by Pyzik, Agata
The other approach is that of the hard left under the slogan of ‘full communism’. In the works of Dean, Badiou, Negri and to an extent Slavoj Žižek, there is a radical vision of a new communism - yet, similar to their soft-left counterparts, they also don’t see the communist East as a source of inspiration. They can only embrace the Cold War past of ‘real socialism’ through a disavowal. Removing Eastern Europe from the ‘communist horizon’ can result only in its marginalization. Somehow, we ourselves already did this work for the West. We so strongly believe we don’t deserve the normal conditions of a social democracy that we hardly fight for it. Eastern Europe may continue to be the ‘wild man of Europe’, but it could use this position to remind the West of its errors and duties. Writing this book I realized how privileged we were as a part of the world which despite its tininess, could dictate and impose its ideals on the vast rest. Closeness to the Western world, especially the European Union, still is a massive advantage - it’s sufficient to look at Poland and compare it to Belarus or Russia.
Because of that, what remains of the years ’45-’90 east of the Elbe is mostly melancholia or nostalgia. The melancholic approach is visible everywhere: I described it in the chapter on Berlin, where there’s either a restitution of the pre-war past at all cost, or the obsessive study over trauma. The ‘traumatic studies’ of communism occupy several books, where the work of ‘mourning’ replaces action in the present, from Charity Scribner’s Requiem for Communism, to Susan Buck-Morss’s Dreamworld and Catastrophe, or the architectural activity of Daniel Libeskind, whose most prominent projects, like the Jewish Museum in Berlin, or the Military Museum in Dresden, are done in the high-class kitsch poetics of buildings incarnating ‘the wounds of old Europe’.
In contrast to that, we could be addressing the contemporary history of the former East countries, and speaking about its notorious past, but in a dialectical way, where the reshaping of the past by the present and the present by the past can become visible. The world of thought, the political world, all are in great need of ideas. From time to time there’s an excitation, as if there was a great new idea on the horizon, yet most often it turns out to be just another demand for an idea. One of the ideas in this book is: “why the periphery must stay the periphery”, but maybe it should be: “how can the center learn from the periphery?” In a recent interview, Russian Marxist dissident Boris Kagarlitsky recounts an anecdote about a meeting with some young Swedish revolutionaries. During the intellectual dispute it was pretty boring, but after the lecture the youth wanted to drink bottled beer in the park. Yet there was no bottle opener. Suddenly there was a fright in the eyes of the students: how are we going to open the bottles? Kagarlitsky then opened the bottles using the table and then explained there’s at least half dozen of other ways. “This is the difference between the Russian intellectual and Swedish revolutionary. They know that a bottle is opened with a special tool, a bottle opener.” The East of Europe, culturally a part of the West, was pushed into a parallel reality for 45 years and some of its countries are still paying the price for it today, especially compared to the affluent West. But maybe we still can come up with ways to open things that you don’t and didn’t have to know about.
Warsaw 4/07/13
Acknowledgements
Writing this book was an incredible challenge. A double challenge because of the language, which is not my own, and because I dare to propose this book to the Western reader, on things which are often quite alien to him. It was initially thought as a polemical, shortish book on Ostalgia – nostalgia after communism, or rather the critique of this concept as it was becoming popular in the West. Soon enough, as my own migrant existence was becoming more intense, this occurred to me as rather too shallow for a whole book. If I wanted to achieve anything by writing it though, then it’s a calling for compassion and consideration to this vast cultural and societal complex called “Eastern Europe”, as it is now and as it used to be. Also, in the process of researching and writing it, from the initially hostile position towards this concept, I was growing warmer and more compassionate about it. I feel that to admit that one’s an Easterner can sound ridiculous today, but I also feel this distinction can act to our own benefit. What kind of world do we want? What position should Eastern Europe assume today towards its more powerful Western counterparts? I still of course haven’t found an answer for it, but this book is a start.
Several articles published before in The Guardian, The New Statesman, Architectural Review Asia Pacific, Calvert Journal and The Wire made their way, in a changed form, to the book. Thank you Natalie Hanman, Philip Oltermann, Helen Lewis, Daniel Trilling, Simon Sellars, Frances Morgan and Jamie Rann for commissioning them. Chapter 3 is partly based on an essay called Forefather’s Eve. On the Embodiments of the Uncanny in Polish Culture I published in 2008 in the Polish arts journal “Obieg”. Here I used a greatly modified version of the original translation of that essay into English by K. Majus. With the exception of that, all translations used here are mine.
