The idea for the sculpture came to Kozyra when she was still a student at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. She drew her inspiration from the Grimm Brothers' tale of the "The Bremen Town Musicians", a story of four animals who set out to try their luck as musicians in town, stopping off in the woods along the way. They find an empty cabin with a table loaded with goodies and they stuff themselves to their heart's content. The cabin turns out to already be occupied by a band of robbers in the woods, but the animals manage to frighten them off as they stack up one on top of another, towering above the robbers. They end up living, as it were, happily ever after. It is a story that leaves quite a bit to the imagination, its message particularly ambiguous. Yet the topsy-turvy ending of a group of farmyard animals outsmarting a group of especially mischievous human beings lends its license to Kozyra's project, which explores the ways in which human activities have run amuck with the food pyramid and the relationship between prey and predator.
Kozyra herself selected the animals for her project - first she bought the horse and then she got the dog from a facility that put dogs down at the request of their owners, then a cat. In the case of the rooster, she opted for a large one and a small one, not knowing exactly what size would fit the bill, and killed them herself. She does admit she considered the question of whether she should have killed the dog and cat herself. What stopped her? "Emotions," she said, "I couldn't do it, at least not then".
Of course, the choice of building a sculpture using real animals was a controversial one. Yet the animals had already been slated for termination before Kozyra had acquired them for her project. People were still shocked by the fact that she had been so close to their death - she'd even filmed the slaughter of the horse, which, incidentally, bore the same name as the artist - Kasia. In one of the frames, the camera zeroes in on the eye of the dying horse. While there is no way of knowing what the horse was really feeling at that very moment, Kozyra's goal was to show how distanced we are from death, in spite of a world in which animals are regularly killed for our benefit. Society's tendency to hide slaughter behind factory walls pushes it out of sight and out of mind, yet these animals make it to our dinner plates and on our bodies as leather. Perhaps human beings should be made to face the truth of how animals are treated and the conditions in which they are put to death. As the artist explains, "Civilisation has painted its own fantastic, clean picture. At the same time, however, the same rules that preside over nature apply".
Kozyra's own personal experience with approaching death overlapped with her work on the Pyramid project. She was going through treatment for cancer. On the day the horse was killed, her hair was following out after her final chemotherapy session.
"The consciousness remains that it's only an extension in the face of a galloping destruction. Suddenly, it turned out that I was seriously ill and the diagnosis wasn't optimistic. Suddenly, I jumped into another level of consciousness. I experienced finality", said Kozyra to Artur Żmijewski. She used this experience more directly in her next work "Olympia". The "Pyramid" she described as a monument to the genius of metabolism. She explains, "The horse was eaten by dogs and cats, now they're mashed up into feed for swine and chickens. And we eat all of it, if not this horse, than another. In this sense, it's genius. For reincarnation".
It may not appear quite like reincarnation to many but, rather, the other way around. The piece inexorably brings to mind thoughts of death and demise, of one's own fate. These stuffed creatures with glassy eyes are the epitome of the finality of death. Where does spirituality fit into the picture?
Kozyra is of the opinion that "these imaginary philosophies are all contrived for the purpose of camouflaging the obvious, the fact of destruction, simply. No, I don't think that it's a tragedy, it's harmony and I have a great part in it".
The discord with the accepted 'philosophies' was what fueled attacks against the artist. Critic Xymena Zaniewska asked whether it was the "diploma project of a sculptor or a dog catcher? "Will we next find along this road an exhibition of lampshades made of tattooed human skin?" inquired the head of the Warsaw Association of Polish Artists. The public wrote letters of protest to local newspapers and calling for the artist to be brought to trial for her actions. On the one hand, there was the well-being of animals at stake, on the other, freedom of speech and the right to artistic expression. The ideas behind the sculpture were completely ignored. It did not conform to any of the patterns and principles of decorative art.
In an interview with cafebabel.co.uk, Kozyra expresses surprise at the uproar her work has inspired, saying
I felt that what I did was responsible. It didn’t even occur to me that people would distance themselves from it to such an extent. Suddenly it turns out that although everyone eats meat, I was the person who killed animals and created some kind of advantages out of that.
With a certain irony, she took the debate on "what is art" further, writing in the description about her piece that the pyramid "had been realised in cooperation with Mr. J. Linkowski, whose abilities in preparing animals can be called art".
Author: Agnieszka Le Nart, based on the original text in Polish by Karol Sienkiewicz on Culture.pl of December 2009