The Avant-garde Hypotheses. Collected Texts and Images

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THE AVANT-GARDE HYPOTHESES /// COLLECTED TEXTS AND IMAGES Edited by Aneta Szyłak Translated by Marcin Wawrzyńczak

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National Museum in Gdańsk 2021

Edwin Bendyk Sebastian Cichocki Mikołaj Iwański Elżbieta Jabłońska Aleksandra Jach + Paulina Kurc-Maj Rafał Jakubowicz Zuzanna Janin Agnieszka Kilian Wojciech Kozłowski Piotr Krajewski Anna Królikiewicz Krzysztofjastrubczakłukaszkaczmarek Adam Lipszyc Jakub Majmurek

Dorota Monkiewicz Jacek Niegoda Paulina Ołowska Ewa Partum Joanna Rajkowska Anda Rottenberg Stanisław Ruksza Jan Sowa Jarosław Suchan Kuba Szreder Aneta Szyłak Bogna Świątkowska Mariusz Waras Zorka Wollny Iwo Zmyślony

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1 The Avant-garde: Hypotheses of the Future /// Aneta Szyłak

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This publication is the NOMUS New Art Museum’s contribution to the Year of the Avant-garde. It consists of essays written specially for it and complemented with those published earlier that seem to fill in the picture of the directions of avantgarde work and of the reasons why it is needed and possible or, alternatively, problematic, or even impossible.

The centenary of the avant-garde movement in Poland is a manifestation of a phenomenon that, relative to the historical avant-gardes, has already undergone substantial musealization. The latter avoided the museum, only to eventually become its part. Such is also the mission of the museum: to preserve, record, capture, but also redefine that which is important for shifts in art. The historical avant-gardes were co-opted by museum institutions often against the intentions of the artists themselves, who resisted both the durability of the artwork and its commodification. The problem applies to our times too. At the heart of the avant-garde problematics today is financial and marketing dependency: The capitalization of value and a greater than before individualization of copyright as a driving force of the market, which, on the other hand, is a centrifuge of the copyright sharing movement.

We intuitively associate with the avant-garde two in a way contradictory characteristics. For some, being avant-garde means being able to experiment and push the limits of art, while for others it is tantamount to community commitment and the right to political subjectivity achieved by means of art. Sometimes it is possible to reconcile the two attitudes, but only for a short time. For this reason, the avant-garde experience is both the fulfilment

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of a wish and a taste of disappointment. One of the issues that committed artists grapple with today is the need of agency and its opposite, a sense of impossibility.

The historical avant-gardes are also artistic phenomena that emerged at a particular moment in time – that of revolutions, of great social upheavals. They can hardly be discussed without an awareness of the time of their birth and of why they were possible at a time of social disintegration. Historical forms of capitalism produced other forms of dependency on capital than today’s. Whereas the historical avant-gardes sided exclusively with the organized proletariat, contemporary ones belong to and get involved on behalf of the dispersed and networking precariat as well. We face great changes today too, but the means of the functioning of movements and revolutions are different. The art field has expanded through the networkization of competencies, but this does not make for an easier connection with those whose side we would like to be on. It often means going against the market, which segregates consumers and limits their access to art, but also concerns the problem of solving the significant limitations of Internet algorithms, which have become another means of social segregation.

One of the most important questions is how we can think today about avant-garde concepts of the museum The efforts of the state and of capital have opposite vectors; the latter is interested in more elitism, in filtering competencies, while art institutions are rather devoted to investing in egalitarianism, shared access to knowledge, and the democratization of art as a common good.

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Shared knowledge is an active field rather than a duplication of limited competencies, and that is how we understand the function of a committed institution building on the avant-garde legacy.

The (hostile perhaps) takeover of the term “avant-garde,” which has led to its being applied to virtually everything as part of a culture of sampling and reusing, means that it is com-monly construed today to denote something different and extravagant or trendy. This is the only popularity that the avant-gardes have achieved. Perhaps the avant-garde to come will bear a different name altogether.

The avant-garde wants to have it all – both the right to experiment and the right to participate in a political revolution, siding with the oppressed or underprivileged, with all the ethical consequences of this fact. Avant-garde hypotheses are also social hypotheses, as it were, seeking to situate art in a field broader than the one it has been assigned.

The historical avant-gardes proclaimed themselves the front guard, but perhaps now the avant-garde will remain in hiding, operating by guerrilla tactics, using diverse methods to connect dispersed and hostile tribal communities. This is why the avant-garde postulate of blurring the boundary between art and life is so vital. Being together in spite of all is probably the most radical of the possible avant-garde gestures today.

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2 “Hello, Aneta, I don’t know if you know that the future has been cancelled.

We are reportedly going in circles” ///Zorka Wollny

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2 / “Hello, Aneta, I don’t know if you know that the future has been cancelled. We are reportedly going in circles”

2 November 2017 Hello Aneta, I don’t know if you know that the future has been cancelled. We are reportedly going in circles.

In the paralysis of the political imaginary, the future has been cancelled... Under the sway of folk-political thinking, the most recent cycle of struggles has involved the fetishization of local spaces, immediate actions, transient gestures, and particularisms of all kinds... It has become a politics of defence, incapable of articulating or building a new world...

Today it appears that the greatest amount of effort is needed to achieve the smallest degree of change. Millions march against the Iraq War, yet it goes ahead as planned... Failure permeates this cycle of struggles, and as a result, many of the tactics of the contemporary left have taken on a ritualistic nature, laden with a heavy dose of fatalism.

The dominant tactics – protesting, marching, occupying and various other forms of direct action – have become

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a part of a well-established narrative, with the people and the police each playing their assigned roles.1 This introduction shook me so much that I stopped reading, so I do not know the outcome yet. I am writing, therefore, from a fatalistic position.

1 Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work, (Verso, 2015).

Avant-gardes, composed of dreamers, put forth visions of the future and a new sensibility. But the quantity of these new ideas depends on how quickly social change occurs, and whether science, technology, and social philosophy are able to imagine a near (not always better) future, to create an enticing picture and provide material. Then artists react most quickly – they are like secreted hormones, they move on to spread the word.

Alternatively, artists need to be frightened with a bleak vision (war, lack of solidarity), for they are always good people who believe in society. The avant-garde operates in a group, a community, aided by conversation or the exchange of correspondence.

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2 / “Hello, Aneta, I don’t know if you know that the future has been cancelled. We are reportedly going in circles”

Well, but today the future has reportedly been cancelled. So we are emotionally moved by avant-gardes and view them with a sense of nostalgia. Just as we are emotionally moved by cosmonautics and land art. I think that, wishing for art to be able to become an avant-garde again, we are waiting for the great new social ideas, which, however, art cannot produce by itself. Let us not overestimate art; let us have a reasonable view. Art has to remain under protection, art requires support – at least that of a small group, a handful of initiated persons, or a working brother – in a foul system, that of a patron. The artist does not grow without some broader social confidence and only towards a broader social structure.

It is like with my project in Oldenburg (a composition for a crowd of people) – if there is no energy in a community, no inner tensions, if it is torpidly complacent or gripped by a sense of hopelessness, a single artist will not be able to generate energy on a crowd. My power proved enough for twenty two people. It is much easier to direct energy, the need of expression, or conflict, to create a space for it to resound fully.

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So what to do with the future? How to do the future? We hang around with social workers, devour political news, browse architectural-design websites, hoping that one day something may resonate in us. We create micro-utopias, temporary autonomous zones, artist-run spaces often without contact with each other.

Even the alterglobalist movement is dead; what strikes me as symptomatic is that from global-scale meetings (think World Social Forum) we are back to local initiatives (Occupy), to country-level problem-solving.

Strong individualities working together?

No, there is no atmosphere for that today.

The art market divides artists; the market devours them. Everyone cares about their own piece of cake. My students can hardly be persuaded to work in a group. I hope the left pulls back together soon and proposes a visionary alternative!

This letter certainly reflects my own limitations because more often than visions I have observations, and distorted ones. But art in general has become

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2 / “Hello, Aneta, I don’t know if you know that the future has been cancelled. We are reportedly going in circles”

more about small observations.

Everyone is tired with that. We are waiting for a signal. And then, I promise, we will do the opera about destruction, with costumes, a collapsing roof, and beautiful noise. Without nostalgia and without mercy. And on the ruins of this building someone will put a really, but really awesome installation. And no one will regret the past. love, Zorka

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3 ///Paulina Ołowska

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3 / PA U L I N A O ŁO W S K A

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Paulina Ołowska, She for Support [Ona na Oparcie], 21 × 29,7 cm, 2002

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4 PROMISES / COMPLICATIONS / / / P i ot r K raj ew s k i

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4 / P R O M I S E S / C O M P L I CAT I O N S

PROMISES: Avant-garde art is about a striving to seek out entities that are only waiting to be grasped and mobilized. This striving can produce results in various fields: form and aesthetics, content and learning; it can generate flows connecting art with life. I see a shared characteristic of the movements that emerged in art near the end of the First World War in the notion of progress as a positive value and the premise that society progresses eventually in the direction set by art, even if it takes it some time. Today, however, the avant-garde functions mainly as a metaphor, a promise that in moments of idle stabilization art will always be capable of significant progress.

And although the term “avant-garde” is often applied to any even slightly experimental attitude, in the narrower sense it denotes not so much innovation itself as innovation manifested in the creation of processes that with time are taken up by others. In the 1990s, Lew Manovich encapsulated this in the essay Avant-garde as Software, pointing out that groundbreaking phenomena from the fields of painting, film, photography, and typography, can, decades later, be found in the typical operations of popular computer programs.

Simplifying things, one can say that the myth of the avant-garde is a positive story. What it promises to convention-defying artists is, if not personal recognition and future fame, then at least popularization and a role in the transformation of the world. Though quite historical now, it remains on the offensive, providing reassurance and promise.

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PROMISES: When a centre is missing, it is hard to delimit the avant-gardes.

In principle, there has been an easing in the pressure for that something which at the present moment could only be expressed through art. The stubborn continuation of experiments in areas traditionally viewed as avant-garde has, for all its consistency (or because of it), proved unable to deliver the expected results; academism speaks in the avant-garde’s name, enduring in its positions.

Explorations conducted in one’s own field are no longer the principal strategy in art; they are now accompanied by the lending of field. Artists are participating in discourses that have emerged in other processes, in other areas, in other cognitive perspectives. Avant-garde means shedding familiar forms then, to speak instead on behalf of the unspoken, unrepresented, unrecognized, or powerless. Perhaps it does not matter, then, whether or not art allows itself to be overtaken by reality.

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Paulina Ołowska, A New or an Old Formation [Nowa lub stara formacja], 21 × 29,7 cm, 2002

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6 The Things that Remain / / / J a ro s ł aw S u c h a n

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6 / The Things that Remain

The question of the possibility of the avant-garde is usually one of the future of avant-garde ideas, attitudes, or practices. The most material aspect – the existence of things that the avant-garde leaves behind – is lost on those asking the above question about it. One gets the impression that this is either an insignificant issue or a self-evident one. But if it is insignificant, then how to explain the effort of maintaining museums that preserve such remnants?

And if it is self-evident, then why do so many practices considered as avant-garde seek (even if unsuccessfully) to free themselves of the logic of producing objects for museums?

Bürger, author of a classic theory of the avant-garde, saw in the musealization of its products an evidence of failure. Do we not deepen it by maintaining museums of avant-garde art? And should not the institution of new ones be called a crime against the avant-garde and the art originating from it – unless we need them, like cemeteries, to bury that which inevitably dies and to mourn the resulting loss? It is Adorno who notices that the museum and the mausoleum share more than just phonetic similarity.

So is this the only future that awaits the things left behind by the avant-garde? And can the museum be nothing but their cemetery?

According to Groys, if the gesture of avant-garde transgression is to be effective, it needs to be constantly renewed, for every gesture, even the most revolutionary one, wears away with time and loses its power.

This also happens because of the way museums inscribe the gesture in a “natural” sequence of art’s development, thus stripping it of its transgressive meaning. But does this mean that the avant-garde

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reiteration has to lead to the production of new things – things that, according to the above logic, are alarmingly soon musealized, turning into relics, or, from the avant-garde perspective, simply into useless waste?

If so, then we are dealing with a rather peculiar economy and ideology of art.

This is probably not a false diagnosis. We let avant-garde inventions age too quickly, which inevitably implies the necessity to replace them with new ones.

But this is not necessarily an inevitable process, and museums are not necessarily doomed to perpetuate it. There is nothing to prevent us from using the museum as a machine to reactivate the potential of the things preserved in it. The gesture mentioned by Groys does not result in overproduction then, being based instead on a recycling, as it were, of existing resources.

For this to be possible, the museum should, firstly, become a place where the power of the modernistic imperative of the constant pursuit of novelty is suspended – for the same imperative that propels the avant-garde forward, causes barely begun projects to be abandoned, their potentials unrecognized and unexploited. Paradoxically, therefore, in order to update the power of the avant-garde gesture, it is necessary to negate the temporal dynamics that yielded it. The museum could thus be a place where it is made possible for that which eludes time and is usable here and now to be extracted from the avant-garde thing.

Secondly, the museum has to betray its own nature.

This is because the museum together with its regnant art history strive to pinpoint the thing saved exactly in time by reconstructing its historical context.

Emphasizing the historical aspect, they underscore

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the distance separating the thing from the contemporary spectator, rendering living contact between them impossible. As a result, as Adorno says, that which could work, generate emotional responses, disappears, reduced to relics of the past. The artworks appear even more dead. Instead, the museum should be a space where contact with the work becomes a live experience, resonating with that which matters for the spectator. Only then can the work change the way we view, experience, think about, and, consequently, organize the world. Such, after all, should be the purpose of the renewed avant-garde gesture.

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7 The Avant-garde from the Perspective of a Conservative Institutionalist ///Wojciech Kozłowski

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1 “Sztuka PO,” in Pokaz Poznański, exh. cat. (Warsaw: Galeria Studio, 1985).

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The avant-garde has been blotted out.

Jerzy Ludwiński1

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It could seem that the idea of the “vanguard” has become exhausted with that of progress itself. But if we remember that the avant-garde of the early twentieth century returned as the neo-avant-garde of the 1960s,2 then perhaps we should expect some kind of neo-neo-avant-garde.3 Given also the fact that tendencies, until recently considered as extremely marginal, have been on the rise in socio-political life, there is still a need for people who are alert to evil. Whether artists should count among them too remains however an open question.

One of the key reasons for the rise of the avant-garde was an unwillingness, on the part of a small fraction of the art community, to accept the authoritarian tendencies, militarization, and a turn away from the idea of individual freedom that had come to the fore at the beginning of the twentieth century. While we know in hindsight that the avant-garde attitude was unique at the time and hardly had an impact on the course of things in the real world, we still remember it as a warning sign – then and now – let alone its influence on art, of course. In a military sense, the advance guard, even if it became involved in skirmishes at all, was above all a reconnaissance force, a mobile and elite formation that warned of dangers ahead.

Today, when the realization of one of the avant-garde’s postulates, namely that of common participation in art, transformed within the neo-avant-garde field into the Beuysian “Everyone is an artist,” has, in a way, been made possible, can we still believe in the existence of any kind of guard – any elite unit able to change the course of the battle?

2 An indispensable reading on this subject: Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009).

3 Not to be confused with the collective neo neo neo (Dobkowski / Zieliński).

In 1985, I attended the opening of the Poznań Show at the Studio Gallery in Warsaw. An essay written by Jerzy Ludwiński for the catalogue was in fact an integral part of the exhibition, which was meant to make clear how far art had become detached from the idea of the formal self-evidence of the avant-garde artwork. It also inspired myself and Leszek Krutulski to start a gallery that we called “po” [after]. In the essay, Ludwiński wrote about the avant-garde’s disappearance. For the next

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thirty years it seemed obvious to me that the avant-garde was no more, and even if I speculate now that something may happen that will revive the idea, I am not really sure about it myself. At the same time, the trivial and retrograde, utterly conservative thought occurs to me that the avant-garde (even if we do not call it that) will be all that which cannot be experienced in a mediated form but only directly, that which remains it, if not by name, then in the institutional sense. Amid the sea of derivative and commonly accepted appearances, it will be (like before) that which cannot be immediately named, absorbed, chewed and discarded. It will lose (for it has long lost) its formal discriminant, but will possess, like it used to, an ungraspable, invigorating, individual meaning.

Wojciech Kozłowski P.S. Jerzy Ludwiński’s essay was prophetic; it has, I believe, remained topical to this day and should be read by everyone who has used the term “avant-garde” at least once. It is arguably the most important Polish text that attempts to predict the future of art.

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8 The Avant-garde Institution / / / Dorot a Mon k iew icz

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Is today’s “young art” synonymous with the former avant-garde?

There was the pre-war avant-garde, called the first one; then there was the post-war avant-garde, often referred to as the second, e.g. the Second Cracow Group; finally, there was the neo-avant-garde (Prof. Stefan Morawski’s term, which gained wide currency). After 1980, it is hard to speak of any avant-garde at all.

(Some) art institutions became avant-garde (with time).

These are not only museums and galleries, but also mega-exhibitions such as biennials, triennials, or festivals. When art assumes a dispersed shape, gets rid of an integral form, it is the institution that frames and completes the work’s meaning.

The institution itself can be a work of art, and its leader an artist.

It is the sequence of events, their selection and succession, that forms the structure.

I want to believe that the institution is based on relationships.

I do not mean relational art, but interpersonal relationships: within the institutional team, in contact with the public, in relation to artists and other creative individuals (e.g. authors of public programmes) contributing to the institution.

The institution is neither for everyone nor for no one.

In the competitive world around it, the institution builds its small community of team members and members of the

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public. This community grows with time, forming around shared experiences.

There is certainly a line somewhere beyond which a successful institution ceases to be avant-garde.

The avant-garde institution is not a temple of the Artist, but rather of its community, and art, among other actions, provides impulses and experiences that integrate it. This is a situation that artists find hard to accept. Some of them would like to be “art workers,” but pretty often they are unable to step down from the Romantic pedestal.

Theatre is today an unsurpassed example of community-building.

Staying together in the same space, actors and spectators experience simultaneously their own mutual presence and the performed material.

And how will the future avant-garde look?

Who knows?

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A A A I I I

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9 You Are Never The Avant-garde Once and For All ///Iwo Zmyślony

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The avant-garde is, after all, about growth, about setting trends and creating change; about remaining intellectually mobile – about processuality, experimentation, the challenging of dogmas, and solving of equations with many unknowns.

The avant-garde is neither a formation nor a community. It is rather an attitude: mindful and inquisitive, critically reflecting on its own foundations, keeping its finger on the pulse, analyzing and keeping up with the changes at hand; ready to leave the safety of its comfort zone, to break the mould and run risks. There is no avant-garde without passion and curiosity. It is about the joy of erring, the perverse pleasure of tracking your own prejudices, missteps, and limitations, the euphoria of discovering new perspectives, and a dexterity in juggling the points of reference. For the same reason, the avant-garde is a team game, one where the participants draw on each other’s work, learn from, inspire, and motivate each other.

No one holds a monopoly for being the avant-garde. You are never the avant-garde once and for all. Anyone who has been it or has at least got close to it can, with time, unnoticeably to himself, turn into a dogmatic

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individual. The history of academisms is a history of avant-gardes, albeit petrified, infertile, hollowed out, or pedestalled by this or that salon.

The avant-garde finds its death not in the academe, but in conservatism – in spiritual laziness, routine, and the common human tendency to rest on one’s laurels. The avant-garde dies when boredom, narcissism, and an unshakable sense of being always right creep in; when creative anxiety and a desire for change are supplanted by territorial instinct, love of power, and attachment to sinecures.

The avant-garde attitude is an ideal that we strive for and that few actually achieve. It is a disposition characteristic not only for outstanding artists, designers, writers, or composers, but also scientists, social leaders, technology inventors, or business visionaries.

What connects these different fields? One could say that it is art. For it is an art to see a problem where no one sees it, and to discover a solution that no one has thought of yet. This may be an innovative artistic form or a curatorial strategy, but also a groundbreaking theory, a political vision, an innovative product, material, or technology.

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The problem is the lack of something that is needed and, in the given context, becomes possible. In order to discover it, therefore, one needs to know something – to recognize the dispersed formations and connect them so that they define the field of exploration. So called “creativity” is in fact a way of thinking and a set of competencies – something that can be learned, cultivated, and shared.

It is not easy to be the avant-garde, today more difficult than ever, and not because everything has already been done. We live in times of permanent changes, occurring faster than just a decade ago and having ever further-reaching consequences. Our competencies can sometimes become obsolete much sooner than we are able to realize.

Question: what is art institutions’ role in all this? What is museums’ role? Will they still be needed in the post-Internet era? By whom and what for? What functions should they have besides producing a certain version of history? Perhaps the avant-garde will emerge elsewhere, far beyond them?

Perhaps it is already emerging, unbeknownst to us? I think we will learn the answers soon.

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10 The Avant-garde as a Zombie ///Jan Sowa

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The avant-garde project is neither about searching for new, original aesthetic forms nor about art’s social or political commitment. At the heart of avant-garde thinking about art lay the idea of undoing the separation between art and life as distinct and opposite fields. Art was to become life and vice versa. As late as the 1950s and 1960s, this goal motivated the Situationists’ practices with their revolution of daily life, and later the thinking of Joseph Beuys and his idea of social sculpture. So construed, the avant-garde programme today has the status of something undead, a zombie: it is neither dead nor alive, but frozen midway between the two states, like the man walking through walls in Marcel Aymé’s famous short story. On the one hand, no one really believes that the avant-garde idea of erasing the boundary between art and life is feasible at all; on the other, however, there has been a strong sense in the contemporary art world that art should relate to the social world and contribute to its change.

The avant-garde is, therefore, paradoxically, both impossible and necessary.

This is because there is an asymmetry or incompatibility between contemporary art and the social world of today. The wiping out of the division between art and life was to be achieved through a dialectical annulment (German: Aufhebung) of both components. This particular operation – the only adequate Polish term for which is the too-technically-sounding “sublation” – is a move of both destroying something and realizing it on a higher level (as in Freudian sublimation, where instinct directs itself away from its direct object and towards a higher goal). For the avant-garde’s essential purpose to be accomplished, a complete transformation was needed of both art and social relations. The former was achieved in the 1910s with Duchamp’s gesture; the art language became infinitely stretchable, and today every element of reality can be transformed into a work of art: objects, phenomena, relations, events. As a result, art is capable of encompassing life in its entirety. The socio-political

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order, however, has not moved an inch. Despite the hopes of the early-twentieth-century revolutionaries, we still live in a world of private property and alienated, pseudo-democratic power. For the avant-garde programme to be realized, this world also has to change – something that the interwar avant-gardists knew perfectly well and which was the precise reason why they became involved in revolutionary activities. Their revolutionary efforts failed, but art must not regress to its previous forms, as today’s conservative academic artists would like it to. It therefore remains in suspension, like an undead zombie, waiting for the world to change so that it can fulfill its avant-garde message.

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11 Medium – Prophecy – Reconstruction Notes from a Séance that Took Place in Warsaw on 1 November 1917

/// Zuzanna Janin

Zuzanna Janin,Reading in Future (Avant-garde Hypotheses) [Czytanie w przyszłości (Hipotezy awangardowe)], 1917-2017 A reconstructed lost record of a prophecy of a medium reading from the future from 1.11.1917 contains later quotations from texts dating to the second half of the 20th century. Texts from the future by philosophers, writers, artists, activists, economists, and poets of the 20th and 21st centuries, including Maria Janion, Hanna Arendt, Bauer Rothschild, Slavoj Żiżek, Micheal Newman, Zygmunt Bauman, Jan Sowa, Emmanuel Levinas, Barbara Skarga, Gregor Sholette, Guerilla Girls, Żubrzyce Mówimy NIE, Occupy Museum, Collective Action, Zofia Nałkowska, Gorillaz, Benjamin Clementine and the author were used during the reconstruction of this document from the past.

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Zuzanna Janin, Prophecy from the Past [Przepowiednia z przyszłości], 30 × 20 cm, pencil on 20th century office paper

T H E AVA N T - G A R D E H Y P O T H E S E S / / / C O L L E C T E D T E X T S A N D I M A G E S

Zuzanna Janin, Prophecy from the Past [Przepowiednia z przyszłości], 30 × 20 cm, pencil on 20th century office paper

1 1 / M e d i u m – P r o p h e c y – R e c o n s t r u c t i o n . N o t e s f r o m a S é a n c e t h a t To o k P l a c e i n W a r s a w o n 1 N o v e m b e r 1 9 1 7

The following is the transcript of a prophecy recorded during a séance with a future-reading medium in Laski near Warsaw in November 1917. Found over eighty years later, in 1998, after the death of doctor Maria Kloss, daughter of lawyer Juliusz Kloss and Stefania, née Czarnecka, in her apartment at 21 Mokotowska Street in Warsaw. Lost again around 2000 in unknown circumstances (burned down?) at the artist’s home in Radość or Międzylesie in Warsaw.

Reconstructed in 2017, on the centenary of its making.

1 November 1917. The medium is silent for a moment and then starts speaking in a girl’s voice:

When ravens and owls become friends with the buffalo, the tiger, the lion, the crab, the monkey, and the bison . . . [illegible] . . . and when . . . silence ceases to be gold and becomes dirty junk, scrap, rust that consumes shapes before the naïve man discovers them who needs knowledge, authority, a signpost, but who will see only rust and the rot . . . [illegible] . . . of corruption, and who will hear lies, aggression, and will be afraid, for all the composure and grey hair . . . [illegible] . . . of the white raven and red owl . . . [illegible] . . . self-combustible . . . [illegible] . . . a woman burned for the inspiration of hell and the peace of the unknown descendant . . . [illegible] . . . will be a safe home, grey . . . [illegible] . . . the beginning a white tree and white birds.

There is silence. Then the medium speaks in a male voice:

As the philosopher says: The silent world is revealed by the Other, even if he were a malicious demon here. Speech hides at the bottom of silence as perfidiously disguised laughter . . . [incomprehensible] . . . The lie of the malicious demon does not contradict the truth. It resides in the ambiguous space between deception and seriousness, where the doubting object breathes. So the silent world would be an anarchic one.

Knowledge could not begin in it. An absolutely silent world, indifferent to terminated speech, silent with a silence that does not allow one to surmise anyone who invests this world with meaning, and at the same time means itself – if only to lie with deceptive speech like a malicious demon – a world so silent could not even reveal itself as a spectacle.

The medium speaks in a male voice, in English with an American accent:

After all, the art world is counting on your collective silence. Let’s do it again, comrades, let’s occupy the Museum. International relations. Music.

Fiction. Non-fiction. Feminism, racial justice. Art Workers Coalition. Guerrilla Art Action Group. Angry Art, Guerrilla Girls, Bison Ladies. Decolonize this place. Urban resistance.

The medium breaks off for a moment. Then she starts speaking in a young woman’s voice:

New forms will be used for old contents, and progressive forms for conservative contents, and this will shine most brightly and bring riches to people spoiled by fame and money. Delusions of grandeur. Narcissism.

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Conceit. Violence. The instruments of freedom will be used for oppression, independence for fear, the era of hope-management will be replaced by that of fear-management, and art will become a vanguard of [incomprehensible] . . . and to find out when the old . . . [illegible] . . . of violence, suffering, and inequality spread under a new form, when evil nature hides itself behind a new language, silently holding in iron claws, it will name anew, in its own voice, loudly, very loudly, old slavery and exploitation, reinforcing old compulsions, cheap forces, dependencies, with new combinations of words and new orders, and the oppressors of democracy will be sealing their lips which have to speak because silence won’t be gold anymore, and silence will be junk, the good name will be the ill name, and speech and shame will divide into golden speech tantamount to grey confessions, which are power, and black violence tantamount to money and authority, which is weak. Shame will break up into two camps, the one that used shame to block evil will become powerless in shame and impotence with its mind scattered around the world, and the one that was supposed to protect the stronger will sit down in shamelessness, and it is it that salvation for the weaker will begin from. There will appear on other continents gold-grey-rosy-black crowds and letters on shiny books, words of condemnation, statements of despair and oppression, and the silence-wielding oppressors will be recognized, their images will flow around the world in a moment, just like shame will traverse the globe in seconds. The she-raven and he-owl, in white and grey clouds, will circumvent the junkyards and refuse dumps, the heaps of chemicals and the chains that entwine the world like strands of mycelium, to circumvent wings smeared in tar, how to proudly wear clean wings smeared in tar, for the clean will be tainted in tar when with tar shame the shameless. . . and they will manage fear and shamelessness . . . [illegible] . . . and will sink in the attractiveness of fear . . . [illegible] . . . and in the fragment. Connecting the fragments dispersed around the world will take a lot of pain: despair and lament will be forgotten, and silent weeping will be heard beyond the seas. The descendants of kings will shamelessly explain their ignoble deeds before the court, and this pain will be similar to that of giving birth, forgotten in the love of the prodigal son. knowing the end and the new beginning. He who knows is not afraid. . . .

The medium speaks in the voice of an elderly woman:

For, as the philosopher says, authority figures’ choices are often determined by all kinds of myths entrenched deeply enough to influence such choices.

The medium leans her head and speaks in a male voice:

Therefore a silent world would be anarchic. Knowledge could not begin in it.

The medium leans her head and speaks in the voice of an elderly man:

If utopia were invented today, like it was invented at a certain moment in the past, it would probably be called differently. Morus would certainly

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not write of U-topia in reference to topos, the place, but would use an equivalent of the concept of the road. It is a road that runs somewhere, but we do not know where; a road that does not necessarily have a finishing line.

She starts speaking in a female voice:

That is why they are on the U-via, a road to the utopia, to a better world which never ends because there is no utopian place, no utopian world, but there is a road leading to it, and it is it that is the meaning of utopia – the U-via.

She leans her head and starts speaking in a young man’s voice:

Give me control of any country’s money and it will not matter who lays down its laws . . . [illegible] She continues speaking in a young man’s voice:

We know from history that there are many ways to become a slave. You can be born a slave, sold into slavery as a prisoner of war or shackled directly by the victorious army, you can be relegated to the status of a slave by the elites of your own society, as it happened to the peasants in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Finally, there is slavery over debts . . . [illegible] She leans her head and changes her voice, speaking rhythmically and clearly in a young man’s voice:

Let us consume as if there were no tomorrow! . . . [illegible] . . . there is no tomorrow because tomorrow is already today! What will happen tomorrow? The day after tomorrow, or the one after that, or the one after that, depending on how much money we borrow from the bank. This does not matter, though, because there is always an “after” than can be added.

It is interesting that a theoretician pivotal for the popularization of postmodernism, Jean Baudrillard, imagined the situation precisely so: debt will accrue infinitely and it will never have to be repaid.

The medium switches back to a young man’s voice:

But it did not work! We are in a moment of crisis: the derivatives spacestation has gone off orbit and is coming down, burning in the toxic atmosphere of the Crisis. The trick did not work with the environment.

The future seemed more promising. After all, the future cannot protest, occupy, demand anything, because it is not yet here. Seemingly the perfect garbage pit. But it has turned out different, and for a very simple reason. The future – kudos here to analytical philosophers – is that which is to happen to us (our fate, touché). Debt, bankruptcies, unemployment, precarization, growing inequalities, expropriations, budget cuts, oligarchization. Colonizing the future, capitalism has effectively deprived us of it. The future is over – it has been sucked dry by capitalism, becoming a grim rubbish heap . . . [illegible] . . . The Real will finally return. And it will be a very traumatic encounter.

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In a young woman’s voice:

No to misogyny! No to rape!

She leans her head and speaks loudly in English with a Slavic accent:

Don’t look for people . . . [illegible] . . . Look for acts. Look for what people did even if it’s against their nature. In a true heroic act, you don’t do what you want to do . . . [illegible] . . . It really is like a kind of materialist divine grace. You do something that you yourself wouldn’t think you are capable of. And I think that all great things happen this way.

There is a long silence. Then the medium leans her head and continues in English with a Slavic accent:

Because, in a way, I’m here for the democracy, for heroes and miracles.

