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 Building Utopia from the Bottom up
Vito Acconci, one of the most acclaimed opponents of Narcissism in art, said: ‘My artistic ideal is public art which deconstructs the status quo’ and Polish artists of the last two decades heeded the call, becoming fully engaged in the dismantling of the once dominant mental clichés. Meanwhile, during a Varsovian discussion of ‘Political Critique’s Guidebook to Sasnal,’ Maciej Nowak expressed an opinion that the nineties’ contest between the visual arts and other media of expression ended with the visual arts beating the rest two nil. Obviously, art hasn’t got much in common with the track and field events or even with the hit parade, but it has undoubtedly been involved in a spot of gamesmanship while jostling for a prominent position in the newly transformed country. There was nothing in the post-communist; or indeed in any other European countries; to rival a veritable festival of newly-won freedoms celebrated in nineties’ Poland. Artists such as The Smithy group (prof. Grzegorz Kowalski’s circle ‘Kowalnia’ at the Warsaw Fine Arts Academy), Grzegorz Klaman and Zbigniew Libera catalogued each in their own way the changes happening countrywide in an attempt to assimilate that ongoing ‘work in progress.’ The beneficiaries of their activities included Polish literature, theatre and film in that chronological order; but the road ahead had already been paved by the visual arts.
Street Fighting Men (and Women)
The nineties’ artists brought down to earth the collective national imagery which had been hopelessly beholden to the Polish cultural symbolism of yesteryear and dragged art out into public spaces for the first time. From today’s perspective it is difficult to say with any certainty how much of this process was the result of conscious policy, how much of inspired intuition and how much simply a firm rejection of the traditional ‘white cube’ gallery.
Examples of this revolution include ‘Into the Heart of the City’ (1993); an intervention by Anna Janczyszyn, during which the artist crawled, constantly molested by the passers-by, into the city centre of Krakow – the ‘spiritual capital’ of Poland; followed by Robert Rumas’s ‘Termofory’ (1994) in The Long Market in Gdansk, where statues of Jesus and Mary had been wrapped into plastic water filled sacks and apparently abandoned. Passers-by frequently ‘liberated’ the statues, ferrying them to a nearby church. In 1995, Jacek Niegoda ran up the down escalators, being aggressively jostled by its more conservative users and earning himself the apparently dismissive nickname of a ‘nonconformist.’ Krzysztof Wodziczko organised his ‘Public Disclosure’ (‘Projekcja Publiczna’) on The Market in Krakow in 1996. The ‘Disclosure’ rubbed the reluctant public’s noses in the shunned realities of their city’s life: homelessness, AIDS, junkies, disenfranchisement of women, physical and mental impairment. Pawel Althamer’s action ‘Brodno 2000’ organised the tenants of a residential high-rise in the Brodno district of Warsaw into switching their lights on in a pattern spelling out the message ‘2000’. This action resulted in a playful ‘people’s festival’, outside of the accepted national or religious holidays. Finally, in the winter of 2002, Joanna Rajkowska erected her monumental ‘Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue’ palm tree at the capital’s busy de Gaulle roundabout intersection with Jerusalem Avenue. And this book starts at the moment when the Polish society collectively ‘tripped over the palm tree.’
All these actions in public spaces revealed their innate political agenda by virtue of being roundly attacked by the nascent Polish democracy. The price for the artist daring to challenge universally accepted taboos, in other words the price of the unannounced (i.e. unauthorized) interventions, turned out to be the ostracization of art and its exile into the wilderness usually reserved for agent provocateurs and their like. This stand-off swiftly flared up into a ‘cold war’ to be waged by society at large on its own artists (viz. Zbigniew Libera’s text compiled from disparaging rightwing comments on critical art). In order for peace to break out, we need to find a solution to a new dilemma: if society won’t come to art, how can art come to society; and how can the body of knowledge generated by art serve that society?
Here - Not Here
Joanna Rajkowska is one of the most important artists of the period in question. Paradoxically, this widely endorsed accolade doesn’t often go hand in hand with either theoretical appraisals, or with available analytical and critical texts (especially those dealing with her place within history of art). All the more surprising, because her work can be read on multiple levels: land-art, postconceptualism, relational aesthetics, feminism, postcolonialism, body politics, phenomenology and so on.
It doesn’t help that the idiom of our home-grown art theory is grimly reminiscent of ‘the affectations of a funeral parlour’ - woefully ossified and ritualized. It is not an open-minded institution willing to embrace exciting new possibilities. This conservative with a small ‘c’ idiom kowtows to the whims of the art market as it sees it, while naively struggling to perpetuate the existing rift between art and society and playing yah-boo politics which tout the spectre of art becoming overly ‘polemical’, ‘ideologized’, etc. Our capitalist system may still be in its infancy, but it has already come up with its own version of noncontroversial art aimed at a recipient who has shied away from any (apart from neoliberal, of course) ideology or discourse. A perfect example of this mindset is the escapist humbug of the so called ‘New Surrealism,’ conjured up by several conservative critics and gleefully applied to all the more important phenomena in the Polish art of recent years. Rajkowska herself has been rigidly pigeonholed as an exponent of ‘guerrilla strategies’ and an ‘interventionist into public spaces,’ without a thought being given to the fact that her projects function just as well (as postconceptual fetishized objects, photographs, documentations, etc) inside galleries. ‘Camping’ in Bytom’s Kronika Gallery (2008) and ‘The Periscope’ (2009) in the Art Institute Wyspa in Gdansk testify to her versatility.
Political Utopia in Practice
Joanna Rajkowska is certainly one of the most single-minded artists of the contemporary Polish art scene and has stood for the engagement with the world outside of the academe from her very first artistic beginnings. She started with the blurring of lines between herself as an artist and the viewer within the gallery space; progressing through relational aesthetics and public projects to community space actions. These community space actions best describe her area of activity today.
We must note, however, that Rajkowska’s engagement with the world has never implied anything like an uncritical acceptance of the here and now.
Keeping in mind that the Utopian experiments of the twentieth century (such as Nazism and Communism) have been thoroughly compromised, the contemporary utopian artist would be best advised to start with a blank page and Rajkowska’s multilayered utopias start from the bottom up – a single body placed next to another body. She initiates utopian situations with no predictable outcomes, using the living tissue of humanity as her medium. She deals in human relationships and living memory frameworks aiming at the dismantling of ritualised behaviours with the end result hopefully pointing towards the revitalization of social structures and/or - at the very least - of the urban environment.
If we accept that the postpolitical model of government means the end of robust politics as we know them and the consignment of ‘disarmed’ artistic artefacts to a museum, maybe the essence of all things politicized lies somewhere else altogether. Maybe in view of the de-pollicisation of public life at large - which still carries on as if nothing had happened within assorted comatose institutions (parliament; citizens’ forums, city councils and the dominant political parties) - Rajkowska’s work – and the work of other artists like her – provides the only living and breathing political alternative.
Rajkowska’s attempt at the renewal of social relationships means somatic engagement with the art of (living politics of) desire, anger, emotion and instinct. She insists that we should go back to the beginning and re-build from the bottom up. We should be receptive to the lessons that her projects afford.
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