Last June Poland’s education minister, Roman Giertych, announced that Witold
Gombrowicz’s novels would no longer be taught in the nation’s public
schools. The decision was hardly unique. Indeed, it was part of a
broader initiative to shield Polish children from undesirables
including Joseph Conrad, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Franz Kafka.
But Gombrowicz (1904 – 1969) was the focus of the effort. Perhaps this is
because the author of Ferdydurke (1937) specialized in
viciously witty assaults on hypocrisy, xenophobia, goon-squad populism,
and other qualities that Giertych and his party, the League of Polish
Families, have consistently evinced. More likely, however, this
particular prohibition arose simply because Gombrowicz was gay:
Giertych makes no secret of his energetic distaste for “homo-agitators.”
And so “Giertych or Gombrowicz!” became the
battle cry of the minister’s supporters. In turn, the curricular fatwa
sparked a firestorm of protests from artists, intellectuals, and the
political Left, while feuilletons across Europe derided Poland’s
Far-Right coalition government. Soon, teenagers were reading Gombrowicz
with flushed cheeks on the subway, and bookstore windows in Warsaw
overflowed with his works. The city’s Adam Mickiewicz Museum of
Literature hung a huge banner printed with lines of dialogue from his
1953 novel, Trans-Atlantyk, in which the narrator, whose name
is Gombrowicz, fields accusatory questions from buffoonish government
officials: WITH THE MINISTER? YOU WANT TO SPEAK WITH MR. MINISTER? WHAT
HAVE YOU SCRIBBLED, GOMBROWICZ, WHAT? Eventually, Mr. Prime Minister,
Jaroslaw Kaczynski, stepped in and shut down the campaign to revise the
reading list. And by August, Giertych had been ousted from his post in
the midst of a broader government shake-up that led, in October, to
early parliamentary elections. (Voters rejected the Far-Right coalition
in favor of the center-Right Civic Platform.)
Had Poland chosen Gombrowicz over
Giertych? That would be the happiest interpretation, but as the great
novelist himself would surely have pointed out, “Giertych or
Gombrowicz!” is itself a flawed proposition, a classic false choice.
However contradictory they might be, Giertych and Gombrowicz are not
mutually exclusive: To embrace one is not necessarily to repudiate the
other. And Warsaw is better than most cities at accommodating seemingly
oppositional terms. To see this, one need only look at the urban
environment itself. A palimpsest of historical styles, with some
sectors revamped in the image of globalized urbanism and others left
untouched by the massive redevelopment efforts of recent years, Warsaw
embodies what Polish philosopher Zygmunt Bauman has called “liquid
modernity.” And within a liquid urban fabric, there are bound to be
what might be called reservoirs of contradiction. One such repository
is a small square known as Plac Grzybowski — a blank space in the center
of the capital, surrounded by housing blocks and sleek new skyscrapers.
Plac Grzybowski was once part of the Warsaw Ghetto, and, according to
resistance leader Marek Edelman, it was the site of one of the battles
of the Jewish uprising. Today, Jewish people cross the square on their
way to a nearby synagogue, while groups of Israeli students pass
through during their tours of the land of their grandparents. Even so,
a nationalist bookshop with a full complement of anti-Semitic
titles — from Henry Ford’s screed against the proverbial rootless
cosmopolitan to instruction manuals teaching readers to “recognize the
Jew” — operated for almost a decade in an adjacent church basement,
finally shutting down only last year, when the parish refused to renew
its lease.
It was artist Joanna Rajkowska’s idea to
activate this site with a project that subtly responds to its
contradictions. Her project Dotleniacz (Oxygenator), 2007, is a
small pond in the middle of Plac Grzybowski, complete with ozonation
equipment to improve air quality, diffusers that create a perpetual,
glittering mist, benches for visitors, and a surrounding lawn. “How
will people react in a situation that is so casual, not requiring them
to stand at attention or to take sides?” asks Rajkowska, recalling the
question that motivated her as she developed the project (which was
curated by Kaja Pawelek of Warsaw’s Center for Contemporary Art,
Ujazdowski Castle). “I was interested in generating a momentary vision,
a bit like a mirage, where all the reasons lose their validity, where
the moments when people err and go astray are no longer important,
where the conflict-generating positions become ineffective,” she says.
Rajkowska has created such politically
freighted mirages before. When, in 2002, she placed an artificial palm
tree on a busy traffic circle in downtown Warsaw, the installation
provoked a heated debate. Its title, Pozdrowienia z Alej Jerozolimskich
(Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue), was a reference to one of the city’s
main thoroughfares, Aleje Jerozolimskie, and it was as if the work had
made people realize for the first time what that name meant. Passersby
said things like, “The Jews have put this palm here, because it’s their
street.” But the palm, which is still standing and in fact has become a
Warsaw landmark, has accrued other meanings and resonances over time.
