Magdalena Abakanowicz gained international fame thanks to her huge, abstract woven structures which redefined the meaning of spacial forms. At least since the 1970s the human figure has been an important point of reference and module for the artist. The human form is for her a starting point for existential reflection. Looking at her sculptures – or at least the majority of them – one can come to the conclusion that the reflection is not positive. The artist shows the dark side of existence and the individuals' functioning in a group.
Abakanowicz has been creating The Crowds since the mid-eighties. The first Crowd, presented during the artist's retrospective in Műcsarnok Museum in Budapest in 1988, was composed of 50 figures. The second one was created when she moved with her husband to a house with a studio. The humanoids are made out of jute sacks and sometimes cast in bronze. Art historians analyzing the artist's work say that there are now more than a thousand figures, and ironically add that they have never been seen together.
Abakanowicz's figures have no faces, they lack this element of autonomy which determines the individual's features. Deprived of faces, they have no identity and no right to speak. Even though each figure has some specific features that differentiate one from the others, they are difficult to notice. What's important is the repetitiveness, identicalness, impersonality. The individual always gets lost in the crowd, but it's also in the crowd where it finds its place.
Each Crowd is a separate organism. It's realized in direct contact with the viewer, but most of all it creates an existential metaphor. As art historian Jasia Reichardt, who accompanied the artist for many years, wrote, ‘in modern art there aren't many images as moving and as unsettling as this one; crowd presentations are also quite rare’. Abakanowicz's sculptures, both placed in museums and in landscapes, can be seen as a call to action, provoke anxiety or even a sense of danger.
Abakanowicz's works, especially The Crowds, are not canonically beautiful. Their textures bring to mind matter painting – Jean Fautier, Jean Debuffet and especially Alberto Burri's paintings. Mariusz Hermansdorfer wrote:
Abakanowicz rejects all beauty, all decoration and all camouflage. She tears them off, layer after layer, as if she wanted to tear off layers of skin. Only what's essential remains and maybe that is all that is real.
Finally the figures from The Crowds are only coverings, negatives. The artist wrote about Alterations (1975) that the cycle ‘applies to the empty space that can be filled by our imagination, and the tangible, inflexible sphere, which is an incomplete trace of our spacial compatibility with our material surroundings’.
Magdalena Abakanowicz used two metaphors when referencing The Crowds: the metaphor of a mosquito swarm and of grains of sand. As she wrote in 1985:
Once I watched mosquitoes swarm. Grey masses. One group after the other. They were tiny creatures. In a brush of other tiny creatures. Constantly moving. Each of them concerned with its own trail. They were all different in form. They created a crowd which uttered one sound. Were they mosquitoes or people?
Abakanowicz noticed a particular pattern in nature, a repetitiveness, a mass action. ‘I put a spell on this unsettling law, engaging my own, still herds into this rhythm’, she added referencing her own sculptures. In another text, also from 1985, she compared the anonymity of the crowd to grains of sand. A crowd becomes one organism with functions hard to define, but prone to be intuitively sensed.
I lose myself inside the anonymity of glances, movements, odours, in the collective absorbtion of air, in the pulsing of juices below the skin.
The experience of the crowd is an experience of immersing oneself in the repetitiveness, and also of being a part of communal life, of mutual interaction. There is a danger to the mass, though, and the artist doesn't hesitate to name it:
I become like a cell of the expressionless, immersed in one another. In destroying ourselves, we rejuvenate, and in hating – we stimulate each other. Our bones are similar, our brains, the sensitivity of our skin. We fill the planet with our soft-heartedness and goodness which turns into craving for murder.
This is the interpretation of The Crowds presented by the artist herself and also in the majority of texts dedicated to her, which usually repeat her propositions. Waldemar Baraniewski in a brilliant essay about the Życie Warszawy tapestry noticed that ‘the characteristic of these texts is an attempt to read Abakanowicz's works through existential metaphors, at the same time ignoring their historical genesis and context’. What he has in mind is mostly seeing Abakanowicz's works – The Crowds included– as a reflection on the totalitarian reality of communist Poland by ’one of the favourite artists of the PRL's authorities’. Maybe that is why in the history of Polish art Magdalena Abakanowicz has a rather independent, if not solitary, place.
Author: Karol Sienkiewicz, December 2009, transl. by NMR, January 2016.
- Magdalena Abakanowicz
Tłumy / The Crowds
since 1985