Polish Contemporary Art, 1980 - 2012The political turning-point and artThe eighties, the decade of resistance, ended with fundamental changes in the country's cultural politics. They were not, however, received without some ambivalence. On the one hand, of course, artists were given the opportunity for extensive, free involvement without fear of censorship. On the other hand, however, the political and economic changes at the end of the eighties had a huge impact on the already impoverished artistic milieu. Despite censorship and repression, artists were assured of a minimum level of material security by
the Communist state. This was lost when the
free market arrived with
democracy.
Overall, the rejection of the limitations imposed by a centrally-driven cultural system in which the ministry and the artists' unions subsidised artists and the specialist press, was greeted enthusiastically by the artists of the older and middle generations. The young artists, however, were completely uninterested in these organisational changes.
In fact, it was the artists making their debuts in the eighties who gained most from the post-1989 systemic and organisational changes. Wojciech Krukowski - artist and director of the "Akademia Ruchu" / "Motion Academy" theatre, participant in the "Documenta" in Kassel - was appointed in 1989 as the new director one of the most important exhibition spaces for experimental art, the Centrum Sztuki Wspolczesnej (Centre for Contemporary Art - Ujazdowski Castle) in Warsaw.
Wojciech KrukowskiKrukowski shaped the Centre's new profile in terms of its exhibitions, research programmes, and publications. The management of the hitherto most important exhibition space in Warsaw,
Zacheta, also changed hands (
Anda Rottenberg). In that same year a most important space on the map of art galleries was created, namely the private
Galeria Starmacha / Starmach Gallery in
Krakow. Those three continue to be the most influential exhibition spaces for the newest art in Poland to this day.
Along with the dismantling of the foundations of artistic life, came the arrival of artists who had no links with the training system operating till then, artists who were not graduates of the art schools, attendance at which had been, hitherto, an essential requirement for entry to a career as an artist. The kind of underground cultural life operating during the eighties was certainly conducive to the emergence of these changes which, in the nineties, became an important aspect of the artistic milieu.
Between the media and the bodyIt's against this background that the 1989 turning-point (the fall of Communism in Poland) and the choices associated with it made by Polish artists acquire a meaning and a proportion that demand explanation. The moment is interesting not because of its political significance - which is, after all, fairly obvious - but because it separates two artistic periods by ignoring the overpowering political circumstances of the time. While it separates political epochs, it also separates epochs in art which seems not to notice the political changes, blatantly ignoring them, seeking other sources of inspiration and confirmation, and noticing other changes to which the politicians are oblivious. Art seems to be saying something completely different from what the now free press are writing and the media are showing. For researchers and critics of contemporary Polish art this is an exceptionally interesting phenomenon. Polish art has stopped taking an interest in current affairs; it has, furthermore, jettisoned almost entirely the experiences of the preceding decade (its attitude to the Church, the return to traditional genres, the very distant but questioning attitude to politics).
At the turn of the decade, the political theme has appeared in a meaningful way only in the painting of Jerzy Truszkowski and in the monumental photography of Zofia Kulik (born 1947). In both cases we are presented with a display of the symbols of totalitarian regimes, playing with political rituals, with a consideration - especially in Kulik's work - of all kinds of totalitarianism.
Jerzy Truszkowski w rytualnym szale - połowa lat 90tych.Zofia KulikThe appearance of photographs in Zofia Kulik's works makes us aware of her drawing away from accepted conventions - the traditional canvas, or sculpture. The pull towards the new media (photography, videos, but also billboards, television, electronic transmission) seems to be one of the characteristic features of the art, not only Polish, of the last decade. It contains not just a fascination with means of transmission, but also an attempt to draw attention to the nature of the mass consciousness that is being shaped by them.
Stereotypes of mass consciousness have probably been most powerfully exploited in a work by Zbigniew Libera (born 1959) called KLOCKI LEGO / LEGO BRICKS in which a child's toy is used to build concentration camps. The shallowness and the infantile nature of the social information conveyed by the mass and electronic media are the new subject of Polish art. In the eighties, television and the regime-backed press were treated with contemptuous silence, and ignored. In a free Poland the power of the means of mass communication which have no specific explanation of, or social consent to, the values which they would like adhere to when constructing a contemporary Polish consciousness, has instantly become an object of great interest to artists.
Zbigniew LiberaThe omnipresence of the mass media, and of advertising, brought about by the violent development of the free market has meant that they have taken possession of the visual capacity to create images. The creation of pictures or images stopped being the special preserve of artists and became something done by advertising executives. Freedom became an element used in experiments to find more effective ways of influencing customers without questioning its purpose. This virtual reality, though many artists do find it fascinating, is not universally approved. Warsaw's "
Foksal" gallery appears to be oblivious to this new interest and stalwartly remains enclosed within the framework of traditional methods of expression, albeit in the avant-garde tradition. The avant-garde, however, and especially the "
first" avant-garde, is no longer as important in the nineties as it was even as late as the eighties.