During a nurses’ strike this year, a giant replica of a nurse’s cap,
with the dark stripe traditional in Poland, was hung on it as a token
of support. (“It’s not a palm. It’s a nurse!” one of the strikers
said.) Like Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue, Oxygenator
doesn’t “take sides,” but perhaps for that very reason works against
intolerance. Suddenly those whom the populists of the Polish Right
would like to portray as enemies — those going to the church versus those
going to the synagogue — have gained a meeting place. Rajkowska has
offered them a context in which they can simply be. Shortly
after the pond was installed, neighborhood residents started visiting
in droves. Elderly ladies began spending all their time there. The
place became a center of community life, and residents eventually
circulated a petition calling for Oxygenator to be left in place indefinitely.
As artist Artur Zmijewski writes in his
introduction to a newly published Polish edition of Jacques Rancière’s
writings on politics and aesthetics: “Politics isn’t about using the
state apparatus to administer a certain set of views to people, but
about creating a place where our demands, needs, and desires can meet.”
Certainly, the drive within Warsaw’s cultural circles to carve out such
spaces seemed to gather momentum this year, as politics hung in the
city’s air like the ambient mist above Rajkowska’s pond. A focal point
on Warsaw’s cultural and intellectual map — REDakcja (REDaction), a venue
operated by the Left-leaning journal Krytyka Polityczna — generated much of this momentum. The space, which also houses Krytyka Polityczna’s
offices, hosted an astonishing number of events — dozens of debates,
panel discussions, screenings, and lectures, some of which, such as a
meeting with philosopher Slavoj Žižek, attracted hundreds of
people — over the course of the year. The journal itself, and the books
it publishes (titles include the Rancière translation as well as
Žižek’s Revolution at the Gates and Alain Badiou’s Saint Paul)
are designed by Grupa Twozywo, an outfit with roots in street art whose
members are interested in linguistic, verbal, and visual gamesmanship
and in graphic design as a medium for social and political discourse.
Zmijewski is a pivotal member of the group of philosophers, political
activists, and artists that come together around Krytyka Polityczna.
In addition to serving as the publication’s art director, he penned a
manifesto, “The Applied Social Arts,” that appeared in its pages and
quickly became the year’s most hotly debated text in Warsaw’s artistic
and intellectual communities. “Does contemporary art have any visible
social impact? … Does art have any political significance — besides
serving as a whipping boy for various populists?” Zmijewski asks at the
beginning of his essay. He answers these questions in the negative, and
then sets about exploring why this might be so, and what artists can do
about it.
Too often, Zmijewski opines, people who
are unfamiliar with art feel excluded from it, while artists, in turn,
are excluded from political discourse; their voices are ignored, except
when they become controversial. “The ignorance here is twofold,” he
writes. “Artists are seen as ignorant by experts in other fields and
vice versa: Experts in the field of, say, science or politics are as
helpless as children when it comes to ‘reading’ images.” For Zmijewski,
the problem in a nutshell is that art’s hard-won autonomy — the
independence from other discourses sought by the historical
avant-gardes — has isolated it from social reality and neutralized its
potential political and social impact. “Too much autonomy has led to
the alienation of art, so that it is ‘not heard’ and most of the
knowledge it generates is being squandered,” he writes. He calls for
artists to renounce their status as “idiot savants” and to embrace the
notion that art is a discourse for the production of knowledge.
This does not mean that art should discard the
ambiguity, risk, occasional opacity, or privileging of image over text
that allow it to avoid the “cognitive fundamentalism” of the sciences.
Rather, it means that art should cease to regard itself as
autonomous — it should enter into a dependence, albeit a circumspect one,
on other discourses. “Politics, science, and religion can do what art
no longer can: achieve a connection with reality by producing useful
tools: tools for the implementation of power and of knowledge. By
becoming once again dependent, art may learn how to be socially useful,
even at an operational level (it already knows how to challenge reality
and can count on support for its proliferation of rebellion).” For
Zmijewski, an operative metaphor for this nonautonomous art is the
algorithm. “In mathematics, computing, linguistics, and related
disciplines, an algorithm is a procedure (a finite set of well-defined
instructions) for accomplishing some task which, given an initial
state, will terminate in a defined end-state… . Algorithms imply
something operational and positive, a mode of purposeful action.”
Visitors to Documenta 12 in Kassel this past summer encountered one of Zmijewski’s own algorithms. His video installation Oni
(Them), 2007, documents a workshop he held last spring in a
postindustrial space in Warsaw. In the workshop, four
teams — respectively composed of Catholic ladies of a certain age,
members of a Far-Right nationalist youth group, left-wing activists,
and young Polish Jews — were each asked to create a large painting with
imagery expressive of their ideologies. The Catholic ladies painted a
church; the members of the youth group drew a sword; the Jews’ central
motif was the Hebrew word for Poland; and the leftists’ was the word freedom.