I want to thank first and foremost my partner Owen Hatherley, without whom nothing: my stay in the UK, my immersion in the language, my decision to write the book and accomplishing it wouldn’t be possible. He was cheering me on, always supportive and ready to help. I’m indebted to him in ways which I will probably never be able to reciprocate. I also thank to Tariq Goddard from Zero Books, who got interested and decided to publish a book by a Polish journalist. I thank Anna Aslanyan, Bobby Barry, Alex Niven and Daniel Trilling for reading my manuscript and for their instructive remarks. Special thanks go to Robert Jarosz, researcher, archivist and expert on Polish punk – his own research, his expanding archive “Trasa W-Z” as well as his assistance significantly widened my knowledge on this fascinating period of Polish underground culture in the last decade of communism. To his kind help I also owe several magnificent photographs in this book – here I thank the outstanding artists-photographers: Tadeusz Rolke – the legend of Polish photography, Mirosław Stępniak, Tomek Barasiński and Ryszard Gajewski, whose great works I have the honour to host in my book and who documented the last socialist avant-garde which happened in Poland. In the same way I thank Paulina Ołowska, charismatic contemporary artist of growing cult following, who kindly allowed her punk painting of band Kontrola W to be reproduced on this book’s cover and whose captivating archival work of “repainting” the past, where the unobvious socialist glamour and grind go together hand by hand, embodies the “poor but sexy” spirit to me – the ways in which the past and present of the Eastern avant-garde cross their ways.
In this book I’m indebted to scholars David Crowley, Boris Groys and Justyna Jaworska, whose refreshing approach to the Eastern European studies and ways of seeing the communist past I find very inspiring and which encouraged me to make my own move and attempt my own contribution. Equally inspirational was the style of music journalism of Chris Bohn aka Biba Kopf, who put a bridge between the East and Western music already in the 80s and is the only music writer I can think of who understood both. I also thank my parents, Iwona and Tomasz Pyzik, for sending me to English lessons since the age of 8 and taking great care about my education, so that I could come to another country without fear and become a writer in another language.
Warszawa, 21/08/2013
Further Reading
Introduction
Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (Basic Books 2002)
Gareth Dale (editor), First The Transition, then the Crash. Eastern Europe in the 2000s (Pluto Press, 2011)
Boris Groys, The Communist Postscript (Verso 2010)
Agata Pyzik, ‘Poles are here to stay, but it will take time to make a cultural splash’, The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/12/poles-britain-cultural-splash
Lukasz Ronduda, Alex Farquarson, Barbara Piwowarska (eds), Star City – The Future Under Communism (Nottingham Contemporary, 2011)
Dubravka Ugresić, ‘To be Yugoslav now requires a footnote’, (interview
), at Balkan Insight http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/to-be-yugoslav-now-requires-a-footnote
Chapter 1
A.M Bakalar, Madame Mephisto (Stork Press, 2012)
Ekaterina Degot and Ilya Budraiskis (eds), Post-Post-Soviet – Art, Politics and Society in Russia at the Turn of the Decade (Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, 2013)
Elizabeth Dunn, Privatising Poland. Baby Food, Big Business and the Remaking of Labor (Cornell University Press, 2004)
Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories. Marking Time in the Culture of Amnesia (Routledge, 1995)
Christina Kiaer, Imagine No Posessions. The Socialist Objects of Russian Consctructivism, (MIT Press, 2008)
Susanne Ledanff, ‘The Palace of the Republic versus the Stadtschloss’, German Politics & Society, Volume 21, Number 4, Winter 2003