Almost everybody is capable of a miracle. And that’s the mystery of ethics for me. I read a story about a Gestapo officer who was privately anti-Semitic, conservative, whatever. And then, all of a sudden… he was even organizing the transports to Auschwitz… all of a sudden, he saw something totally ridiculous, he saw a small Jewish boy crying, leaning on his mother, and he broke down, he risked his life to save some of them – miracles happen. So, look for miracles. The problem is you don’t know where to find them because if you know where to find them, they are not miracles. So, the only way to encounter them is by a miracle. That’s what I say to you as a materialist: open yourself to miracles. Open yourself to them and if you are lucky, if you are touched by grace, you will find them.

She raises her head and speaks in a British accent:

I am ashamed to be here. I am ashamed to be seen. I’m ashamed to be… a fat white man standing in front of you. I’m here instead of anyone else.

I am here in a place of others. I am ashamed of how I am ashamed of my country. I am ashamed to be alive. Why should it benefit from all the suffering of others? But is it possible to turn shame on? Can you make yourself red with shame? What are the conditions for that... Can you be ashamed without being seen. Would you be ashamed in the dark, would you be ashamed when no one is looking at you?... Is it possible to gesture shame? Could you simulate shame? Did I simulate shame just now?

The medium speaks in a woman’s voice:

NO. NO. NO to patriarchy, no to sexism, no to misogyny, no to male domination, no to rapes, no to violence.

Silence . . . [illegible] . . . Then she continues in fluent English.

Capitalism has grammaticized the flow of life to capitalize on it.

There is a long silence. Then the medium speaks, switching between a woman’s and a man’s voice:

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I am ashamed of a country whose culture is defined by men who use violence and commit crimes: friends of criminals, wife batterers, men killing out of jealousy, rapists, violent men who humiliate others! I am ashamed of this country! I am ashamed of the rape culture. I am ashamed of a country dominated by a culture of violence!

In a young woman’s voice:

No to misogyny. No to rapes.

She speaks in a woman’s voice with German and American accents at the same time:

Persuasion appears as an opposite... [illegible] ... of the way dialogue is conducted; an opposite because that philosophical dialogue was concerned with knowledge and the discovery of truth, and precisely for that reason required an overwhelming argumentation. Culture and politics are related because neither is concerned with knowledge or truth, but rather with judgement and decision... [silence] ... Earth with its specific laws is just a marginal case of the absolute universal laws that govern the vast universe.

The medium speaks in the self-assured voice of an elderly woman:

Modernism so construed demands the emancipation of minorities, respect for individual rights, true gender equality. It is accompanied by a deep regression in the realm of myths, symbols, and values. The previous government was guilty of underrating the role of artists and culture professionals. Today we are witnessing an obvious, centrally-planned shift towards a culture of bankrupt, epigonic romanticism – a canon of religious-patriotic stereotypes and Smolensk as a new messianic myth are supposed to integrate and soothe those wronged and humiliated by the previous government. The martyrological pattern that dominates in Poland is so inefficient and harmful! Let me say it straight – messianism, and especially its official-clerical version, is Poland’s curse and bane.

I honestly hate our messianism.

In a young woman’s voice:

NO to a culture where women artists become visible only when they are dead!

In an elderly woman’s voice:

I have no doubts that our permanent inability to modernize has its source in the phantasmal realm, in a culture that attaches the collective unconscious to pain.

A nation that cannot live without suffering is doomed to inflict it on itself.

Hence the shocking, sadistic fantasies about forcing women to birth even lethally deformed foetuses, hence the burrowing in the graves of

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the Smolensk air-crash victims, aggression against natural monuments, and even – do not be surprised – the stubborn cultivation of a coal-based power sector, which envelops cities with smog and threatens an impending civilizational collapse. The memory of pain and the realness of what has been done to us and others, what we have seen and are still seeing – this cannot be erased. Teaching young people to understand, we teach them to grow beyond themselves as an ethical and emphatic imperative. Hard times lie ahead, I know. But The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk have been written, they exist. A renewal-oriented vision of history forms my hopes for the future. I am convinced that the opening up of collective memory, the transformation of mourning into empathy, and the rejection of a “pre-critical consent to the technicization of the humanities” is a work with children and young people that has to and will be carried out in the coming difficult years.

In a young woman’s voice:

I have no doubts that our permanent inability to modernize has its source in the phantasmal realm, in a culture that attaches the collective unconscious to pain.

A nation that cannot live without suffering is doomed to inflict it on itself.

Hence the shocking, sadistic fantasies about forcing women to birth even lethally deformed foetuses, hence the burrowing in the graves of the Smolensk air-crash victims, aggression against natural monuments, and even – do not be surprised – the stubborn cultivation of a coal-based power sector, which envelops cities with smog and threatens an impending civilizational collapse. The memory of pain and the realness of what has been done to us and others, what we have seen and are still seeing – this cannot be erased. Teaching young people to understand, we teach them to grow beyond themselves as an ethical and emphatic imperative.

Hard times lie ahead, I know. But The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk have been written, they exist. A renewal-oriented vision of history forms my hopes for the future. I am convinced that the opening up of collective memory, the transformation of mourning into empathy, and the rejection of a “pre-critical consent to the technicization of the humanities” is a work with children and young people that has to and will be carried out in the coming difficult years.

Continuing in a young woman’s voice:

No to misogyny. No to rapes. In solidarity with the Arab women’s uprising.

We’ll get off the walls when we get onto TV. The medium speaks in a young woman’s voice:

In the face of the currently promoted culture of historical sadistic affirmation of sadness, misfortune, “carrying the cross” as a source of aggression, frustration, and exclusion, we are demanding the right to have fun, to enjoy ourselves, to be merry, the right to be happy, to experience pleasure, and to err.

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In a young woman’s voice:

We are not surprised.

In a woman’s voice:

The conquest of space and the science which made it possible have come perilously close to this point. If they ever should reach it in earnest, the stature of man would not simply be lowered by all standards we know of, it would have been destroyed.

In the voice of a man speaking with a British accent:

I am ashamed that I am a survivor. Why did I survive? Not others? Why did I survive, not others?

In a woman’s voice:

We are all survivors, children of survivors, grandchildren of survivors.

In a man’s voice, singing occasionally:

Here is our tree / That primitively grows / And when you go to bed / Scarecrows from the Far East / Come to eat / Its tender fruits / And I’ve thought the best way to perfect our tree / Is by building walls / Walls like unicorns / In full glory / And galore / And even stronger / Than the walls of Jericho / But glad then my friend / Out in the field we shall reap a better day / What we have always dreamt of having / And now for the starving / It is love, that is the root of all evil / But not our tree / And thank you my friend / For trusting me / Hallelujah / (Hallelujah) / Hallelujah money (Past the chemtrails) / Hallelujah money / (Hallelujah money) / Hmmm / Hallelujah money / (Hallelujah) / Hallelujah money / (Oooh) / How will we know? / When the morning comes / We are still human / How will we know? / How will we dream?

How will we love? / How… In a young woman’s voice:

And here too – with the single exception of Ms. Sempołowska’s bolder voice – we have only heard what has already been said on many occasions.

Our task in the field of ethics is to fundamentally redefine the ethical principles that govern us today. Women are divided today from a male perspective. But there is a realm where women’s individuality is beginning to manifest itself – that of literature and art. We want the whole of life!

In a man’s voice:

And I think to myself, why now, why me, why… / She says I think I’d better go / She says goodbye and I say… No! / Susanna, Susanna / Susanna, I’m crazy loving you…

Singing in a man’s voice:

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Here is our tree / That primitively grows / And when you go to bed / Scarecrows from the Far East / Come to eat / Its tender fruits / And I’ve thought the best way to perfect our tree / Is by building walls / Walls like unicorns / In full glory / And galore / And even stronger / Than the walls of Jericho / But glad then my friend / Out in the field we shall reap a better day / What we have always dreamt of having / And now for the starving / It is love that is the root of all evil / But not our tree / And thank you my friend / For trusting me / Hallelujah / (Hallelujah) / Hallelujah money (Past the chemtrails) / Hallelujah money / (Hallelujah money) / Hmmm / Hallelujah money / (Hallelujah) / Hallelujah money / (Oooh) / How will we know? / When the morning comes / We are still human / How will we know? / How will we dream? / How will we love? / How… In a woman’s voice, singing:

Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river / You can hear the boats go by, you can spend the night forever / And you know that she’s half-crazy but that’s why you want to be there / And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China / And just when you mean to tell her that you have no love to give her / Then he gets you on her wavelength / And she lets the river answer that you’ve always been her lover / And you want to travel with her, and you want to travel blind / And you know that she will trust you / For you’ve touched her perfect body with your mind / And Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water / And he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower / And when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him / He said all men will be sailors then until the sea shall free them / But he himself was broken, long before the sky would open / Forsaken, almost human, he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone / And you want to travel with him, and you want to travel blind / And you think you maybe you’ll trust him For he’s touched your perfect body with her mind / Now, Suzanne takes your hand and she leads you to the river / She’s wearing rags and feathers from Salvation Army counters / And the sun pours down like honey on our lady of the harbor / And she shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers / There are heroes in the seaweed, there are children in the morning / They are leaning out for love and they will lean that way forever…

In a man’s voice, singing:

Mmmm-mm-mm-ommm / Sula vie dilejo / Mmmm-mm-mm-ommm / Sula vie milejo / Mmm-omm / Cheli venco deho / Cheli venco deho / Malio / Mmmmmm-mm-ommm / Helibo seyoman / Cheli venco raero / Malio / Malio…

She starts speaking in a woman’s voice:

Memory is a factor of the future. Memory is the future.

Speaking ever more slowly in a woman’s voice with an American accent:

“How in your opinion are we to prevent war?” Woolf begins by observing tartly that a truthful dialogue between them may not be possible. For

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though they belong to the same class, “the educated class,” a vast gulf separates them: the lawyer is a man and she is a woman. Men make war.

Men (most men) like war, since for men there is “some glory, some necessity, some satisfaction in fighting” that women (most women) do not feel or enjoy. What does an educated – read: privileged, well-off – woman like her know of war? Can her recoil from its allure be like his?... [illegible]...

Very quietly in a woman’s voice:

Memory is a factor of the future. Memory will inhabit the future.

In a man man’s voice, melodically:

How will we know? When the morning comes. We are still human. How will we know? How will we dream? How will we lose? How… The lost transcript of a psychic’s prophecy from 1 November 1917 includes later quotations from twentieth- and early twenty-first-century texts by philosophers, writers, economists, artists, activists, and poets: Maria Janion, Hannah Arendt, Bauer Rotschild, Slavoj Žižek, Michael Newman, Zygmunt Bauman, Jan Sowa, Emmanuel Levinas, Barbara Skarga, Gregory Sholette, Guerrilla Girls, Żubrzyce, Mówimy Nie, Occupy Museum, Collective Action, Zofia Nałkowska, Gorillaz, Benjamin Clementine, Leonard Cohen, Nina Simone, David Bowie, Susan Sontag, and the author.

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12 Workerism.

A Radical View of Art 1 ///Rafał Jakubowicz

1 This essay was published on 14 November 2016 on the website of the academic journal Praktyka Teoretyczna: http://www.praktykateoretyczna.pl/8352-2/ (accessed 30 October 2017) and in the conference monograph, Wyparte dyskursy. Sztuka wobec zmian społecznych i dezindustrializacji lat 90., ed. Mikołaj Iwański (Szczecin: Akademia Sztuki, 2016), pp. 78-110, https://issuu.com/mikolajiwanski/docs/wyparte (accessed 30 October 2017). It has never been published in print before.

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Rafał Jakubowicz, Panel at the Rozbrat Squat, Poznań, 2013, photo by R. Jakubowicz

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For this, we say that the workers are against society, that they are different from other classes by the fact that society is entirely structured against them and that it has perfected itself in this way in response to their movements.

Workers Committee of Porto Marghera2

Through our struggle against work, against the compulsion to sell yourself, we negate all social rules.

Gianni Sbrogio3

Critical Art and the Victims o f t h e P o s t - C o m m u n i s t Tr a n s i t i o n “Critical art,” Izabela Kowalczyk writes, “can be defined as art that constantly references the contemporary reality and reveals the strategies and relationships of power present in our society, in politics, in culture at large as well as in ourselves.”4 So construed, critical art remains topical, as indicated, for example, by Andrzej Turowski’s conception of “particular art”5 which can be interpreted as a polemic with Artur Żmijewski’s Applied Social Arts.6 However, both Turowski and Żmijewski miss in their propositions the aspects of class conflict and class struggle, which – after the experience of “twenty five years of freedom” (as the winners of the transition like to call it) – seem absolutely crucial.

Workers Committee of Porto Marghera, The Refusal of Work (1970), https://libcom.org/library/ refusal-work-workerscommittee-portomarghera-1970 (accessed 10 October 2020).

Gianni Sbrogio, “Warto walczyć,” Przegląd Anarchistyczny, no. 7, Spring-Summer 2008, p. 211.

Izabela Kowalczyk, Ciało i władza. Polska sztuka krytyczna lat 90., (Warsaw: Sic!, 2002), p. 9.

See Andrzej Turowski, Art that Sparks Unrest: the Artistic-Political Manifesto of Particular Art (Warsaw: Instytut Wydawniczy Książka i Prasa, 2012).

In the early 1990s, when, due to the restructuring of the com- See Artur Żmijewski, “Stosowane sztuki społeczne,” munist economy, thousands of people lost their jobs, social Krytyka Polityczna, no. 11/12 (Winter 2007), pp. 14-24. status, sense of security, and dignity virtually overnight, See also idem, “Stosowane nauki społeczne,” in Artur critical artists were preoccupied with the problematics Żmijewski. Przewodnik of the body, pushing cultural issues to the foreground and Krytyki Politycznej, pp. 74-96. opposing conservative morality, including the devotional oppression of the Catholic Church. “The moment had arrived 7 when you were able to talk about different sexual or religious Marta Świetlik, Wiktoria Kozioł, “Poszerzyć imagipractices, about mind-altering substances, so artists narium polskie. Rozmowa ze Stanisławem Rukszą became concerned with that. But no one dealt with the wokół wystawy Oblicze dnia. Koszty społeczne economy,”7 noticed Stanisław Ruksza, curator of the piow Polsce po 1989 roku,” Obieg, 15 September 2014, neering exhibition The Face of the Day. Social Costs in http://archiwum-obieg.ujazdowski.pl/teksty/33381 (accessed: 16 October 2016).

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8 See Elizabeth Dunn, Prywatyzując Polskę.

O bobofrutach, wielkim biznesie i restrukturyzacji pracy, trans. Przemysław Sadura (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2008), p. 47; originally published as Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004).

9 See Jacek Tittenbrun, Z deszczu pod rynnę.

Meandry polskiej prywatyzacji (Poznań: Zysk i S-ka, 2007).

10 Dunn, op. cit., p. 47.

11 See Tomasz Rakowski, Łowcy, zbieracze, praktycy niemocy. Etnografia człowieka zdegradowanego (Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo słowo/obraz terytoria, 2009).

12 See Małgorzata Maciejewska, Zmęczone ciała i bezcenne produkty.

Warunki pracy kobiet w specjalnej strefie ekonomicznej przemysłu elektronicznego. Raport z badań Think Tanku Feministycznego i Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego w ramach projektu o warunkach pracy w specjalnych strefach ekonomicznych, Biblioteka Online Think Tanku Feministycznego 2012, http://www.ekologiasztuka.pl/pdf/strefy_raport_ maciejewska_2012.pdf (accessed 4 November 2020).

13 See Guy Standing, Prekariat. Nowa niebezpieczna klasa, trans.

Krzysztof Czarnecki, Paweł Kaczmarski, Mateusz Karolak (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 2014), p. 219; originally published as The Precariat.

The New Dangerous Class (City: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011).

14 Jarosław Urbański, Prekariat i nowa walka klas. Przeobrażenia współczesnej klasy pracowniczej i jej form walki (Warsaw: Instytut Wydawniczy Książka i Prasa, 2014), pp. 214-215.

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Poland after 1989 at the Światowid Cinema in Nowa Huta (2014), today the Museum of the Polish People’s Republic, its title alluding to a somewhat forgotten book by Wanda Wasilewska. Indeed, one would look in vain for any reactions in art of the period to the sweeping privatization of large industrial conglomerates, which not only transformed state-owned enterprises, which until then were both worker communities and social institutions, into commodities, but also entailed a fundamental redefinition of the very concepts of the person/worker and of work, a phenomenon that has been suggestively described, for example, by Elizabeth Dunn8 or Jacek Tittenbrun.9 The privatization and reorganization of production destabilized workers’ lives, turning, as Dunn aptly puts it, subjects into objects, owners into property, and profit into debt.10 Privatization led to the degradation of whole towns with their local communities, and to the humiliation and declassing of the working masses that replenished the ranks of the reserve army of labour. Many of its members tried to switch to hunter-gatherer practices of impotence (e.g. the “poverty shaft” miners11), to emigrate to the West, or found themselves working in junk jobs at “special economic zones” (introduced by a law passed on 20 October 1994), which could only offer them the permanent status of the working poor. The realities of exploitation in one such zone have been suggestively described by Małgorzata Maciejewska in the report Tired Bodies and Priceless Products. Working Conditions of Women in the Special Economic Zone of the Electronics Industry.12 Collective labour agreements were restricted in the SEZ, so fixed-term employment contracts became the new norm.13 “Special economic zones,” writes Jarosław Urbański, “are connected with a new economic policy. Vis-à-vis adjacent the dispersed and high unemployment-burdened working class stand the employers, whom the central and local governments provide not only with the necessary infrastructure, but also with a convenient mode of operation and a certain model of labour relations.”14 The zones are a kind of laboratory, where organizational and management solutions are tested that serve to divide and control the working class; these are then applied elsewhere and become ever more common. Employees are divided into long- and short-term ones, thus breaking up their potential solidarity and encouraging intra-class antagonisms. The lack of even basic existential security

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and prospects as well as the trap of inherited poverty result in a sharp rise in the number of suicides, which are usually committed by unemployed men, rural and smalltown inhabitants.15 These suicides can be perceived not only as an act of despair, but also as a radical form of selfaggressive resistance, a refusal to participate in a humiliating system of exploitation, a protest against a miserable life, a “radical form of refusal to participate in a world where one is always on the losing side,”16 as Agnieszka Mróz puts it. In 2014, the labour-union movement was shocked by news of the suicidal death of Krzysztof Gazda, a charismatic activist of the OZZ Inicjatywa Pracownicza union, involved in the famous struggle against Chung Hong Electronics at the Kobierzyce SEZ near Wrocław.17 The practical application in Poland of a shock doctrine18 in the shape of the Balcerowicz plan, which fetishized the “free market” and “private ownership,” resulted in widespread disorientation and a sense of helplessness in the face of changes that seemed inevitable and natural. We were oblivious to the hazards of the predatory, “unbridled, nineteenth-century capitalism of primitive accumulation,”19 attractively packaged in liberal slogans. “The accumulation of wealth at one pole,” Marx argues, “is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, the torment of labour, slavery, ignorance, brutalisation and moral degradation at the opposite pole, i.e. on the side of the class that produces its own product as capital.”20 Living in misery became a source of embarrassment, and the Marxist discourse, i.e. thinking in class terms, a basis for a critical analysis of capitalism, was identified with the failed system of real socialism and eliminated almost completely from public debate. According to Jerzy Kochan, the “fashion in Poland for treating Marx as a ‘dead dog’ causes his theoretical writings – a foundation of modern European culture – to be ignored, distorted, and criminalized, with his works destroyed and withdrawn from public libraries. Such phenomena only attest to the provinciality and ignorance of the Polish intelligentsia and Polish universities, its political and intellectual impunity.”21 To this day, the term “Marxist,” just like “leftist,” continues to be used in public debate chiefly as an insult. There was a widespread sense among rightwing commentators that the left was taking over the realm of art. “The issue of ‘leftist’ domination in the field of contemporary art inspired campaigns directed against

15 See David Ost, Klęska Solidarności. Gniew i polityka w postkomunistycznej Europie (Warsaw: Muza, 2007), p. 51; originally published as Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005).

16 See Rafał Jakubowicz, „Radykalna odmowa.

Rozmowa z Agnieszką Mróz,” in Rafał Jakubowicz, Krzysztof Gazda va in paradiso, exh. cat., Galeria BWA Sokół, Nowy Sącz, 2012, no page; and Rafał Jakubowicz, „Radykalna odmowa. Rozmowa z Agnieszką Mróz,” in Manifestacje romantyczne, exh. cat., Galeria BWA Sokół, Nowy Sącz, 2014, p. 96.

17 See Rafał Jakubowicz, Krzysztof Gazda va in paradiso, brochure (“Radykalna odmowa.

Rozmowa z Agnieszką Mróz”; “Właściwie nie wiem, co to pokazuje…

Rozmowa z Gośką Maciejewską”), as part of the exhibition Romantic Manifestations, Galeria BWA Sokół, Nowy Sącz, 2014, no page. See also “Krzysztof Gazda va in paradiso,” in Manifestacje Romantyczne…, op. cit., pp. 78-113.

18 See Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2007).

19 Tadeusz Kowalik, www.polskatransformacja. pl (Warsaw: Muza, 2009), p. 215.

20 Karl Marx, Das Kapital (1867), Volume One, Chapter 25 “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation,” Section 4 “Different Forms of the Relative Surplus-Population. The General Law of Capitalistic Accumulation,” trans.

Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, https://en.wikisource.org/ wiki/Das_Kapital_Volume_ One/Chapter_25#Section_4.

21 See Jerzy Kochan, “Marksizm, neomarksizm, postmarksizm…,” in Jerzy Kochan, Socjalizm (Warsaw: Scholar, 2013), pp. 213-214.

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22 Łukasz Drozda, Lewactwo.

Historia dyskursu o polskiej lewicy radykalnej (Warsaw: Instytut Wydawniczy Książka i Prasa, 2015). p. 168.

artists, one of the most interesting examples of which,” Łukasz Drozda noted, “was the dispute over an exhibition at the Kronika in Bytom, described by a local journalist as ‘leftist propaganda’ and ‘art in the left’s service’.”22 With the language of Marxist analysis vilified and the left in crisis, no tools were available to correctly recognize and react to the then economic situation. We surrendered to a rhetoric of a “return” to an allegedly culturally-neutral “normality,” a rhetoric that identified the free market and private ownership of the means of production with democracy itself, something that in artistic circles was facilitated by a deeply entrenched sense of elitism and a philosophy of individualism that prevented collective action. Paradoxically, even though the “artist” became the employee type most desired by capital (due to his commitment and fetishized “creativity”), artists too found themselves in economic oppression, in the face of which they long remained helpless, unable to mobilize themselves to resist it in an organized fashion.

Union Movement an d Worker Autonomy

23 Standing, Prekariat…, op. cit., p. 60.

24 Ost, Klęska solidarności…, op. cit., p. 60.

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For over two decades, artists paid little attention to the idea of self-organization. It did not make much sense in the 1990s anyway because labour unions, being weak and conciliatory, were not only unable to prevent the commodification of labour, but actually contributed to a worsening of workers’ situation by accepting and legitimating changes that led to the outsourcing of jobs and, consequently, to the precarization of work, manifested in constant pressure, existential uncertainty, and lack of professional identity, among other things.23 The epic decade’s heroes, admired, it is sad to note, even by union leaders themselves, were businessmen, entrepreneurs, and managers. David Ost points out in his book, Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe, that instead of identifying with the workers, union leaders voiced respectful sympathy for the capitalists, believing that free-market strategies were the best way to protect the interests of the working class.24 Oftentimes, unions hushed up existing conflicts, seeking, at all costs, to reach a settlement with

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the employer. Union leaders accepted the new techniques of “human resources management” and did not oppose the privatization of state enterprises; they only negotiated the terms thereof. Solidarity, Ost notes, strove consistently to turn the working masses’ anger away from class divisions and towards identity divisions, which had negative consequences both for the quality of the Polish democracy and for the union movement’s effectiveness.25 Rather than mobilizing workers, Solidarity wanted to keep a rein on them.

In the amok of vetting members, the union devoted itself to fighting “communist influences,” believing that “evil” communism threatened “good” capitalism. Instead of fighting capitalist exploitation, Solidarity fought for “true” capitalism. After 1989, there was a widespread sense that unions should only function until the arrival of that “authentic capitalism” and then should be disactivated (like the privatized industrial plants), being no longer needed.26 In those conditions, the status and prestige of union activists suffered heavily. Union leaders lost their sense of identification with the rank-and-file and sought at all costs to join the elites, accepting expert positions in government, public administration, and on supervisory boards. The rhetorics of “decommunization” made it possible to criticize the downsides of a free-market economy without losing faith in the free market. As David Ost writes, economic conflicts in post-communist Poland were consistently reframed into a struggle over who is a true member of the community.27 Named as enemies, besides post-communists and leftists, were also non-Catholics, atheists, foreigners, and nonheterosexuals.28 Nationalist, xenophobic, and homophobic rhetorics were used to control and redirect economic anger at the Other. Soon workers themselves became the Other.29 The authorities of Solidarity, a union that soon became the domain of right-wing political parties (a curiosity characteristic for the post-transition reality), presented dissatisfied, striking workers as unreasonable troublemakers. They were supported in this by the successive governments and by oligarchized media, portraying union activists and workers generally as firebrands and enemies of democracy.

Workers became the Other of the new system, albeit not one that critical artists would speak up for as determinedly as they did, for example, on behalf of sexual minorities.

25 Ibidem, p. 84.

26 Ibidem, p. 117.

27 Ibidem, p. 378.

28 Ibidem, p. 158.

29 Ibidem, p. 216.

Does this low representativity of labour unions have its causes in Solidarity’s passive, placatory, pro-market, and

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anti-worker attitude after 1989? Is it connected to how they are repugned today by government agencies and various quasi-union employer organizations? Or perhaps unions simply no longer fulfil the hopes pinned on them? Perhaps the interests of full-time activists are – inevitably – at odds with those of the ordinary workers? Perhaps the chasm between the leadership and the rank-and-file just cannot be bridged?

30 Jarosław Urbański, “Poza reżimem pracy i ideologii,” in Krzysztof Król, ed., Autonomia robotnicza.

Anarchizm, idee, praktyka (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskiej Biblioteki Anarchistycznej, 2007), p. 137.

31 Alfredo M. Bonanno et al., Workers’ Autonomy (London: Elephant, 1990), Chapter 3 “Workers’ councils, self-management and developments in proletarian autonomy.”

32 Ibidem.

33 Krzysztof Król, “Słowo wstępne,” ibidem, p. 8.

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“Conceptions of struggle or political postulates,” Jarosław Urbański writes, “cannot be ‘introduced to’ or ‘forced upon’ the working class from the outside, but have to be developed within it. Employees are not a shapeless mass that can be formed according to this or that ideological theory.”30 It needs to be remembered that labour unions also represent power, reiterating all the mechanisms of its functioning.

“Struggles against production,” writes Alfredo M. Bonanno with members of the Kronstadt Editions collective, “are not aimed at gaining bargaining power, but at contrasting, time after time, the employers’ steps in increasing exploitation and decreasing labour. It is not by chance that the action of the trade unions today is that of suppressing these struggles, both through launching false programmes, and through overt repression.”31 And then he continues: “The various parties and organizations who consider themselves the memory of the working class always tend to filter problems through the polaristic optic of power groups, thereby having a negative effect on the proletariat.”32 Union organizations, originally supposed to remain proactive in struggle, quickly turn into closed organisms with their own rules and internal politics. “The institutionalization of struggle,” Krzysztof Król argues, “is a strategy that sooner or later brings about its end. It constitutes a machine whose needs become partly contrary to those of the broader social movement.”33 Only autonomous actions undertaken by the proletariat make possible the development of specific forms of struggle, feasible in the everyday reality.34

Bonanno, op. cit., Chapter 3.

The union movement is significantly hindered by the ongoing precarization of the working masses; it was only on 2 June 2015 that the Constitutional Tribunal ruled that people employed on “junk contracts” or self-employed can join existing unions or start new ones. “The strengthening of entitlements for regular employees, a twentieth-century achievement of unions and social democratic movements,

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has led to hostility towards unions by the young precariat,” Guy Standing points out. “They see unions as protecting privileges of older employees, privileges they cannot anticipate for themselves.”35 Workers employed full-time are successively replaced with those hired through work agencies on short-term contracts. Thus intra-class antagonisms are born, weakening the proletariat’s position.

35 Standing, Precariat…, op. cit., p. 90.

36 “Opór prekariatu. Prekariacka rewolucja będzie miejska albo nie będzie jej wcale. Z Jarosławem Urbańskim ze związku zawodowego Inicjatywa Pracownicza rozmawiają (tuż przed Świętem Pracy) Krystian Szadkowski i Maciej Szlinder z „Praktyki Teoretycznej,”” Notes na 6 tygodni, no. 84 (May–June 2013), p. 174.

“Is the precariat capable of organizing itself in the hitherto way?” asks Jacek Urbański. “Are these male-dominated, hierarchical forms of organization a viable proposition at all for the precariat, which is predominantly female? Do we not need other, networking unions? The most significant of the precariat’s struggles are highly diverse, organizationally amorphous, non-centralized; they absorb various groups, striking temporary, networking coalitions. You fight for 37 a cause, successfully or not, and then it breaks up. Until Harry Cleaver, Reading 36 Capital Politically (Leeds: the next struggle.” In crisis for over a decade, unionism Anti/Theses, 2000), p. 58. started recovering only in the 2000s, which coincided with the rise of the alterglobalist movement. It was on that wave 38 See Piotr Fijałkowski, that Marcel Szary and Jarosław Urbański started the Workers’ Amazon: „Solidarność krytykuje Inicjatywę Initiative at the Ceglorz factory in Poznań in 2004.

Pracowniczą,” Gazeta Wyborcza, 7 July 2015, http://poznan.gazeta.pl/po znan/1,36001,18317836,am azon-solidarnosckrytykuje-inicjatywepracownicza.html (accessed 16 October 2016); OZZ Inicjatywa Pracownicza w Amazonie, Prawdziwe oblicze Solidarności, 9 July 2015, http://ozzip.pl/teksty/infor macje/wielkopolskie/item/ 1954-prawdziwe-obliczesolidarnosci (accessed 16 October 2016).

The actions of labour unions “may accurately express the struggles of the workers themselves, or they may not. They are often completely at odds with them,”37 Harry Cleaver notes. The so called “yellow,” collaborationist union movement is a means of controlling workers, serving to discourage or thwart any radical actions on their part. In this vein, Solidarity issued a statement condemning the Workers’ Initiative’s “confrontational” position at the Amazon logistics centre in Poznań.38 “The quisling unions,” Laura Akai writes, “are dominated by people who accept the fact that the bosses rule and try no more than to get the best 39 deal from them.”39 In this situation, anarcho-syndicalism Laura Akai, „(Dez)organizacja świata seems the best option. “Anarcho-syndicalists take their pracy dziś,” Recykling Idei, no 9 (Spring/Summer point of departure in the perception of labour unions as 2007), p. 14. a central pivot of the social revolution. Unions are a primary form of organization in capitalism, aimed at resisting and ultimately subverting it, a germ of a new social formula that is only emerging within the existing order, and a basic building block of the free society of the future. In other words, the labour union appears as a practical and highly effective means of resisting the state and the capitalist system, and of raising public awareness about self-orga-

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40 Mikołaj Drabiński, Anarchosyndykalizm w Europie. Teoria i praktyka (Poznań: Oficyna Wydawnicza Bractwa „Trojka”, 2014), p. 107.

41 Poznańskie żłobki. Więcej pracy za niższe płace, brochure (Poznań: OZZ Inicjatywa Pracownicza, 2013), no page numbers.

See also Bruk na rząd, brochure, special edition, Poznań, June 2013.