In the fifteen-minute video, the workshop’s atmosphere gradually
transforms from one of uneasy cordiality to one of out-and-out
aggression, with participants defacing and finally burning one
another’s works.
It’s impossible to watch Them,
which might be understood as an exercise in radical pedagogy, without
thinking of Zmijewski’s own pedagogical history. Like Pawel Althamer,
Katarzyna Kozyra, and a number of other outstanding Polish contemporary
artists, Zmijewski was a student of artist and critic Grzegorz
Kowalski, who has taught for years at Warsaw’s Academy of Fine Arts.
Kowalski’s teaching method stems from Oskar Hansen’s utopian theory of
Open Form, which construes art and the built environment as
interactive, flexible, and modifiable. Transposing Hansen’s ideas to
the studio and classroom, Kowalski has developed a kind of neo-Socratic
pedagogy that, resonating with Rancière’s notion of the “ignorant
schoolmaster,” is based on open communication and nonhierarchical
dialogue with students. For his exhibition “Warianty”
(Variants), on view this past fall at Warsaw’s Zacheta National Gallery
of Art, Kowalski asked students and collaborators to “edit” and
reanimate his own earlier works.
If Kowalski’s show offered an opportunity
to assess the influence of one important figure in Polish contemporary
art, the October opening of a permanent exhibition within Edward
Krasinski’s apartment-studio promised to preserve the legacy of
another. Within this light-filled space in a Warsaw high-rise,
Krasinski (1925 – 2004) made art while his long-term flatmate, Henryk
Stazewski (1894 – 1998), played host to Poland’s artists, activists, and
philosophers. The iconic Stazewski was an artist and cofounder of the
legendary Foksal Gallery; after Krasinski’s death, the Foksal Gallery
Foundation made plans to preserve the space. For the most part, the
apartment, now known as the Instytut Awangardy (Avant-Garde Institute),
is just as it was when Krasinski died. His blue-tape spatial
interventions traverse surfaces on which artworks and mementos rest,
conjuring the world of the Polish avant-garde in the late twentieth
century. But on the balcony, the foundation has built a glass pavilion
to house temporary exhibitions and workshops, and there are also plans
to start an artist-in-residence program.
Together, Kowalski’s show and Krasinski’s
studio suggest the genealogy of an engaged avant-garde tradition that
gave rise to Zmijewski’s manifesto and to other efforts within Polish
contemporary art to create formulations in which the two terms — politics and art — are
anything but contradictory. But one can’t paint an accurate picture of
Warsaw’s year in art without discussing a development that bespeaks the
relationship of aesthetics and politics in a different way. I’m
referring to Warsaw’s Museum of Modern Art, slated to open in 2012. In
February of this year, Swiss architect Christian Kerez won the design
competition for the building. To its detractors, the structure Kerez
envisions looks like a supermarket, but even most of these critics feel
that the low-slung building will provide a welcome contrast to its
neighbor, the Palace of Culture and Science. This social-realist pile,
Joseph Stalin’s gift to Poland, has dominated central Warsaw for more
than fifty years. Its shadow loomed over the military parades that once
took place in Plac Defilad, the huge public plaza built in front of it,
then over the amusement park that was built on the plaza after the fall
of Communism, and finally over the shambolic assembly of
corrugated-metal stalls, selling all manner of merchandise, that have
proliferated since the mid-1990s. The art museum is the linchpin of an
ambitious plan to reconfigure Plac Defilad as the fulcrum of a
revitalized central Warsaw. Civic boosters believe that the new museum
will “fuse cultural experience with transportation and leisure zones,”
as one press release hopefully put it. Such dreams of fusion, of the
frictionless intermingling of culture and leisure, align with Bauman’s
notion of “liquid modernity” while echoing the increasingly dominant
view of cultural institutions as a kind of urban loss leader,
generating consumer activity all around them.
In “The Applied Social Arts,” Zmijewski
notes that politicians have appropriated one of art’s key
strategies — transgression. Citing Giertych as an example, he argues that
the education minister’s bizarre crusades against culture are in fact
transgressive gestures, except that the taboos they exploit are the
taboos of democracy — not of, say, religion or polite custom. Perhaps
Giertych’s real goal was not to ban Gombrowicz’s work, but to
instrumentalize it in the service of a transgressive political
performance. At the Warsaw MoMA too, as at so many contemporary art
museums, art in some sense has been put into the service of
politics — the neoliberal politics of cultural consumerism. One task of
the institution itself, the first new Polish museum dedicated
exclusively to art since the National Museum opened its doors in 1938,
will be to find some of the algorithmic acumen Zmijewski speaks of,
presenting visitors with art that engages, and produces new forms of
knowledge about, the conflicted society that surrounds it.
Tomasz Fudala is an art historian, critic, and curator based in Warsaw.
The article was published in „ARTFORUM” (December 2007).
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