Artur Żmijewski, "Nasz śpiewnik / Our Songbook", format DVD, master S-VHS, 11', 2003, courtesy of the artist and the Foksal Gallery Foundation
In a consequent and detailed manner, Artur Żmijewski's work concentrates on issues of memory, postwar trauma and Polish post-Holocaust culture. His artistic proposal, though ambiguous at times, seems quite coherent. It provokes controversy not only about issues of representation, but also about inter-human relationships in general. History, understood here as an experience of repressed trauma that demands a situation in which it will be able to return, emerges in Żmijewski's work in as violent a way as corporeality does. The artist seems conscious of the fact that in order to fully understand and experience the present, one needs to work through the past, in close relation to which the present has been shaped. What is interesting in this context, are both our perception of the past and our attitude towards it, and also how the past influences our perception of the world, and how it produces the myths that organise our cultural reality. The above issues are rendered by such video works as: Pielgrzymka / Pilgrimage (2003), Itzik (2003), Lisa (2003), Zeppelintribüne (2002), Berek / The Game of Tag (1999), Our Songbook (2003) and 80064 (2004).27 For Żmijewski, memory and histories "locked" in people and places are objects of fascination, and, at the same time, a challenge. His artistic practice could be summed up by the words of the Polish-Jewish writer, Henryk Grynberg, who wrote about himself:
"I go to visit neither countries nor seas, but people. Especially, if there is a painful story in them, which cannot be born [...]. I do not do it for them, but for myself, because it is me who speaks through these stories. Not by commentary but by identification with their fate."
The dominant theme of the works of Rafał Jakubowicz from 2002-2004 is Holocaust history and memory. His most interesting pieces include Seuchensperrgebiet (2002), Arbeitsdisziplin (2002) and Pływalnia (Swimming Pool) (2003). The latter concentrates on searching for the meanings of architecture, on the return of repressed, forgotten history. In Poznań, on April 4, 2003, Jakubowicz organised an artistic action in the municipal swimming pool on Wroniecka Street. He projected onto the façade of the building an inscription in Hebrew: בך׳נת־שחײה. It took place on the 60th anniversary of the day when, during the German occupation, the Synagogue was converted into a swimming pool, as it has remained until the present day. Jakubowicz, writes Jaromir Jedliński, is testing the possibilities of an involved observer, a viewer, who participates in what is common.28 The artist begins by checking whether there is anything left in common, then he examines the limits of indifference, of an escape from reality, and, what is more, from freedom. For his sensitivity to the signs of reality and to language's lack of innocence, he is indebted to Mirosław Bałka and Luc Tuymans, artists dealing with collective and individual memory.
Jakubowicz opens public spaces to painful and difficult problems, and suggests the need for working through them, for the refreshing of memory. He causes discomfort, writes Jedliński, as if warning against an epidemic of amnesia and blissful peace. It seems that the artist understood the lesson of Krzysztof Wodiczko:
"[...] today, art is an element in a complex puzzle of power and freedom discourse which takes place in the space of the city. Silence would simply mean the acceptance of the disappearing of public space, that is, of democracy, as that space would transform into a private space of rulers and owners.
According to Jedliński, Jakubowicz mends this space, consequently mending collective memory.
Another inheritor of Luc Tuymans' painterly imagination, Wilhelm Sasnal, in 2002, for the exhibition, "Zawody malarskie" ("Painterly Competition"), painted on the wall of Bielska BWA Gallery, a fragment of Art Spiegelman's graphic novel, Maus. Sasnal removed the drawings and left only the texts alluding to the war experience of the Jews in Bielsko-Biała. He presented the re-made 157th page of the book, in which Vladek Spiegelman and his wife, denounced to the Gestapo, are walking through the streets of Bielsko-Biała, near their family textile factory. Firstly, the painting was supposed to be placed on the wall of the Technical Museum located in a former factory (in Maus it is the Spiegelman factory). Unfortunately, the artist and the organisers were refused. Therefore, it was placed on the back wall of the gallery building that stands in the place of the Synagogue destroyed by the Nazis.