The preponderance of the electronic media, the interest they inspire, and the absence of painting are all striking features of art in the nineties. Even though painters of the previous decade - especially
Edward Dwurnik,
Wlodzimierz Pawlak,
Jaroslaw Modzelewski and
Pawel Susid - often created their best works in the nineties, they did not rouse as much critical attention as they had till recently. It is hard to give an unequivocal reason for this state of affairs. It would seem that in today's world - in an age when traditional patterns are threatened by globalisation, when value hierarchies are being blurred by the dominant liberal ideology and when the autonomy and individuality of the artistic message is being undermined by advertisements, billboards, spots and clips - that the individual artist's manual and craftsmanlike dexterity would be in greater than ever demand. And yet the opposite is true. The painter's image has stopped having any of the political resonance it had in the post-1955 political thaw or in the eighties.
A good example of the changes taking place in Polish painting over the last two decades is the work of
Leon Tarasewicz (born 1957). He has undergone a singular evolution from the very personal, monumental and synthesising landscapes which verged on the extremes of abstraction during the eighties, through to a painter's environment, spatial arrangements with an extraordinarily sensuous, almost sculptural treatment of pigment. It could be said that what is being shown here is a symbolic rejection of the biographical element in painting in favour of the physicality of paint, its biological dimension, and at the same time a more corporeal interaction between the spectator and the monumental painting.
Leon TarasewiczIt is indeed corporeality, an interest in the body, the body treated as a medium, the body in a cultural and biological context, that seems to be the other fulcrum, the counterweight to the stereotype proposed by the media, the counterweight to the virtual reality of the electronic media. Corporeality seems to be, from the artists' viewpoint, concrete art opposed to the non-concrete, abstract, global culture of the end of the twentieth century. The roots of this fascination with the body can be traced to the performance art of the late sixties and early seventies and particularly to the influence of the Repassage Gallery in Warsaw. Performance artists associated with the gallery included
Wlodzimierz Borowski (born 1930),
Elzbieta Cieslar (born 1934) and above all the sculptor Grzegorz Kowalski (born 1942). During the nineties
Grzegorz Kowalski's studio at the Academy of Fine Arts became a real nursery for artists involved in questions of the body, its exploitation, its the cultural limitations and its biological aspect.
Pawel Althamer (born 1967) and
Katarzyna Kozyra (born 1963), artists of acknowledged international renown, are the most important representatives of this trend.
Pawel Althamerwww.designboom.com/weblog/cat/10/view/11459/pawel-althamer-at-gwangju-art-biennale-2010.htmlThe ideas propounded by the artists associated with
Grzegorz Kowalski's studio are deliberately provocative and often extreme. They seem to draw on
Joseph Beuys's ideas in which
the substance and
purpose of art lies in
its social awareness and not so much in
the material piece of work.
Kowalski himself is prepared to concede that he is developing many of the ideas of the "
moderns" of the fifties and above all of the architect
Oskar Hansen (born 1922), a long-time lecturer at
the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts and the author in 1959 of his "
open form" theory.
Grzegorz Kowalski points to the fact that the work of many of his students is reminiscent of the ideas propounded by the European situationists of the fifties and sixties. Of smaller significance to the achievements of
Grzegorz Kowalski's studio are the works of the "
art of the body" movement of the seventies in the West. There is no doubt that the art created by
Kowalski's pupils has a clear Polish genesis and is a response to the country's cultural climate, and that the scandals associated with it can be put down to
the extreme attitudes adopted by the
artists towards
faith, the
Church,
sex, or
the value of social conventions.
In the majority of the important achievements coming out of this studio, however, radical methods are used for more sophisticated and more deeply argued cultural ideas.
Katarzyna Kozyra won a prize at the Venice Biennale in 1999 for an installation using a video filmed by using a hidden camera in a men's bathhouse (she herself dressed up as a man); this work is notable for having been set within the context of traditional oriental bath-houses and the timeless theme of the nude. It is not unlike her earlier video-based installation OLIMPIA (after Manet) of 1996.
Katarzyna Kozyra, pyramid of animalsMiroslaw Balka "
exploits" his own body rather differently, in a more intellectual manner though with an extraordinary sensitivity to the means employed (smell, temperature). In an installation at the
Venice Biennale in
1992 he used the level, and heightened, temperature of his body while creating an arrangement employing methods typical of the minimal or poor art movement (Arte Povero) of the sixties.
”Boy and an Eagle”
Mirosław Bałka, 1988
stone, zinc metal plate, water pump, plasticBetween the media and the body - that could be a shorthand way of describing Polish art in the period from
1991 to
2000. Instead of politics -which, though not obvious in the works of the artists of the eighties, clearly defined them -
the subject matter of art has become civilisation as a whole.
The specifically Polish context is virtually absent from Polish art. The devaluation of ideas about social cohesion, the painful price paid for the building of democracy, liberalism with its concept of unlimited freedom, the pauperisation of artistic milieus following the introduction of free-market principles, the lack of any kind of cultural policy of the state - all this has done little to encourage artists to participate in current events or to deal with them in their own art. There is in this also a sign of a new perception of the rôle of the artist and maybe even a new sensibility which is different from traditional ones.
Perhaps the memory of the dangers inherent in political restrictions is still so fresh, etched permanently into the minds of Polish artists, that it won't allow them even to suggest any kind of preferred cultural model for
Poland. Is that why the political has been replaced by the civilisational context?
P.S.-
This is ofcourse the personal opinion of the Polish author of this article and represents a section of the Polish cultural world (artists circles)