Polish Media Art in an Expanded Field

By Aleksandra Kaminska

From an Eastern nation on the global periphery to a European neoliberal democracy enmeshed in transnational networks, Poland has experienced a dramatic transformation in the last century. Polish Media Art in an Expanded Field uses the lens, and mirror, of media art to think through the politics of a post-socialist 'New Europe', where artists are negotiating the tension between global cosmopolitanism and national self-enfranchisement. Situating Polish media art practices in the context of Poland’s aesthetic traditions and political history, Aleksandra Kaminska provides an important contribution to site-specific histories of media art. Polish Media Art in an Expanded Field demonstrates how artists are using and reflecting upon technology as a way of entering into larger civic conversations around the politics of identity, place, citizenship, memory and heritage. Building on close readings of artworks that serve as case studies, as well as interviews with leading artists, scholars and curators, this is the first full-length study of Polish media art.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Jan 10, 2016
• ISBN: 9781783205424

Aleksandra Kaminska

Aleksandra Kaminska is Assistant Professor of Media Studies and Research-Creation in the Department of Communication at Université de Montréal. Her current projects gravitate around the technologies and practices of identification, authentication, and recognition. She is currently working on a book on high-tech paper and security aesthetics. Her first book is Polish Media Art in an Expanded Field (Intellect/Chicago University Press, 2016). www.aleksandrakaminska.com

Book preview

Introduction

People…cannot live without being attached to a place, because only then do they become real.

Olga Tokarczuk (2003/1998)

Globalization…is nothing more than a fiction.

Piotr Piotrowski (2009a)

In his Polish Year in Madagascar (2006), the artist Janek Simon curated an exhibition of contemporary Polish art in Antananarivo, the capital of the African island, that did not feature a single Polish artist (see Figures 1 and 2). The artists instead came from other countries in East-Central Europe (ECE), including Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. While on the one hand this choice was meant as a statement against nationalism, on the ability of artists from outside of Poland to provide a meaningful reflection on Polish reality, on the other, the decision to limit the choice to East-Central Europeans asserts what the artist calls some kind of Central European likeness (Simon 2006). The fact that Simon’s exhibition had no Polish artists was also a critique on the surge of Polish Year festivals or Polish-themed exhibitions around the world, where often, as he says, there is no concept behind most of the projects, their only ideas seem to be something like ‘Let’s present seven Polish artists’. Nothing comes of this, doesn’t produce any value, any discussion (2006). Simon played with these ideas in his Polish-but-not retrospective. Elements of the exhibition first shown in Madagascar were then presented at Atlas Sztuki, a gallery in Łódź, Poland, as part of a show that also included documentation from Simon’s trip to Africa, and archive materials of Polish plans from the 1930s to colonize the island (see Figure 3).¹ The plans offer a biting reminder of Poland’s wishful colonial aspirations between the wars, a time when the country hoped to place itself within the world elite (Sienkiewicz 2006). The trip, which Simon undertook with minimal preparation and information, was based on a kind of engagement with the world that is not preceded by knowledge or mediated by information technologies, allowing him to assume the imaginary role of a discoverer left to his own devices, a traveller, and a colonizer at the beginning of the twentieth century. This idea of an intrepid adventurer who could conquer the world and also understand it is, in a sense, a longing for a kind of simplicity where every civilized person was capable of grasping operating principles of every technological device (Łukasz Ronduda quoted in Ujma 2007, 101). Moreover, this effort to somehow bring together Poland and Madagascar, countries with such disparate geopolitics and histories, was a comment on the relationships between nations, on the categories of colonizer and colonized, as well as on the ambitions of creating a coherent rubric of Polishness for the outside world. All of these, as part of larger histories of Eastern European otherness, national coherence, and technological experience and engagement with the world, are motivating themes of this book.

Figures 1 and 2: Janek Simon, Polish Year in Madagascar, 2006. Interactive installation. Courtesy of Raster Gallery .

Figure 3: Janek Simon, Polish Year in Madagascar, 2006. Interactive installation. Courtesy of Raster Gallery .