In 2003, for the exhibition, "Pokaż ręce. Chodź bliżej. Patrz." ("Show Me Your Hands. Come Closer. Watch."), at the Foksal Gallery Foundation in Warsaw, Sasnal presented works on various themes, such as modern sacral architecture in Poland, 'stage diving' during a rock concert, a character from Art Spiegelman's Maus, a landscape illustrating Tadeusz Borowski's prose, the lights of a graveyard at night. The title of the exhibition is a dialogue taken from one of Borowski's short stories that Sasnal had previously used in a comic strip. The exhibition was regarded as a contribution to the debate on Holocaust representation, or rather, the impossibility of a direct depiction of the event. It concerned both a reconciliation with the past and with living in a "deadly setting", but it was also of a critical nature, touching upon the problem of the Catholic indifference towards the past. The artist formulated a demand for Holocaust memory, for a kind of settling of accounts with the past.
"these issues are invariably difficult - wrote the critic Bogusław Deptuła - and there are no simple solutions for them, Sasnals' paintings being just one of the attempts. However, they become an important part of the dialogue on our past and present".29
The Desert of the Obscure
Miejsce nieparzyste / Odd Places (2005) is a series of large format photographs by Elżbieta Janicka. They are, at the same time, minimal in form and very elaborate. The photographs depict air (in Poland we breathe differently, says the artist), and the recordings accompanying the presentation are those of the sound of silence. Both air and silence were recorded in the former death camps of Auschwitz II Birkenau, Kulmhof am Ner, Majdanek, Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka. The artist poses a question: is that what we see, air or traces of the murdered wiped out of memory? Separately, Janicka presents sets of numbers, illustrating the scale of the crime: for example, "Oświęcim 1100000 (1 000 000), Chełmno 310 000 (300 000)", the numbers in brackets stand for Jewish victims. The inscription reading 'AGFA' on the frame of each photograph in a way involuntarily points to the problem of co-responsibility (during the Second World War, AGFA was part of I.G. Farben that produced, among other things, the Zyklon B used in gas chambers). These photographs and recordings, though seemingly empty, are full of meanings. The title of the series was taken from the infamous tradition of the "bench ghetto" during which the administration of the Warsaw University stamped the record books of Jewish students with "place in the odd benches", thus discriminating against them by sending them to separate seats. Death camps became for the Jews such an "odd place", this time however, they were cruel and fatal.
Joanna Rajkowska's project, Dotleniacz / Oxygenerator, (2006) is a pond, supposedly situated on Grzybowski Square, within the former Warsaw Ghetto. The artist wants to let in some fresh air, some oxygen into this space overfilled with meanings, and create a neutral, separate place that could be treated as a kind of sanctuary from the chaotic urban landscape. On one hand, the space would allow one to forget about everything, on the other, to concentrate on what is pulsating in this particular place, the living, though buried under the ground, neighbours' history. Another installation, Literatura patriotyczna / Patriotic Literature, depicts anti-Semitic publications, bought in the patriotic book store, Antique, located under the Catholic church on Grzybowski Square, and spread all over a couch. These books, however, differ from the originals. The text was printed backwards, as if reflected in a mirror. This project plays with stereotypes, it inverts the relation of anti-Semitism and its critique. The video, Maja Gordon jedzie do Chorzowa / Maya Gordon Goes to Chorzow, is the record of a 58-year-old Jewish woman's trip to Poland, where she was born. It is a trip in search of the past but at the same time, an image of the impossibility of return. The protagonist succeeds neither in finding her house nor in getting to know the truth about her origins. The artist strips bare the illusion of finding the truth, the true version of what happened, and what influenced the present. She exposes the fear of leaving conventional forms of memory trapped in anecdotes and family myths. Rajkowska grasps the dynamics of these processes. She places a mirror, or a pond's surface, in front of the viewer and encourages them to look inside, to discover themselves.
Hypertextual Story
The artistic group, Katarzyna Krakowiak, Dr Muto and Łukasz Szalankiewicz, created a fictive hypertextual object entitled Ashaver 220 (www.ashaver220.net/) (2006), consisting of fragments of narratives, sounds, and images, that reveal the wiped out memory of the Warsaw Ghetto. The project includes artistic objects placed within the city space, photographs, documents and a collection of recordings of witness testimonies and recollections. The Ghetto functions here on two levels: it is a state of mind separated from the dark past and a space in the centre of the capital. The aim of the artists was to awaken memory, to enter into its most repressed parts. In this project the mobile phone is the medium through which the viewer/participant communicates with the past. He/she leaves the gallery's space and enters the city's space, becoming in this way both a virtual and a real wanderer. Depending on where the viewer with a phone is standing in the former ghetto, divided into sections of a few hundred square meters, he/she receives fragments of hypertext ascribed to these spaces. In this way, a relation between the past and the present is established, and a non-linear, obscure narrative develops. Consequently, it should lead to the deconstruction of the process of historical mythologisation. Moreover, the participant should feel a sense of oppression and entrapment in history, and then the sense of liberty accompanying the coming to terms with memory. As the artists claim, an inspiration for this project was provided, among others, by the history of the lost sections of Emanuel Ringelblum's Archive.
