Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West

by Pyzik, Agata

  Interrupted Song showed how within sotsrealism we can seldom find the things we usually associate with artistic excellence: the notions of originality, individuality or technical accomplishment, cease to exist. Instead, we encounter rooms full of almost identical paintings, in which we wouldn’t be able to distinguish the artists if not for the labels next to them. Sotsrealism encouraged nationalism, but was selective about which elements of a particular country’s patriotic traditions could be used – after all, they could start giving people ideas. In this way the impeccably folksy, reactionary nationalist Slovak painter Martin Benka was banned as a “formalist”. Czechoslovakia had strong pre-war avant-garde traditions, especially surrealism. So we still find some quite stupefying examples of Sotsrealism informed by pre-war ideas, like Ladislav Guderna’s constructivist, aggressively colored New Machine Station, or Edita Spannerova’s In the Kindergarden, where an uncanny, brightly lit group of little children and their maids sits closer to Balthus’ underage Lolitas than to the distinguished men of Stalin’s portraitist Gerasimov. We can also spot hints of Gustave Dore, Gustave Courbet or Expressionism. But mostly, the rooms of the gallery were filled by insipid large-format portraits, pathetic, metaphorical visions of worker’s labor and the forthcoming Golden Age. Individual talent ceased to have any importance. What was important, at least in intention, was how art will transform their lives, how it’ll play a role within their most everyday life: lets remember sotsrealism wasn’t only, although it was in huge part, monumental paintings cherishing agriculture and heroic labor. Sotsrealism was supposed to encompass the totality of human life – which today, with the complete dismissal of any project of totality as totalitarian, is completely rejected, supposedly for the sake of ‘pluralism’. It’ll be better to understand the specificity of sotsrealism by remembering what came directly afterwards: Poland and other more liberal satellites adapted a more modern style in art and design, a Brussels Expo ’58 colorful optimism, while Russia remained skeptical towards abstraction until the end.

  Another level of sotsrealism is architecture, which was, as some say today, pioneering of postmodernism, in its neoclassical or eclectic revival. Maybe that’s why there wasn’t a great deal of controversy when the infamous publishing empire of Dr Andreas Papadakis, with its flagship magazine Architectural Design, was in the 1980s regularly publishing outpourings of Charles Jencks in praise of the tastes of HRH Prince Charles, Leon Krier’s praise of Albert Speer and Anthony Gormley’s monumental, figurative sculptures next to Russian correspondence on the Sotsrealist mosaics of the Moscow Metro and the fair at VDNKh (the All-Russian Exhibition site in Moscow, representing an especially flamboyant type of Sotsrealist architecture), often by the great specialist in Russian avant-garde, Catherine Cooke - because in the end they all expressed the same aesthetic sensitivity. “Pluralism”, as understood since the 90s, meant usually the horrific monumental neoclassicism of sculptors like Igor Mitoraj or Zurab Tsereteli, not dissimilar to the ‘Gormleyism’ spreading across the British Isles.

  By contrast Warsaw MoMA, normally devoted to sophisticated conceptual art or rediscovering socialist modernism (like the pioneer feminist sculptor Alina Szapocznikow), for the whole summer of 2012 was a strange house for the creativity of the political “other side”, showcasing the aesthetic expressions of the recent right wing movements and its sympathizers in Poland. Among them were “flower carpets” made by women from the church circles during the processions of the Corpus Christi holiday, fragments of the gigantic figure of Jesus (bigger than in Rio de Janeiro) from the small town of Swiebodzin, visual frames from football matches (e.g. mass ornaments on the terraces, with a gigantic face of Jesus inscribed into the team logo), covers of the “intellectual” journals of the Polish right like Fronda, clips/visuals from Polish nationalistic hip hop, and most preeminently, artworks and projects associated with the infamous Smolensk plane catastrophe.

