.
By now the critique of instrumentalizing political issues, and of relational aesthetics especially, has become nearly banal. It is made from different perspectives though. The Berlin Biennale got criticisms for its complete ignoring of the “real art” (that is, paintings, installations, objects). The more progressive circles critiqued the way that Żmijewski simply assumed that socially engaged actions wouldn’t become merely objectified themselves. In this it’s certainly no better than just another exhibition with canvases on the wall. By the sheer inviting of leftist artists or the Occupy activists and closing them in a gallery, it’s rather just objectification, making ideas harmless.
Yet this could lead us to rethinking some old and mis-used notions of art, like “reality’, realness and, in the end, realism. Żmijewski is a perfect example of an artist who felt a ‘social’ calling and is consciously now using his high position in the art world, to, at least according to him, make it more politically expedient. Yet, expectedly, it didn’t have any other effects than a smug shaming and alienating of anyone with a different approach. Yet, there’s not enough examination of the sheer notions that this kind of community art operates under: care, interest, politics. In Żmijewski’s works, we usually end our knowledge/relation with its subjects exactly where the film finishes. The artists bear no interest in the further lives of people they engage, despite them providing the material for an attractive, “subversive” work of art. Many characters of his films, like the Holocaust survivor who tattooed his concentration camp number again on his forearm, or the people who took part in his ‘repetition’ of Professor Zimbardo’s Stanford Experiment, or deaf children singing Bach cantatas, disappear with their problems so that we can move on. The ‘realism’ of their lives and suffering is a fictional realism, since it fails to create a continuous reality between what is in the gallery and their lives.
It is clear Żmijewski and his like suffocate in the present climate, yet the bona fide solutions they find to it are bound to fail, for obvious dialectical reasons. The situation of an artist who hates ‘art’ as a bourgeois concept or simply a
n ideological veil for capitalism is obviously not new and dates from the early twentieth-century avant-garde. When the consumer society started to emerge, artists, especially in Weimar Germany, felt that they had to react against the increasing appropriation of art by the market, but not by necessarily rejecting it completely, even if that was possible. Art could still be a practice, which would come from some everyday job, which could still feed their art. Left-leaning avant-garde artists like Dadaists Georg Grosz, John Heartfield or theatre reformer Erwin Piscator were rallying to the progressive cause. For modern artists there were specific progressive approaches, Grosz and Wieland Herzfelde claimed: “if he doesn’t want to be an idler, an antiquated dud, the contemporary artist can only choose between ideology and propaganda in the class struggle. In either case, he must relinquish ‘pure art’. Either by enrolling as an architect, an engineer, or an advertising artist in the - unfortunately still highly feudalistically organized – army which develops the industrial forces and exploits the world, or by joining the ranks of the oppressed who are struggling for their share in the world’s value, for a meaningful social organization of life, as a recorder and critic reflecting the face of our time, as a propagandist and defender of the revolutionary idea and its supporters.’
Propaganda, instruction, fact, zero psychologism and illusionism – these were the principles of the new art, that was from now on to mingle with the most everyday, most common and banal: newspapers, advertising, radio, cinema, also theatre. Those were there for the artist to use to spread the word. This referred also to the Soviet factography, yet, as the historian specializing in the magazine LEF (“Left Front for the Arts”) and productivism Ben Brewster writes, it “must be seen in a triangular debate with psychological realism and revolutionary romanticism”, which were the necessary backdrop. Living in the era of screaming fascism, artists saw the mass media as the field in which they had to fight the Nazi propaganda. At least in the case of advertising this prospect ended in a tragic misunderstanding, in which it was capitalism that devoured agit prop, not vice versa. Yet the message is clear. The artist should do the possibly least artistic thing in his other life if he’s to remain an artist – a classic TS Eliot formula (see his Tradition and Individual Talent), where the artist was supposed to transfer his talent into business, like advertising, banking or the press. Even if in capitalism advertising wasn’t transformed by the propagandist experience into revolutionary art, it showed the ways a radical socialist art could be practised. The artist was at best a virus on capitalist society’s unhealthy body, infecting it with ideas.
A group from the “oppressed East” today worth mentioning in this context is Voina – a collective from St Petersburg who in the last few years have provoked the Putinian regime by many flippant actions, the most famous being drawing a gigantic phallus on a drawbridge next to the KGB headquarters, just before it was raised. They are also definitely regarded as part of the ‘third avant-garde’. In their case it’s less about the sophisticated artistic means, but the real risk the members are putting into their work. Żmijewski made them the co-curators of his Berlin Biennale as an attempt to save them from arrest. Many of the artists engaged in the Biennale came from places where it can’t entirely be said there’s no movement or no serious political cause. If we say that everything that gets caught up in the rigmarole of late capitalism is necessarily formatted by it, does that mean the mystical Russian east manages to exist somehow outside of it?
Yet, for that reason precisely Voina have become the best-loved darlings of the Western artworld, which craves nothing more than their authenticity, which, in effect, despite the real life risks the artists are taking, does not essentially change the meaning of their gestures, which now visible in billions at computer screens or news portals, become just another sexy news story, and this time with poor oppressed artists as a background. This reality principle is manifested in the jailing of Pussy Riot (several members of whom were also members of Voina), despite, or maybe with the help of the wide support they received around the world, leading to curious events such as the “staging” of their trial in the London Royal Court and Pussy Riot-themed symposia where pseudo-folk artists like Emmy the Great are asked to “discuss whether feminism in art is dead” or something similarly ludicrous.