42 Jarosław Urbański, “Poza reżimem…”, op. cit., p. 138.

nization, self-government, and federalism. Finally, syndicates, anarcho-syndicalists believe, are the way to achieve anarchy in politics and liberal communism in the economy.”40 At the Workers’ Initiative – a radical, autonomist tradition-inspired, anarcho-syndicalist labour union that I am a member of – there is no hierarchy and no paid positions for union officials, which usually lead to the emergence of a “labour aristocracy”: “Union members reject externally imposed divisions between workers and fight in solidarity for their rights and for a complete say over work-places. We do not differentiate between those employed permanently or temporarily, workers or students, pensioners, unemployed persons, women or men – everyone can join our union because the struggle for improving the situation of the working world has to be a common one.”41 Union organizations have a future in Poland, provided that they avoid being merely extensions of political parties, façade organizations legitimating or cushioning the operations of government and capital, and so long as they do keep changing, getting rid of amicability and demonstrating an uncompromising attitude in disputes, and above all promoting the interests of the workers and speaking on their behalf. Unions have to fight for more than just wages growth, achieved at the price of far-reaching compromises.

“Of course, organizational forms based on twentiethcentury examples seem to belong to the past, but this does not mean that other, more mobile and flexible modes of orga-nization do not make sense. The experience of the Workers’ Initiative, Urbański writes, suggests that such “soft struc-turing” is sometimes needed and advantageous; provided that the “grassroots” movement is not hindered, nor emerging protests muffled. It is advantageous, for example, when it is necessary to democratically coordinate the strategy of small workplaces (the so called community and inter-work-place committees), when the employees of the given (newly founded) workplace have little experience in fighting any struggles, and therefore external knowledge becomes highly useful, or, finally, when the issue concerns individuals who have lost contact with their workplace (e.g. illegally sacked union activists).”42 Membership in the Nationwide Labour Union “Workers’ Initiative” (OZZ Inicjatywa Pracownicza) is open to all employees (excepting personnel of the uniformed services,

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forming part of the capitalist state’s apparatus of oppression).

Only permanent-contract employees can sit on workplacelevel basic committees. Membership in inter-workplace committees is open to permanent- and freelance-contract employees of those workplaces that employ fewer personnel than is required to start a basic committee (ten), or those where, for various reasons, this required number is hard to achieve. Membership in community committees is open to all those who are ignored by other unions, including to artists, most of whom have no permanent job or employer, have only irregular income, and can mainly work on precarious contracts.

The Oppression of Creativity For over twenty five years, the neoliberal propaganda of mainstream media has been repudiating all manifestations of union activity as examples of “self-entitlement” and a “homo sovieticus mentality.” The term “homo sovieticus” itself, denoting a passive individual, lacking in the entrepreneurial spirit and therefore expecting state support, was popularized by Father Józef Tischner and promoted by Jerzy Turowicz and the Tygodnik Powszechny community.

It was meant to stigmatize and disparage social groups resistant to neoliberalism. At the same time, neoliberal propaganda has promoted creativity, until recently widely cited in the context of Richard Florida’s notion of society’s supposedly dominant “creative class,” which, tailored for the purposes of gentrification, has resulted in an even 43 greater commodification of culture and art,43 as well See Jamie Peck, “Zastrzyk as productivity, competitiveness, flexibility, availability, kreatywności,” in Ekonomia kultury. Przewodnik innovativeness, rivalry, and a focus on success, construed Krytyki Politycznej (Warsaw: Krytyka Polityczna, 2010), in terms of professional career growth. “As the concepts p. 104. of ‘creativity,’ ‘productivity,’ and ‘innovativeness’ entered the field of waged work, the artist became the prototype of the worker. The worker-as-artist model made it possible to define work in terms of pleasure, play, and self-expression.

Today, working individuals are forced to prove to their bosses that they don’t work out of need, working for work’s sake being considered a guarantee of quality. Thus, as Anna Zawadzka writes, employees have been implicated in an extra labour: the work of concealing the immanent

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44 Anna Zawadzka, “Przymus kreatywności,” in Wieczna radość. Ekonomia polityczna społecznej kreatywności (Warsaw: Fundacja Nowej Kultury Bęc Zmiana, 2011), p. 228.

45 See Patricia Reed, “Sześć sfer problemowych dla artystek oraz ich pracy,” in ibid., pp. 258–259.

46 Marian Golka, Transformacja systemowa a kultura w Polsce po 1989 roku (Warsaw: Instytut Kultury, 1997), pp. 92–93.

47 “Świat należy do ludzi, którzy chcą żyć w wolności” – o życiu, rozwoju i biznesie opowiada Piotr Voelkel, https://andrzejtucholski.pl /2014/swiat-nalezy-doludzi-ktorzy-chca-zyc-w-wolnosci-o-zyciu-rozwojui-biznesie-opowiada-piotr-voelkel/ (accessed 7 December 2020).

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nature of capitalist work.”44 Capital expects you not only to work, but to work with a smile on your lips. The employee’s goals are expected to be identical with those of the company.

He or she must be like an artist who is totally committed to and preoccupied with what he or she does. The employee is expected to demonstrate “spontaneous availability.”

The discourse of creativity soon became a self-exploitation-sanctioning ideology of the Stahkanovites of art, who obscured conflicts of interest between employees and the employers, pushing waged work into the field of immaterial labour, and in the process gentrifying not only urban spaces, but also, as Patricia Reed rightly notes, the field of work.45 In 1997, the sociologist Marian Golka wrote, “It is precisely artists who can be expected to adapt more smoothly than others to the free-market economy and to the new situation generally. This is due to the fact that already before, under communism, many of them, lacking permanent jobs, had to make do somehow by demonstrating initiative and taking up certain challenges stemming from the quasi-art market of the period.”46 Well, artists indeed took up new challenges and made the effort of adaptation , in which they were “helped” greatly by the creativity discourse.

One could actually get the impression that Joseph Beuys’s statement that “everybody is an artist” was proven correct beyond any doubt, albeit in the field of the economy of work; it finds its embodiment in the flexibilization of the forms of employment, the popularization of short-term work contracts as well as the introduction of various models of internship and volunteer work, common too in sectors other than art. Desperate young people are prepared to work for free, constantly enriching their CV, which employers cynically exploit, pushing them into a hell of traineeships and volunteer periods. Asked what he would recommend to a student who has just earned their degree, Piotr Voelkel, a businessman, art collector, and owner of several private institutions of higher learning, replied with an anecdote: “I have a solution that’s a bit funny, but it works. I experienced it myself when a young, ambitious girl once approached me and asked me if I needed someone like her in my company. I had no such needs. She said: you know what, I’ll work for you for free for three months to show you what I can do, and on this basis you’ll decide whether I’m worth keeping. And it worked. She contributed things to the company that I didn’t expect from her.”47

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C u l t u re Wa rs The critical artists of the 1990s, struggling against vitriolic moral censorship, shied away from issues related to growing social stratification and rampant unemployment, which, especially in areas of former state farms and de-industrialized cities such as Wałbrzych, produced conditions comparable only to the Great Depression of the 1930s, a period shameful for capitalism, described by Ludwik Krzywicki in Diaries of the Unemployed or Marie Jahoda et al. in Marienthal: The Sociography of an Unemployed Community,48 among others. Jarosław Urbański notes that “within four years after the transition, the official unemployment rate had risen to over 16 percent, but a number of social groups had de facto been pushed out of the labour market (earlier retirement, disability pensions etc.), so the actual figure was much higher, perhaps even twice as high.”49 As a result, we can easily speak today of a “civilization of unemployment” and a “civilization of inequality.”50 “If economists weren’t aware of the consequences, subscribing to neoliberalism one after another, why should have artists noticed anything?”51 Stanisław Ruksza rightly points out. It was hard at that time, during the transition, to find a distance that would let one acknowledge the tragedy of those who had paid the price – the losers. When the system collapsed, a sharp rise followed in the number of people living at the fringes of society – the homeless, beggars, or those on subsistence-level pensions.52

48 See Marie Jahoda, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Hans Zeisel, Marienthal: The Sociography of an Unemployed Community (Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, 1971).

49 Jarosław Urbański, Prekariat i nowa walka klas. Przeobrażenia współczesnej klasy pracowniczej i jej form walki (Warsaw: Instytut Wydawniczy Książka i Prasa, 2014), p. 169.

50 See Tadeusz Kowalik, www.polskatransformacja.pl, op. cit., p. 225.

51 Marta Świetlik, Wiktoria Kozioł, “Poszerzyć imaginarium polskie.

Rozmowa ze Stanisławem Rukszą wokół wystawy Oblicze dnia. Koszty społeczne w Polsce po 1989 roku,” Obieg, 15 September 2014, http://archiwum-obieg.ujazdowski.pl/teksty/33381 (accessed 16 October 2016).

52 See Jane Hardy, Nowy

Artists did not support, nay, did not even (which seems polski kapitalizm (Warsaw: Instytut Wydawniczy telling) notice the worker protests of the early 1990s, with Książka i Prasa, 2010), p. 179. their apex in the great coal-miners’ strike of 1993. “There is no doubt,” Urbański writes, “that a large part of the working intelligentsia – members of the professional class, hoping for a return to meritocracy and swift growth in the educational sector – distanced themselves already then from 53 worker protests and the workers themselves.”53 Artists Jarosław Urbański, were not moved either by the protests of 2002–2003, epito- Prekariat i nowa…, op. cit., p. 173. mized by the occupation of the cable manufacturing plant Fabryka Kabli in Ożarów, ended only after 214 days by a four-day-long battle with the police and security. Nor did they become seriously involved in the general strike of 2013.

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54 Joanna Ruszczyk, Wojtek Bąkowski, “Ekskluzywna wegetacja,” Wysokie Obcasy, 19 April 2013.

55 Nancy Fraser, “How Feminism Became Capitalism’s Handmaiden – And How to Reclaim It,” Guardian, 14 October 2013; https://www.theguardian.c om/commentisfree/2013/o ct/14/feminism-capitalisthandmaiden-neoliberal (accessed 19 November 2020).

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“When I see demonstrators being batoned by the police, I’m encouraged,” artist Wojciech Bąkowski said in an interview in 2013. “I reassure myself that at least in this instance the state works. It’s not the oppressiveness of systems but rather their weakness that’s a major issue in Poland today, I guess.”54 A major issue in Poland today, and a serious obstacle in the struggle for workers’ rights and working-world solidarity, is the lack of a political consciousness on the part of culture professionals, so “encouraged” by the sight of “demonstrators being batoned,” a proof of the “system” functioning effectively, that they are unable to notice that the struggle for decent living and working conditions is a common one; it concerns both culture-sector workers and other exploited social groups. Other examples of such discreditable statements made by artists could be cited here. Artists had sided, alas, with the neoliberal democracy, gladly striking alliances with the bourgeois class (for example by accepting dubious commissions from real-estate developers).

Art of the 1990s was politicized on the basis of identity rather than class conflict. Trendy critique, including art critique, informed by the liberal feminist discourse, focused on “gender identity”; abandoning the ideas of social equality, it effectively supported the installation of neoliberalism. “In effect, we absolutized the critique of cultural sexism at precisely the moment when circumstances required redoubled attention to the critique of political economy,”55 as Nancy Fraser puts it. Artistic scandals fuelled the media spectacle, making it possible to release growing class anger by finding substitute “enemies.”

At stake in this game for political actors defining themselves as leftist was the construction of an “open” society.

If artists addressed the topic of work after 1989 at all, it was usually in the context of other discourses – primarily of the body and sexuality. In Painters, a 2007 film by Karol Radziszewski, we see the muscular and suntanned bodies of young construction workers, followed by a candid camera as they work on some scaffolding. They have been objectified, becoming merely a gay fetish, an object of desire and sexual fantasies. Instead of class wars, we watched, for over twenty years, numerous cultural wars, perfectly resonating with the media-amplified conflicts related to critical art, and especially body art, which, as Artur Żmijewski put it, “played the role of the sucker, paying

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part of the price of the country’s transition (which also the scandals surrounding recent art can probably be attributed to).”56 Those conflicts generated divisions that were discursively framed and politically exploited by the conservative right. In the art of the first decade of the transition, the topic of work was as good as nonexistent. Moreover, the art community shared an aversion to the supposedly still privileged yet “unproductive” workers; there actually reigned a kind of abhorrence and contempt of physical labour, which could easily be called class racism.57 Although artists, unless they had wealthy parents or partners, were hardly able to live off art (most, after a period of intense struggles, working side jobs, gave up, leaving the art world), they still generated antagonisms, which power and capital played on for their own benefit. As a result, more than twenty five years after the introduction of shock therapy, we, the avant-garde of the precariat, still find it difficult to define our own position in terms of labour.

Instead, artists have continued to reiterate Romantic mythologies that justify exploitation. “Art is situated closer to play or love, which are the opposite of work,” Zbigniew Libera proclaimed, “and when the artist begins to work, the results are never good.”58 Interestingly, this did not prevent him from posing for a photo in his studio with a sign saying, “I’m an artist, but this doesn’t mean that I work for free.”

The picture of Libera facing us from his sofa became an icon of art professionals’ strike and protests, and was featured on the cover of the Black Book of Polish Artists.59

F rom Ar t St r i ke t o Pre c a r i at Street Demonstration

56 Artur Żmijewski, “Stosowane sztuki…,” op. cit., p. 24.

57 See Monika Bobako, Konstruowanie odmienności klasowej jako urasawianie. Przypadek polski po 1989 roku (Biblioteka Online Think Tanku Feministycznego, 2011), http://www.ekologiasztuka. pl/pdf/f0108Bobako2011.pdf (accessed 7 December 2020).

58 Roman Pawłowski, “Libera: Ludzkość się opamięta?

Jestem sceptykiem,” Gazeta Wyborcza, 31 July 2015.

59 See Katarzyna Górna, Karol Sienkiewicz, Mikołaj Iwański, Kuba Szreder, Stanisław Ruksza, Joanna Figiel, eds, Czarna księga polskich artystów (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2015).

Today we are wiser with the several years’ experience of the Civic Forum of Contemporary Art, which did away with the notion of the artist as a desperate pursuer of symbolic capital, remunerated with nothing but increased visibility, and which lobbied successfully for the introduction of art-sector minimum-wage agreements. We are after an unprecedented strike, the Day Without Art, an important and highly symbolic event, during which it turned out that another professional group, artists this time, is openly manifesting its discontent, because the flexibilization of employment is bad for the culture sector too, and the neoliberal

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60 OZZ Inicjatywa Pracownicza, Witamy nowe komisje!, 18 August 2016, http://ozzip.pl/teksty/infor macje/ogolnopolskie/item /2161-witamy-nowekomisje (accessed 16 October 2016).

61 Quoted after Agnieszka Maria Wasieczko, “Czy strajk artystów może być skuteczny?” Obieg, 5 July 2013, http://archiwumobieg.u-jazdowski.pl/teksty/ 29145 (accessed 16 October 2016).

62 Ibidem.

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narrative constructed around it (such as the positive connotation of the term “freelancer”) is a bunch of nonsense. In early 2014, the newly founded Art Workers’ Community Committee of the Workers’ Initiative initiated and organized a nationwide demonstration as part of the campaign, “We, the Precariat”, which was held in Warsaw on 23 May 2015, i.e., on the eve of the third anniversary of the Day Without Art. The event popularized the term “precariat,” allowing workers from other industries to better recognize their own position in the capitalist mode of production, and to realize that the issue concerns almost all sectors. The Art Workers have inspired the founding of numerous basic committees in the culture sector; among the institutions where such committees have recently been founded are the Contemporary Museum in Wrocław and the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews.60 Speaking in a panel discussion accompanying the exhibition Freelancer at the Zachęta in 2013, Jarosław Urbański mentioned the previous year’s artist strike: “Though half-baked and weak, it was still, to me, a blow to the heart of the system. Everybody thought that artists were coping, and yet they have no social security. Everything is seemingly up to us, but we’ve become stuck in the worst position – that’s a paradox.”61 The model of the freelance artist, an individualist, a self-focused monad, a hyper-flexible, mobile worker and, at the same time, a creative entrepreneur and socialite, had until then functioned as an exemplar of the work relation forced upon workers in other sectors as well. Yet it turned out that, in spite of what neoliberal propaganda would have had us believe, the system did not work well even for artists themselves. Worse still, it did not work at all. “If a given group raises issues, it immediately gains a different social status,” Urbański said. “When artists question their position on the labour market, this has a different significance than in the case of other social groups, for example, domestic cleaners.”62 Despite the relatively privileged position we occupy in the social hierarchy, we encounter exactly the same problems as domestic cleaners, with the difference that – due to our situation in the social division of labour – our voice can be heard far more easily in the space of public debate. This, however, requires politicizing the demands, instrumentally leveraging the position of institutions that we exert influence over, work for, or collaborate with

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(academies, universities, museums, galleries, art centres), and, above all, adopting an egalitarian stance to pave the way for alliances with other professional groups. “Artists are atomized and organizationally weak. At the same time, they are perceived by the public as those who live the good life and accept their condition. So how are they to speak about their problems to inspire others and encourage them to act? This is the most important challenge. As contemporary precarians, artists find themselves ill at ease in hierarchized forms of organization, and better in non-centralized networking unions which will allow them to build 63 coalitions and join in the common struggle.”63 We are finally Ibidem. beginning to speak in a different language and act collectively. But not all, of course.

Komuna’s Bourgeois Awakening

A sad picture of a culture professional’s state of consciousness in 2015 is provided by the words of Tomasz Plata, curator of the festival, “We, the Bourgeois”, who fantasizes about a “bourgeois awakening”: “When I see critical artists organizing a campaign to support striking coal-miners, I can only shrug or laugh. Critical artists are unable to 64 abandon their leftist phantasmagorias about fraternity “Mamy Amisza pod skórą.

Rozmowa z Tomaszem with the working class, even though workers are the most Platą,” Dwutygodnik.com, no. 153 (February 2015), reactionary part of society, one openly hostile to left-wing http://www.dwutygodnik.co m/artykul/5759-mamyvalues.”64 It would be worth asking Plata, eulogist of the amisza-pod-skora.html (accessed 16 October 2016). bourgeoisie as the “sole effective revolutionary class in 65 history,” when exactly did workers become reactionary – 65 in 1980, 1993, or perhaps 2002? Or 2015? “From their glory Ibidem. days as the heroes of 1980, the undisputed vanguard of a nonviolent revolution that meant all things to all people, Polish workers found their social prestige steadily devalued throughout the 1980s. When the decade was over,” writes David Ost, “labour ended up being recast as the epitome of a social pathology: a deformed remnant of the old system fighting irrationally (a key term in the new narrative) to hold onto privileges it neither earned nor deserved and which, if maintained, would ruin the chances for the new system to succeed. From the harbinger of the new, they were reinterpreted as a spectre from the past.”66 66 Ost, Klęska solidarności…, Plata’s argument resonates, unfortunately, with a vast op. cit., p. 93.

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68 Ibidem, pp. 71, 94.

69 Ibidem, p. 108.

array of sociological literature describing workers as a marginalized, objectified “obstacle”67 to democratization, with ignominous attacks on proletarians of the 1980s (in the fields of politics, the economy, culture as well as ideology). A formation that brought Plata purported “freedom,” the twenty fifth anniversary of which was recently so boisterously celebrated, has suddenly become reactionary? What is the nature of this reaction? Because referencing the bourgeois ethos – which unlike the working-class one introduces divisions in order to then play on them – is by principle reactionary, just as is the fact that the author unreflectively embraces a crudest, Catholic, nationalist narrative of the working class. Plata clearly needs to be reminded that in the course of history it was always workers who stood out as the most consistently pro-democratic force; when the bourgeoisie fought for its political rights, the working class fought for the scope of those rights to be widened.68 After 1990, the elites widely shared Victorian-era notions according to which the working class is “dangerous” and needs to be “reined in,” for it had become an obstacle on the path to democratic reform.69 From “friends,” a symbol of the changes, workers soon became “enemies.” Neoliberal demagogues believe that workers should bravely fight alongside them for “true” capitalism to take root, and avoid a “self-entitlement mentality,” that is, accept the undoing of social security as a relic of the past era. After two decades of being brainwashed, of being vilified for defending their interests, can workers be blamed for their false consciousness and antiliberal protests?

Accusing workers of being “reactionary,” Tomasz Plata forgets in his reactionary statement about the difficult process of attaining class consciousness, that is, of moving from an unawakened “class in itself” to a self-conscious “class for itself,” an active historical subject (in our community, this process has taken as long as two decades and – as Plata’s comments show – a lot still remains to be done). Jerzy Kochan wrote that “consciousness must not be treated as something perfect; just as there is no thinking without the thinking subject, so there can be no class consciousness without its material institutional media: labour unions, healthcare funds, political parties, the press, ideologists, festivities, marches, strikes, the history of the worker movement, intellectuals, artists,

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theories, and saints.”70 Class consciousness means that workers recognize themselves as a social group whose interests are different from those of the other groups.

Operaismo introduced the distinction between “labour-power” (workers as a variable factor, an exploited factor of production) and the “working class” (the takeover of collective political power through the rejection of the performance of work), which laid the ground for the methodological distinction between the technical and political class compositions.71 “When it functions as part of capital,” Harry Cleaver writes, “the working class is labour-power, and capital defines the class by this fact. This can be clarified by using Marx’s distinction between the working class in itself and for itself. The working class in itself is constituted of all those who are forced to sell their labour-power to capital and thus to be labour-power. It is a definition based purely on a common set of characteristics within capital.

The working class for itself (or working class as working class – defined politically) exists only when it asserts its autonomy as a class through its unity in struggle against its role as labour-power.”72

70 Jerzy Kochan, Socjalizm, op. cit., p. 104.

71 See “Operaismo,” Przegląd Anarchistyczny, no. 7 (Spring–Summer 2008), pp. 182-184.

72 Cleaver, Reading Capital…, op. cit., p. 83.

I do not know what “fraternity with the working class” Plata meant, nor how he understands the term “working class,” which, as Paolo Virno writes, “is defined solely by the repression as well as social and political undoing of labour- 73 Paolo Virno, “Siła robocza,” -power as a commodity.”73 Artistic communities “moved in Alisa Del Re et al., Marks. away from radical appeals for the commoning of art and Nowe perspektywy, ed.

Libera Universita ‘dissolving’ it in life itself, and therefore it did not,” Jarosław Metropolitana, trans.

Sławomir Królak (Warsaw: Urbański argued, “become a form of an ultimate refusal to Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 2014). accept the economic regime of work, even though such hopes were pinned on it.”74 I do not know where Plata saw 74 Jarosław Urbański, “Poza those artist-organized support campaigns for striking reżimem…,” op. cit., p. 139. miners during the latest protests in Silesia (for I, though on a lookout for them, did not notice any), nor what he means by “left-wing values.” One of the participants of Plata’s festival, Grzegorz Laszuk of the pseudo-leftist Komuna Warszawa (though perhaps the name Korporacja Warszawa would be more appropriate today), went even further than that, saying “I think the last twenty five years were, after all, a great success. And I regret that instead of stressing all that we’ve done well, people fume about the inevitable blunders. That’s a foolish tactic politically because it repels the potentially progressive bourgeoisie, blaming it, as the beneficiary of an ‘unjust success,’ for the wrongs suffered

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75 Quoted after Izabela Szymańska, “We, the Bourgeois Festival: It Is Time to Start Negotiating with the Contemporary Bourgeois,” Gazeta Wyborcza, 28 February 2015.

by the unsuccessful.”75 This sounds almost like Michał Żebrowski confessing in his famous discussion with Paweł Demirski on TVN that he is “set up pretty well in life” because at his farm in Podhale he keeps cows, horses, pigs, chickens… Plata and Laszuk, two members of the “progressive bourgeoisie” from under the sign of President Bronisław Komorowski’s chocolate eagle, who have perhaps been successful, who probably on time and without much self-sacrifice pay the mortgage on their apartments at posh new developments and therefore do not have to deal with forced evictions and tenant expellers – which is something they can only be congratulated for – Plata and Laszuk, I repeat, have unfortunately remained mentally stuck in early transition narratives. Their words bear testimony to the devastation, or rather colonization, that the quarter of a century of a nearly exclusive cultural focus on obscenity politics have wrought on the minds of persons strongly aspiring to the middle class. Balcerowicz should be proud of himself!

The Lifestyle “Left”

76 See Jacek Tittenbrun, Klasa robotnicza czy pracownicza?, originally published at the website Lewica Bez Cenzury, which was closed down in 2008, now available at www.1917.net.pl/?q=node/ 4241 (accessed 16 October 2016).

77 Ost, Klęska Solidarności…, op. cit., p. 275.

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Let us return to the 1990s. The rhetorics of advancement to the middle class, an “entity whose existence our commentariat, politicians, and no small part of academia crave like water in the desert and pray for appropriately,”76 was at the time a means of defusing the anger of masses forced to tighten their belts and, worse still, made it possible to do away with the idea of class formation as a process where some classes solidify their position at the expense of others.77 The aspiring middle class and the elites decided to dissociate themselves from the workers. “The first thing they did once they’d climbed to power on the workers’ backs,” Jan Sowa writes, “was to condemn the same workers – viewed not as real people, but as variables in Leszek Balcerowicz’s anti-inflation equations – to unemployment and impoverishment. For workers in the 1990s, ‘solidarity with the elites’ did not prove a good idea. These elites, which back in the 1980s firmly rejected postulates of worker autonomy and workplace democracy, a decade later excluded the movement’s very initiators – workers

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themselves.”78 The way of thinking exemplified by Plata and Laszuk, particularly trendy in the late 1980s, led eventually – despite the intentions of the liberal “Roundtable” elites – to the triumphant rise of a radical, xenophobic right. The recent election victory of the Law and Justice (PiS) party, the success of the Kukiz ‘15 platform, on whose ticket the nationalists have made it to parliament, and of Ryszard Petru’s Nowoczesna party, which revives Balcerowicz-style free-market slogans and weaponizes the false myth of union “privileges,”79 are all partly its fruit. PiS is strong with the weakness of the liberals and the aftermath of the predatory privatization they oversaw (together with the SLD) and their welfare-policy failures. “Insecure people make angry people, and angry people are volatile, prone to support a politics of hatred and bitterness,”80 Guy Standing warned. Solidarity leaders believed that only leftists spoke up for workers, so unless they themselves intended to be perceived as such, they should speak up for the emerging middle class, the bourgeoisie. This is why, David Ost writes, the right was able to triumph. It saw an opportunity and seized it, assuming the role of the classic left, an organizer of angry, abandoned, unemployed workers.81 Ost’s words from over a decade ago sound highly relevant today.

Solidarity intellectuals disregarded workers. Treating them in an instrumental and very condescending manner, they rejected in effect their own social base. The right, in turn, and the nationalists – a force that has dominated the bourgeoisie frustrated with its inability to achieve the living standard it aspired to – kept offering workers substitute objects to release their anger on: “leftists,” “communists,” “atheists,” “homosexuals,” “gender ideology,” “foreigners,” and omnipresent “mafias,” proposing – instead of a struggle for their class interests – the show of “lustration” (the vetting of public official for ties with the communist-era security services), and introducing, a step by step, religious Catholic fundamentalism, and recently engineering a cult following around the so called “cursed soldiers.” Today the Other that the PiS government has decided to focus the hatredand xenophobia-based national community on are mainly guest workers from Ukraine and, even more so, from the Arab-speaking world, i.e. war refugees, those members of the industrial reserve workforce that have no worker rights and no social security whatsoever.82

78 Jan Sowa, Inna Rzeczpospolita jest możliwa! Widma przeszłości, wizje przyszłości (Warsaw: Grupa Wydawnicza Foksal, 2015), pp. 167-168.

79 See Jakub Gregorczyk, “Związkowy ‘czarny lud’ Ryszarda Petru,” Strajk.eu, 14 January 2016, http://strajk.eu/zwiazkowyczarny-lud-ryszarda-petru (accessed 16 October 2016).

80 Standing, Precariat…, op. cit., p. 148.

81 See Ost, Klęska Solidarności…, op. cit., p. 15.

82 See Jakub Grzegorczyk, Ignacy Jóźwiak, Wojciech Nadgłowski, Katarzyna Rakowska, ed. Mateusz Janik, Uchodźcy mile widziani. Migracje, kapitalizm, ruch pracowniczy, brochure (Warsaw: OZZ Inicjatywa Pracownicza, 2015), p. 6, http://ozzip.pl/publikacje/ks iazki-i-broszury/item/2004migracje-kapitalizm-ruchpracowniczy (accessed 16 October 2016).

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83 See Oskar Szwabowski, Uniwersytet-FabrykaMaszyna. Uniwersytet w perspektywie radykalnej (Warsaw: Instytut Wydawniczy “Książka i Prasa,” 2014), p. 189.

84 Ost, Klęska Solidarności…, op. cit., p. 49.

85 “Socialism,” Tymoteusz Kochan writes, “is not a movement for wealth, but for the social control of property, and therefore also for excluding as much property as possible from capitalist reproduction.

The actual struggle of socialism is not to spend more money on subsidies, but to socialize spending and the economy at large in an ever greater number of aspects. It is through the socialization of general welfare, housing, or cultural goods that the process of capitalist social reproduction can be stopped”; Tymoteusz Kochan, “Trzy typy antagonizmów,” Nowa Krytyka, no. 32 “Marksizm w Kulturze Polskiej,” pp. 154-155.

86 Ost, Klęska Solidarności…, op. cit., p. 13.

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Critical art was part of a wider struggle for a pluralistic “open society” and “civil society” (terms that rapidly gained currency after 1989, supporting the free-market transition and legitimizing the outsourcing of public-sector functions to NGOs, which meant pushing full-time salaried staff into unpaid volunteerism), the Polish apologists of which came usually from the privileged classes that had benefited from the transition. No wonder, therefore, that they situated their left-wing values in the cultural sphere only and were unable to assimilate the language of class conflict, the use of which was simply not in their interest (which is precisely why worker struggles are the last thing that comes to Tomasz Plata’s mind when he thinks of “left-wing values”).

Most of them shared a sense that a class-based society had been supplanted by one consisting of groups sharing a similar lifestyle, ethnic background, values, consumer models, and gender. Artists combined neoliberal economic views with a critical attitude in the cultural sphere, limited, alas, to taboo-breaking in the fields of religion and bodily politics. The academic left with their safe regular jobs understood only the ambitions of the so called middle class, but had little empathy for the needs of the proletariat.

Let us remember that in 1989 academia supported neoliberalism, becoming a “protective bumper” for a system of social injustice, serving to mute class conflicts and absorb the shocks of potential revolt. “Acting on behalf of the government,” Oskar Szwabowski writes, “they acted like a state aristocracy, thinking that after the transition they would remain a privileged group.”83 The world of science was practically unconcerned with workers. “Most of the literature about the democratization, David Ost writes, either ignored the labour world or stressed that it should accept the upcoming changes, which was of course another way of ignoring it. It simply considered real workers’ real problems as unimportant for the subject at hand.84 Leftist identity did not manifest itself, as it should, in reference to ownership relations, in a striving to replace the capitalist mode of production with a socialist one,85 but in aspects mainly of lifestyle. In Poland, where the neoliberal and nationalist discourses reign supreme, liberals can pass for the left. This, however, Ost qualifies, does not make them true socialists.86 Across art schools, the dominant ideology continues to be widely accepted as a neutral, apolitical discourse – and in this sense it is almost transparent, which further entrenches the still-alive myth of the

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autonomy of art. Besides academism and conceptualism, the only acceptable option in art academies after 1989 was postmodern leftism expressed through so called differentiating (radical, engaged) art. Economic issues, in turn (except coarse, neoliberal “art marketing”), were not on the radar at all. When resorting to Marxist terms, one is immediately accused of “indoctrination” (as if other attitudes were apolitical and did not – with their alleged neutrality – underpin the dominant discourse). Artists considered as left-leaning, who usually had extensive contacts and significant cultural capital, but were themselves exploited and lacked prospects for permanent employment, had separated themselves from the losers of the transformation, including the “bigots,” represented by the “mohair berets,” by a barricade of “crassness.” They could at most be joked about, like Maciej Kurak did in the work Duel (2005), where he invited pensioners to the Old Brewery Gallery, situated in an upmarket shopping mall owned by Grażyna Kulczyk, so that, dressed in fur coats and berets, they formed a pressing crowd (that was what the project was about), for which they received a 250 grams 87 coffee pack each.87 One can hardly resist the impression See Marcin Krasny, “Maciej na Dzień Babci,” that culture professionals sided with power and the elites, Kurak Obieg, 28 January 2005, http://archiwum-obieg.usupporting a system of class contempt. jazdowski.pl/recenzje/397 (accessed 16 October 2016).