Female Intimacy
Since 2005, the program of the annual festival, Singer's Warsaw, has included, on Próżna Street, exhibitions of artists whose works deal with issues of absence, memory and the Holocaust. Among the artists featured was Krystiana Robb-Narbutt who presented the installation, Księga pamięci / The Book of Memory (2005) , a story of contact with past generations established on the basis of conversations, recollections, photographs, newspapers and books. For the artist, this was also a bridge to the past. The imperative of remembrance is present in her work in a very particular way. It is constitutive of Fuga pamięci / Memory Fugue, an installation consisting of seven glass cases in which the artist collected various objects: a toy-carriage, teddy-bears, sugar, etc. These objects refer to dead relatives, while the captions suggest their fate: "A Train Rose took", "Toys, with which the twins could have played." The installation was accompanied by a quotation from Paul Celan: "I know it is not true we lived".
The voice of Krystiana Robb-Narbutt is exceptionally individual and intimate, just like the voice of Ewa Kuryluk, the author of the installation, Tabuś. In a room on the second floor of an old, grey house on Próżna Street, the author placed enlarged photographs of herself and her brother playing with a skipping rope and a wheel, both painted yellow, and a text:
"A street in Amsterdam
Anna Frank holding a skipping rope and her friend holding a wheel.
On the other side
Auschwitz-Birkenau:
Women and kids on the way to the crematorium.
Copies of newspaper photos
found by me
in Mum's things after her death.
Only then I understood
what she meant by saying:
'You had the same wheel
as Anna's friend.
And Peter had the same skipping rope'."
By evoking her mother's story, Ewa Kuryluk tells of the tragic fate of murdered and saved families. Every year, both the organisers of the festival and of the exhibitions repeat: we strive at saving memory.
After Hansen
Almost half a century after Oskar Hansen's project for the Auschwitz monument was dismissed, Jarosław Kozakiewicz's project won the competition for the "Park of the Nations' Reconciliation" that is supposed to be situated near the museum of the former camp in Auschwitz. The park will not be yet another museum, but a place for contemplation, both for the visitors and the inhabitants of Oświęcim. One critic called Kozakiewicz a "sensitive reformer of space"30 for proposing a project that denies the idea of a commemorative monument. The artist retains a respect for the past, while, at the same time, not allowing it to dominate the present. Two sides of the river Sola will be connected by a "ghost bridge", reminiscent of an extended Moebius strip, and symbolising the passage from life to death. Kozakiewicz employed many universal symbols in his project, and these are supposed to create a message beyond national and religious codes.
The works discussed above can be treated, on one hand, as part of the critical discourse on memory producing counter-narratives, and, on the other, as part of the discourse following the remembrance imperative, recreating and regaining histories. This artistic discourse, though heterogeneous, finds its reference point on the international art scene, in what is nowadays considered the canon of contemporary art. I am thinking here of artists such as Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer, Hans Haacke, Gerhard Richter, Christian Boltanski, Frank Stella, Barnett Newman, but also of the representatives of "the second generation", such as Christine Borland, Frédéric Brenner, Rudolf Herz, Roee Rosen, Tom Sachs, Alan Schechner, Vera Frenkel, James Friedman, Matthew Girson, Erich Hartmann, Mikael Levin, Pier Marton, Rachel Schreiber, Susan Silas, Marina Vainshtein, Jeffrey Wolin. The visual sphere of official discourse, embodied by the visible signs of memory - monuments and museums - is not meaningless for Polish artists taking up the challenge of Holocaust representation. They allude to it either directly or indirectly. In this country, recollections of the horror of war, historical politics and manipulations, pathos and heroism, the rule of the Romantic paradigm, everyday life, all have a very specific status: they shape collective memory, the source of a lasting national battle.
Author: Katarzyna Bojarska. Edited by James A. Hopkin, January 2011.