David Ost, The Defeat of Solidarity. Anger and Politics in Post-communist Europe, (Cornell University Press, 2006)
Grazyna Plebanek, Illegal Liasons (Stork Press, 2012)
Agata Pyzik, ‘Poland’s Left-wing voices are being silenced’, Comment is Free, 24 October 2012, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/24/poland-leftwing-voices-silenced
‘How people in Poland are kept from the streets’, New Statesman, 11 July 2013
‘Ostalgia Trips’, Frieze, 11 October 2011 http://blog.frieze.com/ostalgia/
Marci Shore, The Taste of Ashes, (William Heinemann 2013)
Marzena Sowa and Sylvain Savoia, Marzi – A Memoir (Vertigo, 2011)
Blog consulted: Beyond the Transition, by Gavin Rae, at http://beyondthetransition.blogspot.co.uk/
Chapter 2
Misha Baster, Hooligans-80 (Anok TCI, 2009)
Deborah Curtis, Touching from a Distance (Faber, 1995)
Rolf Helleburst, Flesh to Metal: Soviet Literature and the Alchemy of Revolution, 2003
Robert Jarosz, Michał Wasążnik, Generacja, (Ha!art, 2011)
Theo Lessour, Berlin Sampler, (Ollendorf Verlag Berlin, 2012)
Mirosław Makowski, Obok albo ile procent Babilonu?, (Manufaktura Legenda, 2012)
Agata Pyzik, ‘Laibach: Monumental Avant-Garde, Tate Modern’, in The Wire, #340
Christopher Sandford, Bowie: Loving the Alien, (da Capo Press, 2005)
Jon Savage, Time Travel (Vintage, 1997)
Jennifer Shryane, Blixa Bargeld and Einsturzende Neubauten – German Experimental Music (Ashgate, 2012)
Andrzej Sosnowski, Lodgings – Selected Poems (Open Letter, 2011) Kostek Usenko, Oczami radzieckiej zabawki, (Czarne 2012)
Blog consulted: Pushing Ahead of the Dame, by Chris O’Leary, at www.bowiesongs.wordpress.com
Chapter 3
John Ashbery, Other Traditions, (Harvard University Press 2001)
Marek Bieńczyk, Melancholia, O tych, co nigdy nie odnajdą straty, (Sic! 2000)
Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, (Penguin, 2003)
Witold Gombrowicz, Trans-Atlantyk (Yale University Press, 1995)
Inhibition, exhibition catalogue (Ha!Art 2007)
Maria Janion, Niesamowita Słowiańczczyzna, (Wydanictwo Literackie, 2006)
Maria Janion, Do Europy, Tak, ale z naszymi umarłymi (Wydanictwo Sic!, 2000)
Maria Janion, Gorączka Romantyczna, (Slowo/obraz terytoria, 2008) Lechosław Lameński, Stach z Warty Szukalski (Wydanictwo KUL, 2007)
Adam Mickiewicz, Forefather’s Eve (School of Slavonic Studies, 1925)
Ryszard Przybylski, Słowo i milczenie bohatera Polaków (Instytut Badań Literackich, 1993)
Agata Pyzik, ‘White doesn’t always mean privileged: Why Femen’s post-Soviet context matters’, New Statesman, 18 April 2013, at http://www.newstatesman.com/voices/2013/04/white-doesnt-always-mean-privilege-femens-ukrainian-context
Andrzej Walicki, Stanislaw Brzozowski and the Polish Beginnings of ‘Western Marxism’, (Clarendon Press, 1989)
Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, Insatiability (Northwestern University Press, 2001)
Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, Searching for Cioran (Indiana University Press, 2009)
Chapter 4
Adorno, Benjamin, Bloch, Jameson, Lukacs, Aesthetics and Politics (Verso, 2007)
Daniela Berghahn, Hollywood Behind the Wall – the Cinema of East Germany (Manchester University Press, 2005)
Clare Bishop, ‘The Social Turn - Collaboration and its Discontents’, Artforum 2006
Ben Brewster, ‘Nowy LEF Documents’ in Screen (1971) 12(4)
Matthew Cullerne Bown, Socialist Realist Painting (Yale University Press, 1998)
Evgeny Dobrenko (editor), Socialist Realism Without Shores (Duke Universoty Press, 1997)
Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism (Verso, 2012)
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism (Verso, 1992)
Christina Kiaer, Was Socialist Realism Forced Labour? The Case of Aleksandr Deineka, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 28, number 3, 2005 György Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (Merlin Press, 1979)
Alex Niven, Folk Opposition (Zero Books, 2012)