Before 1989, ECE² was regularly neglected and absent from the Western art world, which did not reveal any serious interest in the art of its close neighbors (Piotrowski 2003). With few exceptions, ECE was missing from Western exhibitions and studies of art history to such an extent that, during the Cold War for example, the West lived in the belief that no true values could emerge behind the Iron Curtain (Rottenberg 2011, 8). This situation was radically problematized and redefined after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, when suddenly there was a boom in museum exhibitions that survey[ed] the wreckage of socialism and its industrial remains (Scribner 2003, 3). The paradigmatic" exhibition of the time was Europa, Europa (1994) (Kazalarska n.d., 3). Curated by Ryszard Stanisławski and Christoph Brockhaus at the Kunst-und Aussteslungshalle in Bonn, this ambitious show was one of the first in the West to provide an overview of modern and contemporary art from the former Eastern Europe (including Russia). It still revealed, however, a prevalent colonial attitude that was trying to understand how to integrate the region’s art practice into the universal art canon, or, more precisely, into Western art history (Piotrowski 2009a, 12).³ Other retrospectives on the East by the West during this decade included Der Riss im Raum at Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin (1994); Beyond Belief at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (1995); Aspekte/Positionen: 50 Jahre Kunst aus Mitteleuropa, 1949–1999 at the Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna (1999); and After the Wall at Moderna Museet in Stockholm (1999), for example (Piotrowski 2003).⁴ A turning point in the conversation occurred in the late 1990s, as countries from the former Eastern Europe, including Poland, started to join NATO, and then again in the 2000s, as they began to become members of the European Union (EU), thereby ringing in a new chapter in the history of the continent (Hegyi 2004, 7).⁵

In her study of curatorial responses to the European enlargement of 2004, Bulgarian scholar Svetla Kazalarska points out the huge wave of exhibitions on the so-called ‘New Europe’ that was aimed at presenting the art and culture of the ten new European Union members to the old ones (n.d., 10). The focus was now on Europeanization, on a newfound cosmopolitanism and contemporaneity, and on establishing post-colonialist curatorial narratives (5). Some of these exhibitions framed as explorations of the region included Passage Europe: Realities, References at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Saint-Étienne Métropole in France (2004) and Living Art—On the Edge of Europe at the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands (2006), among many others.⁶ Joining the EU also meant that, for ECE artists, there were now more opportunities to exhibit abroad, to participate in international residencies, and to make deeper inroads into the global art world and its art market. But this situation was also misleading and paradoxical. Despite a certain popularity or caché as artists from this region, many worked to shed this constricting exotic identity. The attempt to blend in and join in a global mélange reflected a trend in the politics of identity at the time, which had moved towards a concern with a cosmopolitan solidarity (Fowkes and Fowkes 2010). The rising interest in the art from the former Eastern Europe therefore coincided with the desire of its artists to forgo their particularism and join European and global movements and conversations, reflecting the growing allure of postnational ideologies and economies. Nevertheless, these well-intentioned cultural exchanges essentially continued to showcase artists from this region separately, reaffirming a continued otherness that required or merited a cordoning off or demarcation into their own shows, their own retrospectives and events, even their own galleries (such as Calvert 22 in London, founded in 2009).⁷ There was a pronounced tendency towards fetishization that tried to capitalize on the trendiness or exoticism of postsocialist ECE, rather than offer meaningful explorations of the manifold histories, traditions, or cultures of this region. This homogenizing tendency ultimately stifled the artist, who rather stood in as a representation of some idea of Eastern Europeanness as defined by the West. The art critic Noemi Smolik compares this treatment to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s subaltern, one who has no voice and is prevented from speaking; in this context, even if artists were able to raise a voice, they would hardly have a chance of permeating the order of an art discourse dominated by the West (2013, 97), one which had already defined them as other.

There have been some significant inroads to remedy this situation. For example, in the 2010 show The Reality of the Lowest Rank: A Vision of Central Europe, curated by Belgian painter Luc Tuymans in various locations around Bruges, Smolik praised Tuymans for not only having given these Central European artists their voices back but also for using his own prominence to finally get others to listen to them (2007, 99). Mostly, however, it is ECE artists, curators, critics, and historians themselves who worked to rewrite and reclaim their own narratives, curating exhibitions, projects, and initiatives to rethink and reframe the art from their region through their own lens and histories. These included Body and the East (1998) and Interrupted Histories at Modern Galerija in Ljubliana (2006), the first Prague Biennale thematized as Peripheries Become the Center (2003), or East Art Museum at the Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum in Hagen (2005), Gender Check at MUMOK in Vienna (2009), and Zachęta in Warsaw (2010), or fairs like the VIENNAFAIR The New Contemporary launched in 2005. The same is true in the Polish context specifically, with numerous Polish exhibitions within Poland and in Europe (e.g., The Power of Fantasy—Modern and Contemporary Art in Poland at the Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels in 2011; Twisted Entities: Contemporary Polish Art at the Museum Morsbroch in Leverkusen in 2013; Polish Polish British British at CCA Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw in 2013; As You Can See: Polish Art Today at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw in 2014). When located in Europe, these events attest on the one hand to the rising popularity and legitimacy of Polish art within the global art world, which some have said, constitutes one of the most vibrant and exciting international art scenes (Kreuzer 2013, 17). At the same time, they also restate the question of difference and otherness, of whether there is a distinctive character in art from the region of ECE (Groys 2010, 18).