T h e Tw e n t y - F i v e - Ye a r s - o f - F r e e d o m Mantra an d the Conformism of the “Chocolate” Elites “I know we have achieved great things, such as a bloodless, internationally recognized revolution and twenty five years of freedom. We have capable businesspeople, economic growth, EU direct investment, great, talented young people, and start-up companies that are making inroads in Silicon Valley. We travel around the world, and pursue professional careers on the developed markets. More and more people have been enjoying this freedom, which for them is like a breeze of fresh air. It is easy to forget that there are also people who feel surprised and confused by freedom.

People who perceive it as a threat. Like birds that spent years living in a small but safe cage, and have suddenly and unwittingly found themselves outside, among strange,

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88 Piotr Voelkel, “Wolność jak step szeroki,” Gazeta Wyborcza, 27 June 2014, http://m.wyborcza.pl/wybo rcza/1,132749,16233394,Wo lnosc_jak_step_szeroki (accessed 16 October 2016).

89 Michał Merczyński, “Oświadczenie w sprawie odwołania spektaklu Golgota Picnic,” http://2014.maltafestival.pl/pl/news/oswiad czenie-w-sprawieodwolania-spektaklugolgota-picnic (accessed 16 October 2016).

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unfamiliar creatures. Such people seek shelter, leaders who will promise to take care of and protect them. They form groups, strike absurd but reassuring alliances, seek common challenges, observe a world full of threats, and fight anyone they deem hostile. They use every opportunity to rally and feel their power.” These words were not spoken

by Plata or Laszuk, but by Piotr Voelkel, a Poznań-based financier and entrepreneur active in the furniture industry, who wrote an emotional letter to Gazeta Wyborcza in the aftermath of the scandalous censoring of the theatre show Golgota Picnic back in 2014.88 In the context of the Polish “lifestyle left,” the case of Golgota Picnic appears particularly grotesque. The show was censored, for reasons of conformism, by Michał Merczyński, director of the city hallpampered Malta Theatre Festival, under pressure from the then mayor and his good friend, Ryszard Grobelny (who at the time sat on the board of directors of the National Audiovisual Institute, until recently run by Merczyński). Correctly sensing the prevailing public sentiment, Grobelny was in fact fawning to conservative voters ahead of an election that, his political intuition told him, was set to be won by the fundamentalist Catholic right. When a scandal broke out, Merczyński deftly made a U-turn and presented himself as a victim of censorship.

Going on the talk-show circuit with the show’s author, Rodrigo Garcia, talking about how they’d been vilified by “bigots,” citing threats and insults received from “mohairs” incited by Gazeta Polska, he inaugurated a festival of hypocrisy, as it were. In his pettifogging explanations published on the Malta Festival’s website, Merczyński resorted to an exalted tone, saying more or less the same as Voelkel: “All this assumes an even greater significance as we celebrate twenty five years of freedom and democracy in Poland. It is precisely on this important anniversary, during the 24th edition of the Malta Theatre Festival, which since the outset has supported creativity and plurality, that radical groups violating the right to freedom of speech and demanding the introduction of preventive censorship, get a chance to speak. This decision should not be the end but the beginning of a nationwide debate on how to protect the fundamental value that is freedom.”89 Malta’s skilful crisis management worked wonders. Most of the public bought Merczyński’s argumentation. Artists did not withdraw from the cast, the shows took place as planned, and soon there began to mobilize groups of urban activists who – almost

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under the director’s supervision – read out aloud the script of the censored play. Instead of pointing to the actual censor, they stood with their chests thrown out proudly, some even with national-colour armbands, facing a handful (though a reverse proportion had been expected) of old people with crucifixes and a Gazeta Polska banner, and experiencing, in collective elation, a peculiar catharsis.

Merczyński won. Grobelny lost the election. Two more editions of Malta have since taken place. “Agression,” Piotr Voelkel wrote, “is a symptom of helplessness, a result of a fear of freedom, of the wide steppe where everything depends entirely on us. It is also a reaction to a sense of 90 failure, of missed opportunities that others have seized.”90 Voelkel, op. cit.

Piotr Voelkel and Michał Merczyński had their opportunities during the transition and seized them, each in their own way of course. Most people did not have them. Politicians as well as crony business and cultural elites have been trying to play the same game since the early 1990s, seeking to polarize the electorate around actually insignificant religious- or cultural-politics issues, thus diverting attention away from what really matters, i.e. class-based confrontation.

The advocates of an “open society” or “civil society,” the “progressive bourgeoisie” so courageously staging readings of the Golgota Picnic script, are willing to stand up for civil liberties, freedom of speech, and sexual minority rights in Equality Parades, or, more recently, for abstract “democracy” in KOD (Democracy Defence Committee) marches, but not 91 See Natalia Mazur, “Wyzysk necessarily so for the worker rights of miners or of temsprzątaczek. Firma zarabia porary workers hired through outsourcing agencies in krocie, ukrywa się w Londynie i nie płaci pośrednikom,” Special Economic Zones. There was a highly publicized Gazeta Wyborcza, 20 August case in Poznań of cleaners working at the Adam Mickiewicz 2014, http://wyborcza.pl/1,87648,1 6500307,Wyzysk_sprzatacz University. They were employed on junk-job contracts by ek__Firma_zarabia_krocie_ _ukrywa sie.html (accessed an outside company, London-based FMD Consulting 16 October 2016).

Marcin Działowski, which was failing to pay them.91 Krytyka Teoretyczna issued then a radical open letter to the Rector,92 92 See Ogólnopolski Związek which, however, received only lukewarm support from the Zawodowy Inicjatywa Pracownicza, Naukowcy academic community, for cleaners, though working for the popierają sprzątaczki, 11 March 2014, University, are not – performing such a contemptible, http://ozzip.pl/teksty/inform acje/wielkopolskie/item/17 invisible labour – part of “our” community. It is worth 09-naukowcy-popierajaremembering that from this community, due to the constant sprzataczki (accessed 16 October 2016). pressure for academia to relentlessly cut costs and follow a strict profitability policy, some of the teaching faculty may soon be excluded as well. That is only a matter of time.

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93 See Daniel Flisa, “Sprzątaczki wracają na etat.

Uczelnie stawiają wymagania w przetargach,” Gazeta Wyborcza, 26 January 2016, http://wyborcza.pl/1,75398, 19533798,sprzataczkiwracaja-na etat-uczelniestawiaja wymagania-wprzetargach.html (accessed 16 October 2016).

94 See Katarzyna Kała, “Uniwersytet Opolski wraca do umów o pracę.

Koniec z outsourcingiem,” Gazeta Wyborcza, 6 July 2016, http://opole.wyborcza.pl/o pole/1,35114,20355458,uowraca-do-umow-oprace.html (accessed 16 October 2016).

95 See Olga Baszuro, Posprzątać wyzysk – o solidarności studentów z portierami i sprzątaczkami, Ogólnopolski Związek Zawodowy Inicjatywa Pracownicza, 25 August 2016, http://www.ozzip.pl/teksty/ publicystyka/strategiezwiazkowe/item/2169posprza-tac-wyzysk-osoli-dar-no-sci-stu-denttow-z-por-tie-rami-isprza-tacz-kami (accessed 16 October 2016).

96 See http://vod.tvp.pl/kultura/ hala-odlotow/wideo/halaodlotow-s-ii-odc-34praca-czy-wyzysk/ 14853683.

The coverage Praktyka Teoretyczna gave to the case of the AMU cleaners, supported by a campaign launched by the Workers’ Initiative, eventually produced results. In 2016, the University of Warsaw and the Adam Mickiewicz University introduced a requirement for outsourced service staff to be employed on regular contracts.93 They were soon joined by the University of Opole.94 Today, students and instructors at the Art Academy of Szczecin are fighting for decent working conditions for receptionists and cleaners. For Fuck’s Sake, It Won’t Clean Itself (2016), a flag by Olga Apiecionek (Baszuro), has become a symbol of this struggle.95

The Class Dimension o f “ R i s k - Ta k i n g ” a n d “ C r e a t i v i t y ”

“Young people tend to think that such a [job] contract guarantees some kind of security. They don’t want to take risks; don’t understand this aspect of risk-taking. And this risk is a pleasure,” the doyen of critical art and face of the Day Without Art, Zbigniew Libera, said on TVP Kultura.96 These words unexpectedly earned him the sympathy of Andrzej Sadowski of the Adam Smith Centre and other economists talking on the show who were cast there rather as his adversaries. Libera was unable, however, to relate his after all privileged situation to the reality of people on the McJobs, like cashiers at supermarkets or cleaning workers. He forgot to add that for most working people “risk-taking” was not and would not be synonymous with “pleasure.” The show presented Libera’s work Freelancer (2014), which shows a railway worker who has caught and is leading a tormented, naked artist – Libera himself. This image perfectly visualizes a way of thinking about workers that was prevalent in the art community after 1989.

The point is not that Libera did not realize what was going on in the 1990s, because everybody was lost and helpless then, but that he has still not caught on. And he, for one, should have. Among the works of a young artist, Julia Popławska, alumnus of the Arts University of Poznań, is a film, If You Really Want Something (2013), a short documentary about her mother and her mother’s friends who

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work in Germany as cleaners to provide for their families in Poland. The women talk about the hardships of the work, about getting there, being separated from family, longing for kids, or the language barrier. We learn about the challenges (related to economics, family, living space) that have forced them to go abroad and that prevent them from returning to places where their prospects are virtually nil.

Workers in Germany are much better paid of course than in Poland, a fact that, incidentally, allowed the author to pay for her tuition at the Poznań art school. But this often comes at the cost of alcohol and substance abuse. In the closing scene, the mother wonders whether, for all the effort put into her studies, her daughter would not end up in the same situation as her, i.e. as a guest worker abroad.

In this short film we find a critique of the conditions of post-transition Poland, the issue of emigration as hidden unemployment, a feedback loop between women’s paid work and reproductive labour (which resembles the former), and the protagonists’ anxiety about their own future. In deciding to leave, they took a huge risk, displaying an incredible amount of flexibility and creativity. What the main protagonist thought at first would be no more than a year of work has now been eighteen and counting. “She met women who like her had left their own homes to clean at other peoples’,” Julia Popławska said in an interview. “She 97 asked them how long they’d been working like that. When Bo jak się mocno czegoś they said two years, she felt pretty sure she’d never endure chce. Wywiad z Julią Rozbrat.org, that long. A few years later, she grew anxious she might get 11Popławską, July 2013, 97 http://www.rozbrat.org/kult stuck there for life.” This, however, is a kind of risk-taking ura-film/3976-bo-jak-siemocno-czegos-chceand of creativity that no one notices or appreciates because wywiad-z-julia-poplawska they bring neither splendour nor a significant improvement (accessed 16 October 2016). in economic terms. It is certainly not the “creativity” that 98 Richard Florida wrote about.98 “What determines which See Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class practices are recognized (or rather anointed) as creative (New York: Basic Books, 2002). and therefore paid for?” Anna Zawadzka wonders. “Can the complex survival strategies developed by people who have been excluded from the labour market be called creative too? Are terms borrowed from neoliberal discourse applicable to the experiences of people who have found themselves outside the field of visibility? Is creativity unconnected with the possibility of a career or a striving to have one the same creativity that employers require from us? There is finally a creativity that, particularly in the conditions of an ongoing liberalization of labour regulations, is required by worker-rights activism. How to demand

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99 Anna Zawadzka, “Przymus kreatywności,” in Wieczna radość…, op. cit., p. 236.

rights and how to exercise them without a formal work contract? How to prove you have been unjustly fired when you were not officially employed to begin with? How to recover unpaid wages? How to stage a strike in the subcontractor sector? All this requires a great deal of creativity; creativity not so much demanded by employers as unwanted by them. This creativity is an excess, a ‘human capital’-produced surplus, a bastard of new capitalism.”99 The notion of “creativity,” like that of “risk-taking,” obviously has a class dimension.

N e o s l aver y

What is the “working class” today? Artur Żmijewski sought to confront the question in the film project Świecie (2009), which documents a sculpture retreat at the Mekro industrial plant in Świecie (where steel constructions and containers are manufactured, among other things), an event that echoed numerous communist-era projects seeking to bring together the worlds of art and industry. Żmijewski showed how widely these worlds had diverged. The problem is, however, that his project sought to, and did, prove a certain preconceived assumption.

In response to the proposed lead theme – “The Worker” – the (mostly highly conservative) sculptors participating in the retreat – with the possible exception of Jacek Adamas – came up with trivial, simplistic concepts, which were then slated for execution. One of the participants said, “I think it’s about the idea and the essence – what being a worker means in the first place.” Another described her project thus: “A workman, a workwoman, a worker ant, an ant carrying something on its back”; yet another found inspiration in the workman’s overalls. Someone proposed “men lifting a steel pipe,” another a puzzle, arguing that workers are “part of a larger system, a larger machine, some really huge enterprise that consists of many people and it is only when a piece of this puzzle falls out that you begin to notice it.” One of the works produced was an abstract form loosely inspired by safety gloves. “This may sound banal and incredible today,” asserted the project’s

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curator, Karina Dziewczyńska, “but really during those two weeks of joint work between artists and workers, the utopia of ‘inter-class’ cooperation was fulfilled one hundred percent.”100 Yet, judging by the contents of Żmijewski’s film, “cooperation” is hardly the word to be used here. The invited artists presented generally rather banal propositions, which the workers then very professionally crafted, treating them as yet another task assigned to them as part of their job, though perhaps a somewhat more interesting one than usually. Unlike the artists, the workers were able to correctly describe their position. One said, “They respect the worker when they need to overthrow a government. Afterwards, once they’ve climbed to power, they forget about him.

Today the ordinary worker has been turned into a slave.”

Although the slave is someone who owns neither the means of production nor his own labour-power, and the worker is someone who owns the latter, but not the former,101 the slavery metaphor proves apt. “It is not true that in this society we are free. We are only free to get up every morning and go to work,” reads the text The Refusal of Work by the Workers Committee of Porto Marghera.102 “I set out from the refusal of labour, from resistance to work,” Antonio Negri writes, “because I maintain that the capitalist organization of labour is true and proper slavery.”103 Slavery can be said to be an inherent characteristic of the current system.

Neoliberalism, Yiannis Mylonas argues, is responsible not only for a growing gulf between the rich and poor, but also for an increase in the degree of exploitation, which, contingent on geographic, civic, and class variables, results in the emergence of various forms of neoslavery.

Moreover, neoliberalism produces a constantly growing excluded population that is brutally refused the right to earn a living.104 The employees of Alima-Gerber complained that the ministry had treated them “like slaves.”105 “The continuity of the relation between slave and slave holder is preserved by the direct compulsion exerted upon the slave. The free worker, on the other hand, must preserve it himself, since his existence and that of his family depend upon his constantly renewing the sale of his labour capacity to the capitalist,”106 wrote Marx. Moreover, “in the case of the slave, the minimum wage appears as a constant magnitude, independent of his own labour. In the case of the free worker, the value of his labour capacity, and the average wage corresponding to it, does not present itself

100 Karina Dziewaczyńska, Artur Żmijewski – realizacja III etapu projektu Reaktywacja, http://www.przebudzenie.ok sir.com.pl/zmijewski.htm (accessed 16 October 2016).

101 See Jerzy Kochan, Studia z teorii klas społecznych (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Scholar, 2011), pp. 327-328.

102 The Refusal of Work, op. cit.

103 Antonio Negri, Goodbye Mr. Socialism (Seven Stories Press, 2011), p. 57.

104 Yiannis Mylonas, “Reżymy praw własności intelektualnej jako źródło cierpień,” in Wieczna radość..., op. cit., p. 181.

105 Elizabeth Dunn, Prywatyzując Polskę.

O bobofrutach, wielkim biznesie i restrukturyzacji pracy (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2017).

106 Marx, “Results of the Direct Production Process,” in The Process of Production of Capital, Draft Chapter 6 of Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes, https://www.marxists.org/ar chive/marx/works/1864/eco nomic/ch02a.htm#469a (accessed 14 December 2020).

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107 Ibidem.

108 Massimiliano Tomba, “Zróżnicowanie wartości dodatkowej we współczesnych formach wyzysku,” in Wieczna radość…, op. cit., p. 126.

109 Beverly J. Silver, Forces of Labour: Workers' Movements and Globalization since 1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

110 Artur Żmijewski, “Lekcja martwego języka,” in Robotnicy opuszczają miejsca pracy, exh. cat. (Łódź: Muzeum Sztuki w Łodzi, 2010), p. 21.

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as confined within this predestined limit, independent of his own labour and determined by his purely physical needs.”107 It is worth considering slavery not as an anachronic form, a vestige of bygone historical periods, but rather as a multiplicity of forms that, as Massimiliano Tomba puts it, are produced and reproduced behind the scenes, as it were, of the present-day capitalist mode of production.108 The contemporary labour market increasingly resembles a slave market. The neoliberal state has created a legal framework in which workers are exploited to the limits of their biological capacities. Capital likes to use the term “human resources.” Workers get thus reduced to operational costs, which need to be trimmed at all times.

In a slave economy (most blatantly exemplified by Special Economic Zones) and private business typically benefits from the redistribution of public funds.

Commenting on the impressively large and decorative sculptures produced during the Świecie retreat, another of the Mekro workers featured in Żmijewski’s film got to the heart of the matter: “It depends on what you want to achieve through art – whether it’s just to promote yourself or to really fight for something.” It is worth trying the latter, especially that, if Beverly J. Silver is to be believed, a global working class is emerging today, sharing similar (and challenging) conditions of work and life.109 Żmijewski says that the Świecie experience has made him realize that it is not artists who help workers articulate their subjectivity, but rather “workers who help artists understand their lack of qualifications for speaking about workers.

Artists resort to stereotypical notions, are conservative in their thinking, are simply incompetent – but they have no doubts either that they can define who the worker is today.”110 Perhaps if the Świecie participants had during the retreat analyzed their own place in the capitalist mode of production and then confronted it with the situation of the Mekro workers, they would have constated that their worlds were not far apart enough for there being any “inter-class cooperation” to speak of. Perhaps they would have found a language that would have allowed them to move beyond the stereotypical definition of the worker’s identity, and to discover much more than Żmijewski was originally hoping for when he wrote the script, assigning them a specific place in his project and casting them in predefined roles.

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Artists as the “Culture Faction of the Upper Class”?

One of the first, and very much needed, attempts to examine art in class terms is the issue of the Mocak Forum edited by Igor Stokfiszewski. In the introduction, Stokfiszewski rightly notes that critical art seeks impulses that would serve to transform the collectivity into a more egalitarian 111 See Igor Stokfiszewski, and just social community. One of the vectors of artistic “Klasowy impuls sztuki,” Forum Mocaku, no. 1, 2015, experiments is, according to him, an “orientation towards p. 3.

111 cooperation with the lower social classes,” i.e. a tendency 112 for artists to “collaborate with the popular class.”112 The opposition artists vs. “popular [lower] class” seems dubious, Ibidem. though, because it is so patronizing and paternalistic. The term “lower class” is in itself heavily stigmatizing, unlike “working class” or “proletariat,” which are historically contingent carriers of class pride. The terminology Stokfiszewski proposes in the introduction (“upper class,” “middle class,” and “lower class,” a.k.a. “popular class”) is also consistently used by several other authors featured in the Mocak Forum: Maciej Gdula, Mikołaj Lewicki, Przemysław Sadura, and Joanna Erbel. These authors speak clearly from the position of an “upper class,” for which, as can be supposed, they are predestined primarily by their cultural capital. They stop short, however, of explaining how they understand the class division so introduced. Nor do we know the criteria on the basis of which they assigned respondents – in their own research projects which they now comment on – to the particular social classes. It was not, as can be guessed, economic factors that decided, but the respondents’ cultural competencies. As a result, the “upper class” includes a graphic designer, a sculptor, and a scholar, among others, and the “middle class” a nurse.

I am terribly curious about the economic standing of the study’s authors, the graphic designer, the sculptor, the scholar, and the nurse.

We learn from research by Gdula and Sadura that the “pursuit of pure pleasure,” that is the “exercise of cultural practices and assimilation of cultural goods, consisting 112 Maciej Gdula, Przemysław in a renouncement of external purposefulness on behalf Sadura, “Charakterystyka of the practice itself,” is a “specific disposition of the upper klas wyższej, średniej ludowej w Polsce,” class.”113 We also learn that the “upper class clearly distances iibidem, p. 4.

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114 Ibidem, p. 5.

115 Ibidem, p. 9.

116 Ibidem, p. 14.

117 Gdula, Sadura, “Klasowe odmiany gustu teatralnego,” ibidem, p. 48.

118 Kuba Szreder, ABC projektariatu. O nędzy projektowego życia (Warsaw: Fundacja Nowej Kultury Bęc Zmiana, 2016), p. 97.

119 Maciej Gdula, Mikołaj Lewicki, Przemysław Sadura, “Instytucje kultury i styl(e) uczestnictwa klasy ludowej,” Forum Mocaku, no. 1, 2015, p. 57.

120 Kochan, Studia…, op. cit., p. 340.

121 Ibidem, p. 340.

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itself from hierarchy, stressing partnership,”114 that the style of the middle class is one of a “class torn between its (aristocratic) aspirations and (common) background,”115 and that the “dispositions most characteristic for the popular class are realized in what can be termed familiarness.”116 Artists have been awarded a special place in this system: we have been appointed as the “chief representatives of the culture capital-rich upper class” (or, more precisely, the “culture faction of the upper class”).117 Today, fortunately, less and less artists seem inclined to think about themselves in this way. Comparing his proposed term of projectariat with that of proletariat, Kuba Szreder wrote: “Proletarians are defined by their lack of capital and the resulting need to sell their own labour-power. Projectarians, similarly, have to perform short-term ‘gigs’ or join projects. The only ‘commodity’ they possess, analogically to the prolateriat, is their own labour-power.”118 This perspective seems far more convincing.

From research by Gdula, Lewicki, and Sadura, we learn also that members of the “lower class” (“popular class”) manifest a “tendency to spend time together” and like to participate in “big open-air public events.”119 The cultural research conducted by Gdula, Lewicki, and Sadura only perpetuates existing stereotypes, entrenching and sanctioning social divisions. Let us remember that, as Jerzy Kochan says, borrowing from Marx, “classes are shaped on the basis of ownership relations, so they are essentially economic entities rather than mental or political ones.”120 Writing about the “culture faction of the upper class,” Gdula, Lewicki, and Sadura obviously allude to Pierre Bordieu’s concepts of social, cultural, economic, and symbolic capital, which, of course, need to be taken into consideration.

The problem is that they often obscure class divisions of an antagonistic nature. “The fundamental distinction between the possessing classes and the earning classes (to use Max Weber’s terms) disappears,”121 Jerzy Kochan writes.

Moreover, the distinction between estate and class is blurred. “Classes,” Kochan argues, “are phenomena that are germane to ownership divisions in the spheres of production, distribution, and services. Besides those, there are large groups of people not connected with these spheres and employed instead in the education sector, the military, the state administration or in churches. Their relation with the state as well as other markers of social position have been more or less successfully discursivized by the

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theory of social estates, which is an integral part of class theory. The term ‘employee class,’ which is not sensitive to estate-class distinctions, is also used sometimes. The rationale behind it is that it highlights an important shared characteristic of people who survive by selling their labourpower. Its careless use could, however, lead to a disregard for the distinction between estate and class, to a blurring of the differences in the ownership of labour-power.”122 For 122 Ibidem. p. 338. the “scholar” surveyed by Gdula and Sadura, work is a “fascination” and it “fills his life.” Thinking of scholarly work in terms of wage work rather than a fascination – the “place of work and life” can still be distinguished.

In a report from research on a correlation between class affiliation and theatre taste, what seems most problematic is the perpetuation of widespread stereotypes about the artistic tastes of the “lower class” (“popular class”). “The randomness of the preferences of members of the popular class,” Gdula and Sadura write, “can be attributed to both their inexperience as theatre spectators and their limited competencies with respect to the specialized realm that is 123 the theatre field.”123 But can it really? Waldemar Miksa, the Gdula, Sadura, “Klasowe protagonist of Solidarity Museum (2013), another film by odmiany…,” op. cit., p. 46.

Julia Popławska, is a Gdańsk Shipyard worker with over forty years’ experience. In the film, he talks not only about the work and his ways of escaping its inherent alienation; he is also interested in painting. He compares Neue Wilde painting with the work of the Polish New Wild: “When I looked at the latter, I couldn’t resist the impression they didn’t know what painting technique was.” And that is a very apt recognition. Asked by Popławska what he would like to do in his spare time, Miksa says: “Read Karl Kraus’s articles from Die Fackel. He was a man for whom aphorism was a natural form of expression.” He also confesses he would like to listen to a live performance by Paolo Beschi, one of the three founders of the Baroque music ensemble Il Giardino Armonico. So where would Gdula, Lewicki, and Sadura classify Waldemar Miksa: in the “upper class” (per his cultural competencies), in the “middle class” (per his wages), or the “lower class” (per his job)? This division is simply untenable, particularly so in a situation where the class structure is changing, where we are witnessing widespread social degradation because a college degree has long ceased to be a guarantee of a job consistent with the holder’s skills and aspirations – as a result of which they

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end up at, for example, an Amazon fulfilment centre, such as that in Sady near Poznań, where among the employees are my friends, university graduates, who – per their cultural competencies – should be counted by Gdula, Lewicki, and Sadura as members of the “upper” class.

The Return of the “Working Class”

124 See Ost, Klęska Solidarności…, op. cit., p. 54.

125 Ibidem, p. 10.

126 Ibidem, pp. 33-34.

127 Neil Smith, “Pragnienie rewolucji w dobie cięć budżetowych,” trans.

M. Rauszer, Praktyka Teoretyczna, http://www.praktykateoret yczna.pl/index.php/pragni enie-rewolucji-w-dobieciec-budzetowych (accessed 16 October 2016).

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The reason why most Poles are reluctant to use the term “working class” is that it is widely perceived as a relic of the communist era. The strong sense among the Polish public after 1989 that the class society has been abolished is doubtless a success of neoliberal propaganda. In fact, it was only after 1989 that economic class divisions began to emerge, and workers were pushed down to the very bottom of the social ladder.124 David Ost has noticed that people in Poland are tired of anything that has to do with the “working class.” “As soon as they hear the term, he writes, they stop listening and turn away wearily; they simply associate the words with the former regime.” But no matter how much politicians may be weary with workers and poor people in general, there is no denying the fact, Ost continues, that the capitalist economy introduced in Poland after 1989 systemically places workers at the bottom of the social hierarchy and produces poverty; therefore any party that appeals to them will win the elections.125 According to Ost, both communism and the struggle against it are responsible for a low sensitivity to class issues.126 In this situation, class anger has for years been exploited by the right.

The meaning of the term “working class” is hard to grasp today. How should we rethink the composition of the working class to include in our thinking newer forms of its life, up to the point where it is by definition precarious? Class, Neil Smith believes, pertains to the social means of production, but not to the forms that production assumes.127 A return is doubtless needed to thinking in class terms, which need to be redefined and brought back into use. The working class exists, he says; it simply looks different today. The whole language, the whole rhetoric consists largely in getting rid of the working class. The way this was achieved was very

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clever; it was argued that belonging to the working class carried a stigma. How was this done? By repeating the highly limited stereotype that the working class consists of coal miners, steel workers, and no one else. They’d narrowed down the notion of the working class to a relatively small group overwhelmed by industrialization, a group that deserved our compassion. From there, Smith continues, it was close to a clear aversion involved in assigning someone to the working class, for it would have ended merely in modest compassion. Thus we have all become the middle class. Voilà! Problem solved. People have lost the language in which they were able to speak about themselves as the working class, but not entirely. For all those working in language, Smith argues, it is vital to speak clearly of a “working class” because this denotes people afflicted by austerity, budget cuts, fiscal crisis and so on. All these issues affect 128 precisely the working class.128

Ibidem.

Similarly, Harry Cleaver uses the term “working class” to designate not only industrial waged workers, but also unwaged workers. “These include housewives, children, students, and peasants, whose work under capitalism consists primarily of the production and reproduction of the ability and willingness to carry out activities (including industrial work) which contribute to the maintenance of the system.”129 We also need to return to a language in which the notion of class struggle is a valid one. “Class struggle,” Cleaver writes, “is the confrontation of the capitalist class’s attempt to impose its social order — with all its categories and determinations — and the working class’s attempts to assert its autonomous interests.

Working-class struggle is that revolutionary activity which puts the ‘rules of the game’ of capitalist society into question.”130

129 Cleaver, Reading Capital…, op. cit., footnote 1, p. 23.

130 Ibidem, p. 76.

A return to class terms will enable art workers and all wage workers, among whom precarians comprise a large group, to fight a common struggle, whether within social movements and the structures of radical labour unions or outside them. “From the perspective of contemporary Marxist theory,” Tymoteusz Kochan wrote, “the proletariat has neither disappeared completely nor changed its location. The only thing that has changed is the nature of the European economies, in which the proletarians have simply changed the sector and sphere of their employment, all the time

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131 Tymoteusz Kochan, “Proletariat – w obronie pojęcia,” Nowa Krytyka.

Czasopismo Filozoficzne, http://nowakrytyka.pl/spip. php?article664 (accessed 16 October 2016).

132 Joanna Bednarek, “Opisać reżymy nadzoru/wyzysku,” in Wieczna radość…, op. cit., p. 193.

133 Jacek Drozda, Opór kulturowy. Między teorią a praktykami społecznymi (Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Katedra, 2015), p. 119.

134 Ibidem.

remaining wage workers, and therefore, in Marxist terms, proletarians.”131 Let us notice and acknowledge the work of other professional groups, let us try to join or support them.

Let us not create a division between knowledge-producing artists and scholars (cognitariat) and workers in other sectors (proletariat) because, as Joanna Bednarek suggests, the “idea that knowledge production is somehow special may entrench existing hierarchies, for it sustains the existing distinction between physical and mental work, a distinction that since the early stages of capitalism has served to divide, hierarchize, and obscure shared experiences, or, generally speaking, to set some groups within the multiplicity against others.”132 Already the operaists postulated an absolute equality between blue- and white-collar workers in order to fight a common, successful struggle. Operaist theoreticians, Jacek Drozda observes, believed that “students and brain workers are subject to direct exploitation just like the industrial proletariat, and already at the learning stage become fuel for the reproduction of capital.”133 As a result, they are considered “proletarians, almost a Marxist ‘class for itself,’ its identity born in struggles.”134 Capital constantly introduces new divisions (e.g. between “permanent” and “temporary” workers) that undercut class solidarity, as a result of which workers, instead of fighting against work, begin to work against themselves – for work. It is a frequent malady at Polish cultural institutions that intellectual workers look with superiority at the technical and service staff (administration workers, technicians, guards, cleaners), which is a form of compensation for low wages. Sometimes the management tries to exploit arising conflicts by setting one group against another. In modern society, liberation can only be achieved by challenging one’s role (the division of labour, which in itself bases on other divisions: of gender, education, property status), which may unite various communities, rather than cultivating it, which only strengthens and reproduces capital, obscuring and legitimating growing income disparities.

Autonomist Marxism as an Inspiration Drawing conclusions from the practices of specific class struggles, operaism developed a theory that contributed to

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a revival of Marxism. Capital, according to the operaists, has to confront a political class structure that is a historical fact. This means that the working class should be viewed as an attacking force rather than a reaction to the experience of exploitation.135 As art workers, we are better poised than 135 See “Operaizm,” Przegląd other workers to strike a blow to neoliberal power and capital. Anarchistyczny, no. 7 2008), That is why it is crucial for us to support, using the art world’s (Spring-Summer pp. 182-184. distribution channels, the struggles fought by the working poor. Workers who lose their jobs and join the ranks of the unemployed, Cleaver says, learn very quickly that the problem 136 cannot be solved on the local level.136 “Work and capital, “Cyrkulacja walk jako forma therefore,” Krzysztof Król writes, “should be perceived as organizacji. Rozmowa z Harry Cleaverem,” in Autonomia exclusive entities, where strengthening the position of one robotnicza, op. cit., p. 74. professional group serves to strengthen the entire class and at the same time to weaken capital. Improving the situation of the poor, whether working or not, weakens the 137 overall power of employers.”137 Krzysztof Król, “Słowo wstępne,” ibidem, p. 6.