  The Smolensk catastrophe spawned political divisions and many right wing conspiracy theories, but hasn’t, surprisingly, affected the polls – more people are still voting for the neoliberals of Civic Platform, leaving the right wing, Catholic and nationalist Law & Justice behind. Yet, ideologically, society is divided. Smolensk augmented the break within society that existed already. The works collected at the exhibition largely dwelt on emotions “repressed” from the modern progressive discourse, like patriotism, nationalism and piousness in the Catholic religion. Granting them a place in a prestigious gallery, seemingly brings these repressed discourses into art, which polarized Polish society after Smolensk. This is neither ‘relational’ nor it is simply ‘authentic’ art. It was rather folk art – fulfilling all the premises of this kind of expression. As Alex Niven in his Folk Opposition points out on the British context any spontaneous, anti-bourgeois, working/peasant class expression has been today either neutralized and taken over by the middle classes, or given a political label of far right. For the progressive, liberal art circles if means (mostly) “don’t touch”. Yet it could be felt that the show electrified the debate, as it gathered what perfectly fitted the fetishized category of ‘authenticity’, realness and all sorts of street-cred. The presented artefacts are similar to the art most willingly promoted by the progressive institutions: they are second or third circuit, and were done according to the DIY ethos. They are the ‘unofficial narrations’, those “other traditions” we mentioned in the third chapter. Yet the same spirit is expressed by the popular and often reactionary historical superproductions at the cinema, ubiquitous in the former Soviet Bloc, with films like Battle of Warsaw 1920 taking revenge on communist times. Made for millions of taxpayers money and promoting nationalistic behavior, they couldn’t be further from folk art.

  The artefacts presented often came to existence in the process of collaboration, group activity and within the direct engagement in reality, and within unofficial, spontaneous channels, which sounds exactly like the community art ideal. Yet what “effect” these works may have – and do – on the reality, is strengthening the feeling of national identity, of feelings that are often xenophobic and lead to an exclusion of others, which of course couldn’t be further from the ideas of the leftist avant-garde. Coming back to TS Eliot’s essay title, where is the relation between the tradition (which the avant-garde rejected in strongest terms) and the individual artist? As for the aesthetics of the presented works, they were mostly complete amateurism combined with a reactionary mindset that sometimes produced accidental aesthetics, as if from a fanatic Sunday artists club: they dwell on the passeist aesthetics, freely mixing the imagery from different levels, pop with world art movements and sacred art. There are exclusions: Fronda’s covers from the beginning presented a very high level of graphic design. What of it though, if they’re serving a despicable cause?

  If anything from the past, this art reminded me of the spontaneous artefacts created by the members of the Solidarity movement – by workers interned, under arrest or during the difficult period of strikes in 1980-81. Political, agit-prop leaflets, posters, banners, picket placards, stamps, postcards, badges, prints on fabric, magazines, even jewellery made of barbed wire - all DIY, all printed, Xeroxed and distributed with often the most primitive methods. Overnight workers had to become propagandists, paint their own posters, which often presented an extremely high and interesting level of graphic design. They combined collage, comic strips, quotations from older art, prison associations, elements of mass imagination, verbal jokes. They also use the visual symbols of the forbidden historical events – the Warsaw Uprising from 1944 or previous, bloody strikes. The symbol of the union itself, the famous red lettered SOLIDARITY in itself is a magnificently done logo. Although often expressing the anticommunism and devotion to Pope John Paul the Second, there was something carnivalesque to the way workers – artists, amateurs - treated any available element. The carnival of Solidarity, as those two years were called, brought a short lived unity which, subsequently, was lost. The pre-existing divisions within the move
ment won out after the unjust division of power after ’89. The right wing within the movement formed a stubborn, closed front, where it was becoming increasingly reactionary.

  4.5 Flower arranging at the New National Art exhibition at the Warsaw MoMA.

  In PRL, in order to be considered an artist, one had to have permission from the state, with proper studies finished, and to be registered. Yet the contemporary sophisticated leftist movement don’t seem interested in working out a strong, appealing, powerful aesthetics, and reject it as kitsch or superficial. We used to have a powerful aesthetic of protest in the form of a strong grassroots movement, which today remains in the hands on the other side of the barricade, as the other side has a ‘cause’ it strongly believes in. Aesthetics develop alongside movements, and the greatest failure of the post-communist countries is the inability to create a strong labor movement. If the aesthetic of the right seems strong now, even if amateurish and not according with our sophisticated expectations, it’s a manifestation of a movement we ourselves don’t have.

