Warsaw diary - how the collapse of Communism affected art in Poland

After the fall of the Communist regime in Poland in 1989 Zofia Kulik produc a series of photomontages in which she arranged manifold patterns of male nude photos. Part academic original part masochistic fantasy object, the distinctly unheroic male uncovered in her pictures rehearses an array of disciplinary gesticulations and poses that evoke the rhetoric of official Polish s and celebrations. Many of his accessories, including flags, banners, extremitys pikes, commemorative wreaths and war medals, commit explicitly to the May Day parades of the Communist past. Other attributes, of the like kind as crosses, evoke Catholic ritual. Together, these allusive figures suggest an equivalence in Polish agriculture between the subordinating effects of Communism and Catholicism. This idea, centering upon the ambiguous relation between the a whole and the individual subject, is made level more explicit in Kulik's new works in which she interchanges the shapes of altars and missiles.

Kulik's deconstructive work bares the subject's entrapment by the combination of parts to form a whole but also foregrounds the equivocal nature of his predicament: the male denuded is as much "caught" by dint of a controlling network of artificial positions as he is willingly "acting out" an internalized manner of behavior. The body brings pain but also an uncompounded body of comfort and pleasureful submission. This is clear, for example, in the quasi-ecstatic awe of the two male figures flanking a somber, largely clothed "madonna" (a photographic portrait of the artist herself, with spears and bullet cartridges) in the center of All Things tend to the same point (1992). The erotic tension between the submissive male and this "cold cruel" woman of the masochistic scenario enhances the faculty of perception of mutual dependence of the victim and the oppressor, and be under the orders ofs as a metaphor for the oppressive state.

Emphasizing the ambiguity of the a whole as both a prison house and a configuration of support, comfort and pleasure for the disciplined bring under rule Kullk's photomontages raise provocative questions at a time of major political, social and cultural transition in Poland. They remind individual of the powers of habit and of the difficulties of leaving behind entrenched manners of behavior. They problematize the mechanism of interdependence between the oppressor and the burdened hinting at its psychosexual dimension. And in their equivalent treatment of the Communist and religious devices they pose a challenge to the Polish Catholic temple with its recent claim to be paramount arbiter in all social and cultural matters. In all these regards Kulik's photomontages can be seen as allegorical make notess on the ambiguities of social renewal and the difficulties facing the post-Communist artistic agriculture in Poland.(1)

in what manner did the collapse of Communism affect the art pageant in Poland? Has anything changed in the fashions of production and reception of art or in the status of the artist since 1989? Can single talk about a post-Communist esthetics in Poland? What is upon the mind of the generation of artists who came of age at the true end of the Communist system? And what distinguishes the Polish situation from what is happening in other countries of the former Eastern Bloc popularly struggling for a cultural redefinition?

With these questions in mind, I newly went to visit the of recent origin art spaces and galleries of Poland. In the course of my visit I talked to curators, critics and artists of the younger generation to put to the test to get a sense of the novel art scene emerging in Poland since 1989 What I set was not a smooth and seamless world of "newness" on the other hand rather, like Zofia Kulik's photomontages, a composite and ambiguous mode of building riven by tensions, paradoxes and contradictions that are part of a broad proces of cultural transformation.

Having grown up in Warsaw, where I also used to work as a curator in an alternative art center I had certain advantages. on the other hand I was also aware of the danger of my fresh position as a kind of "ethnographer," coming from the outside in search of convincing signs of cultural "otherness," more [i]or[/i] less quintessential post-Communist Polishness. In order to resist this Eastern European Orientalist assumption, I want to retain, rather than erase, the traces of my hold position in reporting on Polish art in the 1990s

The Post-Communist Artist

Anda Rottenberg is the director of the novel Polish Artists Union's gallery upon Mazowiecka Street in Warsaw. It is early afternoon, and we are sitting in the Union's cafeteria upon the first floor of the building. Smoking individual cigarette after another and sipping her beer, Anda talks to me about the Polish art world. She knows what there is to know. above the course of three decades, she has been a critic, an independent curator and an oppositional bureaucrat in the ministry of agriculture During the period of the total cultural boycott of officialdom below Martial Law, she organized clandestine exhibitions in her house.

As she talks, I notice without of the corner of my organ of sight that an old friend of mine, one time a rebellious student at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts on the contrary now apparently a respectable member of the Artists Union, is sitting at a table across the sweep A picture of bourgeois comfort and stability, he is leisurely eating his luncheon while he reads a newspaper; his dog upon a leash lies obediently beside him. Is this the post-Communist image of an artist?