The subject of work has finally started to be discussed in the art field too. We must not, however, let those who 138 have read their Readings for Workers of Art138 turn it into See Katarzyna Chmielewska, yet another fad for a couple of seasons. Taking up the Kuba Szreder, Tomasz Żukowski, Czytanki dla subject of work in a superficial manner, in its lifestyle aspect, robotników sztuki. Kultura nie dla zysku (Warsaw: will only banalize social issues and do the worker movement Fundacja Nowej Kultury Bęc more harm than good. The renewed interest in the subject Zmiana, 2009). can, of course, and should be tapped for propaganda reasons. But we must go much further than that. It is not the point for us as artists to celebrate our newly recognized worker identity, let alone for artists to start making works about workers, producing paintings about their effort and toil, that is fuelling, in the vein of a worker-mania, a “peasant-mania.” In other words, the point is not to idealize the 139 People’s Poland or, as Jaśmina Wójcik does in her works, See Jaśmina Wójcik, “Ludzie 139 z żelaza,” Forum Mocaku, to glorify physical factory work. “The aim of the mass no. 1, 2015, pp. 70-73. worker,” writes Cleaver, quoting Mario Tronti, “is to cease 140 140 to be a worker, not to make a religion of work.” Workers Cleaver, Reading Capital…, cease to be workers when they autonomously shape their op. cit., p. 69. lives.141 141

Let us consider how art can fit into class struggle. A culture-based discourse should be a complementary part of the struggles fought, or an effect of their critical analysis, rather than mere “decoration.” The point is not just to thematize work, i.e. carry out an art project that will boil down to a single exhibition that can be added to your CV.

Ibidem, p. 18.

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Rather it is to become involved on multiple levels in issues that concern not only our profession.

The Circulation of Struggle

142 Ibidem, p. 58.

143 Ibidem, p. 160.

144 Ogólnopolska Komisja Środowiskowa Pracowników Sztuki OZZ Inicjatywa Pracownicza, Teatr w służbie korporacji za 30 czytników, 22 July 2016, http://ozzip.pl/teksty/inform acje/wielkopolskie/item/21 50-teatr-w-sluzbiekorporacji-za-30-czytnikow (accessed 16 October 2016).

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It is necessary to promote a class consciousness in the art community. But before anything else we need to work with representatives of other sectors to develop strategies of defence against the regime of work and think through methods of pressurizing employers. “It is only through a circulation of struggles,” Cleaver writes, “in which those of various sectors of the class interlink to become complementary, that real unity against capital is achieved. Without such complementarity, ‘class consciousness’ is only an ideological gloss; with it, ‘class consciousness’ is superfluous.” 142 As a result of the actions of capital, the working class is divided. Therefore we need to make the effort to overcome intra-class contradictions and start to build a common, wide front of struggle. As Cleaver argues, “Obviously, one overall aim of all segments of the class is to unite in order to have more power.”143 For strategies of resistance, we can draw on the experiences of autonomist Marxism, taking action to improve our situation and, at the same time, offering real support to workers in other sectors, for example to coal miners, who are probably the last stronghold of worker resistance, endowed with a strong class consciousness, as well as to workers in Special Economic Zones and other workplaces based on the same model, such as Amazon distribution centres. We should condemn those cultural institutions that, like Poznań’s Nowy Theatre, accept funding or products from sponsors such as the employee-exploiting Amazon (to warm up its image, the company presented the Nowy with thirty Kindle readers, thus gaining the status of the “technological partner of the Debut Stage”).144 Conversely, we should support those that, like the Ósmego Dnia Theatre or the Polski Theatre in Poznań, share their space with struggling employees, organizing open meetings with them (including with union activists from Amazon).

The experience gained by workers in the course of struggles fought at their workplaces is passed on, in various forms, to comrades from other workplaces, branches, and

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sectors. This means that further disputes and conflicts erupt, and workers already know which strategies work best. For the operaists, struggles outside the factory were as important as those fought inside it. Precarian resistance does not manifest itself, as Jarosław Urbański has noted, in collective labour disputes or mass strikes, but rather in a refusal to work, in temporary leaving of the workposts or prolonging the breaks in protest against the nonpayment of wages.145 The precariat’s resistance shifts from the work- 145 See “Opór prekariatu. Preplace to other areas, to the sphere of labour-power reprokariacka rewolucja będzie miejska albo nie będzie jej duction. Reproductive workers, both waged (e.g. carers), wcale. Z Jarosławem Urbańskim ze związku which get paid the lowest possible rate and often work zawodowego Inicjatywa Pracownicza rozmawiają uninsured, and unwaged (e.g. housewives), which are not (tuż przed Świętem Pracy) paid at all, are in the worst situation. Cleaver notes that the Krystian Szadkowski i Maciej Szlinder z Praktyki Teoretycz“wage divides the class hierarchically into waged (factory) nej,” Notes na 6 tygodni, no 84, May–June 2013, p. 175. and unwaged (housewives, students, peasants, etc.) sectors, such that the latter groups appear to be outside the working class simply because they are not paid a wage.”146 We should, 146 Cleaver, Reading Capital…, therefore, support domestic and care workers. What is op. cit., p. 72. important in this is the circulation of struggle and an exchange of experiences between branches and communities. “Proletarian experiences, even if they wear themselves out, do not disappear entirely but sediment and change from one sector to another, hence we see how certain criteria of struggle applied in the factory are then generalised over the territory with analogical forms of struggle: squatting, self-reduction of rents, bills, fares, food prices, etc., valid also for the unemployed and the partly employed. The struggle against production therefore extends over the territory giving the unemployed and under-employed the possibility of fighting, not for an improbable job, but for a real defense of living standards.”147 147 Ibidem, p. 18.

Housing: a Right, Not a Commodity What, in practice, is class struggle? According to Jerzy Kochan, it is “not necessarily about barricades and revolutions, it is also about prolonging or scrapping the cigarette break, about coffee-drinking and the lunch break, it is about the struggle for vacations, for a five-day work-week and an eight-hour work-day, for maternity and parenting leave. Class struggle is a struggle for labour law legislation, for work safety and hygiene, for access to education,

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148 Kochan, Studia…, op. cit., p.

332.

149 Opór prekariatu…, op. cit., p. 175.

150 Piotr Krzyżaniak, “Ruch lokatorski, prekariat i strajk czynszowy,” Przegląd Anarchistyczny, no. 12, Winter-Spring 2011, p. 152.

151 Opór prekariatu…, op. cit., p.

175.

152 Bonanno, Workers’ Councils, op. cit., Chapter 2 “Workers autonomy: surpassing trade unionism.”

healthcare, and culture. It is a struggle for political rights and for the course of public policy, including foreign policy.”148 Art workers need, therefore, to support not only the strikes, street marches, and other forms of resistance waged by employees of restructured enterprises, but also to carry out a struggle in the reproductive sphere in the defence of living conditions and social security (i.e., support the activism of tenant movements, join solidarity pickets and eviction blockades), while demanding open access to public services, education, culture, pension cover, and healthcare.

“The precariat has no fixed ‘addressee,’ its employer being variable and undefined, whereas local government,” Urbański said, “is defined and is also a major employer (directly or through public contracts). Local government's impact on labour markets became evident during the debate over the planned construction of huge sports stadiums and its main theme: ‘stadiums vs. council homes’.”149 The right to work and housing are currently the axis of class conflict. “Institutions such as local government-funded job agencies or social services centres,” Piotr Krzyżaniak argued, “are instruments of control and means of managing the reserve army of labour. Local-government housing policy is also a convenient means of control. Nothing motivates better to harder and more exhausting work than a rent rise, unless the tenants revolt and refuse to pay, but then they face eviction.”150 The precariat’s struggle has to go beyond the workplace and has to, as Jarosław Urbański put it, “cross the workplace’s limits towards the city and only then liaise in global networks against multinational capital.

Otherwise it will remain ineffective and incomprehensible.”151 Bonanno et al. put it thus: “Rent strikes, squatting, selfreduction of bills and transport charges, are all a defense of wages or living conditions, which also permit the unemployed to conquer a dignified level of existence during the struggle in the territory alongside the employed workers, and not through social security payments and subsidies, which are only instruments for dividing the proletariat.”152 Tenant struggles, symbolized by Jolanta Brzeska, an activist who was murdered in still unexplained circumstances, have been led under the rallying cry of “Housing is a right, not a commodity.”

We need to firmly oppose the ghettoization processes that have been taking place in Polish cities (slum areas, container homes, “community hostels”) by protesting against local

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governments’ anti-social housing policies. Tomasz Fudala and Szymon Maliborski, curators of the seventh edition of Warsaw Under Construction, a festival organized by the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, demonstrated successfully that an exhibition – in this case Reconstruction Disputes, presented at the former Klementyna Hoffmanowa Secondary School in 2015, featuring, among other artists, the Warsaw-based Syrena Collective – can be a means of class struggle. If art has agency, we must use this agency in raising the political demand for the class society and its inherent inequalities to be abolished. Let art not be a useful and effective tool only in the hands of the authorities and real-estate developers!

Relating to the notion of the common good, we need to point out the antagonisms resulting from privatization processes (such as the attempts to NGO-ize public galleries, amounting to their de facto crypto-privatization, which is to result in the state’s withdrawal from the duty to subsidize culture) and from organized crime-controlled reprivatization (“tenement cleansing” being one of its aspects). We need to firmly oppose gentrification, where artists usually play the lead role of the “useful idiots” of gentrifiers in the service 153 of real-estate developers.153 We should refuse to participate See Artyści jako użyteczni in “revitalization” projects that produce homelessness. idioci gentryfikatorów,

Unions in the Culture and Science Sector Although operaism, which used the refusal to work and wild strikes, was “crushed” in the late 1970s in a struggle between armed groups and state repression, the mass worker, “de-skilled, rootless, not respected, responsible for having disorientated the left-wing parties and their political models – constituted,” as Italo Sbrogiò put it, the “driving force behind the intertwining of a great cycle of struggle for a different life in the factories and in society.”154 In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the voice of grassroots civic movements has been resounding again in various parts of the world as they raise worker postulates that are congruent in many respects with the aims of worker communism. Our comrades from the Workers’ Initiative get employed at factories to investigate the working conditions

Centrum Informacji Anarchistycznej, 20 March 2010, http://cia.media.pl/artysci_ jako_uzyteczni_idioci_ gentryfikatorów (accessed 16 October 2016).

154 Italo Sbrogiò, The History of the Workers’ Committee of Porto Maghera, talk given at the presentation of the Augusto Finzi Workers’ Archive, Marghera, 9 June 2006, https://libcom.org/files/fire brands_booklet_2_horizont al.pdf (accessed 22 December 2020).

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there and monitor the situation. Unlike in the art world or the culture sector in general, these are not projects that come to an end once a grant has been spent, adding another item to your CV.

155 Sowa, Inna Rzeczpospolita…, op. cit., p. 270.

156 Cleaver, Reading Capital…, op. cit., p. 72.

The point is not, however, for all of us to get employed at factories. We need to support workers in their efforts to win control of their workplaces, while at the same time striving to gain as much control as possible of our own workplaces by starting Worker’s Initiative basic committees at cultural institutions and universities. “Factories controlled by employees,” Jan Sowa writes, “are not only not second to private ones in any respect, but can actually produce more quickly, at lower cost, and at better quality than them.

It is in a fair manner that they distribute profits from the sale of the goods produced.”155 Nor is it the point for us to abandon gender and identity issues, but rather, in raising them, to expose the way power and capital exploit religious, racial, and gender distinctions to produce class prejudices that serve to discipline and antagonize workers and make exploitation possible. Drawing on the research of Selma James, Cleaver writes: “Sexism and racism can be understood as particular cases of division which are almost always simultaneously wage division This is true even when the racial or sexual divisions are among the unwaged. Here the hierarchy is that of unwaged income.”156 We need to rebuild the symbolic meaning of the working class, mobilizing and organizing workers first and foremost around economic issues.

Critical Art and Class Struggles There is no doubt that critical art of the 1990s was able, by means of radical gestures in the symbolic sphere, to break taboos and provoke public debates. The strategies pursued by artists in the early transition period can still be useful, so long as we reflect critically on the goals those artists set themselves at the time. Drawing conclusions from the experience of the 1990s, one could think of initiating a movement that would embrace the time-proven strategies of critical art, but this time in the context of class-conflict politics, a movement able to initiate public debates around economic issues and prepared to build a common, wide front of worker solidarity. Such a movement (which should

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be an attitude rather than an art trend) could be called workerism (from the Italian operaismo).

The time of isms is over, the pontifices of postmodernism asserted. We must, however, use all means possible, including those availed by art, in a joint struggle for the commoning of the means of production; a class struggle whose goals go far beyond the field of art, and whose ultimate stake is another ism – worker communism.

November 2016

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13 Messianism and the Avant-garde: a Historiosophical Fantasy on Frankist Motifs /// Adam Lipszyc

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Since I am neither a literary critic nor an art critic, I suggest that we approach the question of whether an avant-garde is possible today by means of an analogy; namely, the analogy between innovation in art and innovation in the Jewish religious tradition.

1 Hermann Cohen, Religion der Vernunft aus der Quellen des Judentums, trans. Simon Kaplan (New York: Ungar, 1972), p. 106.

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As we know, Jewish tradition is determined by fidelity to the revealed Scripture, which has the double nature of Truth and Law. This fidelity is manifested in that the text of the Torah is considered a foundation of one’s worldview as well as, or first of all, of one’s way of life. Although this text is finite, it is subject to constant reinterpretation. As the great Hermann Cohen says, “The book is closed; the mouth, however, remains open.”1 Starting with discussions in rabbinical academies – which the Talmud is a record of – post-Temple Judaism has developed through ever new interpretations of both the truth- and lawrelating aspects of the Scripture. However, a rupture between the two modes of interpretation used in this tradition has often been noted. Simplifying things a lot, one could call it a rupture between the rabbinical interpretation and the cabbalist interpretation. It needs to be stressed that this is not an opposition between dogmatism and licence, for both strands provide for a great deal of interpretative liberty so that in principle the text can be unfolded ad infinitum. This said, the rabbinical interpretation has a horizontal nature, as it were, and in a double sense: firstly, in that it relates the Scripture to this world rather than approaching it as a record of secrets hidden in the upper layers of reality, and secondly, in that it adds further comments without actually cancelling the previous ones, finding applications of the Law in the new times, continuing to weave the great fabric of the text. This interpretative mode is guided by the Talmudic formula of “you will not complete the work, but you must not abandon it,” which oozes a calm faith in the cohesion of the hermeneutic community. The cabbalistic interpretation, in turn, is of a vertical nature, and again doubly so: firstly, in that the cabbalist searches in the Scripture for hidden truths about the higher levels of existence, and secondly, in that, while partaking in the interpretative community, he refuses to patiently weave the text of tradition and instead, starting from his specific place in history, crosses his gate to Law in an impatient attempt to arrive at an originary truth, a “written Torah” absent from this world. This is why he accepts the text conveyed to him, but instead of horizontally adding new commentary to it, he tears it open, deforming it in order to get through to what allegedly has always been hidden in it.

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If such a characterization is correct, then one might be tempted to see in the cabbalist an equivalent of the avantgardist in artistic traditions. There are many parallels. The rabbinical mode has probably a lot in common with such a notion of artistic practice that in innovation sees another movement in a fertile space of tradition, a tradition that is alive and therefore open to smooth changes. The cabbalistic mode, being far more impatient, individualistic, and subversive in its attitude to tradition, refuses to be inscribed into this kind of healthy conservatism. As far as analogies with the history of art or literature are concerned, it probably has more in common with bolder gestures which strive towards the righteous form by way of more radical transformations of traditional language or, to put it in more emphatic terms, towards an individualistic appropriation of the language conveyed as opposed to joining a supra-individual tradition of practice. The dialectical combination of individualism, innovation, and appropriation, with the belief that one is arriving at an originary truth hidden under the surface of the text, a combination that characterizes the cabbalistic approach to tradition, finds perhaps an equivalent in those historical movements that, like the Renaissance or Romanticism, innovated impatiently under the slogan of a return to something originary.

But hidden inside the cabbalist is a more predatory figure, a true revolutionary, namely a champion of a messianism fulfilling itself, or actually a pretender to the messianic throne.

For whereas the cabbalist maintains that the Torah that is given to us is a distorted version of the real (“written”) Torah, a version through which, by means of the most eccentric interpretative techniques, one needs to break through to the source, the messianic champion proclaims the dawn of a new era in which the Torah in its correct form will soon be directly accessible. For this reason, he radicalizes the cabbalist’s strategy and willingly moves on to antinomist positions.

Whereas the cabbalist still plays cat’s cradle with the text of tradition, transforming it and eliciting new forms from it, the Messianic pretender and his supporters believe that truth and righteous form can only be arrived at by actively perverting, undoing, or simply breaking old law. The follower of the rabbinical mode is patient: salvation, the ultimate truth, is for him an infinitely distant point towards which he slowly proceeds, quietly unfolding the Law by way of interpretation. The cabbalist is cunning: he feigns patience, accepting the traditional forms, but seeks to break through them to arrive at a higher truth

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2 The Collection of the Words of the Lord [Jacob Frank], ed., trans., ann. by Harris Lenowitz, http://docshare0 2.docshare.tips/f iles/5189/518908 18.pdf (accessed 23 December 2020).

3 See Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1946), p. 319-320; idem, Kabbalah (New York: Meridian, 1978), pp. 307-308.

that offers salvation. The messianic warrior, born out of the cabbalist, no longer wants to wait: he tears open the text of tradition and in an act of transgression strives towards salvation through sin, in ruptures and fractures looking out for a new world which the old one, ours, cannot imagine. It is him who seems to me to be the actual equivalent of the avant-garde artist. And the most extravagant avant-gardist-messiah in the history of Judaism was the rogue and adventurer Jacob Frank, active in Poland in the late eighteenth century. Frank considered himself a spiritual heir of Sabbatai Zevi, a seventeenth-century pretender to the messianic throne, also a great avant-gardist, who, threatened with death, converted to Islam. Taking up the cue from his predecessor, Frank converted with his followers to Catholicism, believing one had to actively break the old Law in order to pave the way for a new one. The Collection of the Words of the Lord, which records his lectures, is an incredible document of Polish literature, to which sufficient attention has surely not been devoted yet.2 One could call it a unique combination of esoteric treatise and picaresque novel. This latter element manifests itself especially in autobiographical passages – extremely funny and terrifying at the same time – where the citizen Frank boasts of his vulgarity, breaking away from centuries of learned dispute, and talks about how by dint of his audaciousness and madness he gained more than others, or about how, whether by reason or force, he made devout Jews violate the law.

Gershom Sholem, the great scholar of the Kabbala and of messianism, pointed time and again to a link between Frankism and the emancipation movement.3 He not only noticed an analogy between the Frankists’ hostility towards old Law and the nineteenth-century reform which introduced radical changes to ritual, but also sought to demonstrate that there existed a literal bond of a genetic nature: that when they grew up, the children and grandchildren of the original Frankists found themselves in the vanguard of emancipation and assimilation. Scholem’s personal favourite was one Moses Dobruška, who began his career as a member of Frank’s inner circle, then changed his life path several times (including adopting a new name and surname), to eventually become involved in the French Revolution and end up on the guillotine alongside Danton.

Scholem’s argument, though extravagant and fiercely contested, holds great significance for us in the context of the contem-

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plation of analogies between messianism and the avantgarde; for although the text of The Words of the Lord is anchored in rural culture, one can already feel in it a breeze of true, momentum-heavy, destructive, lunatic modernity that does not run in circles in the idiocy of rustic life, but rushes forward. There is certainly a lot in the boorish Jacob Frank that reminds one of the village roughneck, but one can as easily see in him an urban dandy, a pink-socked rascal, a man for scandal and cultural transgression, as if taken straight out of Luis Buñuel’s L’Age d’Or. The Israeli artist Roee Rosen very aptly recognized the truly modern, antinomist, avant-garde push for novelty so evident in messianic movements, particularly in Frankism, by inventing the character of a Belgian painter and writer named Justine Frank, an alleged friend of Georges Bataille, who in her fictitious oeuvre was supposed to combine the Sadean tradition of transgressive enlightenment with the Frankist tradition of frenzied antinomism.4 What conclusions can be drawn from the recognition of the analogy between antinomist, revolutionary messianism and avant-garde movements in art? Only negative and pessimistic ones, it would seem. Just as messianic antinomism grows solely on the substrate of cohesive tradition, which it then turns against, so the avant-garde movement rebels against previous models of artistic practice, drawing its energy precisely from revolt and transgression. One need not recognize the analogy with messianism to know that when the authority of tradition collapses, the avant-garde’s antinomist gesture loses its momentum and becomes empty. “It’s no longer possible to scandalize anybody,” André Breton complained to Buñuel at the funeral of one of the Surrealists.

Jean-François Lyotard saw the crux of avant-garde logic in the Kantian aesthetics of the sublime, in the shattering of forms, and a negative representation of the unrepresentable.5 Here, a strengthening can be noticed of the analogy between the avant-garde and messianism, for one could try to demonstrate that antinomic messianism, which by destroying, tearing apart legacy forms of representation, wants to represent that which resists representation in an unredeemed world, is also based on a logic of the sublime. One can, however, hardly avoid the impression that, given the erosion of traditional forms, the era of sublime transgressions is over, and the analogy between the avant-garde and messianism offers little help here.

So perhaps we simply need to accept that if the analogy holds, then both messianism and the avant-garde – like the idea of a political revolution – have both lost credibility today.

4 See Roee Rosen, Justine Frank, Sweet Sweat (Berlin: Lukas and Sternberg, 2009).

5 See JeanFrançois Lyotard, “Odpowiedź na pytanie: co to jest postmodernizm,” trans. Michał Paweł Markowski, in: Ryszard Nycz, ed., Postmodernizm. Antologia tekstów (Kraków: Baran i Suszczyński, 1998), pp. 54-58.

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From the vantage of both the avant-gardist and the messianist, we live today perhaps in a space that appears as a demonic parody of fulfilment: the unredeemed world of traditional forms no longer exists, all that remains are its remnants and fragments, intermixed with bits of new yet already ruined ideas.

This world is perfectly malleable, giving in at every blow, so that the avant-garde or messianic scandal loses its fulcrum. All right, this we already know. But if we permit ourselves a little bit of historiosophical speculation, then the analogy between messianism and the avant-garde may reveal a new picture of this space, identifying some positive prospects of action.

In order to undertake such a speculation, we need to return to Jacob Frank and certain aspects of his teachings.

Frank believed himself to be a repetition and improved version of the biblical Jacob. Accordingly, he presents a significant part of his teachings as a continuation of his precursor’s story, Jacob’s wrestling with the angel, conflicts with Laban and, first and foremost, with his brother Esau. The latter is the forefather of Edom, and Edom is what Jewish tradition identifies with Rome and Christianity, its power of oppression and persecution, as a synonym of the Empire of this world. Frank himself additionally identified Edom with the Kingdom of Poland. He accordingly expressed his belief that Jews should receive baptism by speaking of the need to “go to Esau,” pointing out that when Jacob, having wrestled with the angel, met his brother Esau, he promised to visit him – but never did. Therefore, he, Frank, had to make good on his predecessor’s promise.

Edom is a perfectly ambiguous term in Frank’s teachings. It is a figure of utmost peril, a place where the “weed of death” grows, a space of oppression, downfall, and exile. At the same time, however, it is also a place where the “weed of life” grows, the actual Promised Land of freedom. This is not an inconsistency on Frank’s part, but a precise, antinomist dialectic. According to Frank’s wonderful formula, “two forms are always present in one place”: the weed of life should be sought in the weed of death, salvation in downfall, in sin, the Promised Land in a space of ultimate exile. This is precisely why going to Esau, disastrous from the perspective of Jewish tradition, can be perceived as a truly messianic move.

Of course, from the perspective of Frank himself we are dealing with an extreme example of a sublime, antinomist logic of messianic-avant-garde scandal, a logic of trans-

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gression – the same one whose functioning today we doubt.

Let us imagine, however, what fidelity to Frank would mean today; how, as his successors, we would have to interpret his teachings. Let us imagine what it means to be a Frankist after Frank, at a time when the messianic logic seems inactive.

Jacob Frank led us out, as he promised, “into the field of Edom, to Poland,” but the promised salvation through sin hardly arrived.

As a result, we have found ourselves in a strange, previously unknown realm. We are no longer stuck in traditional structures that we could shatter by “going to Edom.” Rather, we live in a peculiar space in which a perfect superposition of exile and salvation has occurred. Frank’s principle, according to which two forms are always present in one place, assumes a completely new meaning for us: no longer transgressivesublime, but ironic. For it no longer means that we will attain salvation on the strength of sublime transgression, of sin; Jacob Frank led us out, as he promised, “into the field of Edom, to Poland,” but the promised salvation through sin hardly arrived. As a result, we have found ourselves in a strange, previously unknown realm. We are no longer stuck in traditional structures that we could shatter by “going to Edom.”

Rather, we live in a peculiar space in which a perfect superposition of exile and salvation has occurred. Frank’s principle, according to which two forms are always present in one place, assumes a completely new meaning for us: no longer transgressive-sublime, but ironic. For it no longer means that we will attain salvation on the strength of sublime transgression, of sin; it means rather that in everything that surrounds us there ironically flickers the worst and the best. Jacques Derrida described the condition in an extraordinary formula: “I speak only one language, and it is not my own.”6 For it is not so that we have a distinct, cohesive language of tradition that, like Frank himself, we could try to overcome and undo by switching to a foreign one. We live fully immersed in the language of Edom; we still experience it as foreign language, though, again, it is our only one.

So are we lost? Trapped in a demonic sphere of confusion? Not necessarily. Our position could be quite well described with the notion of the “messianic remnant,” developed by Giorgio Agamben in his interpretation of the teachings of St. Paul.7 Meditating on the way the apostle uses this prophetic term which relates to the true messianic subject as well as to the true beneficiaries of salvation, to the avant-garde of the

6 Jacques Derrida, “Jednojęzycznoś ć innego, czyli proteza oryginalna,” trans. Andrzej Siemek, Literatura na świecie, no. 11-12, 1998, p. 26.

7 See Giorgio Agamben, Die Zeit, die bleibt, trans. Davide Diurato (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2006), pp. 62-71.

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8 See Scholem, Żydzi i Niemcy, trans. Adam Lipszyc, Marzena Zawanowska (Sejny: Pogranicze, 2006), pp. 282, 307; Walter Benjamin, In der Sonne, in idem, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972), p.

417; idem, “Franz Kafka,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977), p. 432; Ernst Bloch, “Szczęśliwa ręka,” trans.

Adam Lipszyc, Krytyka Polityczna, no. 13 (Summer 2007), p. 200-201; Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, Minima moralia, trans.

Małgorzata Łukasiewicz (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1999), p. 129; idem, Teoria estetyczna, trans. Krystyna Krzemieniowa (Warsaw: PWN, 1994), p. 253.

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Kingdom, Agamben notes that at least in Paul the term by no means denotes any clearly distinguished community, a small part of Israel, similar to Frank’s original inner circle of followers.

Rather, it refers us to a mode of being that is accessible to everyone: a mode where we are able to become unstuck minimally from ourselves and our own roles, to look at our only language as a language that is not our own. We become members of the messianic remnant when we recognize ourselves as unredeemed beings, as people who do not fully overlap with themselves, do not fit perfectly in the world – although they are unable to indicate in themselves any element that would be hidden from the world, that would not belong to it, that would speak a different language. In our context, this means that the present-day Frankist is not a member of an esoteric community; the present-day Frankist is in the Edomite – there where the Edomite (the Pole) differs from himself.

What actions are possible in such a peculiar position? Their logic is, I believe, probably best epitomized by a principle that Gershom Scholem taught to his friend Walter Benjamin, who in turn passed it on to Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno.8 According to it, when the Messiah comes, everything will be the same as now, only a bit different. Although in its original wording this formula has us looking out for the future saviour, to our situation it best applies to that of people who no longer wait for anything because the Messiah, Jacob Frank, has already arrived and led us astray, into a field of both salvation and downfall. The “a bit different” principle is of course inherently ironic. It describes a condition where we are infinitely close to salvation, a world that is almost-almost the one (just as liberal democracy is almost-almost a kingdom of freedom) and, at the same time, is infinitely far away from salvation, missing it by a hair’s breadth every instant. Acting in accordance with this principle means striving towards infinitely small, clownish deformations of this world, which from our perspective are this world’s corrections, small gestures allowing us, in a flash, a passage, an instant, to notice how things should really present themselves.

Messianism after a Messiah (like Frankism after Frank) is governed, then, by the logic of “a bit different,” not “completely different.” This is again a logic of irony, not of the sublime; a logic of tiny deformations and shifts, not of great ruptures

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and transgressions; a logic of the sublime, of originary messianism and the originary avant-garde – a logic of “completely different” – is the logic of revolution and violence that our master and teacher, Jacob Frank, delighted in. And yet already a new principle was emerging in his thinking, one corresponding with the rule of “a bit different.” It is a principle that is based on the messianic power of wit rather than on a sublime act of violence. It is quite well captured by Ernst Bloch, who in a short note lists examples of the liberating function of the joke and the prank.9 Bloch suggests that if we have to struggle against forces of oppression, raising our hand against them in an act of violence means that we essentially join their side. Instead, we need to play simpletons, tell serious jokes, and use silly ruses so that the hostile forces laugh themselves to death. And again, writing this, Bloch had in mind a proper description of revolutionary action and a wellconstituted world of oppression. That is why in its original version his praise of the joke clearly bespeaks of revolutionary violence, just as Jacob Frank’s own jokes were violent. It is only today, in times of messianism after a Messiah, when oppression is dispersed, when we live in a space of salvation superimposed on a space of downfall, in the field of Edom, that the principle of the messianic joke can free itself from the suspicion of violence; and today it truly acquires credibility as the only possible formula of action. Sublime acts of messianic violence miss the strange form of oppression that we live in today; we can only deal with it by means of the joke, by following the ironic logic of “a bit different.”

9 See Ernst Bloch, Spuren (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), pp.

192-196.

I hope it has by now become clear what I am driving at. I believe we would not be wrong if we thought of all possible artistic action that could arise today as avant-garde in the same spirit in which above I tried to think of the situation of the messianist after a Messiah, a Frankist after Frank. Also today’s avantgardist lives after the Avant-garde, also he has been led by his forefathers out of traditional structures and into the field of Edom, a strange world of culture, where the high mingles with the low, and the saved with the fallen. Fidelity to the messianic call of the avant-garde certainly requires dissenting from what there is, both in terms of existing artistic practices and the existing norms of the non-artistic world. In the field of Edom, this fidelity has, however, to manifest itself in the abandoning of the original logic of the avant-gardes, a logic of the sublime, on behalf of a logic of irony, of the “completely different” principle on behalf of the “a bit different” principle, of the logic

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of violence on behalf of the logic of the joke. It certainly needs to be stressed, however, that the tendency to use jest, pastiche, and products of the cultural industry must not under any circumstances lead to lazy relaxation and the acceptance of what has been, but should rather result in a sense that it is only by dint of small shifts and jokes that it is possible to deregulate this world while remaining faithful to the avant-garde; Roee Rosen – as a subject separate from the invented figure of Justine Frank, who is an element of his masterful, serious jokes – can probably serve as a pretty good example here.

Still, making such statements, I have a strong sense of being far out of my depth, my qualifications being limited to indicating the potential benefits of the above-mentioned analogies and insolent historiosphical fantasies. Therefore, as a Polish Frankist who has little to do with art, I swiftly conclude this essay and return to practicing the “a bit different” principle in disciplines where I feel a bit more confident of myself.

Originally published in Tekstualia, no.3, 2009

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14 What Is the Avant-garde Today?

/ / / J a k u b M aj m u re k

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What does the term “avant-garde film” really mean today?

Does it denote any non-narrative, personal, abstract film that highlights the materiality of the medium or that questions the very apparatus of cinematic projection and its reception? All these practices appeared under the “avant-garde” tag in twentieth-century cinema.

