'We Stopped Being Afraid of the City': An Interview With Wilhelm Sasnal
At the end of June, a mural depicting its patron appeared on the building of the Jacek Kuroń CXIX General Secondary School in the centre of Warsaw. It was designed by Wilhelm Sasnal and realised under the patronage of the Wola District Cultural Centre. In an interview with us, the artist talks about Kuroń as a punk, about prognoses for the post-pandemic world and about discovering his peasant roots.
Piotr Policht: You have several murals to your credit; the latest one, commemorating Jacek Kuroń, is somewhat similar in form to the one portraying Robert Brylewski, which was created two years ago in Jarocin. But this time, the hero is not a punk but an activist and politician.
Wilhelm Sasnal: Brylewski’s portrait is a drawing from the cover of an extended interview published by Znak; initially, I didn’t think it would become a mural. After Brylewski’s death, it began to take on a life of its own. The photo from his youth on which this cover drawing is based is very distinctive; it’s Brylewski all over, at least for me. When I started working on the mural depicting Kuroń, I was also looking for a characteristic photograph that would capture what I think or feel about him, so the path for choosing was very similar. Anyway, if we’re talking about analogies, Kuroń was a punk incarnate for me – rebellious, uncompromising, just like Robert. He was probably one of the most frequently imprisoned disobedient people in communist Poland.
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Mural by Wilhelm Sasnal, Jacek Kuroń CXIX General Secondary School in Warsaw, photo: Jakub Szafrański / Krytyka Polityczna
PP: You ultimately chose two different photographs. In what circumstances were they taken?
WS: One is a fairly well-known portrait by Tadeusz Zagoździński, I believe from the 1990s. The other is a photograph taken when he was arrested sometime in the 1960s, in which Kuroń stands helpless in front of a camera. It’s also a coincidence; while searching the internet, I didn’t come across it right away, but I had a newspaper clipping set aside somewhere in which the Kuroń story was described. I found that clipping quite accidentally in a book I was leafing through recently; it was illustrated with a photo of Kuroń’s arrest. Next to this full-figure picture was a portrait, evidently a prison photo. At first, I painted both the full figure and this prison portrait, but it’s too fresh-faced – it doesn’t bring Kuroń to mind. When I showed it to his relatives, they didn’t recognise him. Therefore, I chose a completely different photograph from a different period in which Kuroń is nevertheless captured.
PP: The choice of the arrest photo is not very obvious – Kuroń doesn’t look like a punk here; he looks helpless, not heroic.
WS: For me, this photo is touching. Also, by how poorly he’s dressed in it. Even the shoes blend into the background, they’re not there in this picture. Kuroń was always heroic despite everything, but he isn’t displaying a rebellious attitude in these pictures. In one, he’s helpless; in the other, he’s a mature man who has stopped running away. Actually, I don’t know if he ever ran away; in any case, there is no longer an oppressive situation that he has to face directly.
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Mural by Wilhelm Sasnal, Jacek Kuroń CXIX General Secondary School in Warsaw, photo: Jakub Szafrański / Krytyka Polityczna
WS: Apart from the obvious reasons, like the fact that the secondary school is named after him, he’s one of the few people who impresses me in an absolute way. Again – much like Robert Brylewski. If I had to name a few people who went through the communist years with their heads held high and tried to change reality in a heroic way, then Kuroń would certainly be among them. I’m also impressed by how his story meanders, from the beginning, from his sincere belief in communism. People are not like Jacek Kuroń – I think we admire him because he was indeed unique. If people were like Kuroń, communism would not have remained a utopia. That’s why he had such a convoluted life, his belief in communism and his involvement in Walterowcy scouting. He was simply a brave man.
