History Teaches Us Nothing: Aleksandra Waliszewska in Athens

Waliszewska_Benaki-11.jpg, default, Aleksandra Waliszewska’s exhibition at the Benaki Museum in Athens, photo: Weronika Pawlak / IAM

photography & visual arts

It could easily have gone wrong – and yet it didn’t. Waliszewska’s paintings, incorporated into the collection of ancient artefacts at the Benaki Museum in Athens, perhaps don’t evoke obvious associations, but do challenge the clichés of contemporary interventions.

The juxtaposition of Aleksandra Waliszewska’s paintings with a museum collection centred on ancient art sounds like a risky idea. Admittedly, Waliszewska, who paints with an impressive intensity, draws on art history – she quotes it, reworks it and remixes it – but her works, although they have been reproduced over the years on every conceivable merchandise item and in various publications, have never before been commissioned. Rather, they have been framed by historical works, as was the case with Cruel Tales at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw a few years ago.

What’s more, Waliszewska’s interests seem far away from Benaki Museum’s profile. The artist is, first and foremost, a distant descendant of the Symbolists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries – it was they who formed the trunk of the visual family tree mapped out by the curators of the Warsaw exhibition, Natalia Sielewicz and Alison M. Gingeras. However, significantly, the latter is also the curator of the exhibition at the Benaki Museum, where the relationship between Waliszewska’s art and the museum’s collection – which spans from antiquity through the Byzantine era to ethnographic artefacts from the period of Ottoman rule – has been outlined in a completely different way.

Another thing: just the juxtaposition of a historical museum collection with contemporary art is already a well-established convention which – having taken root several decades ago during the heyday of institutional criticism – has long since ceased to be as iconoclastic as it was a dozen or so years ago, when Polish artist Karol Radziszewski unearthed previously unseen works from the dungeons of the Zachęta – National Gallery of Art. Today, engaging with history is increasingly being replaced by pastiching it, a practice that fits perfectly into contemporary culture’s obsession with remakes and franchises, whilst also verging on unbearable moralising. Every convention associated with a specific era has acquired associations that are easy to decipher.

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Wystawa prac Aleksandry Waliszewskiej w Muzeum Benaki w Atenach, fot. Weronika Pawlak / IAM

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Waliszewska’s Irruption of Antiquity is a challenge posed to a clichéd and didactic way of thinking about history. ‘I believe the problem with artists is that they read more about art than they actually look at it’, the painter once said. One of her missions is to dismantle a simplistic view of art history, in which every era and every painting carries fixed meanings.

This approach is similar to the perspective of art historian Aby Warburg, who passed away almost a hundred years ago and who is now the patron of the Athens exhibition. The very title, Irruption of Antiquity, is taken from one of the themes of his Mnemosyne Atlas, an unfinished – and, by its very nature, doomed to constant flux and incompleteness – account not so much of the history of art as of visual ideas and symbolic concepts rooted in the ancient tradition. The Atlas, containing plates with reproductions, is based not on a linear presentation of art history but on the logic of montage; meanwhile, antiquity is not so much revived within the framework of successive Renaissances and Classicisms as it bursts into successive eras through eruptions of ancient ‘formulas of pathos’.

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Aleksandra Waliszewska’s exhibition at the Benaki Museum in Athens, photo: Weronika Pawlak / IAM

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It is precisely these eruptions that lie at the heart of Waliszewska’s strategy. The artist reworks the aesthetics of bygone eras, yet always combines their elements into an amalgam that cannot easily be pinned down iconographically. And whilst we may recognise specific objects from the Benaki Museum’s collection or recurring motifs in her successive works, they are always part of a composition that lends them unexpected contexts.

The exhibition greets us with the image of an androgynous woman, thin and pale blue, dressed only in a sheer chiffon coat and a Sid Vicious-style padlock necklace. The figure, with her arms outstretched to the sides and gazing somewhere beyond the edge of the frame, echoes the gesture of ancient orantes; yet she rests her hands on the thorns forming the border of the painting, alluding to depictions of the crucified Christ. Even in this image, set against an abstract background and virtually devoid of narrative, afterimages of antiquity, the Northern Renaissance and turn-of-the-century Symbolism overlap.

When objects from the Athenian collection intrude into Waliszewska’s paintings, they lose their patina. A 4th-century BC oinochoe (a small wine vessel) featuring a relief depiction of Dionysus riding a panther, painted in shades of pink, is superimposed onto a sombre scene depicting the execution of a naked woman. The figure is bent forward, barely fitting into the frame. A pistol pressed against the back of her head is held by an anonymous hand. Blood is about to spurt into the vessel, mixing with the wine. Were the female figure or the small figures visible in the background to be given a specific identity, the scene could easily become a simple allegory. Instead, Waliszewska seems to plunge us into the very heart of a myth whose origins and details we do not know, but which has been reborn and mutating for so long that it seems comprehensible on a deeply subconscious level.