Piotr Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta (Reaktion, 2011) — Art and Democracy in Post-Communist Europe (Reaktion, 2012) Agata Pyzik, ‘A sense of community in Polish Art’, The Guardian, 17 April, 2011 http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/apr/17/poland-art-critical-communism-polska
Derek Spring and Richard Taylor (eds), Stalinism and Soviet Cinema (Routledge, 2011)
Hito Steyerl, ‘Is The Museum a Factory?’, in e-flux journal, at http://www.e-flux.com/journal/is-a-museum-a-factory/
Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics Of Resistance (Duke University Press, 2005)
Slavoj Žižek, For they Know Not What They Do (Verso, 2008)
Artur Zmijewski, ‘Applied Social Arts’, in Krytyka Polityczna, at http://www.krytykapolityczna.pl/English/Zmijewski-Applied-Social-Arts/menu-id-240.html Ot avangarda do postmodernizma. Mastiera Isskustva XX Veka (Tretyakov Gallery Catalogue, Moscow 2006)
Blog consulted, Hannah Proctor, at http://hhnnccnnll.tumblr.com/
Chapter 5
David Crowley, Jane Pavitt (eds), Cold-War Modern, (Victoria & Albert Museum, 2008)
Artur Domosławski, Kapuściński – A Life (Verso, 2012)
Slavenka Drakulić, Café Europa (Penguin, 1999)
Isaac Deutscher, Russia, China and the West, 1953-66 (Penguin, 1970) Sławek Elsner, Panorama (Dumont, 2008)
Dick Hebdige, Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things (Taylor and Francis, 1988)
Sanja Ivekovic, Unknown Heroine, exhibition catalogue, (Calvert 22, 2013)
Justyna Jaworska, Cywilizacja Przekroju, (WUW, 2008)
Milena Jesenska, The Journalism of Milena Jesenska, A critical Voice in the Interwar Eastern Europe, edited by Kathleen Hayes, (Berghahn Books, 2003)
Jan Kamyczek, Barbara Hoff, Jak oni mają się ubierać?, (Iskry, 1958) Andrzej Leder, ‘Kto Nam Zabrał Tę Rewolucję?’ in Krytyka at Polityczna, http://www.krytykapolityczna.pl/artykuly/opinie/20130419/leder-kto-nam-zabral-te-rewolucje
Eduard Limonov, Memoirs of a Russian Punk (Grove Press, 1990)
Paulina Ołowska, Book, (jrp ringier, 2013)
“Piktogram”, magazine, no.16 2011/2012.
Agata Pyzik, ‘Review: Artur Domoslawski, Kapuściński – A Life’, The Guardian, 2 August 2012 — ‘The Many Returns of Socialist Realism’, Afterall, 2 May 2012 http://www.afterall.org/online/the-many-returns-of-socialist-realism/1
Francis Spufford, Red Plenty (Faber, 2012)
Leopold Tyrmand, Dziennik 1954 (Wydanictwo MG, 2011) — Zły (Wydanictwo MG, 2011) (English translation as Man With White Eyes, Knopf 1959) — The Rosa Luxemburg Contraceptives Co-Operative (Macmillan, 1971)
We Want To Be Modern. Polish design 1955-1968 from the collection of National Museum in Warsaw, exhibition catalogue (National Museum in Warsaw, 2011)
Afterword
Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe (MIT Press, 2002) Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon (Verso, 2012)
Tony Judt, Ill Fares The Land (Penguin, 2011)
/> Charity Scribner, Requiem for Communism (MIT Press, 2005)
Further Listening
David Bowie, Diamond Dogs (RCA, 1974),
— “Heroes” (RCA, 1977)
— Low (RCA, 1977)
— Station to Station (RCA, 1976)
— The Next Day (ISO, 2013)
Depeche Mode, Construction Time Again (Mute, 1983)
— The Singles 1981-85 (Mute, 1985)
— Some Great Reward (Mute, 1984)
Deutsche Amerikanische Freundschaft, Alles ist Gut (Mute, 1981)
— Die Kleinen Und Die Bosen (Mute, 1980)
Joy Division, Unknown Pleasures (Factory, 1979)
Einsturzende Nuebauten, whole discography, especially Kollaps (ZickZack, 1981), Silence is Sexy (Mute, 2000)
Kapitan Nemo, Kapitan Nemo (Tonpress, 1986)
— The Best of Kapitan Nemo (Sonic, 1996)
Krzysztof Komeda, The Complete Recordings (Polonia, 1996)
Andrzej Korzyński, Possession (Finders Keepers 2011)
— Third Part of The Night (Finders Keepers 2012)
— Secret Enigma (Finders Keepers (2012)
Laibach, Opus Dei (Mute, 1987)
Maanam, The Singles Collection (InterSonus, 1991)
The Sex Pistols, ‘Holidays in the Sun’ (Virgin, 1977)