Like Karol Modzelewski, their ideological stance always came together as one for me. I remember Modzelewski saying that if he had known how things would turn out, he would not have fought for the country. It was disillusionment with a free market economy. I don’t know if it could have been otherwise, but what he said gave me food for thought. Now, we’re to some extent reaping of consequences of leaving some people to fend for themselves. With what’s happening in Poland, with all the hate speech and the regrowing heads of fascism, I was worried whether this mural would become an object of ridicule and whether there would be any mud on it. So, I discussed with the contractors whether it should start a little higher, out of arm’s reach, but in the end, it was created as planned. Despite this concern of mine, the left-wing Kuroń is a somewhat forgotten figure these days, somehow strangely escaping the hate.
PP: What might this oblivion stem from?
WS: Perhaps from the fact that politics has ceased to serve ideas; it’s become a battle for voters. Instead, it’s a feedback loop of research and public reaction. So, what’s the point of having someone who had such incisive ideas, perhaps not always popular? Such a person is probably not needed, which is why I also speak of a certain commercialisation of politics. Kuroń was the negation of such thinking about politics, about the world.
PP: Do you think a return to this idealistic thinking about politics is still possible?
WS: I don’t think so; it seems to me that the world is somewhere else entirely. It’s a song of the past to which there’s no return. Even a pandemic wasn’t enough of a bump in the road to change the course of the world.
PP: So, are you among those who believe that after COVID-19, things will be the same, only worse?
WS: I believe so, yes.
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Mural by Wilhelm Sasnal, Jacek Kuroń CXIX General Secondary School in Warsaw, photo: Jakub Szafrański / Krytyka Polityczna
PP: It appears that the mural with Kuroń is actually quite fatalistic.
WS: Yes, a little. But on the one hand, it’s fatalistic, and yet, on the other hand, it’s good to be aware that there was someone like Kuroń. In the context of politics, the whole swamp that’s going on in the field of culture and especially education, I also admire the school itself for deciding to make the gesture of having someone like Kuroń all over the wall. Maybe it’s partly because this is Warsaw, a liberal city, but I don’t know if such a figure could appear here where I live, in the south of the country, in Lesser Poland or Subcarpathia. That’s why, for me, this is a courageous gesture. This street, this place belongs to Kuroń.
PP: You’ve also recently taken an interest in the peasant history of your own family; last autumn at the Foksal Gallery Foundation, you showed, among other things, a triptych reproducing compositions by Jean-François Millet, Gustave Courbet and one anonymous painter. Why this selection?
WS: It took me a long time to find the photograph from which I did this last painting. It was only recently that I found it, and it turned out that I had simply taken a photograph of this painting in the Museo Nazionale Romano in Rome; it’s a painting by some Italian artist whose name I can’t remember. I painted these pictures while searching for my roots in the dark because I obviously have no documentary evidence of what life was like for my ancestors a few generations ago. My grandparents were no longer peasants, but my great-grandparents were, hence the search for the peasant tradition. In fact, this is a tradition that is shared by some 90% of our society. When you read about how our ancestors lived, you realise that they were actually, though unofficially, slaves. This is a redefinition and a knowledge that you can’t pass by indifferently. And so, the painting.
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Untitled by Wilhelm Sasnal, 2019, photo courtesy of Foksal Gallery Foundation
PP: This history is still not worked though; there are still many descendants of peasants putting up quasi-noble manors. What might this displacement stem from?
WS: There’s something pathetic about it, of course, but I don’t know if it’s a question of coming to terms with one’s identity. It’s a bit like the issue of the shame of witnessing the Holocaust, the shame of one’s ancestors. But I think there’s some great hope in this process that has happened – even 150 years ago, I would have been a quasi-slave, a serf. But this shows the emancipation of man. Because of this distance in time, I look at it with curiosity, not with a sense of regret. What I find interesting is what is so evident in Jan Sowa’s Fantomowe Ciało Króla (The King’s Phantom Body) – that the peasantry’s ignorance, the lack of an education was parallel to the ignorance of the landed gentry of the time. Everyone was afraid of the city. Both the peasants, who can hardly be blamed because they had no access to education, and the landed gentry, who were very afraid of the city, of the devil that dwells in it. It struck me that the Polish gentry rejected the Enlightenment.
Translated from Polish by Agnieszka Mistur
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