Voina as an organization compare interestingly with Femen. But whereas the latter base themselves on their victimization – the protests can only succeed if they fail, if they will be caught by the police or are abused/arrested - Voina operate exactly to the contrary. Voina may then be an antidote, together with other groups which emerged on post-Soviet ground in the shadow of the brutality of authorities, like Chto Delat or Zagreb’s Badco. Voina’s members are an embodiment of Fransiscan non-violent resistance: they treat art as it was their everyday life (or vice versa), they embody what they do, they don’t use money, they reject property. Their main feature is their invisibility, so that they can’t be punished for what they do. They never celebrate going to prison, and if they do, they get out of it soon afterwards and easily.
The importance of artistic groups in Russia and Ukraine doesn’t diminish because of their lack of real political power or claims to it. In the current protests Voina probably played a crucial role, after the giant dick waved at the KGB HQ had done the rounds on TV and internet and shown people that everything is possible, even this kind of massive disobedience to the state. Within the absence of democracy those movements play a double role, activizing society. Voina and Pussy Riot successfully instigated an important debate on the connections between artistic action, politics and the state. At the same time, much art that is supposed to stand for “avant-garde” today seems to be in an irreconcilable crisis. It would like to dwell on the experiences (and propagandistic successes) of the previous movements, and yet today it is marginalized and insignificant as never before. The problem with Żmijewski and others in the contemporary avant-garde, like the Otolith Group, is that they often use the methods and forms similar to the leftist and conceptual avant-garde existing around the year 1968 but taking them out of their original context and the initial ideas that fed them. Żmijewski was a student of Grzegorz Kowalski, member of the Polish conceptual scene whose original methods of work applied the Polish post-war architect Oskar Hansen’s theory of ‘Open Form’. Kowalski pursued transcending the notion of a simple artwork and directed artists to create situations, always open-ended, which he popularized in the free, open space of his studio at the Fine Art Academy in Warsaw. Yet the methods of Kowalski were deeply rooted in his own practice and experiments, grounded in the reality of 60s, 70s and 80s People’s Poland, while Żmijewski simply takes them and reuses in completely different contexts, as if he was thinking simply that the interest in ‘leftist’ ideas makes a ‘leftist’ artist. Decontextualization is often the case with recuperation. Żmijewski often wants to see a ‘result’, an effect, no matter if this effect is in the end positive or negative. The maximal amount of ‘leftism’, or ‘engagement’ is supposed here to give the critical mass of leftism that will finally explode into some leftist paradise. But putting the Occupy movement within the gallery walls will remain as an objectifcation of the movement. With the recent discussions on the immaterial work and unpaid work of artists, it becomes simply a way the art world cleans its bad conscience at having a more pleasurable, concern-free life than most of the people who have to work for a living.
The New National Art, or the New Socialist Realism
Contemporary art, even of this kind, that genuinely is sensitive to the political state of affairs and sees its role as similar to the previous engaged avant-gardes, finds itself alienated from the popular sphere. When researching this book in summer 2012, I encountered two symptomatic exhibitions. The first was conceived as a “parallel action”, to borrow an expression from Robert Musil, to the Berlin Bienniale: The New National Art, in Warsaw’s Museum of Modern Art. The second was Interrupted Song, a huge exhibition of socialist realism in the Slovakian Natio
nal Gallery in Bratislava. One was a retrospective of the 50-year old examples of this style of fine and applied arts in communist Czechoslovakia, the other was collecting and positioning the new, inconvenient flourishing of amateur national/patriotic art in Poland, which, with a bit of a stretch, its curators said could be called ‘the new socialist realism’.
4.4 False or true empowerment. Wojciech Weiss, ‘Manifesto’, 1950. In Socialist Realist painting people were bigger than life.
Both couldn’t have made a different impression, which rather undermined the intentions of the Warsaw MoMA’s curators. The Bratislava National Gallery – in itself a stupendous example of socialist modernism, with its cubist, experimental form, - presented ‘sotsrealism’ in its all visual forms, from paintings to street decorations and banners, to the design of a flat and souvenirs. If anything, this Interrupted Song showed sotsrealism as a prisoner of its conventions and political conditions. Uncountable amounts of canvases, over and over, of heads of state, boring, repetitive identical depictions of street demonstrations, colossal, monumental figures of workers like gods. And, at the same time, a feeling of inappropriateness: should we really look at them? Sotsrealist paintings now made an impression similar to pornography: we feel we shouldn’t be looking and yet there’s something in it, the feeling of the Verboten, that makes it exciting. This is also the way Boris Groys writes about socialist realism: today, hidden in the museum magazines, it is not the avant-garde that seems to retain a subversive power. But can we honestly say that it can be found in paintings which were often endorsing dictators, turning famines and bloody events into kitschy neo-tsarist poetry? What impressed in the Bratislava show, apart from the sheer quantity, was the seeming ‘amateurism’ of Sotsrealist art, seeing how many of the previous styles and poetics persisted within the new, obligatory style, unnoticed or rather transferred too amateurishly so be taken seriously.