Notes
1. After: Piotr Piotrowski, "Znaczenia modernizmu. W stronę historii sztuki polskiej po 1945 roku", Poznan, 1999, p. 10.
2. See: Eleonora Jedlińska, "Sztuka po Holocauście", Lodz, 2001.
3. See: Fragments of the interview with Dlubak were published in Obieg 1/2006, pp. 52-60.
4. "Magdalena Abakanowicz", Warszawa, 1995, s. 3.
5. See: "Art from Poland 1945-1996", red. Jolanta Chrzanowska-Pieńkos, and others, Warszawa, 1997, p. 259.
6. The title of this series is sometimes translated into English as "To My Jewish Friends". For the purpose of my analysis and this article, however, I would like to introduce my own translation of the work, that, in my opinion, is less restrictive for the interpretation.
7. See: Andrzej Turowski, "Budowniczowie świata. Z dziejów radykalnego modernizmu w sztuce polskiej", Kraków, 2000.
8. Marek Zaleski, "Formy pamięci", Gdańsk, 2004, p. 158.
9. See: Doreet LeVitte-Harten, "Przekładanie bólu na kolor", in the exhibition catalogue of the Zachęta National Gallery in Warsaw: "Gdzie jest brat Twój, Abel? / Where is Abel, Thy Brother?", Warszawa, 1995, p. 14.
10. After: Jedlińska, op.cit., p. 12.
11. I would like to thank Prof. Piotr Piotrowski for pointing out this project to me.
12. See: Piotr Piotrowski, "Auschwitz vs Auschwitz", Zerstörer des Schweigens. Formen künstlerischer Erinnerung an die nationsalsozialistische Rassen- und Vernichtungspolitik in Osteuropa, Köln, Weimar, Wien, 2006, pp. 515-530.
13. See: Oskar Hansen, "Towards Open Form", ed. Jola Gola, Warszawa, 2005.
14. See: Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius, "Oskar Hansen and the Auschwitz 'Countermemorial' ", 1958-59, www.artmargins.com/content/feature/murawska.html, 01.12.2006.
15. See: James E. Young, "At Memory's Edge. After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture", New Haven and London, 2000.
16. Stephen C. Feinstein, "Zbigniew Libera's Lego Concentration Camp: Iconoclasm In Conceptual Art About the Shoah", in: "Other Voices", vol. 2 n. 1 (February 2000).
17. See: Piotr Piotrowski, "Obraza uczuć. Odbiór sztuki krytycznej w Polsce", "Res Publica Nowa", 3/2002.
18. Dora Apel, Trespassing the Limits: "Mirroring Evil – Nazi Imagery/Recent Art" at the Jewish Museum, "Other Voices", vol. 2, no. 3 (January 2005).
19. See: "Gdzie jest brat twój, Abel?/ Where is Abel, Thy Brother?", op.cit.
20. Marianne Hirsh, "Family Frames. Photography, Narrative and Postmemory", Cambridge Mass. and London, 1997, p. 22.
21. Sztuka legalizowania buntu – Bożena Czubak talks to Zbigniew Libera, Magazyn Sztuki n. 15-16/1997.
22. Ernst van Alphen, "Playing the Holocaust", in:
Mirroring Evil. Nazi Imagery Recent Art, ed. N.L. Kleeblatt, New York, 2003.
23. Zygmunt Bauman, "Modernity and the Holocaust", Ithaca, New York, 1989.
24. Saul Friedlander, "Memory, History and the Extermination of the Jews in Europe", Bloomington, 1993, p. 47.
25. Piotr Piotrowski, "Obraza uczuć...".
26. Susan Sontag, "Fascinating Fascism" in: "Under the Sign of Saturn", New York, 1980, pp. 73-105.
27. See: Artur Żmijewski. "Co się stało raz, nie stało się nigdy / If It Happened Only Once It's As If It Never Happened", ed. Joanna Mytkowska, Warszawa, 2005.
28. Jaromir Jedliński, "Reperowanie przestrzeni publicznej (przez Jakubowicza)" w: "Magazyn Sztuki" on-line.
29. Bogusław Deptuła, "Obrazki z wystawy", Tygodnik Powszechny, Nr 18, 5.05.2002.
30. Anna Cymer, "Kozakiewicz. Wrażliwy reformator przestrzeni", Obieg 2/2006, p. 56-61.