Poland syndrome

In the past decade, artistic life in Poland has been shaped by the ongoing political transformation of the nation--a process that began in 1989 when the Polish government officially recognized the independent labor union Solidarity, which it had suppressed in 1981. The first oppositional movement to participate in free elections in a Soviet-bloc nation since the 1940s, Solidarity achieved electoral success, went on to form Poland's first postcommunist government, and introduced political and economic reforms that sought to replace almost fifty years of communism with a democratic state and a market-oriented economy--a transition that has brought new freedoms and new responsibilities, as well as massive upheaval.

Since 1989, Polish art has begun to assume an increasingly important role in the public life of the nation as it strives to adjust to this new reality. As the pace of political, social, and economic change has accelerated, the once communist-controlled cultural system has disintegrated. This system has been decentralized, with more decision-making power and fiscal resources devolving to regions and cities, which has nurtured greater cultural diversity, as well as more competition for audiences and more freedom of movement both domestically and internationally. At the same time, previously illegal artist-run organizations have been given legal status, challenging the authority of official art institutions, which include museums and schools dating from the early nineteenth century, the 1920s, and the communist period. Finally, individual artists have immersed themselves in the redefinition of their personal and national identities, and in the process they have explored social, political, and cultural issues th at had scarcely been investigated in the recent past--issues such as the role of religion, education, and the body in the daily life of the individual and of the nation. As they have become increasingly involved in public debates about these pressing issues, they have begun to map out new ethical and aesthetic models of the artist as citizen in the postcommunist era.

Some writers have connected the emergence of a more critical art practice in Poland in the 1990s with the precedent of the Eastern European avant-gardes of the 1910s and 1920s, that sought to make work that was engaged with, not alienated from, society. This tradition was suppressed during the communist period, when socialist realism became the official style. While artists were encouraged to produce work in the socialist realist mode during this period, they were also permitted to produce abstract art; the opportunity to pursue abstraction consequently came to signify the alleged creative "freedom" of the nation, even though in reality abstract artists were not permitted to make work critical of the regime. In the 1990s, artists renounced the isolationism of the communist period, once again became skeptical of the concept of art for art's sake, and began to seek ways of engaging critically with the social and political issues of their new reality. The painful history of the avant-gardes during the twentieth century has demonstrated to this generation that to be engaged does not mean to serve the regime, but to be critical of systems of power, whatever they are.

One of the most powerful forces in contemporary Polish society is the Catholic Church. The vast majority of Poles are Catholic, and the Church wields tremendous social and political influence. Although all religions came under the control of the state during the communist period, the Church remained largely independent. The election of Karol Cardinal Wojtyla, Archbishop of Krak[acute{e}]w, as Pope John Paul II in 1978 buoyed many Polish Catholics, and the authority of the Church increased significantly with the fall of communism in 1989.

One artist who has engaged critically with the authority of Polish Catholicism is Robert Rumas (b. 1966, Kielce). In the 1990s, Rumas began to work with the symbols of Polish Catholic devotion, such as plaster figurines of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary. In his sculptural installation Dedications (1992), Rumas flanked an aquarium filled with yellow water and seashells with an aquarium filled with green water and a figurine of Christ on the left and an aquarium filled with blue water and a figurine of the Virgin on the right. In this work, he treated the religious figurines as ordinary decorative objects of the sort one might find in a typical Polish working-class home. In Thermophors X 8 (1994), Rumas placed religious figurines purchased from a devotional objects shop inside giant hot-water bottles and installed them on a busy street in Gda[actue{c}]sk. The project provoked frantic reactions from passers-by, who regarded the figurines as real objects of devotion and brought them to the nearest church.

The incident brings to mind the scandal that erupted when one of the most important Polish weeklies published a cover image of the Black Madonna and the Christ Child, the holiest personages for Polish Catholics, wearing gas masks; the image accompanied a feature on air pollution in southern Poland. Church officials and right-wing politicians viciously attacked it, and the political posturing that ensued, in which the meaning of the image was obscured, reflected the syndrome that Rumas sought to critique in Dedications and Thermophors x 8.

