Post-communist art is haunted by communism. Precisely because of its ‘communist ghosts’, i.e. the relics of a historical experience which from a national and neoliberal perspective appear as non-sensical or even threatening and which accompany and drive this art, it is disruptive/uncanny art.
Post-communist art is an expression of the predicament and crisis caused by the collapse of relations, narratives, and identities that used to characterize the ‘age of extremes’. In this context post-communist art can be read as art that speaks from within the experience of having been thrown out of the chronology and space of modern progress and as such it haunts those discourses which seek to reestablish or preserve identity structures or narratives that would strengthen or restore pre-1989 structures. It does so by actualizing 'Eastern Europe' as something that does not reflect what a national or Western gaze expects. Instead of seeing in it a reflection of a coherent history and known struggles the Western gaze finds in this art traces of ventures and experiences (past hopes
and catastrophes) which from the perspective of the new hegemonic formations after 1989 are kept repressed.
In this chapter I want to explore this ghostly character of post-communist art further by focusing on artistic practice in and from Poland more specifically. The contemporary art phenomena I will look at in this context are the so-called Critical Art and Applied Social Arts which have been seen as characteristic, in one way or the other, of artistic production in Poland after 1989. I will discuss in which way these contemporary art forms drag us back to traumatic experiences related to the historical avant-garde and its main concern with the relation between art and life or art and politics.
I will argue that in comparison to common accounts of today's meaning of contemporary art that have been developed predominantly in relation to art from Western Europe and North America post-communist art re-actualizes experiences of the twentieth century that in today's hegemonic art discourse are normally repressed. I argue that while causing an interruption of and shock to existing, hegemonic ideas on the function and role of art, post-communist art from Poland
challenges precisely the idea that art is reduced to causing irruptions and critique. Instead, applied social art seeks interventionist, directed ruptures that not only disturb but also create, heal, or transform and by doing so it asks for a reengagement with the idea of a politicized art that is at odds with what is usually tolerated within today’s art world.
Post-communist art in Poland after 1989
Artistic production in Poland in the 1990s was strongly influenced by a phenomenon which was called ‘Critical Art’. The term Critical Art referred to art projects that were often situated in public sites and were characterized by their unconventional, provocative, or even scandalous contents or forms: a sculpture created out of four stuffed animals, two of which (a horse and a cock) had been killed by the artist herself, with a video installed next to the finalized sculpture documenting in detail the gruesome process of killing and dying (Katarzyna Kozyra, Animal Pyramid, 1993); a Lego version of a concentration camp analyzing artistically the tools and effects of mass culture and the commercialization of suffering (Zbigniew Libera, Lego. Concentration Camp, 1996); or statues of Christian icons like Virgin Mary and Christ stored in aquariums mimicking decorations or accessories of a new emerging Polish identity (Robert Rumas, Dedications I, II, III, 1992).
Although often working with objects and phenomena of the non-artistic sphere and in some cases even situated in public places the aim of these critical artworks was not so much a political one,
which means that critical artists of that time did not try to actively participate in building up the new democratic structure of the post-1989 era. Instead they aimed at disturbing emerging or existing public discourses and rituals by entering as artists the post-1989 socio-political transitions. In a time when public actors and institutions were constructing new or reviving old narratives for defining the regained Polish nation state, artists in Poland sought to influence this process from the perspective of radical yet free/autonomous critics. More specifically, their aim was not to offer alternative strategies or policies but, firstly, to challenge societal standards and traditions as these were in the process of becoming the new status-quo and simultaneously to take advantage of the transitional phase the country was in to also confront, as artists, societal taboos.170
Piotrowski compared this phenomenon of a publicly present and radical form of art practice with an
‘agorophilic’ condition which was characterized by an increased need to be present in open, public spaces. After years of having been excluded structurally as free artists from the public sphere the 1990s saw suddenly in former communist countries an unprecedented return of artistic interventions into public spaces and discourses. ‘The strategies of limiting political social participation and of restricting culture and cultural production constituted, irrespective of the degree of actual
restrictions’, Piotrowski writes, ‘an important part of communist rule and served as an instrument of the cultural policies carried out by the state apparatus.’171 Consequently, reclaiming the right of free speech and realizing specific forms of creative and cultural freedoms right at the centre of the public sphere was thus an urge that characterized art from all former communist countries, including Poland.
However, this type of expressive critical art practice and with it its artistic forms as they emerged in post-1989 Poland were not something that was exclusive to the Polish or post-communist context.
In fact, Critical Art of the 1990s has been repeatedly compared to the so-called Young British Artists in the UK.172 But what was indeed exceptional, and what could therefore be seen as symptomatic for the particularity of this critical art and its relation to the specific socio-historical context, were the
170 Grzegorz Kowalski who taught many of these critical and controversial artists at the Warsaw Academy of Art said:
'The artist is called to question obligatory standards. But must remember that he/she will be judged according to these standards. He/she therefore must accept the risk that society will reject and condemn him/her.' Critical Art hence was understood as a practice that remained different from societal norms and structures but which had the task to criticize and challenge these. It did not change these norms directly, did not participate in processes that would normalize certain forms of collective life, but it made their unquestioned existence more difficult.