In an effort to align East and West, and perhaps in retaliation against any negative associations with the Eastern (and thus implicitly backwards), the term New Europe has surfaced to acknowledge the two-sided nature of an expanded Europe, moving beyond the divisions, wars, and othering that marked the old Europe. New Europe at once refers to the new members of the EU but also to a new Europe—one sparked by possibility, novelty, and the future, which includes the old and the new members of the EU. At least in theory, the notion of a New Europe proposed that we have reached a moment of coevalness or contemporaneity that includes East and West in a post-Soviet condition marked by a shared historical moment, one in which different registers in the organization of time and space have finally been overcome (Buck-Morss 2006; Condee 2008). However, while it would be tempting to consolidate new members within an already defined idea of Europe, it is crucial that this newfound contemporaneity—or as Geeta Kapur (2008) refers to it, a global time of now—exists in relation to and with named historical, political, and geographic entities such as sites (she suggests nation-states). In other words, even within the New Europe, expressions of contemporaneity are still spatially defined and the product of particular, geographically situated physical sites.

This book is an inquiry into what it means to be a Polish artist at a particular time in history. The time frame covered here are the years 2004–2009: the first five years of integration with the EU, of Poland as a primary building block of the New Europe.⁸ Though it may appear at first glance that this is the contemporary period—that this is the story of the present—many things have in fact changed and are continuing to change since that fleeting moment. These were the years overlapping with Lech Kaczyński’s presidency (2005–2010), which were characterized by a conservative nationalism and xenophobia, a time ripe with tensions between openness and insularity, cosmopolitanism and patriotism. While Poland had been transitioning since at least 1989 into a capitalist, democratic, and neoliberal society, the transformations that occurred in 2004–2009 highlighted the fragile recalibration and fraught identity of an independent postsocialist European Poland. Moreover, as Poland was largely shielded from the global economic crisis that reverberated around the world in the late aughts, the economic boom associated with European integration temporarily overshadowed the realities of neoliberalism. This sense of openness and economic optimism that came along with European integration has, however, since passed. By 2010, writers were noting that though Poles actually have reason to celebrate in terms of how they have navigated the treacherous transition from communism, the overriding mood was one in which they were feeling insecure, pessimistic and uncertain about the future and they have turned on one another (Slackman 2010). The disillusionment, the anger of broken promises and the widening gap between expectations and achievements just continued to mount, ultimately fueling street demonstrations across Central and Eastern Europe, from Sofia to Bucharest to Budapest and Warsaw (Tismaneanu 2014, 60). In this quickly changing landscape, this particular five-year window provides a complex cross-section of the negotiations of identity, democracy, and site-specificity that were taking place. It is precisely because it was so fleeting that these five years are meaningful to dwell on: as a moment of fulfilled historical achievement (joining Europe), of pregnant promise at least to start, and where the future had not yet crystallized and taken shape, leaving the door cracked open, optimistically, to the possibility of a better and different future. Or at least, that is how we may come to remember and idealize it. A moment that too quickly has faded into history, swept under the weight of new realities, and new problems.

This book is an exploration of difference, one that affirms it as productive, if not essential, in allowing the countries of the ECE region to enact the self-enfranchisement and sitespecificity that ultimately render political citizenship possible. This paradoxical situation between maintaining and shedding difference forms an exploration of the New Europe as a process, a goal, or an idea, rather than a fait accompli. This New Europe is a state of hope for ECE, but it is also a risky space defined through a critical juncture between localized particularity and grounded historicity, and the kind of universality that the West represents. In this sense, the goals of a new Europe must be that as East and West negotiate their differences, ECE does not lose itself through the mechanisms and influence of socalled westernization, Europeanization, and/or globalization, but rather it redefines Europe as much as it is being changed by it. Critic Viktor Misiano has explained this struggle by suggesting that,

the more you approach the Global, the more you discover that in fact its structure is local. It is composed of closed groups in which you rediscover the very same narrowness of spirit, dogmatism, personal rivalries, and intrigues. And the fact you belong to the Local—in Moscow or Ljubliana—will protect you, will allow you to maintain your distance and your independence.