In the group exhibition Anty-ciala (Anti-bodies), which he organized for the Centrum Sztuki Wsp[acute{o}]lczesnej (Centre of Contemporary Art) in Warsaw in 1995, Rumas showed another controversial work. Maly przybomik do cechowunia (The Small Marking Kit, 1995) is a kit filled with metal stamps presumably designed for stamping on the body religious symbols, such as the Cross, the Star of David, and the Crescent, as well as the male and female symbols. The kit was placed in an aquarium filled with water, on which floated a layer of fluorescent green figurines of the Virgin. The work itself critiques the darker aspects of Polish national history, which has been characterized by periods of intolerance toward communities of various religious faiths, including Jews. In another exhibition it featured a sandbox filled with the same plastic objects. Here, Rumas sought to address how children absorb the phobias and obsessions of adults.

In this work, Rumas connects his examination of religion as a system of social control to the role of children's education in the inculcation of dominant ideologies. Among other artists concerned with this issue is Zbigniew Libera (b. 1959, Pabianice), who has made a series of works involving toys, which he views not only as keys to the nature of consumer culture, but also to adults' attitudes toward children. He takes brand-name products, such as Nautilus machines, Legos, and Cindy dolls, and then alters them to create works with such titles as Body Master dla dzieci do lat dziesieciu (Body Master: The Toy Kit for Children Up to Ten, 1995), Ob[acute{o}]z konecentracyjny z klock[acute{o}]w lego (Lego Concentration Camp, 1995), and Mo[dot{z}]esz ogoli[acute{c}] dzidziusia (You Can Shave a Baby, 1995). The last is a boxed naked doll with curly orange hair on her head, under her arms, around her groin, and on her knees, which children can "shave." With such works, Libera questions the assumption that toys creat e an imaginary world distinct from the hypocrisies and cruelties of reality by making toys that we would never imagine giving to children. He also explores the relationship between education and marketing by revealing what he considers to be the unstated goal of education: to create the perfect consumer.

The artist group Centralny Urzad Kultury Technicznej (Central Office for Technical Culture), known by the acronym C.U.K.T., critiques educational systems in another way. Dzie[acute{n}] Sztuki (Art Day) was an educational performance that C.U.K.T. presented in 1998 at the Gdy[acute{n}]skie Liceum Autorskie (Gdy[acute{n}]ia Independent Grammar School), a private school in Gdy[acute{n}]ia For one day, C.U.K.T. replaced the school's lessons with lectures and activities on subjects not in the curriculum. The group wrote that "The fundamental aim of this undertaking is to acquaint the young people with contemporary methods of artistic expression and with the current state of technical culture both in the country and abroad." Developing from its earlier actions, which investigated traditional conceptions of the role of the artist and the function of art, all of the lectures and activities were videotaped and used as part of a room-sized installation entitled Klaso II B (Class II B, 1999), presented in Public Relati ons: Sztuka z Gda[acute{n}]ska/Art from Gda[acute{n}]sk, an exhibition organized for the Centrum Sztuki Wsp[acute{o}]lczesnej La[acute{z}]nia (Bathhouse Centre of Contemporary Art) in Gda[acute{n}]sk. The dimensions of the room were the same as the dimensions of the original classroom, and the room itself featured the same number of chairs and tables as in the original, as well as a blackboard and a large group portrait of the students. Sited in an art institution near two public schools, it is an installation in which the works of other artists were visible through the "classroom" windows.

In addition to addressing the role of religion and education in postcommunist society, Polish artists have also begun to explore the significance of the body, a subject of collective denial in Poland. For example, Katarzyna Kozyra (b. 1963, Warsaw) has worked to demystify the concept of the body and related subjects such as sexuality, illness, and death. Many of Kozyra's works refer to canonical images from the history of art, such as Rembrandt's women, Ingres' female nudes, and Manet's Olympia. In these works, Kozyra modifies well-known cultural icons to transform idealized images of the female body into images that are difficult to look at. For example, in Olimpia (Olympia, 1996), she presents a bald Olympia with an TV inserted in her arm lying seductively on a hospital bed, with a female doctor standing behind her.

One of Kozyra's most recent works is an installation entitled Laznia (The Bathhouse, 1997), which features a video in which she recorded the activities in a public bathhouse for women in Budapest. By shooting with a hidden video camera, she was able to document the behavior of the women as they attended to their bodies in a totally unselfconscious manner, even though most of the women would not be considered "beautiful" according to conventional societal ideals. She was also able to explore the relationships among women in a completely female environment and in the process encountered unexpected intimacy, tenderness, and empathy. In this manner, she encourages the viewer to juxtapose mental images of idealized standards of beauty with this record of women's bodies.