171 Piotrowski, Art and Democracy in Post-Communist Europe, 7.
172 See for example the exhibition British British Polish Polish curated by Marek Goździewski and Tom Morton:
‘British British Polish Polish: Art from Europe’s Edges in the Long ’90s and Today’, accessed 1 June 2017, http://www.e-flux.com/announcements/32268/british-british-polish-polish-art-from-europe-s-edges-in-the-long-90s-and-today/.
reactions these radical art interventions had provoked in Poland – which were very different from the reactions triggered by their Western counter-parts.173 While in Britain artworks by Tracy Emin or Damien Hirst had caused, if at all, only some scandalized headlines, artists in Poland were regularly confronted with an actual agitation against critical art by the media and the public.174 Court trials were a common byproduct of these art projects as were cases in which public artworks were
vandalized or their exhibitions prohibited or censored due to the pressure exerted by state or church institutions. The case of Dorota Nieznalska who was sentenced to six months of restricted freedom and community work on accounts of blasphemy and who was forced to remove from the exhibition space her artwork Passion (2001), which showed an image of male genitals upon a metal Greek cross, became emblematic for a series of cases in which artists were taken to court.175 It was also not unusual for members of the audience (whether they were confronted with artworks inside of artistic institutions or within the public space), to interrupt performances or destroy exhibits which they found too offensive.
So while in the 1990s artists in Poland were using their new or regained autonomous institutional position (their autonomy protected by law) to challenge the emerging public and political space as it was created in the course of the socio-political transitions after the breakdown of the communist structure, the public reacted with a hostile attack against their provocative works, trying to silence these voices of the cultural sphere and hence showing a strong discomfort with the freedom of expression that otherwise at that time in Poland – like in other Western democratic countries – was so heavily celebrated. What this art expressed went beyond what many people wanted to hear or see. And it expressed it when no defense mechanisms were ready at hand to channel the cracking and discomforting sounds coming from an autonomous and rebellious art scene which suddenly and unexpectedly had occupied a central place within the public realm.
It was within this lauded, unsettled and transitional environment that yet another approach towards art's engagement with the public sphere developed. An approach that reacted directly to the
experiences made by critical artists in Poland after 1989, but one that sought to take art's involvement with public life even further. In his Manifesto of Applied Social Arts176 the
173 Agata Pyzik, Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West (Zero Books, 2014), 172.
174 Such public outrages were also common in other Eastern European countries (examples) but there had been only two countries in which artists were taken to court on a regular basis: Poland and Russia. Piotrowski, Art and Democracy in Post-Communist Europe.
175 Or the case of Rafal Betlejewski who in 2010 was arrested by the police when spraying ‘I miss you Jew’ in areas that used to belong to the Jewish community before World War Two.
176 Artur Żmijewski, ‘Applied Social Arts’, Krytyka Polityczna 11–12 (2007).
internationally known Polish artist Artur Żmijewski demanded that artistic practice ought to have an actual impact on societal life. While many Polish artists were disappointed by the aggressive reactions they had been exposed to by the public and often agreed to adjust their pieces in order to avoid further conflicts, Żmijewski, on the other hand, interpreted these open conflicts as proof of art's ability to challenge the societal status quo and influence the way life was lived collectively. Not only was art able to interrupt, disturb, and reflect upon how society was developing from its
specific, autonomous sphere, but it could also have a direct, although still artistic, impact on societal structures. Art was thus less to be understood as a virus that spreads and attacks the system without control. It rather ought to be seen as an algorithm calculated through the means available to the artist, means and methods that create aesthetic in contrast to epistemological or political objects or actions, and intended to intervene into the societal sphere in order to change its constellation in a desired, if not conceptually or scientifically evolved, way. Consequently, Żmijewski argued, art should not only critically depict and evaluate reality but actively and practically change it. It was in a way art’s obligation to shape what present society could become on equal terms and in a dialogue with politics and science.
Echoing the agitational demands of later periods of the Russian Avant-garde, in which artists like Arvatov had called for the art world not only to contemplate and organize societal developments but become active ‘colleagues of scholars, engineers, and administrators,’177 Żmijewski asked for a collaboration of art, politics, and science. He encouraged artists not to remain within their autonomous space but to use or instrumentalize their legal position as artists as well as the
specificity of artistic tools (their knowledge of how to create aesthetic objects) strategically to get actively involved in the formation of societal life and amend processes in the public which usually were seen as belonging to the area of responsibility of politicians and scientists. Piotrowski called this approach ‘political autonomy’,178 stressing that despite the strong pragmatic and agitational demands applied social art ought to remain structurally or legally autonomous and free from
decisions or developments of the political or scientific apparatus. In Żmijewski’s view the art events of the 1990s had shown that artists had touched on or visualized realities which otherwise would have been kept repressed and by using this power of art in a strategic and systematic way art could contribute to a radical reorganization of societal life. ‘Today’, however, Żmijewski writes in his manifesto, 'art may be political as long as it stays away from politics.'179 It is afraid of having and
177 Boris Arvatov, Iskusstvo I Proizvodstvo (Moscow: Proletkult, 1926), quoted in Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism, 25.