  The show revealed two Polands: one, which spoke though absence and which its liberal elites aspire to, and another one, abandoned by the state, used by the populists, but also poorer and less well educated people. Yet it retains a powerful position as “this is what the majority wants in Poland”, serving as an excuse for the politicians to continuously refuse rights for the minorities. We live in a reality in which those two groups are constantly and rightly, antagonized. The novelty is that the former are no longer happy with the status of the uneducated masses. There’s the new intellectual right, which takes the lesson from the sophisticated left by founding magazines and discussion clubs not dissimilar to the left. This is not a Polish specificity, as the most prominent example is perhaps the Italian Casa Pound. The anachronistic, national or even folk/legendary aesthetic is what the abandoned parts of Polish society hide behind, scared of modernity. Yet, unlike the Romantics, who wanted to re-examine and exorcise Polish traumas, they are interested only in preserving the life-giving power of trauma, of mythological wars, without which they’d lose their raison d’etre. Yet it also discloses the great failure of the intelligentsia, who lost the battle for the forms of modernity. Instead of the modernity of socialism, we got a modernity entirely stolen by the neoliberal version of capitalism.

  Hardly “the new socialist realism”, this, as sotsrealism was a state art, if equally an expression of nationalist kitsch - and, of course, there couldn’t be a term that would cause greater offence to the communism-loathing far right. Yet, if sotsrealism was apart from nationalism, an expression of several other ideas, what do the artefacts grouped in Warsaw MoMA represent by comparison? Of course, this isn’t sotsrealism in any practical sense, only metaphorical. The people who make this art do not possess actual political power. But they do epitomize a political force that can’t be ignored, like the Catholic Church. The question about New National Art remains: is the notion of “art” in here actually neutralizing something that is possibly much more dangerous? It wouldn’t be the first time in history that the right wing and avant-garde would meet. Art historians still have problems how to categorize the views of the Futurists, or Vorticists like Wyndham Lewis, and how to appreciate art which was inseparable from their often despicable, fascist political views. So is it merely just “the other side”, we should think, or a reverse of what was happening at Żmijewski’s Biennale? This new ‘folk art’ should be cherished by the artists connected to the relational/participatory/engaged aesthetic: it is popular, it is made by ‘ordinary people’, it is ‘spontaneous’. Yet, how to deal with its ideological content? Doesn’t it rather reflect the social construction of the masses created by the sophisticated, educated, liberal elite?

  An equally curious example of reinterpreting Socialist Realist aesthetics is a work by Israeli artist Yael Bartana, shown recently in the UK, And Europe Will Be Stunned, a staged video trilogy about a fictitious “comeback” of Jews, killed in the Holocaust, to Poland. The first part of the video is called “Phantoms-Nightmares”, which could be a semi-conscious reference to the uncanny tradition of Polish Romanticism in the writings of Maria Janion, to whom we referred to in Chapter Three of this book – something which Bartana could have learned via her collaborators from Krytyka Polityczna. It’s also a reference to the evil which was done to the Jews in the Holocaust, who are now called to come back – yet in what form? Does she mean the descendants of those Jews who were killed? Or does she demand a return of the dead Jews? And on which premises, who gives her the right, one might ask? And if they’re dead, are they to make a rebirth, and in what form? As the phantoms in the Forefathers Eve? Or maybe as zombies from a nightmare? Despite being Israeli, Bartana became the artist of the Polish Pavilion in the Venice Biennale 2011. The first part shows the informal ‘leader’ of Krytyka Polityczna, Sławek Sierakowski, stylized as a 1950s Polish ‘intelligent’ – dressed in thick glasses, jumper and in grey colors, as he delivers a passionate speech in the empty – significantly – 10th Anniversary Stadium in Warsaw. This Stadium had a rich history – built in a socialist modernist style, it was one of the first buildings in 50s Poland where architects successfully negotiated the rules of socialist realism, and was recently demolished for the sake of the new, bombastic Polish-flag-wrapped kitsch of the National Stadium, ready for the Poland/Ukraine Euro 2012. The speech, co-written by Sierakowski, is a pathetic address to the – dead? alive? – three million Polish Jews to come back to the land, which previously brought a Holocaust upon them or forced them into emigration in 1968. It’s an apology for their suffering and promise of a new alliance, in which Poles and Jews will no longer be hostile to each other. The second part of the triptych shows the Jews that responded to the appeal, coming back and building a kibbutz in the place of the former Warsaw Ghetto. In the third part, the Leader, Sierakowski, is assassinated during another speech and buried.

