in the context of People’s Poland, was completely and deeply eccentric, untamed, marginal, and palpably dangerous, because it was constantly under threat of being deemed deviant or abnormal.
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Even if his practices could be considered marginal, especially within the belligerently masculine reality of People’s Poland, camp in the 1980s ceased to be the secret code of the underprivileged, and was appropriated. Camp became a style, thanks to mainstream pop artists such as Madonna. It gradually lost its subversive nerve, its nonheteronormative, ‘negative’ associations. It became something ‘cool’, no longer dangerous or a departure from the norm; it became normalised. It seems Machciński stands somewhere between camp as a dangerous method, one that flies in the face of the accepted order and norms, and the one prone to aestheticisation, even in spite of itself. It is in a sense natural that so many subversive acts of the neo-avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s have long since been appropriated by the art and culture mainstream. But what remains subversive is the disability Machciński exposes. He retained the camp elements that could not be popularised and thereby made safe or glamourised and put into the mainstream. But his disability, his lack of adjustment to the accepted norms of femininity, masculinity, or beauty, in one way or another—that will never be appropriated. Images of disability as a part of a mainstream aesthetic simply do not exist yet. In Polish art, this idea was explored by the so-called ‘critical artists’ of the 1990s, such as Katarzyna Kozyra and Artur Żmijewski, who invited disabled people to participate in their projects. And yet physical diability is still shrouded in taboo and intolerance. The artist understands it well, which is apparent in the way he plays around his physicality. In his self-portraits he exposes his disability, his ageing, and the passing of time. Everything that happens to his body becomes part of it. One could say this project is, to him, a way of overcoming his circumstances, both material
and existential, in the depths of People’s Poland, as well as his physical shortcomings. It is a commentary on his existential situation, too. On the one hand, he uses glamour elements, especially in his feminine portraits; on the other, he plays with that glamour, always leaving certain shortcomings, never fully polishing the image. If there’s makeup, it’s there not to cover things, imperfections, or flaws. Something is always revealed. This imperfect Lolita in her crimped hair exposes her damaged teeth and wrinkles. The ‘undoing’ is always there. Machciński plays for both teams. He accepts that he cannot be perfect in his depictions, whatever perfection means. How is he to enter this visual order as ‘someone else’, as a self-created persona, while still marking it with his own special beauty and remaining himself, that is, a physically non-normative man, who in no way fits into the Polish norms of ‘attractiveness’ of the past or present? The persistance of this lifelong project implies the constant need to ‘work through’, which never ends. He must have also derived some kind of pleasure by infecting normative reality with himself and who he was.
provokes us with his non-normative physicality. In one picture Machciński poses as the devil; he fashioned his horns out of egg cups, and the rest is just make-up (his lips vividly painted, the lipstick stroke dragged across his jaw). This emphasis on non-normativity seems to be a deceitful sort of camouflage, because there’s no way a single detail about this depiction was accidental.
The series reminds me of another gay artist (besides Warhol) who was active in this time, but who died prematurely of AIDS in 1989: Robert Mapplethorpe. He returned to self-portraits repeatedly thoughout his career. Known for his aestheticised portraits of the artistic and literary crème de la crème, and weirdly objectified erotic pictures of male bodies, he documented, with somewhat nihilistic pleasure, his body as it was consumed by drugs, vice, and, ultimately, his illness. He has become a symbol of the ‘culture wars’, when his work was under attack from the conservatives for offending morality, and in reality cynically used to justify cutting arts budgets. Mapplethorpe not only didn’t care, but actively enriched his persona by stirring controversy. Like Warhol, Mapplethorpe photographed himself in drag, wearing a fur coat and lipstick—and he was an exceptionally beautiful man. An important element of his self portraits, and his work as a whole, was a kind of dangerous glamour. The artist wanted us to feel unsafe; One of the reasons Machciński began his cycle he constantly looks us in the eye and assaults us with was, as stated above, his need to unite with his mother. his defiant, cocky gaze. At the same time he mocks the But there’s more to it. The artist has created a project position of the artist-faggot-terrorist, like in the wellso big, especially compared to his everyday existence, known self-portrait with a leather jacket and rifle, a look that it has the features of a total work of art. The author worthy of a Tom of Finland cartoon. Portrayed against meticulously prepared for his work: he visited libraries, the backdrop of a huge pentagram, he looks like a queer read and studied art books, paintings, the biographies of RAF soldier or Black Panther. Mapplethorpe constantly those he impersonated, and finally, as a result of a long emphasized the tension between his identities. On the term relationship with them, he became them, in a sense. one hand, he was a seasoned photographer fascinated “I am these characters: the athlete, the priest or Jesus.” 9 with the possibilities of the image; on the other, he had One could call these works a performance that begins a perverse identity, as an advocate and practitioner of at the library, continues in the home make-up studio, BDSM. In his most shocking self portrait, he ironically and culminates with the photographic image. The artist equates the perversities and demonicness ascribed to
Total work