Such a definition, however, would make the avantgarde a conservative and derivative movement; although also the original film avant-gardes not so much heralded a cinema of the future as offered a path distinct from the mainstream of their time.

What defines mainstream cinema today? Two basic factors: a glut of omnipresent images and their speed.

In this situation, avant-gardeness would consist of three movements: of slowing down, returning to the archive, and transgressive reflection.

The first movement slows down the pace of the film, forcing the eye, accustomed as it is to constant simulation, to make the effort of looking. It brings out the temporal aspect of the motion picture. One master of such a slowdown is James Benning. Showing films consisting of still images of nature or industrial landscapes, he forces the viewer to redefine what film perception is, and teaches patience and attention in watching.

A turn towards the archive can be witnessed in the fascination of found-footage filmmakers. An outpouring of films employing the technique suggests that we have

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tools to confront this archive. The genre’s leading protagonists, such as Ken Jacobs in Star Spangled to Death, enter into a deeply dialectical relationship with the archive. They read records against themselves dating from years back, letting them speak so that they turn into indictments against their own unconscious ideological assumptions.

A surfeit of rapid images, circulated in various media (television, cinema, the Internet), weakens the institution of cinema as the sole depositary of moving images. It does so, however, in a naïve, unreflexive way – unlike the avant-garde, which in reaching for the film medium from the very outset wanted to test its limits, stitching it together with other fields of artistic practice or with political commitment. The twenty-first century has offered new vectors of such stitching-together. One example is the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, a project where film is used as a knowledge-producing tool. The Lab’s practice spans the intersection of art, film, and science, problematizing all three categories.

The best-known movie from HSEL, Leviathan, is a study of a fishing boat off the coast of New England, presented from the vantage of sea creatures. The avant-garde returns here to its own original recognition of cinema as an art that, due to its mechanical nature, has a chance to go beyond the human perspective, offering a nonanthropocentric view of the world: as seen by a machine, an “urban organism,” an animal.

The question what to do with this “posthumanistic” reflection on cinema in a situation where cinema made by seeing machines that do not need man is ever closer will certainly be one of the crucial questions of the film avant-garde in the further course of this century.

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15 Jacob’s Ladder /// Anda Rottenberg

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The notion of the avant-garde, i.e. of going beyond established paradigms, is bound up with a faith in progress understood as growth, perfection, moving from a lower to a higher level on an imaginary ladder that mankind climbs in its search for self-perfection, like angels ascending to heaven on Jacob’s ladder in the Bible. Faith in progress was one of the cornerstones of the worldview shared by the French Encyclopaedists, Enlightenment thinkers, and nineteenth-century Positivists. It was also an element of the founding myth of modernity, construed as the building of a new, better world. The Bible is wiser in this regard, for it also takes regress into account; the angels not only ascend, but also descend the ladder. This was understood by the stonemasons decorating the St. Peter and Paul Abbey in Bath in the twelfth century, who showed both the toil of ascending and the sadness of descending, and it was understood by Hegel as he philosophized on the spirit of history. And the modernists believed in the utopia of constantly following the visionaries of a better tomorrow. That is, the avant-garde.

We clung on to this utopia throughout the twentieth century, despite two absolutely irrational world wars, despite the appropriation of technical inventions and concepts formulated for the benefit of humanity and used against it. Alfred Nobel, who died at the end of the nineteenth century, still had pangs of conscience about his dynamite, but the prize he founded certainly did not stop the arms struggle or tribal aggression against the Other – whoever he was. Nor does it today. The Swedish are proud about Nobel because he was concerned with the consequences of his invention, and the French and Polish love Maria Skłodowska-Curie because she won the prize, and yet she was the first victim ever of exposure to radiation.

The Nobel Prize was also awarded, in 1982, to Alva Myrdal of Sweden, whose 1934 book, Crisis in the Population Question, laid the theoretical groundwork for the Swedish eugenics programme, which provided, among other things, for the compulsory sterilization of people deemed unsuitable to foster a child. After the war, Myrdal became a diplomat and served as the ambassador of Sweden in India in the years 1955-1961. There she had to meet Le Corbusier, working at the time on his super-units and a master plan for the city of Chandigarh. Myrdal inspired the Indian government to introduce a sterilization programme that has been under way ever since, and returned with the idea of bringing the working

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class out of city centres and into suburban functional collective-housing estates as part of a progressive agenda called the Million Programme.

The Tensta development in the outskirts of Stockholm, in some respects similar to the Zofia and Oskar Hansendesigned Przyczółek Grochowski in Warsaw, was built around a metro terminus in the period 1967–1972. Its six thousand flats house nineteen thousand people, mostly immigrants. The place has Sweden’s highest unemployment rate and lowest income per capita. The renowned curator, Maria Lind, a firm supporter of the avant-garde, works at the local art centre (Tensta Konsthal). From the vantage of the city centre, her work, the Tensta community, and the problem, remain invisible. Karl Ove Knausgård, a writer highly sensitive to all sensations and describing in detail every moment of his life in Stockholm, fails to mention either the gallery or the development, for he is an heir to high-brow European culture, has the ambition to outdo Proust, and tastes his own madeleine, which, however, does not resemble beef imported from Polish halal slaughterhouses. What matters is that animal rights are respected in Sweden, therefore one can quietly turn inwards. An adaptation of Knausgård’s mammoth best-seller, My Struggle, was staged by an avant-garde director at the avant-garde TR theatre in Warsaw at about the same time that Ruben Östlund’s The Square, deconstructing Sweden’s political correctness, was going off-screen.

We see something else around ourselves. We have halal slaughterhouses, but no immigrants. We live in our professional enclaves, focused on the narrow horizon of our own affairs, “turning inward”: writing books, making films, staging shows and exhibitions. Warsaw’s Museum of Modern Art, whose mission is to study modernist utopias, devoted the latest edition of its Warsaw Under Construction festival to the city’s central square, Plac Defilad. A master plan for it is currently under discussion, with the city hall reviewing suggestions sent in by the public. It will be interesting to find out whether it heeds the postulates voiced by the “ordinary citizen” who set himself on fire there on 19 October, 2017.

The avant-garde wanted to change the world for the better.

We just want things not to get worse. We have entered the phase of descending on Jacob’s ladder.

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16 An Avant-garde Meeting in Gniezno

Krzysztofjastrubczakłukaszkaczmarek

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On 3–4 January 2017, we met in Gniezno, halfway between our respective home cities, Szczecin and Warsaw. We were supposed to hammer out the concept of a new work for a planned exhibition of our art collective, “Krzysztofjastrubczakłukaszkaczmarek,” at the Dawid Radziszewski Gallery. Gniezno was cold and wet. We basically visited only the Museum of the Origins of the Polish State (where an interesting film in 3D can be viewed) because we could not find the entrance to the Cathedral. The weather being as it was, we spent the rest of the time at the Lech Hotel, watching some local TV and discussing our new project. The next day we went home, with one potential idea in mind.

Three weeks later, in an exhibition at the Dawid Radziszewski Gallery, we presented a retrospective of our video work. Moreover, as part of the show, visitors could buy a special pen commemorating our experimental visit to Poland’s first historical capital. Engraved with the title “An Avant-Garde Meeting in Gniezno, 3–4 January 2017,” it also bore our signatures, made with a DVD ink marker. The souvenircum-artwork had been manufactured in Szczecin in a quantity of one hundred for a price of 400 zlotys. During the exhibition at the commercial Dawid Radziszewski Gallery, the pens were sold for 4 zlotys apiece, so the proceeds were meant to just cover the cost of production. Unfortunately, not all the pens sold, so we are still in the red. Moreover, we have

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heard that the autographs have already worn off in some cases, and that many of the buyers have lost their pens. Nonetheless, we are proud that our art collective, “Krzysztofjastrubczak łukaszkaczmarek,” had initiated the centenary of the Avant-garde in Poland by holding an ephemeral and transgressive meeting in Gniezno and producing in its wake an artwork that will be of use to anyone.

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17 The Fortifying Avant-garde

///Jacek Niegoda

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Fortifying like carbohydrates, it is to invigorate, raise spirits, strengthen both physically and mentally. Encourage and hearten.

Guided by Popperian critical rationalism, the avante-garde is to stimulate divergence, i.e. the multidirectional development of an open society, a society embedded in a secular state, pluralistic in matters of culture and religion, enabling the individual to derive maximum benefits from the many viewpoints available.

It is to overcome fanaticism and dogmatism by means of “fragmentary social engineering,” served like a nicely wrapped candy; instead of violent shifts, but also petrified traditions and monuments, to keep creating candy- or cookie-like (con)temporary files, through which the mending of bad things and the perpetuation of good ones are encouraged.

It is to constantly create, as (con)temporary files (i.e. with a limited best-before date), new sweet perfect forms and then, in a process of falsification, to crack them open as fundamentally suspicious, in keeping with the principle that we need to be critical of theories that we find the tastiest.

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18 Lawmaking.

The Artist as a Critical Legislator ///Agnieszka Kilian

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One of the legacies of the avant-garde is a sense that art should not turn away from life. It is not only organically connected with it, obliged to critically examine both itself and social life, but, together with other disciplines, it can and should shape the world; it has the full right to do it. It is precisely the law as a discipline through the critique of which the artist can become an agent of change. Many as may be those who believe that the territories of law and art have little in common, it is perhaps worth asking whether there exists the figure of the “artist as a critic of lawmaking” or the “artist as a legislator.”

And if so, is it not a legacy of the avant-garde? In this short essay, I will focus on how artists have confronted the making of laws, their arbitrariness, and rules as an expression of will.

1 Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” trans.

Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings, Vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 242.

2 Tehching Hsieh, “I Just Go in Life,” a conversation

by Adrian Heathfield, in Hsieh, Heathfield, Out of Now. The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh (MIT Press, 2008), p. 327.

3 Out of Now…, op. cit., p. 29. One can add that from the moment of his arrival in the US in 1974 Hsieh tried to avoid being picked out and deported.

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Walter Benjamin wrote in Critique of Violence: “For in the exercise of violence over life and death, more than in any other legal act, the law reaffirms itself. But in this very violence something rotten in the law is revealed, above all to a finer sensibility . . .”1 At the very heart of the law, therefore, there rests a hidden blade that reveals its nature precisely in such moments, when life and death hang in the balance. This blade is violence, which can have a twofold nature: law-establishing and law-upholding. It seems to me that it was nothing but that inner and immanent self-contradiction of law, the guarantor of security and executioner in one, that Tehching Hsieh must have sensed when he signed a contract with himself as part of his One Year Performance 1978–1979 (Cage Piece). In the contract, notarized by Robert Projansky, a lawyer known for having worked with Seth Siegelaub, Hsieh declares that starting from 30 September he will lock himself away for a year in a wooden cage built in his room. He will make no contact with the outside world, be it by talking, reading, writing, or listening to the radio.

His loft-mate would come daily to deliver him food. The performance was open to be viewed once about every three weeks.2 When he set those rules, Hsieh was an illegal alien in New York and not a recognizable artist.3 Officially, he did not exist. Yet he decided to “eliminate” his person from the public space. He deprived himself of the right to freedom of movement, but also to participation in that public space. At the same time, he exposed his “nonexistence” to public view. He established a law whose blade was turned towards himself. Setting the rules, he deprived himself not so much of freedom as of identity, as it happens in the case of refugees, incarcerated persons, all those against whom security measures are employed, when a private body is subjected to the effect of an official

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text, that is, to sanctioned rules. Even if not directly, Hsieh touched upon fundamental questions: What are legal rules?

What are the reasons behind them? Who decides and in whose name? He also highlighted how the establishment and upholding of laws was related to violence.

On 23 May 2006, the British Parliament passed the Serious Organized Crime and Police Act (SOCPA) which banned public protests within a one-kilometre radius of the Palace of Westminster (in the so called “designated area”).4 One of the direct consequences of this was the removal of the peace camp started in Parliament Square in 2001 by activist Brian Haw, who was one of the first to protest against the imposition of UN sanctions on Iraq and then against the country’s invasion by a US-led coalition. Tate Britain happens to be situated exactly one kilometre away from the Houses of Parliament. Artist Mark Wallinger acted on the coincidence and recreated Haw’s protest in its entirety for his solo exhibition at Tate’s Duveen Hall. He traced the one-kilometre radius across the space and installed carefully recreated placards, photographs, letters, and other items of the original Parliament Square display on both sides of it.5 Presenting State Britain, Wallinger called into question the legality of the regulation itself. But this was not all. He not only decided to make possible in the field of art what had become illegal in the public space. Carrying on Haw’s protest, he played a game with the definition, introduced by SOCPA, of the “designated area”. At the same time, making use of a subversively construed autonomy of art, he instituted a counter-order against the act, thus making possible the protest’s continuation. He incapacitated the opponent, arranging a transgression of the bounds of law, maintaining a tension between both spheres: legality and illegality. The resulting stalemate was best summed up when, upon visiting the Duveen Hall show, the then Prime Minister Tony Blair commented “And I thought we’d got rid of this”. So what is the effectiveness of art and the aesthetics of law? And what else can artists-as-legislators do for us? Paraphrasing what Rancière wrote in Hatred of Democracy about the latter, we might say that there exists only one good law – that which protects from the lawlessness of law. But does it really exist?

And does not this question find its answers precisely in art?

4 The Article 138 of the Organized Crime and Police Act, titled “The Designated Area,” states as follows: “(1) The Secretary of State may by order specify an area as the designated area for the purposes of sections 132 to 137.

(2) The area may be specified by description, by reference to a map or in any other way.

(3) No point in the area so specified may be more than one kilometre in a straight line from the point nearest to it in Parliament Square.”

5 Interview with Mark Wallinger in October, no. 123 (Winter 2008), pp.

185–204.

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20 The Market and the Avant-garde

/ / / M i ko ł aj I w a ń s k i

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Are we capable of noticing at all what purposes art serves in late capitalism?

Or rather during the final stages of neoclassical decadence? Every time we hear about the art trade being implicated in a global financial scandal (e.g. the Panama Papers) or a global issue (tax evasion), we are somehow unmoved. It may even be the same when we read about Donald Trump’s art collection, which among other things includes artworks by classic conceptualists. At other times, art’s presence may be welcomed as a screen or cover to conceal fundamental social issues. Since when has owning a private art museum become an indispensable status symbol for billionaires onc’e happy with their gold furniture and luxury mansions in the French Riviera?

What has happened in the last couple of decades that the art world has gained so many points of contact with the present, least-liked, form of capitalism?

When big money from the finance sector started pouring into the art market in the 1980s, a very strange symbiosis began.

The historical avant-garde was born in the melting pot of twentieth-century history, in a very intense dialogue with a broad social and ideological milieu.

Artists were not afraid to propose bold social reforms, which soon provoked a reactionary backlash. Also, in the order of post-war Fordism and the Cold War, artists informed by the avant-garde tradition made

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themselves heard, alongside the counterculture, in fundamental political disputes. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ensuing atrophy of the underground scene, however, many artists have moved away from vital debates.

The 2008 financial crisis has not led to a breakthrough in this respect. The market is able to absorb critical gestures too.

The art world en masse sides with capital, lacking the courage to refuse to participate or at least to stop dreaming about participating in art fairs, to refuse to aspire to projects carried out by increasingly corporation-like art institutions; or, most importantly, to risk being ill-seen by the market movers and shakers. This is not even (or least of all, perhaps) changed by participationbased strategies, for they usually stop at where radical conclusions, going beyond ordinary consensus, should be formulated.

The art world seems incapable today of regaining political subjectivity, which was the driving force of the historical avant-garde.

Growing individualization is another issue; vigorously socialized to pursue solo careers, artists have a problem with collective work. This is particularly striking in the context of the global peripheries, which can hardly afford critique without risking allegations of resentment.

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As history from a hundred years ago shows, the impulse to reformulate these relationships will come from outside.

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21 Art on the 1:1 Scale, or, Non-Non-Art ///Sebastian Cichocki

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1 This essay is a continuation of the discussions of and texts on “1:1 scale art” that were part of the exhibition Making Use. Life in the Post-Artistic Era, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2016, curated by Sebastian Cichocki and Jakub Szreder in association with Stephen Wright.

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The term “1:1 scale” has been proposed with respect to twentieth- and twenty first-century artistic practices by the Canadian theoretician Stephen Wright, who points out the need to redefine the roles that the producers and recipients of culture play today.1 In his book, Towards a Lexicon of Usership (Van Abbemuseum, 2013), Wright encourages the reader to rethink the passive position of the spectator, the hegemony of the event and the material object, arguing with Kantian “purposeless purpose,” the rigours of ownership and authorship, and the “high-mindedness” of expert culture. The practitioners of 1:1 scale art use the world “as its own map”; to explain the paradox, Wright quotes an excerpt from Lewis Carroll’s 1893 fantasy social novel, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded. In the story, a group of cartographers hired by farmers work on a map, try increasingly large scales until they hit upon the “grandest idea of all”: a “map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile.” However, it is never spread out, the farmers fearing that it would “cover the whole country and shut out the sunlight.”

Therefore, they decide to “use the country itself as its own map, and ... it does nearly as well.” This theme was taken up by Luis Borges in the short story, On Exactitude in Silence (1946), and then expanded upon by Umberto Eco in the essay, On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1 (1995). Through these literary references, Wright identifies historical and contem-porary artistic practices that challenge the rationale of creating artificial models or mock-ups of reality in spaces reserved for art. Artists working on the 1:1 scale become farmers, open second-hand bookstores and private museums, get employed at hospitals or town halls (in the spirit of the 1960s Artists Placement Group consortium), work as

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therapists and shamans, suggest solutions to economic problems and so on. However, 1:1 scale art is hard to recognize, both for institutions and for spectators, because it deconstructs the “distinctive features” on the basis of which particular practices can be grasped, named, and aesthetically judged, or, in other words, to be recognized as art. However, the 1:1 scale allows of enjoying the real effects of such practices, even if they are not always “beneficial”. Wright suggests that they possess a double ontology, being both “this and that”: art and life, performance and a job, an artistic and political process in one.

One possible example of “1:1 art” can be found in some aspects of Rasheed Araeen’s work. Born in 1935 in what is today Pakistan, the artist, an author of minimalist sculptures and installations, moved in 1964 to the United Kingdom. Without eschewing his artistic practice, he became involved in political activism (joining the Black Panthers at some point) and theoretical critique of neocolonialism and globalization. He also curated one of the most significant British exhibitions of the latter half of the twentieth century, The Other Story, which presented the work of UK-based artists of African, Caribbean, and Asian ancestry. In 1978, Araeen started the Black Phoenix, reactivated in 1987 as Third Text, to this day a highly influential magazine on art, which it examines from a political, economic, and social perspective. Publishing a theoretical magazine was an integral part of artistic practice for Araeen. His purpose was to challenge the Eurocentric vision of art’s history and development that also influenced the reception of his own art, considered as “exotic,” and to open art to new interpretations, not conforming to

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2 Rasheed Araeen, Art Beyond Art. Ecoaesthetics: A Manifesto for the 21st Century (Third Text, 2010).

3 It’s the Political Economy, Stupid: The Global Financial Crisis in Art and Theory, edited by Gregory Sholette and Oliver Ressler (Pluto Press, 2013).

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established canons. In the late 1970s, Araeen visited the desert areas of South Beluchistan where his ancestors came from. The imposing and austere landscape had a huge impression on him, and he asked himself: “why cannot this paysage become an artwork?” In his essay, Return to Beluchistan (2010),2 the artist reflected on the legacy of the 1960s and 1970s land art from a non-Western perspective, stressing his lack of a personal or arthistorical relationship with the contexts that had made possible the trend’s emergence in the United States. For several decades, Araeen felt a growing need to produce a 1:1 scale artwork, one that would break with the Western mechanisms of selection and of the institutional verification of such quantifiers of art as originality, authorship, or materiality.

In 2001, he proposed (drawing on his engineering background and expertise) building a dam in the desert that would help retain water from periodic rivers and thus create better living conditions for the nomadic tribes that inhabit the area. The dam would be both a sculpture and a functioning dam, an artwork and an engineering feat, an object of aesthetic contemplation and an agent for change.

At the same time, the work’s double status would guarantee its vitality, creating a tension between artistic work and its institutional “legitimation”.

The dam would be, not a situational model meant to highlight an issue, but a 1:1 scale artwork.

Another, narrower term used to describe some of the contemporary 1:1 artistic practices is that of occupational realism. Proposed by Julia Bryan-Wilson, it plays with the ambiguity of the word occupational as referring to “occupation” as one’s vocation as 3 well as an armed invasion. The US theoretician cites, among other projects, California-based artist

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Ben Kinmont’s Sometimes a nicer sculpture is being able to provide a living for your family (1998, ongoing). Kinmont runs a second-hand bookstore specializing in rare culinary books. He considers this a responsible business and enjoys much prestige in the US second-hand bookseller community; he participates in fairs, runs a mailorder shop, pays taxes and so on, but at the same time he nominates his bookstore as an artistic performance. Taking his case as a point of departure, Bryan-Wilson defines occupational realism as a practice where the domain of paid work (performed to pay for what one needs) and the domain of art (where financial profit as a goal is not precluded, but is transgressed for the sake of aesthetic, personal, or political considerations) clash with each other or deliberately intermingle. One historical example of occupational realism would be the practice of Raivo Puusemp, an Estonian-born US conceptual artist, who in 1975 was elected mayor of the hamlet of Rosendale (CDP) in Ulster County, New York. His artistic practice was based mainly on the “dissemination of ideas” realized by other people. In running for the post of mayor, Puusemp saw an opportunity to employ his artistic imagination in a new field, to create an “artwork as a solution to a political problem”. In 1976, a referendum was held and the village voted to dissolve itself to solve its municipal problems, an idea proposed by Puusemp. It was disincorporated and became part of the greater Town of Rosendale.

During his tenure, Puusemp never defined his work as an artistic project. Its only material trace is Rosendale. A Public Work 1975 – 1976, a compilation of press cuttings about the “self-dissolution” of the hamlet.

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It can be noticed that in Poland art projects in the vein of “occupational realism” have been pursued predominantly by women artists: Julita Wójcik, Joanna Rajkowska (Twenty-Two Tasks), Paulina Ołowska (Nova Popularna, with Lucy McKenzie, 2003), or Elżbieta Jabłońska (The Way to a Man’s Heart Is Through His Stomach, since 1999, or Art Wastelands, since 2014). Julita Wójcik’s oeuvre in particular includes many projects that consisted in nominating physical work as an artistic performance.

She herded goats (Schopenhauer Park Revitalization, 2002) or swept a factory floor (Sweeping after the Weavers, 2003). One project that can be considered more broadly, in the spirit of the tradition of 1:1 scale art, is Returning to Białowieża by Jan Szewczyk and Tomasz Koszewnik. Started in 2015, it is an example of an artistic programme of a hardto-define status, stretched between being a natural escapade, a free university, an art retreat, a selfstudy group, or sociological participant observation.

The two artists proposed a retreat in the Białowieża Forest for PhD candidates of Poznań’s University of the Arts, which took place in association with the Jan Józef Lipski Popular University in Teremiski.

Among other things, the programme included biking trips and meetings with local experts representing various disciplines: naturalists, artists, biologists, historians and so on. Such projects bring into focus all the tensions that are bound up with 1:1 scale art practices (or “post-artistic” practices if we use a term proposed in the 1970s by theoretician Jerzy Ludwiński who considered art as a “glue” connecting different disciplines) and hinder their institutional transfer, which in classic media used to be the movement from the artist’s studio to the exhibition room. Here, spatio-temporal boundaries are blurred, and, instead of a particular medium,

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a “toolbox” with instruments from other disciplines is used.

How to define art’s boundaries in the case of so subjective an experience as a retreat in a primeval forest, the occupation of a city square, or a cartography workshop in a favela? Art has been increasingly overlapping with other, non-artistic systems: ecology, politics, farming, religion, anthropology, or therapy.

It is a specific realm of human activity whose lack of sharp disciplinary boundaries ought to be interpreted in terms of its vivacity and adaptability.

The blurriness of art’s boundaries is a factor that allows of venturing into new areas, of exploring the virgin territory “beyond the map”. Separating artistic practices from professional ones, the art work from the everyday article, or artistic competencies from social ones, has become in today’s institutional art world (and even more so in the noninstitutional one) not so much insignificant as of a secondary importance. This process has had many stages. The upheaval of the 1960s and1970s brought about, among other things, the dematerialized artwork and a mistrust of institutions and their procedures. The new institutionalism of the 1990s, besides challenging the primary role of the exhibition as a means of communicating with the audience, promoted the attitudes of the artist as researcher, and artist as curator and knowledge producer. Today, the institutional art world is still trying to prevent the dissolution of artistic practices in everyday life, resisting the erasure of those characteristics that set it apart from other human activities and without which these practices can neither be judged nor (materially and symbolically) “petrified”. The utilitarian value of art has increasingly been discussed in recent times, as has been

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the idea of replacing the passive spectator with an active participant and the author with an initiator of long-term processes. The classic model of the museum, dating back to the nineteenth century, has been challenged, and numerous institutions around the world have been seeking a way out of the stalemate in a collectivistic, networking “museum 3.0” model. In the case of 1:1 scale art practices, their presentation in the gallery should serve not to “hijack” them institutionally, but rather to distribute information, emphasize certain specific competences used by artists (interdisciplinary thinking, unortho dox knowledge production, temporary institutions), and encourage independent escapades into the world beyond the museum. The second decade of the twenty first century is the time of a global conservative counterrevolution that is undoing democratic forms of social organization. Besides the judiciary, the education system, sexual- or ethnic-minority rights, or the natural environment, language itself has also suffered. The potential of the most interesting post-artistic practices consists in an ability to think the unthinkable and to mobilize the political imagination on behalf of new forms of social communication and organization.

(2017)

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22 Salt of the Earth, or, Post-Art

///Kuba Szreder

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1 Jerzy Ludwiński, Sztuka w epoce postartystyczne j i inne teksty (Poznań and Wrocław: Akademia Sztuk Pięknych, Biuro Wystaw Artystycznych, 2009), p. 66.

2 Stephen Wright, Toward a Lexicon of Usership (Van Abbemuseum, 2013).

One of the doyens of post-artism is Jerzy Ludwiński, a theoretician of a conceptual revolution in art, who in his famous essay, Art in the Post-Artistic Era (1971), wrote: “It is very likely that what we practice today is no longer art. We simply missed the moment when it had turned into something else, something we can’t quite name. It is certain, however, that what we practice today has greater potential”.1 Informed by Ludwiński’s concepts, I curated, with Sebastian Cichocki, the exhibition Making Use. Life in Post-Artistic Times (2016), where we sought to go beyond the established, western canons, shaping our understanding of post-conceptual art, and beyond a shallow critique of its commercialization. At the same time, we engaged in a dialogue with artistic usology (as popularized by the Canadian theoretician Stephen Wright and the Cuban artist Tanja Bruguera) which, in our view, too often emphasizes a wrongly construed effectiveness of art.2 We have inherited from Ludwiński the concept of the “post-artistic era” with the benefit of the inventory. Brilliant in its simplicity, it bears a stamp of the times when it was first formulated. The prefix “post-“ (it needs to be remembered that Ludwiński was writing in the pre-postmodern era) is actually somewhat misleading, suggesting (as intended, in fact, by the author who liked to periodize things) that post-art is something that follows art, some new trend or groundbreaking tendency. In this way, Ludwiński, as an active participant of the conceptual revolution, was reacting to the twofold phenomenon of the inflation of the avant-garde (the proliferation of artistic isms, movements, and factions) and of the implosion of the artwork and its exhibition systems (for most part, after all, his reflection is devoted to impossible art and to institutional – and equally paradoxical – ways of supporting it). In this context, the post-artistic era appears as a kind of Aquarius Age, the promise of new, better times when art, non-art, and non-non-art become one.

But for all of Ludwiński’s periodizations, the roots of the notion of art that he himself subscribed to should rather be sought in the second half of the eighteenth century. It was then that Friedrich Schiller, in his On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, formulated the vision of the aesthetic state, founded on an aesthetic play with form, the play drive, construed as a force that revolutionizes social relations. Thus Schiller significantly modified the Kantian concept of “disinterested observation,” laying emphasis not so much on aesthetic contemplation as on the social application of the power to imagine (I follow here the

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interpretation proposed by Jacques Rancière and his theory of the aesthetic distribution of the visible).

In this light, post-art can be seen as the realization of the imagined, its application in various fields of social life. Stephen Wright, author of the short but influential book, Towards a Lexicon of Usership, notes that in order to make a sensible use of artistic competences, one needs, willing or not, to break with the established conventions of the gallery/exhibition scene, be it by blurring authorship, challenging copyright laws, or undoing the art object itself.

Post-art does not seek to save mankind by force through aesthetic education. Rather, it is like salt: small quantities of it make food tastier without fundamentally changing its nutritional value (unless it is overdosed). Man cannot be expected to survive on salt alone; this would be as unwise as suggesting, as Marie Antoinette did, that the revolted Paris crowd should be fed cakes in the absence of bread (interestingly, it was precisely such gestures that, in the longer term, led to the royal collection being opened to the public and ultimately to the founding of the first republican art museum, the Louvre – but Marie Antoinette lost her life in the process). Neither salt nor cakes will replace bread, but it is nice to eat well-seasoned food, and a tasty dessert is welcome on (almost) every table.

Making use of artistic imagination should be confused neither with its instrumental exploitation nor with an attempt to dominate other fields of life. Artists cross the limits of the art world not in order to replace welfare workers, politicians, or protest organizers in their highly important social functions. Rather, they set about penetrating or differentiating various spheres of life (from future farming to political demonstrations) to make things different, more interesting, though not necessarily more effective. Various examples from the history of mankind leave no doubt that if one wants to change society, one needs to choose proper means for that. When we need to repair a water faucet, we call a plumber, not an artist, unless (a) the artist is a jack-of-all-trades (which is actually often the case); (b) we feel like having a longer conversation about art with someone; (c) the faucet repair is but a pretext for other things. Similarly to transforming societies in a spirit of equality and solidarity, we need efficient engineers, scholars, administrators, or politicians.

Sometimes artists themselves are knowledgeable in these respects and become directly, personally involved. They need not

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(though they can) call it post-art, for they are also activists and citizens. On the other hand, it is worth noting a generic coincidence of intellectual or aesthetic faculties due to which it is precisely post-artists (and not the art-gallery conformists) who actively strive to change the world. Jana Shostak, author of a great master’s project at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, whose ambition is to introduce a new word to the Polish language – to replace the xenophobia-tainted “migrant” with a familiar-sounding “newbie” – organizes pro-democracy protests.

Daniel Rycharski, initiator of the Peasant Memorial – part agora, part sculpture – is a long-time LGBT rights activist.

Contrary to stereotype, these two cases show that post-artistic practices are in fact situated not at the margins of the art world, but at its very core. Master’s projects are produced in-school.

The construction of mobile monuments is made possible by public-art festivals. On the other hand, such projects do not fit into the narrow frameworks of gallery systems whose inefficiency (economic, intellectual, artistic) is currently being discovered by another generation of artists. The Peasant Memorial only works when people are interested in making use of it. Words will come into widespread use when their connection with the artist wears off. Paradoxically, for such projects to artistically succeed means for their artistic nature to be negated. To forestall a well-known argument - yes, post-artistic practices can assume the shape of collectible gadgets, but in such a case their glimmer (for they are normally both a post-artistic action and a social practice) fades, that is they simply lose their appeal.

Let us return to the subject of effectiveness. Post-artistic practices should be considered as a form of communal luxury, deliberate wastefulness, socialized celebration, methodical madness performed with a critical sense and aesthetic sensibility, which may be an effect of long-time training, but also of spontaneous impulse or the all-human ability to behave unconventionally (which is by no means so ubiquitous in the art world as its flagship celebrities might believe). In this sense, post-art can be made by anyone, just like anyone can make a daily walk. But, as we know from experience, only few stray off the well-trodden path.

Recapitulating, I would say that the connection between postart and overall social improvement or progressive political change is not a direct one. It is not so that imbuing a society with post-art will by itself lead to a revolutionary change for the better.