  4.6 Polish intelligentsia in the lost cause. Bartana’s fantasy of the Jewish return back to Poland.

  Art was in this case to have real life continuation – there was, during the aforementioned Berlin Biennale, a Symposium of the Jewish Renaissance Movement. In Poland, among the Jewish community itself, it caused mixed feelings. We know that the idea of a “comeback” of Jews couldn’t be farther from reality, not only because of the mutual attitudes of Israelis and the continent. The Polish-Jewish historian Jan Tomasz Gross, author of breakthrough books on Polish anti-Semitism during and after WWII like Neighbours, on a pogrom in Jedwabne and Golden Harvest, on Poles betraying Jews for money, said about this project that only treated symbolically does it make any sense. In the history of Poland we heard various directives telling Jews where they should go, from Madagascar to Palestine, during the anti-Semitic 1930s, so telling them to come back to Poland is not innocuous. Poles need to realize the hole, the void that was left after the Jewish population’s extermination. Bartana’s cycle, even if objectionable, historically simplifying and too easily sidestepping the profound problems it raises, was interesting because of its form: its Sotsrealist aesthetics was partly intended to evoke the lost early socialist past (and political aesthetics) of Israel, land of kibbutzes, where the pioneers were to found a new world. The films, especially the middle part of the trilogy, evoke the socialist propagandist newsreels, full of healthy bodies affirming their physical fitness and beauty so conspicuous in early socialist heroic art. The question whether the film’s message is ‘for real’ or a political spoof and political scandal is hanging there, to the delight of the artist, no doubt. Yet, Bartana seems to take this at face value, unable to give a counter, critical look. The text of the speech is ludicrous, and neglects the contemporary position of Israel as oppressor of Palestinians. It is a mock politics, conveyed in a knowingly cheesy form.

  From avant-garde to realism (and back again)

  Artists today can once again take Marxism seriously, yet its effect is necessarily weakened by the lack of a strong movement such an art could represent.
But is another weakness leftist art’s devotion to old notions of the avant-garde? Andre Bazin in his essay on realism pointed out its hunger to “bring back to life”, a hunger (not accidentally having here sexual connotations), that can be compared to Badiou’s passion of the Real. What lies behind the fear of realism? It’s an aesthetic that has been ridiculed and become politically bankrupt, as in the cases of sotsrealism in the Soviet Union or China. Socialist Realism was a question of life and death to many under socialism, and hence is part of post-Soviet trauma. We often see it and think about it with shame. Not only in art, but also in literature and architecture, sotsrealism is an easy straw man, as it’s easy to see an oppressor and oppressee in there, and we’re never the oppressor. Surveying Sotsrealism requires from us a complete redefinition and rethinking over what was the function of the artwork, what was the idea of an artist, what was his role.

  It was in the 80s that artists and critics began to confront Sotsrealism again, after Martial Law in Poland, when the disgust at the system reached its limits and the system itself began to decay. There were new possibilities for boycotting the system, there appeared new options for democratic opposition, and critics wanted to somehow regain sotsrealism, as the style-purveyor of realism, figuration and painting. At this time people were disillusioned with the avant-garde. And exactly then the slim but controversial book by Boris Groys was published, in 1987: The Total Art of Stalinism (Gesamtkunstwerk Stalins in the German original).