Kozyra followed this work with another videotape entitled Laznia meska (Men's Bathhouse, 1999), in which she recorded the activities in a public bathhouse for men. Again using a hidden video camera, she gained access by disguising herself as a man. In this work, she explored an area forbidden to women and risked her own safety. Indeed, she discovered that the artificial penis and the beard that she wore did not give her as much self-confidence and freedom as she had expected. She has reported being frightened when other bathers directed their gazes toward her suspicious sexuality.

Grzegorz Klaman (b. 1959, Nowy Targ) has also used the body to address systems of power in cultural systems. In his objects, installations, and actions in public spaces, he has investigated the intersections of art, architecture, science, and education along the axis of the body, and he has particularly focused on the subject of violence. In the postcommunist era, he is interested in exploring the notion of being entangled in systems of power and in seeing the systemic totality outside of totalitarianism, which is even more dangerous because it remains invisible in spite of the reassertion of citizen's rights. He has been especially successful in provoking discussions of these issues in the public sphere.

Emblematy (Emblems, 1993) and Katabasis (1993), both presented in Klaman's one-person exhibition Monumenty (Monuments) at the Panstwowa Galeria Sztuki (State Gallery of Art) in Sopot in 1993, are installations consisting of formaldehyde-preserved human organs borrowed from a medical school that are encased in steel and glass containers that suggest architectural monuments. Emblematy is a darkened room with steel walls, inside of which are three containers holding organs. A column-like container opposite the entrance holds an intestine, a cross-shaped container to the left holds a brain, and a container in the shape of a swastika arm holds a liver. Each container is illuminated by halogen lights. Katabasis is an installation consisting of three glass-faced metal boxes hung on the wall. Each box contains a body part associated with communication (an ear, an eye, a tongue) and is accompanied by a gas bottle. In addition, a loudspeaker plays a soundtrack that sounds like a pronunciation lesson. By removing human organs from contexts in which their presence is not questioned, such as the realms of medicine and science, to realms in which it is, namely art, Klaman confronts the stigmas surrounding the representation of the body. A student of the philosopher Michel Foucault's writings, he asks how and why the body is medicalized, institutionalized, and repressed through systems of power.

Klaman's investigation of these questions often generates lively discussion in the public. For example, works he presented in Anatrophy, his one-person exhibition at the Bathhouse Centre of Contemporary Art in 1999, elicited strong reactions from the mass media, as well as from the city counselors of Gda[acute{n}]sk and a senator opposed to abortion and prenatal research. This work did not include actual human organs, but photographs of human embryos and hands protecting them, as well as a lightbox photograph taken in the corridor of a medical school in Gda[acute{n}]sk of a laboratory shelf containing human embryos in formaldehyde. Another of Klaman's works in the exhibition, entitled Libraries, presented shelf-shaped metal objects with several glass containers with photographs on duratrans of preserved human heads facing the viewer. Both Anatrophy and Libraries invoke our ambivalence toward images of illness, death, and the diseased human body. The aversion and abomination that accompany these unavoidable e xperiences, among the strongest taboos in Western culture, have been subjected to the extreme control of institutional structures established in the Enlightenment. The negative reactions of local journalists and politicians, who discussed Klaman's work at political party meetings in Gda[acute{n}]sk in the spring of 1999, underscores the extent to which the issues that the artist addresses cut to the bone of Polish belief systems. This phenomenon also demonstrates the transformation of artists into mediators between opposing discourses in the realm of social life.

The Bathhouse Centre of Contemporary Art, where I serve as director, has been deeply involved in the public debates about religion, education, and the body that the works of artists such as Rumas, Libera, C.U.K.T., Kozyra, Kiaman, and others have generated in the postcommunist era. At times these debates have evolved into dangerous ideological games in which the institution's program has played the role of a political football. In spite of these challenges, the extensive discussions of the Centre's programs have served as a crucial test for the strength and flexibility of the new democratic structures. These discussions now involve not only public officials, but most of the communities and administrative structures in Gda[acute{n}]sk and the rest of Poland. As right-wing parties have gained power, we have had to reconfront the issue of what it means to be a "real Pole," which conservatives interpret as being a patriot and being Catholic--a process that unleashes the old demons of intolerance, nationalism, an d chauvinism. Artists who question the power of the Church, the role of education in the inculcation of values, and issues involving the body, such as medicine, euthanasia, and abortion, must consequently address the transformation of national identity as it adapts to the new reality.

Aneta Sayrak is Director of the Bathhouse Centre of Contemporary Art in Gda[acute{n}]sk. Her next exhibition at the Centre, All You Need Is Love, opens in May 2000.

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