One can assume, however, that only societies that tolerate (or in

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fact actively support) the everyday-life applications of a postartistic imagination, defined as a widespread ability to transgress social conventions, will be able to cope with a three-fold crisis – of capitalist in-equality, fascist reaction, and ecological disaster. The post-artistic hypothesis rests precisely on the premise that liberty, equality, and solidarity are not possible with-out imagination.

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23 Meret Oppenheim’s Spiral Column.

A Strange Lofty Pillar, Swollen and Gnarled / / / J o a n n a R aj kow s k a

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What is a hypothesis? Perhaps it is one of those moments when a profound existential experience combines with the fluctuation of history, and we draw conclusions and construct a vision of the future? I am thinking of looking back, but also of looking into the future; as well as thinking of the type of experience that does not result in a flash in your head that we call understanding, but of a flash of sensory experiences combined with a profound sense that one day we will be able to understand the sum total of those experiences. And in order to understand them, we project ourselves into the future. To me, such a flash came on the winter morning when I first saw Meret Oppenheim’s Spiral Column at Waisenhauptplatz in Bern, Switzerland.

I remember that it was not a brisk morning. It was early 2009. The air was crystal-clear, sure, but my head still felt heavy after many hours of driving across Europe in my old car. Bottle, my dachshund-like “girl”, which I had taken with me on the trip, was trembling; she is sensitive to low temperatures.

Waisenhausplatz: a strange lofty pillar, swollen, gnarled, and warped in the shoulders, enwrapped with icicles and boas of vegetation, the human/inhuman organism, was so bizarre that my mind did not know what to make of it.

The tubers and encrustations made it gruesome. But I took delight in it nevertheless. It was a woman, dressed gracefully in whole cascades of icicles, and yet it was still naked.

The smoothness of the stone surface was so emphatic you wanted to touch it, like the skin of a taut belly. I do not know how much time I spent at the column, examining it from all sides and plunging my gaze into the knobbly outgrowths and tender islands of moss. For all its vitality, the Spiral Column must have been a result of utter disappointment and weariness with culture. And not only culture.

Holding Bottle in my hands, I was aware of her warmth and the smell of her fur.

Instead of analyzing (and pulling away), I succumbed, as I am wont to, to the experience of looking. I wanted for the column to become, if only for a moment, a gate to my own

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intensity. I wanted to be in it and through it. I wanted to measure myself up against it and become it. The column proved open, porous, and there was an energy flowing through it.

I stopped at that on that cold morning. I knew that one day I would grow to understand the Spiral Column. What follows is an account of the process of that growing.

Attempting an (impossible) identification with the object is the school of my beloved Professor Nowosielski, a subtle thinker; and the result of a profound attachment to Surrealism, which I had discovered in earnest precisely through him. And yes, Meret Oppenheim! The kind of rupture that Surrealism had made in European culture remained a source of hope that an alternative was possible to the cold, analytical modernism that had proved so perfect a décor of capital; modernism which, enthralled with technological progress, naively believed in a better future for mankind... which tries to take reality apart and repair it as if it were a Swiss watch. The Spiral Column did not share that belief. It was, or at least seemed to me, a “child” of maturity and disappointment. Meret Oppenheim had yet again blazed a trail of sensibility.

What struck me the most was the fact that the fate of that column (that woman) lay in the “hands” of inhuman organisms. All agency, as we would call it today, had been ceded to the life cycles of those beings that Oppenheim had given her work away to; or those that (instinctively) responded to the invitation. If she had been asked in whose name she was speaking, she would probably have replied that in the name of those that had decided to literally grow together with the column. It is them that it owes its shape and colour to; its chemical composition, humidity, species make-up; the future; the Spiral Column has become their habitat.

The Column had somehow survived people’s dislike of life. The Bernese were at first put off by its unbridled elementality. In 1983 it showed itself, new and nude – too new

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and too nude – to a crowd gathered in Waisenhausplatz. It was, admittedly, somehow poor. Even the spiral stone waterspout, changing from time to time into a row of short shelves passing the incoming stream water on to each other, did not save its strangely insipid appearance. In the black-and-white photos from the opening, the spectators’ attention seems to be drawn in particular by the colonnade, with people gazing intently at the openwork finial. From then on, the process of the work’s bio-colonization progressed at an amazing pace. By the 1990s, bulges of exploding life had appeared. In 2013, “cleaning works,” costing the considerable sum of 70,000 francs, got the column rid of heaps of moss and calcifications.

They had grown so heavy they were reportedly threat ening the very stability of the structure. And virtually every time I asked about the Spiralsaule, I would hear about attempts to have it removed. Controversies, dislike.

Alluding to the project’s classical origins, the colonnade on top is vulnerable to the penetration of inhuman organisms. Sooner or later, it will become overgrown and disappear. Besides disappointment and maturity, there is also a sense of distance and empathy in that. Beholding the colonnade, I was thinking about my mother who had died recently, about her dream to turn into a tree, and her panic fear of loneliness in the grave. I was thinking about her fascination with forgotten cultures and the mass migrations of entire communities; about cultures that had never been recognized, had not made it to art history books because their meanings and aesthetics were beyond the mental grasp of those writing them. And the Spiral Column was telling me that it did not really matter because what remained was an omnipresent and perpetual life cycle, with its logic and its ruthlessness.

Three months later I left Bern, carrying with me the idea of an animal-shaped container for my mother’s ashes, which would also be a mass grave where human ashes would mingle. In this way, she would not be alone. The container, in the shape of a near-abstract sleeping bat, was to hang under a nearby bridge, the Kornhausbrücke.

It never did, of course.

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Finally, in 2017, I remembered the morning in Bern and the Spiral Column. A year earlier, I had successfully completed the project Trafostation where a defunct 1930s electrical transformer tower in Wrocław was renaturalized, or handed over to non-human species. Today, water silently trickles down the windows of the Trafostation; planted or replanted examples of native, ruderal, or aggressive flora grow inside the building and on its roof; a coat of algae has covered the structure; birds have started nesting inside.

And it was only upon completing that project that I realized what Meret Oppenheim’s Spiral Column really is. And what is the idea of a possible different path for the avant-garde.

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Joanna Rajkowska, Spiralsaule IV, 16 × 21 cm, 2017

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Joanna Rajkowska, Spiralsaule IV, 16 × 21 cm, 2017

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Joanna Rajkowska, Spiralsaule IV, 16 × 21 cm, 2017

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24 The Pirouette ///Ewa Partum

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It is a personal experience.

Between us exists at this moment also our past which we carry in ourselves as an intimate space.

This continuation constitutes the relationship that we find between ourselves and time.

It is a key to reality when we look within ourselves, like in a pirouette.

I tried to destroy my feelings.

My feelings about the past.

What has been and what has mattered is so connected with us as a mirror reflection with the original thing.

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next page: Ewa Partum, Pirouette, Galerie Dialog, West Berlin, 1984

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25 Dreaming the Body, Embodying the Dream.

A Few Thoughts on the Front Guard / / / A n n a K ró l i k iew icz

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I walk in a constant tension between the visible and the invisible: light propels me, I stumble in the dark.

In terms of eyesight, only apes, whales, and birds can match us; all other animals will better find their way walking down a tunnel of sound and smell, an audiochemical trail stretched across water, air, grass.

Weaker, we cannot do that. I would like to imagine my debut on earth, being squeezed out into the world again: a return to the first experience, to the dawn of sensation.

Every analysis is preceded by a distinct and personal contact with the world, a direct knowledge; the body is a gate through which the experiencing subject can import external representations. Flavours would not be denominated, for I would neither know nor have a language to name them, I would have a tongue to rub substances into the taste buds on my palate. Hearing, smelling, grasping would get tangled in a synesthetic experience, things would have consistency, weight, temperature, roughness, aroma, sound. The eye would develop at the end of the path towards self-reliance, as in puppies.

Passing through intervals and arriving at life-points, I experience my time both mentally and sensually, being a subject in a relationship with the world, a bodily compass, confident in my own painterly vision, in a holistic way of looking at everything that I see, in connecting seemingly distinct entities through my intention. Such connections are never made with a single sense, but always with the whole body at once, the body being an indivisible, synergic, and polyphonic totality that opens us to the intersensual world. Maurice Merleau-Ponty argues that by moving, entering the entity being created, in the trance of work, the artist’s body is not merely an object among

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other objects, but rather a rupture that, bending its own structure, makes manifest the invisible. Painting and art cause things that could otherwise remain invisible, and so, nonexistent, forever, detached from the spectacle of consciousness, to be brought into existence through a variety of shapes, awakening the kind of pre-knowledge that I mentioned above.

(Post)modern culture, it is often said, is one dominated by the faculty of sight and generally by the visual. But such a diagnosis is incomplete: it is myopic (!) to the fact that the tone in contemporary aesthetics is set by haptic qualities. In L’Œil et l’Esprit Merleau-Ponty writes of the art of painting as a source of legitimate knowledge about the body’s relationship(s) with the world, as a point of departure for making statements about the world and oneself.

Ignored by Platonic and Christian reflection, the body regains, through Merleau-Ponty, its due status as the unifying centre of living meanings. Now integrated within it inseparably, spirituality and sensuality, immersed in the world, experience it arbitrarily and judge it. According to the French phenomenologist, we always perceive with the whole body, never merely with a single sense; it is to him that we owe the reconstruction of multi-sense perception. An object accessible to sight (a building, a sculpture, a painting) is not just a folder of visual data; to a greater or lesser extent, it also engages the other senses. In her essays on art and technology, Agnieszka Jelewska writes about how the Cartesian intellectual subject is turning today into a sensorium – a subjectivity-inmotion networking with the world – as well as about how being stimulated by the world affects our perception and how a reflection on the hybridity of knowledge should become a critical task for the humanities.

We “look” at the world through the body, from its per-

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1 Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2012), p. 12.

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spective, defined by the stimuli that reach the membrane of the senses. In other reflections on the visible and invisible, the French philosopher again connects bodiness with meaning. In Phenomenology of Perception he stresses that, writing about the body, one must not stop at examining the conscious mind, for bodily experience forces us to acknowledge such establishing of meaning that is not a work of a constituting consciousness, meaning that adheres closely to certain contents instead of being basted to them by intellect. Art is an expression as a result of which successive levels of the essence of this world are discovered, the wealth of reality effervesces, its dynamics shuffle, it is at the artist’s, painter’s, my own disposal. My body is the semantic core here.

This notion of self-learning, self-knowledge, and the bodily sources of cognition is something I resonate closely with, as I do with the much more contemporary theories of Juhani Pallasmaa, a Finnish architect and thinker who in his publications and practices demonstrates how we have impoverished ourselves by focusing almost exclusively on the visual sphere, and calls for the embodiment of the mind. “My body is truly the navel of my world, not in the sense of the viewing point of the central perspective, but as the very locus of reference, memory, imagination, and integration.”1 This sounds like my own manifesto.

The twentieth century changed a lot in aesthetics, Cubism and Futurism having curbed somewhat the power of sight as the until-then dominant sense and, in effect, redefined the notion of beauty itself.

The Futurists set about testing the possibility of capturing movement, action, motion in art, eschewing thus the viewpoint of a passive observer on behalf of that of one being at the centre of changes, inside events. The gadgets allowing the body to follow arousal

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change now; the excitement of touch – tactility, sensations simultaneously irritating the senses of smell, sight, taste, and hearing – mean that all our sensorial centres get activated, evaluating the situation. The Futurist manifesto proclaims, among other things, an embrace of – rediscovered today – haptic aesthetics, the experience of the world as composed of all poles of sensibility at once. The pure form of abstract painting demonstrated, in the avant-garde revolution, that it was possible to construct a system that was nonrepresentational, yet equivalent, analogous. The visible world almost disappears in this painting form, but metaphor and interpretation remain. What remains is a moment of transgression, transcendence, of crossing the boundaries of visibility, going back to the invisible, testing the possible paths between these two worlds. My body becomes a screen between myself and things, all my senses an extension of touch, my drawing and thinking hand an extension, world-thinking and -drawing, of my mind, to quote another French philosopher, Michel Serres.

To such conclusions leads an analysis of both highbrow art (painting, sculpture, architecture) and applied art (product and interior design) of the twentieth century. Over the past century, painters, sculptors, architects, and designers gradually lost interest in the visual qualities of the materials they work with, focusing instead on haptic sensations and ways of implanting them in the space of the artwork, on the automatic activation of the remembering body through a non-conceptual and non-calculated physical reaction.

The artist’s senses and the viewer’s senses as the vanguard of the artwork’s reception helped us to survive and evaluate potentially deadly existential

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threats: to tell a poisonous berry by smell before we ate it, to scan a territory for sounds of danger before entering it. The polyphonic body, a body that I awaken in the viewer and open up to a polysensory experience of reality, to a multitude of senses, causes that which might otherwise remain invisible forever, detached from the spectacle of consciousness, to be called into being through of a variety of sensations, through sight, taste, smell, touch. A three-hundred-sixty-degree awareness: being able to be all ears, to smell a rat, to play on all nerves, to be in the avant-garde of the eye.

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26 Producing Attitudes ///Bogna Świątkowska

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Imagining a new world, organized in accordance with principles that cancel the past, is a rather popular occupation these days. Something has obviously ended, and something else has not taken shape yet. The idea of the vanguard, a formation that explores and is the first to discover what lies ahead, is therefore becoming particularly attractive.

That part of art which claims to be particularly sensitive to social issues casts itself in the role of a precursor and driver of social change. It seeks inspiration: in community practices, local cultures, ordinary people’s lives, in prosaic everyday activities. It feeds on the ordinary and nonartistic, which may mean politics, economics, computer games, the dark Web, power structures, the global South, mega-cities and their slums, traditional teaching methods, or handicrafts. It is not planning a new reality, outlining great visions, but designing individual couplings between art recipients and the world that has become the trend-setting practice. Art has turned into a tool that helps to produce relevant attitudes – it actually feeds on them: on protest, dissension, commitment, collaboration, community. This is underpinned by a sense that the power of individuals united by a shared attitude results in the desired future materializing spontaneously. Art as a precursor of social change wrestles with the resistant matter of the past; providing art recipients with attitude models, it moves on from the business of exhibiting artworks to that of managing attitudes, hoping to see their lasting transformation. The avant-garde has meanwhile taken root in the Polish landscape – there are dozens of dance schools, restaurants, hairdressers and beauty salons, hotels, and residential developments that make the avant-garde an everyday experience.

As an adjective, “avant-garde” means, then: innovative, interesting, challenging, out of the ordinary, a bit weird.

Dining at the Avangarda pizzeria, we dine differently, dancing at the Avangarda dance school, we dance more interestingly, and living on Avangarda Estates, we dream of the future.

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Polish Avant-gardes [Awangardy polskie], Białystok 2017, photo by Justyna Chmielewska

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27 The Power of Error / / / S t a n i s ł aw R u ks z a

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Old distinctions and formulas contribute nothing, merely petrifying entrenched notions and statuses, underpinning symmetrical worldviews, and perpetuating conflicts.

The solution may lie in the future – but not one based on the past. Let us invest in error and randomness!

An experimental attitude, unafraid of mistake, accident, or chaos, reaching out towards the

“unknown result,” is worth considering, especially today, when communication technologies have been revolutionized in an unprecedented way, impacting directly on socio-political shifts.

The sheer scale of communication studies, starting from nineteenth-century linguistics, through information theory, to contemporary media studies as well as future-oriented cognitive science, also prompts us to investigate communication errors.

Moreover, the phantasm of success, professionalization, and prestige, accompanied inevitably by a fear of failure, has become one of the driving forces of mankind in societies based on the principle of competition, and therefore of a division between winners and losers.

Investing in error and randomness is the future. If accuracy requires less effort today (proofreading soft-ware, “copy and paste”), then it follows that it is becoming increasingly trivial and obvious; and perhaps untrue, but forced upon us by dominant discourses or the fashion regime.

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Errors and malfunctions can be seen as demonstrative of credibility and authenticity.

A low-res’ snapshot taken with a smartphone by an “eyewitness” is more trusted these days than a state-of-the-art picture from a professional news photographer. An actor speaking a classical text in a normal (present-day) fashion has more appeal than one maintaining the pathos and emphasis characteristic for traditional drama theatre.

In Of God and Man, his conversations with Stanisław Obirek, Zygmunt Bauman quotes a “resigned conclusion” from John Maxwell Coetzee, inspired by the early-twentieth-century South-African naturalist and poet, Eugene Marais:

“An intellectual apparatus marked by a conscious knowledge of its insufficiency is an evolutionary aberration.”

Ever since mankind became an active subject of history and culture, it has sought to comprehensibly, or intelligibly, record ideas and events.

Making things as clear as possible, laying down principles and rules, and eliminating error have been essential to the development of communication and culture. Western thought, dominated by teleological concepts (Latin telos: purpose), is aimed at concrete results or outcomes (be it in the economy, religion, art, or history), at development and progress, stressing the significance (reign) of history as a directional, purposeful force.

The world only seems to be governed by deterministic laws, by orderly cause-and-

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and-effect sequences, and in art, the control of creation. In reality, the better we know a historical period, the more difficult it becomes for us to explain why things happened the way they did. In the fourth century AD, Christianity was but one of several dozen possible options for holding together a crumbling empire, and in 1913 the Russian Communists but a relatively insignificant émigré party faction with leaders in Zurich and Vienna. Each of those moments in history had a range of possibilities and the chosen one was probably not the only one. Determinism is attractive in art too, because it explains post-fact our presentday choices or positions. It shows them as a natural and inevitable – contingent – historical outcome.

Turning towards error and stressing the role of randomness requires abolishing the importance of history and the development cycle. Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden (1854) that:

Age is no better, hardly so well qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost. One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by living.

Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the young, their own experience has been so partial... Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me; but it does not avail me that they have tried it. If I have any experience which I think valuable, I am sure to reflect that this my Mentors said nothing about.

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To successfully challenge the logic and purposefulness of history or religion means to cut short arguments justifying as reasonable the dictates of ideology or religion, all theodicies, and to open up the way for liminal situations in the arts, to dreaming as a resistance against the domination of capitalism, as well as to all imperfection, failure, error, absurdity, or chaos as carriers of meaning.

Failure is not so much a token of the collapse of an idea, as a defeat of the principle, or concept, of reason. In the Western narrative, the absolutist ratio forgets about its limits and becomes fixated on finding a solution at all costs, explaining fully.

Contemporary art, literature, or music have taken up the play of error, the utility of failure or chance.

Today’s reception of the Great Avant-Garde, being usually based on its relationships with modernism and various community- or state-making activities, often ignores its irrational (spiritual, occult) current, even if one of the first avant-garde texts was Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art, and the spiritualism of Mondrian or Gurdjieff offered an emancipation from the iron grip of capitalism. Writing a history of the avant-garde, particularly its Polish line (in a country religiously and culturally homogeneous), holds emancipatory potential in itself.

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But future avant-gardes do not have to look back at the past, even at the avant-garde one.

To truly front the guard, means to create alternative outcomes without precedent, to send oneself on a cognitive drift.

Let us invest in randomness and error!

The exquisite corpse will drink a new wine!

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28 The Avant-garde in the Age of the Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and Artificial Intelligence ///Edwin Bendyk

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Art and culture face an extraordinary task today. Firstly, they need to confront the challenge of the Anthropocene, a new era that mankind irreversibly entered when it became the main force shaping the global eco-system. An awareness that we live in the Anthropocene entails, paradoxically, the need to abandon anthropocentrism and, as Peter Sloterdijk suggests, to adopt a new eschatological perspective, monogeism, based on accepting that there exists only one Earth and that its limits define also the limits of human existence.

As a consequence of the Anthropocene, monogeism requires a new imagination needed to name the world anew and to answer the following question: is it worthwhile for mankind to survive, which would require forging a new culture of the anthropocene? Or is it too late, and the answer should be left to artificial intelligence which has been gaining an ever stronger presence in the field of symbolic production and reproduction, laying claims to creative autonomy?

Here we arrive at the fundamental issue of the autonomy of the creative act and its potential at the present stage in the development of capitalism, where General Intellect – the intellect accumulated in real capital, that is in the technological system comprising the infrastructure of the Anthropocene – becomes the main force of production. The system’s highest expression is artificial intelligence; its full implementation would eliminate humans from creation and production processes.

The Anthropocene as Capitalocene heralds a need for confronting a vision of radical posthumanism where man as a creative subject becomes redundant. Here a task emerges for the new avant-garde which, as signalled by the manifesto Art in the

Age of Cognitive Capitalism, Posthumanism, and Complexity Sciences (published by this author with a group of artists in 2009), has to be a neo-avant-garde. A neo-avantgarde, i.e. a movement conscious that it is meant to face a fundamental question: does the survival of culture depend on the defence of humans and their autonomy as creative subjects?

Or should we, perhaps, acknowledge the autonomy of the creative act as an expression of the autonomy and agency of a technological system becoming emancipated and, consequently, prepare for mankind’s abdication i.e if that technical, emancipating system will be interested if at all in our shoulds and should nots.

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29 Sperorganism: The Avant-garde and the Experience of Nature ///Aleksan dra Jach + Pa u l i n a K u r c - M aj

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Superorganism: The Avant-garde and the Experience of Nature is the first in a series of exhibitions organised by the Muzeum Sztuki in 2017 as part of the centenary of the avant-garde in Poland, aimed at examining its legacy from the contemporary perspective.

Discussions of modernism have repeatedly identified the theme of its rationalism and progress, both social and technological, entangled in a dialectical model of thinking, based on mutually exclusive contradictions. The avant-garde, its driving force being a desire to transgress the status quo, is identified with the contestation of the historical models of culture. This contestation — or rebellion — bears the markings of emancipatory work, but also of efforts to realise utopian ideas, which often produce unwanted consequences — the dehumanisation and disciplining of new dimensions of life. Such a perception of the avant-garde is, to some extent, due to its very specificity: by employing dualisms, it explained its own raison d’être.

As numerous researchers have stressed, such an optic is insufficient, especially when we are interested in showing the duration and continuity of the avant-garde model in 20th- and 21st-century culture.

A duality-based rhetoric collapses when we look at modernism, and at the avant-garde in particular, as a reaction to the changing paradigms of reality. There was a good reason why antinaturalism and the affirmation of abstraction were among the key themes recurring in the various incarnations of the avantgarde movements of the early 20th century. They were a consequence of a larger issue — the accrual of knowledge about nature and man’s role resulting from the rapid gains made by the natural sciences in the 1800s. In this context, Superorganism: The Avant-garde and the Experience of Nature is an attempt to highlight previously underappreciated or marginalised visions inspired by the natural or by artistic or philosophical interpretations of the modern entwinement of the biological with the cultural. They demonstrate that at the basis of many seemingly highly rational, strictly old-vs.-new attitudes, there rest fundamental questions about man’s role in the world.

These questions are unique insofar that they appear at a moment when new discoveries in the field of biology reveal a close affinity between people, animals, and other natural creations.

It is then that questions about the scope and consequences of this affinity — to this day fuelling debates about man’s status among animals — are asked for the first time.

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Interestingly, in the avant-garde era they elicit various answers, some of which could indeed be considered within the context of both contemporary posthumanist theories and those that still insist on a humanist perspective. Some are closer to materialism, while others are holistic, vitalistic, or actually metaphysical in nature. This is doubtless also a time of a rise in nature-centric or, as some researchers prefer, biocentric (focused on life) tendencies, views, theories, and perspectives.

In modernism, it is the natural order and the fascinating complexity of natural processes that are viewed as a source of inspiration, and analogies between the life of animals and humans become highly influential — suffice it to mention Maurice Maeterlinck’s “insect trilogy” (The Life of the Bee, 1901; The Life of Termites, 1926; The Life of the Ant, 1930).

Reading Maeterlinck’s essays, we see in them not only scholarly knowledge, but also the encouragement to apply animal relationships to human experience. It is narratives such as Maeterlinck’s that cemented natural-cultural analogies, which should be viewed with proper critical distance (though not necessarily rejected altogether). The famous popular scientists, historians, and philosophers of the era were often persons with a background in the natural sciences, who used metaphor as a means of demonstrating interdependencies between the Homo sapiens and its their environment, as well as to emphasize interspecies similarities and the uniqueness of every living being.

The term “superorganism” is one of such natural-science metaphors aimed at highlighting the tension between individual and collective potential, between autonomy and dependency, specialisation and efficiency. It denotes a social unit of organisms that as individual entities do not necessarily display any special survival skills, but in collaboration with others comprise a powerful “superorganism.” Examples include certain eusocial insects (ants or termites) or slime moulds. The latter occur all over the world, from the North Pole to the South Pole.

They are neither plants, nor fungi, nor animals, but possess characteristics of them all. In certain conditions, they can form a superorganism that creeps, pulsates, and even grows limbs.

The secret of insect societies, in turn, is the strong functional division of their members. Only one group, or “caste,” is capable of reproduction; the others work for, protect, heal, or feed the colony.

The superorganism metaphor is useful when seeking to evoke the postulates that the avant-garde (which actually did not use

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the word) made with regard to man’s significance, role, and responsibility. Mankind as a self-organising species that operates as a whole may be seen in this perspective as a metaorganism that is something more than the sum total of its parts.

Using his intelligence, creativity, strong social skills, and expansive nature, man has colonised almost the entire planet.

Inhabiting virtually all climate zones, he has adapted to life in the hot tropics as well as in the Arctic cold. At the same time, he has been changing Earth at a faster pace than the millions of years of geological evolution. The era of this expansion has been termed the Anthropocene — the “human epoch” — and it has seen not only rapid civilisational progress, but also the dangerous degradation of the environment in many parts of the globe. In a way, modernism was aware of man’s crucial role in the shaping of nature, though not quite of its negative consequences. It held a positive view of efforts to organise the environment, seeing these efforts as a way of transforming it that lends a direction to the blind forces of nature and involves a responsibility for the world. For this reason, modernist attitudes may be considered as an archaeology, as it were, of contemporary environmental debates.

Using the term “superorganism” requires making a reference to the still highly influential notion of the organism, as well as to concepts such as organisation or the organic. It needs to be remembered that the division into organic (i.e., animate) and inorganic (i.e., inanimate) matter was made only as recently as the late 18th century. The organic was supposed to be bound up with production, growth, and reproduction, whereas the inorganic connoted death. Michel Foucault brought attention to the consequences of establishing a fundamental distinction between life and death by distinguishing the specificity of the former. It is also an argument for the superiority of the organic over the inorganic, one that influenced intellectual formations in 19th- and 20th-century social and political sciences, visual culture, and art, where the notion of the organism carried new connotations: of parts working on behalf of the whole, of balance, harmony, autonomy. The organism was both metaphor and a (biological, ideological, and empirical) concept that was even used in the context of metaphysics.

Both the exhibition and this publication are an invitation to look, from the perspective of the sensitive apparatus that is art, at the history of man’s relationship with the environment. Examining but a short fragment of that history — the turn of the 20th

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century — we can see how greatly the development of the natural sciences and technology, as well as philosophical texts and art, contributed to an understanding of the complexity of the world. The conceptual framework of the exhibition and publication has been informed by the research of Olivier Botar, Linda Henderson, Fae Brauer, and Isabel Wünsche, among others, who in recent years have proposed new perspectives for interpreting the relationship between the avant-garde and science, technology, and nature. The project owes its character to an analysis of those propositions and to an examination of the avant-garde through the prism of contemporary philosophy and nature studies.

The comprehensive and multifaceted material has been divided into sections to closely examine the cultural contexts in which modern artistic attitudes emerged. Titled The PostNatural Landscape, Biophilia, The Fourth Dimension, Vision Embodied, Microcosm and Macrocosm, and Evolution, they broaden the stereotypical notion of the avant-garde as a space of conflict between the rational and irrational, the materialistic and the spiritual, the pro- and the anti-technological. We try to demonstrate that both the work of particular artists and the specificity of entire artistic movements were far more complex than these dichotomous categories would suggest. Moreover, the issues that avant-garde artists and intellectuals grappled with have not lost their currency: a fascination with the potential of technology coupled with a reflection on environmental hazards, nature as an inspiration for designing both individual objects and entire systems, the impact of technology on human evolution and the study of various kinds of matter or inter-species boundaries, or finally the development of nature-informed ethics and the search for spirituality in materialistic philosophies—these are but some of the issues that are tackled within these sections. Each section consists of a mini-essay and a selection of exhibited works. This publication includes also larger essays by Fae Brauer, Isabel Wünsche, Iwona Luba, and Jacob Wamberg, discussing selected themes connected with the exhibition’s subject matter. Fae Brauer examines Darwinist narratives and processes she calls “naturizing evolution.” Isabel Wünsche analyses how artists of the Organic School of the Russian avant-garde defined nature and the modern man’s place in it. Iwona Luba writes about the Polish avant-garde in the context of environmental reflection, while Jacob Wamberg wonders how much the Benjaminian “second nature” engineering and technology — changed the character

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of avant-garde art, anticipating contemporary discourses of posthumanism or the Anthropocene.

The book and exhibition comprise, therefore, a panorama of complex relationships between the avant-garde and the environment, which reveal the attitude of modernity to nature and culture. They form an intriguing picture of the fascinations, anxieties, illusions, reflections, and affects that we experience in connection with nature and which, due to the universal and constant character of that experience, remain topical. On the one hand, they confirm the Faustian myth of the man-as-creator, building his world that has no limits.

On the other hand, they belie the notion that the avant-garde manifested itself solely through the negation of nature and affirmation of the works of man, encapsulated in the triad of “metropolis–mass–machine.” Finally, they ask questions that have been raised in the past and will likely continue to be posed in the future: about the relationship between man and the environment, its role and significance. These questions were aptly summed up by Herbert George Wells in his screenplay for the 1936 sci-fi film Things to Come: “But for man, no rest and no ending. He must go on, conquest beyond conquest. […] And when he has conquered all the deeps of space… and all the mysteries of time… still he will be beginning. […] Poor humanity — so fragile, so weak. Little — little animals. […] And if we’re no more than animals, we must snatch each little scrap of happiness… and live and suffer and pass… mattering no more than all the other animals do or have done. […] All the universe or nothingness.”

First published in: A l e ks a n d ra J a c h , K a t a r z y n a Ku rc - M a j , I n t ro d u c t i o n , i n : S u p e ro r g a n i s m : T h e Ava n t - G a rd e a n d t h e E x p e r i e n c e o f N at u re , exhibition catalogue, Muzem Sztuki w Łodzi, Łódź 2017.

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30 Disappearing.

The Deficit Event in a Transition Period / / / E l ż biet a J a b ł o ń s k a

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3 0 / D i s a p p e a r i n g . T h e D e f i c i t E v e n t i n a Tr a n s i t i o n P e r i o d

In a defined time, at an assigned place, we realize a handful of marginal episodes; sometimes utterly unnoticeable manifestations.

Accustomed to perpetual scanning, we need ever new experiences and stimuli. We glance cursorily over reality, only approaching the essence, satisfying the basic needs. We look for places, people, events, images, or sounds.

Discovering undeveloped gaps, breaches, hernias in a complex, layered tissue, ruptures in a structure – it is them that become a stimulus, inspiration, or impulse. We make attempts. The schedule of the work is hard to foresee; sometimes focused on filling a void, sometimes on modifying the status quo, on exploiting, making use of, colonizing; always in a chosen direction; so that we eventually become the goal.

To cooperatively resist matter.

Reduce activity, stop, slow down.

Add nothing, produce nothing, fill nothing.

Deduct. Liquidate. Limit.

Surrounded by excess, succumb to constructive, creative resignation.

In small communities, collectively dissolve in reality, disperse. Rein in. Remove. Dismantle.

Through joint effort.

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31 Appendix: NOMUS Manifesto ///Aneta Szyłak

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We name the new institution in the making the

NOMUS New Art Museum.

The word nomus is phonetically close to the Greek nomos, which meant law, including social law and community order, and in the Egyptian tradition, a unit of territorial division. In the spirit of local law, we therefore exercise our right, the right to write our own art history – anew. We do not want our museum to be similar to others and to reproduce a canonical image of art.

Rather, we look for the specific and unique; for what has been and what may be; for the urgent and topical in the context of our city and region; in the context of the values that we believe in – creative freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of scholarly research.