178 Piotrowski, Art and Democracy in Post-Communist Europe, 98.
179 Żmijewski, ‘Applied Social Arts’.
using its power, of intervening in societal life, of actually trying to change how people think and feel – of actually supporting scientists and politicians to achieve new forms or structures of collective life.
This inhibition of art’s radical potentiality can be explained, Żmijewski argues further, by the fact that artists themselves are traumatized and influenced by taboos that don't allow them to act out their actual power. The idea of an applied and effective art practice that would go beyond a mere critique protected by the realm of an autonomous art world – thus a critique from which people and institutions could shield themselves if they wanted – is burdened, Zmijewksi writes, by a sense of shame and guilt. These feelings are triggered by the return of past traumatic experiences, making sure that every time an artist is about to cross the borders of what is commonly accepted (namely that art can only be political to an extent in which it does not have any direct political effect), he or she will make sure the artistic actions are not going too far. Shame and guilt therefore limit,
unconsciously, today’s art events so that art stops precisely at that point when it could potentially start changing our life directly – turning it into something better – something more. According to Żmijewski the traumatic experiences that have led to these feelings were the experiences made in fascist regimes as well as the experience of Socialist Realism – both phases in which artists were forced to produce works in accordance with the political interests of the party in power. The fascist and the communist experience are seen as having had similar traumatic effects on the history of modern art. In each case the political and progressive potentialities and tools inherent to the
phenomenon of art, as well as art’s own urge to engage more directly with non-artistic realms as had been expressed in the historical avant-garde (see below), had been eventually used, or abused, by totalitarian regimes to implement and foster violent structures, turning the artist into a collaborator or supporter of the political system in place. The Manifesto of Applied Social Arts and its attempt to theorize a new form of political art, on the other hand, aims to resurrect or revive art’s desire for power by confronting these emotional (unconscious) realities or mechanisms that prevent artists and the art world from becoming useful, effective, and transformative.
The return of the avant-garde: Peter Bürger and Hal Foster
We thus find expressed in the critical or agorophilic art of the 1990s and the Manifesto of Applied Social Art a condensed artistic exploration of the relation between art and life, which evolved around questions that for the first time had been raised, as Peter Bürger has argued, by the historical
avant-garde movements of the 1910s and 20s.180 Bürger’s main argument is that historical avant-garde movements such as Dadaism, Surrealism, or the Russian Avant-avant-garde were an enactment of an inevitable self-critique of bourgeois, thus modern autonomous art. This self-critique had become possible as well as necessary once art found itself completely separated and alienated from the non-artistic spheres of life. Bürger argues that by the beginning of the twentieth century bourgeois, autonomous art (in the East as well as the West) had arrived at a point at which it not only had become institutionally autonomous, which means that it worked as an institution within modern societies whose products were created by ‘free’ individuals who were not dependent on the interests of other societal subdomains or actors (as had been the case in pre-modern and imperialist
societies), but its autonomy had also gradually extended towards the artwork's form and content, both of which were increasingly directed towards the laws and dynamics of aesthetic elements only (abstract and minimalist art). This complete detachment from the themes and symbols of everyday life, which Bürger described as the latest stage or completion of modern aesthetic paradigms, put artistic production into a position from which the only option it had to develop in a creative and artistic way was a radical self-critique of or break with its own autonomous status. Instead of rejecting former styles art had to start rejecting the institution of autonomous art itself. Art had become 'sich selbst zum Gehalt'181 - had become its own content – and the different avant-garde movements (Dadaism, Surrealism, Russian Avant-Garde) had put this critique of the institutional as well as formative realm of art into practice.
At the centre of the avant-garde's attack on institutionalized modern art was a critique of art’s deliberate separation from other spheres of societal life captured in the concept of art's autonomy.
The intention of the historical avant-garde movements was consequently to destroy the institution of art as one that was withdrawn from everyday life praxis182 and to reconnect art with non-artistic spheres of social life. This, however, did not mean to simply include more direct and realistic links to societal matters and images in an artwork's content. Rather, the aim was 'to organize through art a new life practice’/ ‘von der Kunst aus eine neue Lebenspraxis zu organisieren';183 not simply creating a more realistic art, but overcoming the dualism of art and life by sublating these two contradictory spheres into a new dynamic union of life and art, so that new forms of social practice and reality could emerge. This new reality was seen as a life practice that would be aesthetic in
180 Peter Bürger, Theorie der Avantgarde, 13th ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2013). Bürger developed the first comprehensive theory of the avant-garde. This was in 1970. His theory has been referred to widely but also repeatedly criticized, especially his view on the neo-avant-garde.
181 Ibid., 66.
182 Ibid., 117.
183 Ibid., 67.
itself – a new form of ‘Lebenspraxis’ that would evolve around aesthetic considerations – while art would become practical or engaged. This fusion of life and art ought not to be understood as an
itself – a new form of ‘Lebenspraxis’ that would evolve around aesthetic considerations – while art would become practical or engaged. This fusion of life and art ought not to be understood as an