Waliszewska is, however, sufficiently well-versed in art history not to be taken in by the first thing that catches her eye. With hundreds of objects from the collection at her disposal, she didn’t seek out the most spectacular or the strangest ones. These flashes of antiquity work precisely because the artist selects small, unassuming objects, skilfully integrating them into her works. This is best illustrated by the Athenian tetradrachm, a coin featuring an owl – the city’s patron – an object that, against the backdrop of all the splendours of antiquity, is downright mundane, easy to overlook. In Waliszewska’s work, this coin appears in the sky like a gigantic sun or a deity. Naked figures hidden in a cave glance at it anxiously – perhaps we are witnessing a scene from before the dawn of civilisation, or perhaps from the time immediately following its end. The tiny coin takes on a significance comparable to that of the Statue of Liberty encountered by Taylor in the famous final scene of Planet of the Apes.

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Aleksandra Waliszewska’s exhibition at the Benaki Museum in Athens, photo: Weronika Pawlak / IAM

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In keeping with the logic of the Mnemosyne Atlas, Waliszewska’s works feature not only specific objects from the Athenian collections. At times, in her slightly earlier works, the ‘formulas of pathos’ embedded in the artist’s painting come to the fore, complemented by objects from the collection. A Byzantine epitaphion – a liturgical cloth depicting the dead Christ – accompanies, for example, a scene in which motifs of the entombment, the koimesis (the Dormition of the Mother of God), and the birth of Christ seem to converge in an uncanny and unsettling interweaving. A small female figure with blurred contours, either veiled or unveiled, glows with an unearthly golden light, like the infant – the ‘light of the world’ – in the paintings of the Netherlandish masters.

Within the museum space, a dozen or so of Waliszewska’s paintings are strikingly incorporated into the setting of the Athens institution’s rather old-fashioned permanent exhibition. Some simply hang amongst other paintings, while others become elements of a complex scenography, such as the portrait of the late Mitusia, a white cat (she is a recurring motif in Waliszewska’s work), which, painted against the backdrop of a pale danse macabre, inhabits a reconstructed drawing room from the era of Ottoman rule.

Despite her careful selection of unassuming objects for her paintings, the artist by no means fetishises the originals or their direct contact with the artwork. Just as Warburg did when compiling his atlas, reproductions would surely have sufficed for her as well. A painter whose career began during the heyday of Tumblr, she knows how to make excellent use of them – both those printed on art paper in the albums filling her studio, and those stumbled upon by chance on Instagram. In one of her paintings, for example, there is a fragment of the frescoes from the monastery on the island of Patmos – painted precisely from a photograph posted somewhere online.

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Aleksandra Waliszewska’s exhibition at the Benaki Museum in Athens, photo: Weronika Pawlak / IAM

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Perhaps paradoxically, actually coming in contact with the original pieces is becoming more and more important. For years, Waliszewska operated somewhat outside the mainstream art scene and her works could mainly be viewed online. At the same time, they were easy to reproduce – painted in gouache and watercolour on paper in small formats, much like traditional illustrations created with reproduction on paper and screen in mind. In recent years, with her growing institutional presence and representation by the Consonni Radziszewski gallery, the artist has increasingly turned to oil paints and canvas, and her works have become more diverse in form

The narrative presented at the Benaki Museum ends at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, a time of aristocratic Grand Tours of ancient ruins and the Greek War of Independence. Hanging alongside a portrait of Byron, who was involved in the Greek struggle for national liberation, the views of picturesque ruins set against the backdrop of even modest ancient monuments pale in comparison. They seem painfully bland and conventional, shaped by the 18th-century, Winckelmannian vision of antiquity and its ‘noble simplicity and serene grandeur’, of white temples and white sculptures. In Waliszewska’s latest work, this vision is pushed to the brink of parody – here we are looking at a bucolic landscape featuring a neoclassical, Palladian villa, a forest and horses, rendered in a sugary, golden-green palette. Yet above it, in the upper part of the painting, bathed in cool purples, ghostly figures throng, pressing against this idyllic scene as if they were about to burst through from another reality.

Aleksandra Waliszewska at the Benaki Museum in Athens – Image Gallery

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One might see in them representatives of another, Dionysian, wild and brutal facet of Greek culture, although the pale, ghostly figures seem to be drawn from elsewhere altogether – from the Young Poland movement’s imagination, which is so dear to Waliszewska. So perhaps this is a vision of time based on a specific cyclical nature, in which there are only two kinds of eras: those built on historical falsehood and those marked by hopelessness and a lack of illusions?

A few years ago, in Szum Magazine, Polish art historian Dorota Jagoda Michalska interpreted Waliszewska’s work through the prism of, amongst other things, Houellebecq’s predictions regarding a new Middle Ages. Today, parallels between the contemporary situation and the Middle Ages are appearing with increasing frequency, describing the transformation of modern capitalism into techno-feudalism. However, Waliszewska – for all her fascination with the art of the past – seems uninterested in seeking out such direct analogies. If, in her view, there is any lesson to be drawn from the successive returns of bygone eras peering through the fabric of the present, it is merely that with each passing century we find new ways of telling ourselves the same lies.

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