(quoted in Blažević 2004, 26)

The (re)turn inward, which has been present in all of Europe in recent years, is a challenge for the European project, which has so far failed to create a shared sense of being European. The idea of a common European imagination and European identity, or lack thereof, underpins many of the current struggles and tensions in the cosmopolitan transnational Europe, where nationalistic and regional projects, quasi-fascist attitudes, and conservative protectionism have undermined the ambitions of the EU. This situation has shaken the idea of Europe to its core, so much so that at the moment there is no agreement among the current EU member states (or other European countries) as to what Europe is or what it should be (Langenbacher, Niven, and Wittlinger 2012a, 1). Despite Europe’s institutions and structures, which it deploys efficiently as it moves eastward, it has a relative weakness and uncertainty of the values that underpin it (Guibernau 2011, 33), and is a nebulous and slippery concept notoriously polyvalent, referring to multiple, if overlapping, realities (Rigney 2012, 610).

This tension over Europe is felt in many ways. Even at the moment of writing, the events in 2013–2014 in Ukraine and the Crimea are a reminder that the fight over East and West is still very much ongoing. While it may have appeared on the surface that Cold War divisions were long behind us, that there was a steady movement towards reconciliation or unification, the Russian tactics to seize Ukrainian territory testify to the difficulties in establishing claims on land, identity, and even nationality, in the ECE region. The proclamation by Vladimir Putin that Ukraine is not even a country (quoted in Stent 2014) is a clear testament to the fragility of sovereignty and borders in the region.⁹ The continued threat of Russian aggression over its former territories and satellite states, even 25 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, is an attempt at Sovietization that continues to function politically as a counterpoint to Europeanization and the ideals of a New Europe. It also reaffirms ECE as a mediating region, and this role might be especially important if Russian antagonism upon sovereign states continues unabated, crushing the ambitions of other nation-states of being part of not only the institutions and organization of the EU, but also of the New/new European imaginary.

In this context, the New Europe represents a conciliation, where East and West exist together in a shared time and where, despite their different temporalities, they are joined by a shared future (Smith 2008, 9). The question remains whether the acceptance of multiplicity and plurality is merely theoretical, or whether and how ECE joins, participates, collaborates, and becomes equal in formulations of European contemporaneity, collectivity, and solidarity without sacrificing its own specificity. How in fact is this Europe new beyond its regulatory and financial net? The contemporary artist Joanna Rajkowska once said in an interview that she dreams of a country that is postnational or transnational, in which however everyone is responsible for its shape and publicly responsible for its well-being (2010). The question is how this responsibility and this public emerge in such a context. What does it mean, and how is it possible, to belong to a political solidarity at a time of cosmopolitan and postnational ideologies? This book takes inspiration from radical political theorist Chantal Mouffe, who summarizes this situation by asking how we understand citizenship when our goal is a radical and plural democracy (2005, 60). Her ideas on agonism were repeatedly taken up by Polish artists in the period examined here, with critics and scholars adopting this model as a way of evaluating how artists function, or aspire to function, in the creation of democratic spaces and practices. Mouffe distills these challenges, which accurately reflect the Polish search for self-enfranchisement, by noting that:

our choice is not only one between an aggregate of individuals without common public concern and a premodern community organized around a single substantive idea of the common good. To envisage the modern democratic political community outside of this dichotomy is the crucial challenge.

(2005, 65)

Part of Mouffe’s project is to define the democratic space between a complete absence of political solidarity and a hegemonic uniformity where differences are impossible; in the Polish case, this could be applied to that space between postnationalism and socialism. How indeed to maintain a sense of political solidarity simultaneous to the fragmentation of the public’s allegiances? To maintain political engagement in a world no longer defined by national allegiances? Importantly, this book does not advocate for ethnic nationalisms or the xenophobia they create, but it is an argument about how and why the grounded site remains central and critical as the space of political action. In the context of the Polish site, it speaks to the continued necessity of politically strong solidarities that are separate but not disengaged from the rest of Europe or the world—that is, that are able to resist the neoliberal agenda of disengaged, uprooted, and deterritorialized publics.