The museum is a space of participation and source of knowledge, offering equal access to culture, democratic and open.

Does this make the museum part of the commons?

We refer to the community as the foundation of the construction of the museum.

This humanistic idea informs our strategic goals and operational tactics.

The museum by and through a community.

A creative community, a community of artists, researchers, residents, a neighbourhood community.

We are interested in reviving the meanings of art in its contemporary and historical dimensions; in reaching to the reservoir of history in all its diversity.

Our goal is to confront the traditionally elitist notion of the museum as an institution with NOMUS as an open and comprehensible place, focused on participation, the transfer of

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knowledge, the production of new ideas, and joint experimentation. We are interested in going beyond the hierarchical and exclusively Western notion of art and its history to discover interesting methodologies outside the European, or western, model. We will be analyzing not only what, but above all how we exhibit, research, and describe.

The museum is no longer solely a space of representation, but above all of critical (re)interpretation.

Our attention will also be focused on a collective critical analysis of our existing resources, on deriving new conclusions from them, new narratives and strands, on filling up gaps in these narratives. We are interested in augmenting our resources by including not only valuable local- and nationalscene phenomena, but also such international-art phenomena that resonate with our museum’s guiding idea, reflecting shared values and providing a valent context for the achievements of the local scene.

We set ourselves the task of bringing forth an insightful picture of art in the Tri-City, one encompassing, besides the visual arts, also theatre, music, photography, film, niche publishing, and socio-artistic movements.

This museum is NEW because it collects not only art, but also its contexts.

Our goal therefore is to realize a museum adequate to the contemporary role of art and to the present-day approach to museum resources and public needs. NOMUS will rework entrenched, individualistic notions of the artist and, antithetic to them, committed and community-based concepts of art in reference to other models, including non-western ones. Art does not have a single canon, just like it does not have a single addressee. Consequently, we seek to reach out to and engage with various audiences through diverse meeting formats.

We will write, read, and publish. Research and educate. Listen and look.

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We will develop forgotten narratives into publications and exhibitions; highlight underappreciated phenomena in fresh interpretative frameworks. We will lobby for conditions to be provided for documenting the history of the Tri-City art scene.

This is why NOMUS will focus on collecting artists’ archives and documentations of ephemeral actions and art venues.

Several years ago, Professor Piotr Piotrowski sought to materialize the idea of the critical museum, one derived from the methodology of a critical art history. What we would like to borrow from this concept is an attitude of commitment, of conscious participation in public debate, and a move beyond canonical thinking, determined by centralized geographies of art. Such thinking and such geographies no longer hold currency, and

our task is to look for new, original solutions in order to discover new meanings encoded in art.

We reject, however, from Piotrowski’s concept, as little effective, the vision of democracy as marked by perpetual conflict and confrontation. It is not conflict but negotiation that appears as the supreme value in constructing the history of art in Pomerania and constructing the New Art Museum.

NOMUS will also reflect critically on the profiling of art and other collections as well as the idea of curatorship itself. It will present curatorial and institutional attitudes on the methods and strategies of their exhibition.

Part of the task will be to go beyond the purely visual sphere, to document audio, bodily, and performative projects that affect the viewer more deeply than a visual message alone.

NOMUS will also support art’s role in the revitalization of post-shipyard areas and will undertake projects in refurbished

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historical post-industrial buildings to ensure that the Shipyard’s industrial heritage is preserved. It will creatively and ingenuously explore the idea of the museum as a final effect of deindustrialization and gentrification processes and their consequences. It will work, with tools available to museums, to minimize their adverse social impact. In order to address various forms of exclusion, we will create platforms of meeting and dialogue beyond – and towards – difference.

One of the important tasks of the new museum is to forge a community beyond class, cultural, or economic distinctions.

We will focus on emphasizing the shared rather than the separate.

Our purpose is to shape and support the cultural and humanistic aspirations of the inhabitants of Gdańsk and the region of Pomerania.

We wish to serve as a platform providing contemporary visual and performative tools to better understand the world we live in.

This is what NOMUS is for!

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32 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

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Edwin Bendyk

Aleksandra Jach

is a journalist, commentator, and writer, head of the science section of the Polityka weekly. He covers civilizational topics as well as the relationships between science/technology and politics, economic and cultural issues, and social life. Member of the European Council for International Relations. Deputy chief editor of the science magazine Kultura i Rozwój.

He writes the blog Antymatrix.

is a curator working at the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź.

She is interested in “critical moments” in the development of various disciplines, and recently in particular in cross-influences between art and science.

She tries to understand how a conducive environment fosters interesting phenomena, including cultural ones. Co-curator of the exhibition Superorganism.

The Avant-garde and the Experience of Nature (Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź).

Sebastian Cichocki Rafał Jakubowicz is the chief curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. Among the exhibitions he has curated are the Polish presentations at the 52nd and 54th Venice Biennales, Rainbow in the Dark. On the Joy and Torment of Faith (with Galit Eilat) at SALT Istanbul and Malmö Konstmuseum, Making Use. Life in the Post-Artistic Era (with Kuba Szreder), Raqs Media Collective The Capital of Accumulation, Zofia Rydet.

The Record 1978–1990, all at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, and a long-term programme at the Bródno Sculpture Park in Warsaw.

Mikołaj Iwański is an economist, academic instructor, and Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Painting and New Media of the Art Academy of Szczecin. An activist and unionist. His research focuses on how market-economic and social factors affect art and art-making.

He teaches the following seminars: Cultural Distribution Methods, The Analysis and Interpretation of Artistic Phenomena, and Contemporary Art Theory.

He has published in Obieg, Szum, Magazyn Sztuki, Gazeta Wyborcza, Przegląd Powszechny, #Format P. Member of the AICA Polish Section since 2013.

Author of the audiovisual show Music of the Market Spheres (with Krzysztof Kaliski and Weronika Pełczyńska, 2012) at the Studio Teatralne Koło in Warsaw, as part of the Performative Lectures project.

In the spring semester of 2013, he taught a seminar called The Artist’s Cough as part of the St. Brzozowski Association’s Critical University (Warsaw). He holds a degree in philosophy from the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (2004) and a PhD in economics for the dissertation Development Factors of the Contemporary Art Market in Poland (Faculty of Economics, Poznań University of Economics and Business). In 2006 and 2008–2009, he did internships at the European Parliament and at a lobbying firm in Brussels.

Elżbieta Jabłońska is a visual artist. A graduate of the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, she has worked at her alma mater’s Department of Drawing since 1996, teaching a course on intermedia drawing. She works in a variety of media, focusing on spatio-temporal and performative projects, photography, and site-specific installation. Participant of numerous group and individual exhibitions.

Her oeuvre includes long-term projects based on collaboration with cultural institutions and the public (Art Wastelands, Exercises in Omission, Score for Animal Voices), community projects (The Handrail, Kiev, Ukraine, 2015), and curatorial attempts (I Repeat Them to Catch Up, Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, 2009).

holds degrees from the Faculties of Visual Education and of Painting, Graphic Design, and Sculpture of the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań and from the Faculty of Neophilology (specialty: Hebrew studies) of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. He currently works as Associate Professor at the Poznań University of the Arts, teaching a course on Art in the Public Space in the Faculty of Artistic Education. Member of the OZZ Inicjatywa Pracownicza labour union. Author of numerous projects, such as Unemployed (CSW Kronika, Bytom, 2012), Manifesto (Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, 2013), Yard, devoted to the memory of Marcel Szary, a legendary OZZ IP leader at the Ceglorz in Poznań (CSW Kronika, Bytom, 2014), Krzysztof Gazda via in paradiso about a charismatic OZZ IP activist at the Chung Hong plant in Kobierzyce near Wrocław (BWA Sokół, Nowy Sącz), and You Have to Do Something, devoted to the memory of Jolanta Brzeska, a tenant-rights activist murdered in still unexplained circumstances in 2011 (Warsaw Under Construction 7: Reconstruction Disputes, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, 2015).

Zuzanna Janin is sculptor, author of installations, video installations, photographs, and performances. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (1980–1987) and at the Ecole Cantonale d’Art du Valais ECAV in Sierre, Switzerland (2004). In 2016, she earned a doctor’s degree from Poznań University of the Arts.

Her main purpose in art is to visualize an elusive state “in between”. Transforming and universalizing remembered fragments of her own biography, she confronts them with collective memory and with images of universal history against the background of contemporary social and political issues. She works with the problematics of place, memory, and time. She has participated in numerous prestigious individual and group exhibitions in Poland and internationally at venues/events such as Hamburger Bahnhof Berlin, Moderna Museet Stockholm, Museo Arte Moderna Rio de Janeiro, Centre Pompidou Metz, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, CCA Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Kunsthalle Bern, Kunstverein Salzburg, Hoffmann Sammlung Berlin, Alternativa 2016 Gdańsk, Istanbul Biennial, Biennale of Sydney, Sonsbeek’93, Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art, or the 54th Venice Biennale (in the Romanian presentation). Recipient of residency grants from the Germination Foundation (Frankfurt a. Main), KulturKontakt (Vienna), Pro Helvetia (Zurich), Pollock-Krasner (New York), and the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Warsaw.

Best Artist at Art Vilnius 2016. Her works are held in many domestic and foreign collections. Zuzanna Janin is represented by Warsaw’s lokal_30 gallery.

32 / BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Agnieszka Kilian is a curator and lawyer, author of projects devoted to manifestations of creative collaboration as well as the conditions of artistic production. She co-curated the residency programme Place Called Space, as part of which she showed the projects (...)

Behind Togetherness (nGbK and Galeria HIT, 2014) and Resting (Cracow/Lanckorona/Znamirowice, 2015). She is also interested in issues of creative freedom and the relationships between law and art. Curator of Jeff Koons Gloves, an exhibition devoted to the problematics of authorship and copyright. Her most recent project is a collaboration at the NGBK Berlin called Dreams & Dramas.

Law as Literature.

Wojciech Kozłowski is an art critic and curator, director of the BWA Zielona Góra gallery since 1998. A graduate of cultural studies at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, he teaches at the Visual Arts Institute of the University of Zielona Góra (since 1992). Member of the AICA Polish Section. He believes in art not only in institutional spaces.

Piotr Krajewski is a curator and author working with new media in art. Co-founder and art director of the WRO Media Art Biennale, chief curator at the WRO Art Centre.

He lectures at the Poznań University of the Arts and the Wrocław Academy of Fine Arts. Member of the AICA Polish Section, the Polish Society of Aesthetics, and the Polish Society of Cultural Studies.

Anna Królikiewicz is a professor at the Gdańsk Academy of Fine Arts where she graduated from the Faculty of Painting.

In 2001–2003, she taught in several courses in the Faculties of Art and Graphic Design of Bilkent University, Ankara. Having obtained her postdoctoral degree in 2010, she currently runs the Fourth Drawing Studio at her alma mater and teaches a course called The Shape of Taste at the School of Form in Poznań (SWPS University) and the Władysław Strzemiński Academy in Łódź. Devoted to monumental drawing and installation art, she is also a writer too. She is interested in the multiplicitous physicality of the body and the fragility of memory, and her work since the 2010s has increasingly focused on issues of synesthesia and haptic experience. Author of numerous solo exhibitions, she has participated in several dozen group shows at home and abroad, presenting her works in, among other places, New York, Istanbul, Ankara, Kiel, Brussels, a defunct butcher’s shop in Sopot, the refectory of a former Carthusian monastery, the Oliwa Woods, or an empty flat at Salwator, Cracow. Laureate of awards for artistic and pedagogical achievements.

Paulina Kurc-Maj is an art historian, head of the Department of Modern Art Collections at the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź. She graduated from the University of Łódź and completed her postgraduate and doctoral studies at the

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University of Warsaw. Her research is focused on twentieth century art, particularly the interwar period. Co-curator of the exhibitions Afterimages of Life. Władysław Strzemiński and Rights for Art (with Jarosław Lubiak, Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, 2010–2011) and Un Mundo Construido: Polonia 1918–1939 (with Juan Manuel Bonet, Circulo de Bellas Artes, Madrid, 2011). Curator and catalogue editor of the exhibition Changing the Field of View.

Modern Printing and the Avant-Garde (Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, 2014). More recently, co-curator and catalogue co-editor of the exhibitions Dada Impulse. The Egidio Marzona Collection (Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, 2015), Superorganism. The Avant-garde and the Experience of Nature (with Aleksandra Jach, Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź), and Organizers of Life. De Stijl, The Polish Avant-garde and Design (with Anna Saciuk-Gąsowska, Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, 2017/2018). Co-editor of the books Maszyna do Komunikacji. Wokół awangardowej idei Nowej Typografii [Communication machine.

Around the avant-garde idea of new typography] (with Daniel Muzyczuk, Łódź, 2015) and Impuls dadaistyczny w polskiej literaturze i sztuce dwudziestowiecznej [The dadaist impulse in twentieth-century Polish literature and art] (with Paweł Polit, Łódź, 2016). Recipient of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage’s Decoration of Honor “Meritorious for Polish Culture” (2015).

KRZYSZTOFJASTRUBCZAKŁUKASZKACZMAREK

is an art collective started in 2010 by Łukasz Jastrubczak and Krzysztof Kaczmarek. They work in a variety of media, producing video performances, films, spatial objects, and sound compositions, among other projects. In 2011, they did a travelling show of Polish feature films in Iceland, titled What’s the Difference Between Pawel and Wawel, which became a pretext for performative actions on the island. Their works have been presented, among other venues, at the CCA Ujazdowski Castle, Dawid Radziszewski Gallery, or the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage (in an exhibition of works from the collection of the National Museum in Cracow), all in Warsaw.

Adam Lipszyc is an essayist and translator. He works in the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Teaches in the School of Social Sciences and the Collegium Civitas and at the the Franz Kafka University of Muri. Author of the books Międzyludzie. Koncepcja podmiotowości w pismach Harolda Blooma [Inter-people. The concept of subjectivity in the writings of Harold Bloom] (Cracow, 2005), Ślad judaizmu w filozofii XX wieku [Traces of Judaism in twentieth-century philosophy] (Warsaw, 2009), Rewizja procesu Józefiny K. i inne lektury od zera [A re-trial of Josephine K., and other readings from scratch] (Warsaw, 2011), Sprawiedliwość na końcu języka. Czytanie Waltera Benjamina [Justice at the end of language. Reading Walter Benjamin] (Cracow, 2012), Czas wiersza. Paul Celan i teologie literackie [Time of the poem. Paul Celan and literary theologies] (Cracow, 2015), and Czerwone listy. Eseje frankistowskie o literaturze polskiej [Red letters. Frankist essays on Polish literature] (Cracow, 2017). Laureate of Literatura na Świecie’s Andrzej Siemek Prize, the Allianz Kulturstiftung prize, and the Gdynia Literary Prize.

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Jakub Majmurek

Paulina Ołowska

is a film scholar, essayist, and commentator. Active as a film critic, he also writes about literature and the visual arts. A graduate of the Institute of Audiovisual Arts and the Institute of Political and International Studies of the Jagiellonian University, he also studied at the School of Social Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Philosophy and Art. He publishes in Tygodnik Powszechny, Gazeta Wyborcza, Oko.press, or the Aspen Review. Coauthor and editor of numerous books, most recently Kino-sztuka. Zwrot kinematograficzny w polskiej sztuce współczesnej [Cinema art. A cinematographic turn in Polish modern art] (with Łukasz Ronduda, Warsaw, 2015).

earned her BA in Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MA in Fine Arts from the Gdańsk Academy of Fine Arts. Laureate of the Aachen Art Prize (2014). Her work has been presented around the world as part of numerous solo exhibitions and artistic projects, including at The Kitchen (New York, 2017), Tate Modern (London, 2015), Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst (Aachen, 2015), Zachęta (Warsaw, 2014), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, 2013), Kunsthalle Basel (2013), CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts (San Francisco, 2010), Camden Arts Centre (London, 2009), Pinakothek der Moderne (Munich, 2009), and Sammlung Goetz (Munich, 2007), among other venues.

Dorota Monkiewicz

Ewa Partum

is an art historian, critic, and curator. Director of the Wrocław Contemporary Museum (2011–2016), president of the AICA Polish Section (2003–2009).

She currently works at the Polish Sculpture Centre in Orońsko. As a curator, she was preoccupied with conceptual, feminist, and critical art (curating, inter alia, the first Polish retrospectives of Ewa Partum and Zbigniew Libera), and as a lecturer (SWPS University, Warsaw, Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Academy of Fine Arts, Wrocław), with museology and curatorial practices. Co-curator of the interdisciplinary exhibition Wild West. A History of Wrocław’s Avant-garde (2015). Author of numerous publications on Polish and international contemporary art. Winner of the Jerzy Stajuda Prize for Art Criticism (2017).

debuted with conceptual works in 1965. She was a pioneer of conceptual art in the field of visual poetry, performance, and the analysis of media such as film, photography, and television, and in the field of Polish feminist art, particularly in terms of reflection on the female subject in the public space. She has participated in a number of major exhibitions of contemporary art, such as Primera generación. Arte e imagen en movimiento 1963–1986 (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2006/2007), Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution (MoCA, Los Angeles, 2007, MoMA PS1, New York, 2008), Manifesta 7 (Rovereto, 2008), re.act.feminism, Performancekunst der 1960er und 70er Jahre heute (Akademie der Künste, Berlin, 2009), Gender Check — Rollenbilder in der Kunst Osteuropas (MuMoK — Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna, 2010), The Promises of the Past (Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2010), Intense Proximity, Paris Triennale (Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2012), A Bigger Splash: Painting after Performance (Tate Modern, London, 2012), 18th Biennale of Sydney, 2012, and Biennale de Lyon (2017–2018). Her classic works are held in the contemporary art collections of international institutions such as Tate Modern (London), Kontakt. The Art Collection of Erste Group and ERSTE Foundation (Vienna), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), Generali Foundation (Vienna), or Frac Lorrain (Metz), and in Poland, Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, National Museum in Warsaw, Wyspa Progress Foundation, and Wrocław Contemporary Museum.

Jacek Niegoda is a visual artist and art activist. He studied at the Gdańsk Academy of Fine Arts in the class of Prof. Grzegorz Klaman and in Prof. Witosław Czerwonka’s Intermedia Studio (1991–1998). He collaborated with the Wyspa Gallery and the Open Atelier (later CCA Łaźnia) in Gdańsk. Co-founder of the Wyspa Progress Foundation and the Central Office of Technical Culture (CUKT). Executive board member of the Kolonia Artystów Foundation (2009– –2015) and of the Secretariat of the Civic Forum of Contemporary Art (2013–2017). He is an author of videos and performances, often featuring elements of humour, that comment in unexpected ways on the real world. He likes connecting art with the practical side of life. This interfacing of art and real life and exploiting of the artistic possibilities inherent therein became a trademark of his practice. In 2000, he was one of the initiators and designers of Wiktoria Cukt, a virtual candidate for the office of the President of Poland. His works are held in public collections such as those of Muzeum Sztuki (Łódź), CCA Signs of Time (Toruń), Varmia and Masuria Museum (Olsztyn), or the National Museum in Warsaw’s Contemporary Art Collections Foundation. Recipient of art grants from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland and the Allianz Kulturstiftung.

Laureate of a honorary mention at the 11th WRO Media Art Biennale in Wrocław (2005).

Joanna Rajkowska (b. 1968 in Bydgoszcz) lives and works in London and Nowogród. An author of public projects, objects, films, installations as well as ephemeral actions and situations presented in the urban space. Her designs have included architectural and geological fantasies, fake archaeological excavations, underwater sculptures, incense smokes, and crystal-filled geodes. Those never realized often function as collective utopias.

Most of Rajkowska’s projects are born, live, and age in the public space, so their matter is not limited to all the beings, organic and not, that comprise them, but also includes their complex relationships.

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Rajkowska studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow in the class of Prof. Jerzy Nowosielski (1988–1993) and concurrently art history at the Jagiellonian University (1987–1992). Laureate of the 2007 Polityka Passport award for “extraordinary projects in the public space, for reaching out to the man wandering around the city” and of the Grand Prize of the Polish Culture Foundation for lifetime achievement.

Anda Rottenberg is an exhibition curator and author of essays on art.

She studied art history at the University of Warsaw, graduating in 1970, and worked at the Polish Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Art (1973–1986).

Founder of the EGIT Foundation (1986), the Soros Centre of Contemporary Art in Warsaw (1992), and the Art Promotion Institute Foundation (1995); director of the Zachęta National Gallery of Art (1993–2001), Chair of the Programming Council and Programming Director of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (2005–2007). Board member of the Manifesta 1 Foundation; council member at Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, Oświęcim; MOCAK, Cracow. Member of the Trustee Board of the National Museum in Warsaw. Member of the Documenta 12 Director Selection Committee. An AICA, CIMAM, and IKT member. Member of the Wissenschaftkolleg zu Berlin 2015/2016.

Since 1980, curator and co-curator of around one hundred Polish and international exhibitions, for example: the 1st Gwangju Biennale (South Korea, 1995), Aspects – Positions 1949–1999. 50 Years of Art in Middle Europe (Vienna-BudapestBarcelona-Birmingham, 2000), L’Autre Moitie de l’Europe (Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris, 2000/2001), Where Is Abel, Thy Brother (Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, 1995), Forgetting (Weseburg Museum, Bremen, 2000), Continental Breakfast (Belgrade, 2004), Warsaw/Moscow – Moscow/Warsaw (Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw / Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, 2004/2005), Side by Side. Poland – Germany. A 1,000 Years of Art and History (Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, 2011), Progress and Hygiene (Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, 2014/2015). Commissioner of the Polish Pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale (1993–2001).

Author of numerous monographs on Polish and foreign artists and of books, such as Sztuka w Polsce 1945–2005 (2005), Przeciąg – teksty o polskiej sztuce lat 80 (2009), Proszę bardzo (2009), and Już trudno (book-length interview by Dorota Jarecka, 2014), among others.

She currently works as an independent curator and author.

Stanisław Ruksza is an exhibition curator, art historian, author of essays, and lecturer. Director of the Trafo Centre for Contemporary Art in Szczecin. In 2008–2017, programming director of the CCA Kronika in Bytom.

A graduate of art history at the Jagiellonian University, he lectures at the Art Academy of Szczecin and as a guest lecturer at the Katowice Academy of Fine Arts. In 2007–2009, he lectured at the Institute of Art in Cieszyn, a unit of the Silesian University in Katowice.

His research is focused on links between art and socio-political changes, the issue of death, and liminal phenomena in contemporary art. Residencies at apexart, New York (2009), Careof DOCVA, Milan (2013, 2015), and Cité internationale des arts, Paris (2017).

Curator of numerous domestic and international exhibitions, for example: Je brûle Paris! (Cité internationale des arts, Paris, 2015), Satan’s Children (Fundacja Imago Mundi, National Museum, Cracow, 2015), Project Metropolis (Kronika, Bytom, Imago Mundi Foundation, Silesian Museum, Katowice 2015), The Wall. Art Face To Face With Borders (Careof DOCVA, Milan, 2015; TRAFO Trafostacja Sztuki w Szczecinie, 2017), Plica Polonica (Kronika, Bytom 2014), Romantic Manifestations (BWA Sokół, Nowy Sącz 2014), Your City Is a Battlefield (Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, 2014), Face of the Day. Social Costs in Poland after 1989 roku (ArtBoom Festival, Cracow 2014), Łukasz Surowiec. Forefathers’ Eve (Bunkier Sztuki, Cracow, 2013), Negotiators and Dreamers (Careof DOCVA, Milan, 2013), Transeuro 2012 (Cracow, 2012), Collier Schorr.

German Faces (Kronika, Bytom, 2011), Viennese Actionism: The Opposite Pole of Society (MOCAK, Cracow, 2011), Catholics in Kronika (Kronika, Bytom, 2010), Museum of Unnatural History (Kronika, Bytom, 2008), and Umpolen (Freiraum – Museum Quartier, Vienna, 2007).

Obieg magazine’s Curator of the Year 2014; nominated for TVP Kultura’s Culture Guarantees 2015 award in the Visual Arts category.

Jan Sowa is a materialist dialectical social theorist and researcher. He studied at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow and at University Paris VIII in Saint-Denis.

He holds a PhD in sociology and a postdoctoral degree in cultural studies. He has performed research and lectured at academic centres in Poland and abroad (most recently at the University of São Paulo and at the Akademie der Künste der Welt in Cologne).

Co-founder of the Wydawnictwo Ha!art publishing label and the Spółdzielnia Goldex Poldex art collective.

Former reporter at Polish Radio and curator at Bunkier Sztuki, Cracow. A member of the Committee on Cultural Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences, he is also associated with the Free University of Warsaw.

Author and editor of a number of publications, including Sezon w teatrze lalek i inne eseje [A season

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T H E AVA N T - G A R D E H Y P O T H E S E S / / / C O L L E C T E D T E X T S A N D I M A G E S

in the puppet theatre and other essays] (2004), Ciesz się, późny wnuku! Kolonializm, globalizacja i demokracja radykalna [Be happy, late grandchild!

Colonialism, globalization, and radical democracy] (2007), Fantomowe ciało króla [The king’s phantom body] (2012), Inna Rzeczpospolita jest możliwa [A different republic is possible] (2015), and, with Krzysztof Wolański, Sport nie istnieje. Igrzyska w społeczeństwie spektaklu [Sport does not exist.

Games in the society of the spectacle] (2017). He has also published many journal articles in Poland, France, the USA, Mexico, Germany, the Czech Republic, and Hungary, among other countries.

Jarosław Suchan is an art historian, critic, and curator. Director of Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź (since 2006). Curator and co-curator of numerous exhibitions of contemporary and modern art (most recently Kobro y Strzemiński.

Prototipos vanguardistas, Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, 2017). Author of numerous essays devoted to the avant-garde, modernism, contemporary artistic practices, and institutional critiques, published in Poland and abroad. Editor of books on the art of Władysław Strzemiński, Tadeusz Kantor, and the Polish-Jewish avant-garde.

Kuba Szreder teaches in the Faculty of Visual Culture Management of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. A graduate of sociology at the Jagiellonian University, in 2015 he obtained a PhD from the Loughborough University School of the Arts for a dissertation on the political and economic aspects of independent curatorial projects. His theoretical work is focused on the analysis of contemporary forms of cultural production in the context of late capitalism. An independent curator of interdisciplinary projects combining art, activism, critical reflection, and social experiment.

Initiator of the Free University of Warsaw (2009), as part of which he carried out a number of research programmes concerning contemporary systems of cultural production. Editor of numerous books and exhibition catalogues, author of essays on sociology and art theory, published in Poland and abroad.

His first book as author, ABC projektariatu. O nędzy projektowego życia [An ABC of the projectariat.

On the misery of project life], was published in 2016

by Bęc Zmiana.

Aneta Szyłak is a curator and author of essays on art. Currently serving as the Representative of the Director of the National Museum in Gdańsk for the founding of the NOMUS New Art Museum. President and art director of the Alternativa Foundation. Founder and first director of the Wyspa Art Institute (2004–2014) and the Łaźnia Contemporary Art Centre (1998–2001).

Author and art director of the Alternativa International Festival of Visual Arts (2010–2016). She is interested in vernacular forms as well as local and trans-cultural practices.

Curator and co-curator of numerous exhibitions, such as Estrangement (2017), Damage and Loss

(2016), Vernacularity (2015), What’s Plain Invites Pattern (2015), Everydayness (Hala 90B, Gdańsk, 2014), Hito Steyerl: Abstract (Instytut Sztuki Wyspa, Gdańsk, 2014), Oliver Ressler. Political Visions: the World Anew (Instytut Sztuki Wyspa, Gdańsk, 2014), The Field Is to the Sky, Only Backwards (ISCP Gallery, New York, 2013), Materiality (Hala 90B, Gdańsk, 2012), Buildings and Remnants (Fábrica ASA, Guimarães, 2012), Labour and Leisure (Hala 90B, Gdańsk, 2011), Estrangement (The Showroom, London, 2010; Instytut Sztuki Wyspa, Gdańsk, 2011), Guardians of the Docks (Instytut Sztuki Wyspa, Gdańsk, 2005), The Palimpsest Museum (Łódź Biennale, 2004), Work Safety and Hygiene (Instytut Sztuki Wyspa, Gdańsk, 2004), and Architectures of Gender (Sculpture Center, New York, 2003).

She has lectured at Bard College, New School, Queens College, and New York University, among other institutions; she has also taught as a guest lecturer at the Mainz Academy of Arts and the University of Copenhagen.

Co-author of the book The Curatorial. A Philosophy of Curating (2013). She is currently working on her PhD dissertation, Curating Context. The Palimpsest on the Quotidian and the Curatorial as part of the Curatorial/Knowledge programme at Goldsmiths College and the University of Copenhagen. She runs a blog called The Urgent Museum (pilnemuzeum.org).

Bogna Świątkowska is the initiator, founder, and board president of the Bęc Zmiana Foundation, with which she has produced several dozen projects devoted to public space, architecture, and design as well as competitions for young architects and designers. Initiator and chief editor of the periodical Notes na 6 tygodni.

Formerly chief editor of Poland’s first pop-culture magazine, Machina (1998–2001), author of numerous essays, interviews, radio and TV features devoted to contemporary pop culture. Member of the Council for Architecture and the Public Space of the City of Warsaw.

Mariusz Waras is an outdoor painter, graphic designer, and illustrator working primarily with stencils, author of installations, curator, and traveller. He holds a PhD from the Faculty of Painting of the Gdańsk Academy of Fine Arts (2013). Assistant lecturer in Prof. Henryk Cześnik’s graduation painting class (since 2014). Assistant professor in the Faculty of Painting and New Media of the Art Academy of Szczecin where he teaches a seminar on image and street art (since 2015).

Curator of 238x504, a Gdynia-based outdoor gallery. Co-curator of a series of exhibitions presenting Polish street art. Author of several hundred outdoor paintings as part of the project m-city, he has presented his work in a dozen solo and several dozen group exhibitions in forty countries. Since the beginning of his career fascinated with the city and urban art. His works range from small poster forms to large-format mural paintings.

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32 / BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Zorka Wollny

Iwo Zmyślony

is an author of acoustic compositions for institutions, factories, and vacant buildings.

Situated in a space between art, theatre, and contemporary music, her works always relate to the specific historical and functional context of architectural sites. Her modus operandi includes public rehearsals and workshops, as part of which she produces structures of collaboration with persons such as composers, students, actors, or activists, as well as groups and communities.

is a philosopher and art theoretician, methodologist of design processes – Design Thinking Consultant.

He studied philosophy and art history at the University of Warsaw, the Catholic University of Lublin, the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, and the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. PhD for a dissertation on non-discursive dimensions of learning (tacit knowledge). Lecturer at the University of Warsaw, the Viamoda School of Fashion, and the School of Form in Poznań. Recipient of research grants from the GFPS, the DAAD, the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Republic of Poland, the National Science Centre, and the Młoda Polska programme.

In one of her more recent works, Unmögliche Oper (2017), she brought together several choral ensembles and the residents of the German city of Oldenburg to explore voice as a means of public debate, whereas Order was composed in 2015 for the former Teutonic Knights castle in Świecie, featuring 15 volunteers, three percussionists, and electronics.

In Ophelias. Iconography of Madness (2012), presented at the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, she created a performance for eleven actresses who played Ophelia in historical adaptations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In Oratorio for an Orchestra and a Choir of Warsaw Inhabitants (2011), produced for the Warsaw Autumn festival of contemporary art, Wollny staged a polyphonic intervention in the public space of Warsaw as a collaboration between nongovernmental organizations and the Warsaw Symphonic Orchestra, based on the political manifestos and activities of the featured activists.

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Author of several dozen academic publications and nearly one hundred essays, interviews, and reviews.

He has published in Dwutygodnik, Obieg, and Kultura Liberalna. He regularly appears on TVP Kultura.

Original title: Hipotezy awangardowe pod redakcją Anety Szyłak, Gdańsk 2017

Proofreading: Colin Phillips Graphic design and DTP: Ania Witkowska Printing and bounding: Zapol sp.j.

© The National Museum in Gdańsk, Gdańsk 2021

ISBN 978-83-66433-25-0

The National Museum in Gdańsk Toruńska 1 Street, 80-822 Gdańsk www.mng.gda.pl