The situation in 2004–2009 presented artists with a unique responsibility. If we accept that art is inextricable from its local context, that it does not appear as an autonomous field but a practice enmeshed in politics (Piotrowski 2009a, 9), then we can recognize artists as not only emblematic of change in the new Poland, but also as actors in the negotiations of site that characterized postsocialism, democratization, and Europeanization. In her concept of action, Hannah Arendt writes, "human beings are creatures who act in the sense of starting things and setting off trains of events (Canovan 1998, xvi, emphasis in original). Action—that fundamental activity of the human condition that is inextricably bound and produced through the plurality of individuals—is, Arendt argues, the political activity par excellence (1998, 9). Though Arendt’s idea of action is inseparable from speech (indeed she explicitly states, speechless action would no longer be action [p. 178]), it is nevertheless insightful to consider critical artistic practice as a kind of communication and action, especially as conceived through the idea of the beginning, whereby an aspect of the human condition is the political ability to start something new. To see and imagine the world differently, to propose that it can be different, is a beginning. This opportunity of new beginnings is, in many ways, a reflection of the Polish situation as it has been undergoing a continuous process of reinvention (transition") since at least 1989, and that, in the period 2004–2009 in a sense culminated in the long-awaited integration with the EU. Judy Radul’s (2002) bridging of action as beginning and experimentation is an undercurrent of this book, and the artworks discussed are examples of trying to see things differently, to propose something new, and to chart a course for a different kind of imagination and action within the context of a specific site.

Chapter 1 defines the site-specific artwork not simply as existing in a physical location, but as bearing specific markers of locality—including that of history, politics, and geography—and considers how these are reflected in and assessed through cultural practices. Though the space of the nation-state has been deemed increasingly outmoded, the site-specificity and locality contained within a Polish territory has continuing effects on the way in which art is produced, received, and understood. To understand this, this contextualizing chapter delves more deeply into the historical and political condition of the Polish site, alongside an overview of corresponding attitudes towards the visual arts in Poland, which have historically been tepid. It sketches out the history of Poland as nation, border, and identity, by focusing on selected periods since the end of World War II (WWII). The chapter concludes with an analysis of the immediate consequences and challenges of its inclusion into the EU and defines the 2004–2009 period as a particular historical moment, one that has already passed. Rather than evaluating this phase as the historical culmination of a Polish quest to form a union with the West, the proposition here is that one of the biggest challenges for Poland in this period was to redefine itself as a site that could at once be integrated and distinct within European and global networks. This discussion serves as a response to the ideals of cosmopolitanism and postnationalism that do not fully reflect the sustained way in which localities and sites continue to be politically, culturally, and socially significant. Into this fluid milieu enter the visual arts. Concentrating especially on how this context positioned visual artists during the socialist period and beyond, the shifting situation of the artist provides a window into the changing dynamics of Polish politics and society. This backdrop helps explain why contemporary artists continue to be needed to help in the process of creating a democratic, plural, and public site in the face of the European and global pressures that accompanied the forging of the New Europe.

This attention to site is then turned onto media art itself by tracing Polish (i.e., existing in the Polish site) media art practices within a selective media history that turns to experimental practices in different media within Polish art. In Chapter 2, the notion of the experiment is considered as a principal artistic method for enacting new imaginings, beginnings, and actions. Some key moments in art experimentation in Poland are used to trace a trajectory that deepens our attention of media art as a potentially experimental practice. This is a practice best understood as at once defined through specific formal features, the behaviours, experiences, and processes it enables, but also, crucially, as existing in and responding to particular situated environments. Though pointing out the influence of the avant-garde on new media art practices is not new—for example, the photomontage, collage, ready-made, political action, and performance of Dadaism have all been noted as strategies reemployed by new media artists (Tribe and Jana 2006)—as art historian Boris Groys has noted, contemporary Eastern European and Russian artists work in a tradition of their own avant-gardes (2010, 22). Here, I begin this Polish media art history in the early twentieth century and the germination of the Constructivists in the 1920s and 1930s. In particular, I focus on Władysław Strzemiński and Katarzyna Kobro and the theory of Unism of their a.r. group. Jumping ahead, I look at the 1970s and the neoavant-garde as practiced in the Workshop of the Film Form and their analytic experiments with new