Polish Sausages
I saw more naked bodies on display on my one-day mid-winter trip to Warsaw then I am used to or comfortable with. Performances involving the body, primarily the naked one, have been and continue to play a large part in the Polish artistic tradition. But there is much more to the Polish art scene than men with no pants, which I had the chance to learn thanks to the incredible openness and frankness of the members of the small but ambitious artistic scene of the capital city.
Visiting galleries in Warsaw is what I imagine it might have been like to walk around Berlin’s galleries 10 or 15 years ago. There are no outward displays of wealth from these spaces, no opaque brushed-glass windows or large vertical metal door handles. For the most part, galleries are housed in modest, sometimes crumbling flats, or tucked away in backyard buildings. It’s hard to tell whether these traces of decrepitude are partially an affectation, or whether they’re due solely to a lack of funds. Either way, there is a refreshing lack of pomp and bling on show.
There are also apparently less rigid professional boundaries in the art scene. Colleagues talk openly about fellow colleagues, galleries are eager to promote not only their own artists, but others, too. There is a vague sense of patriotism – while galleries here might be able to cash in on artists from nearby burgeoning scenes in the Baltic states, Ukraine, Romania or Russia, they prefer to represent primarily Polish artists. Members of this tight-knit artistic community are glad to wear multiple hats; many galleries for instance, function simultaneously (if not confusingly) as commercial and non-profit spaces.
Another sign of the lack of precious elitism in the art world in Warsaw is that local and national politics are often tangled up in art – there is no high-brow disengagement from the national political landscape, as may be found in other countries. Political activity is a deep-rooted part of the artistic tradition. Artur Żmijewski, for instance, has recently joined the leftist political movement in Poland, openly mingling his artistic and political beliefs.
My first stop after exiting the train station and running smack into the ominous, looming figure of the Palace of Culture and Science stretching upwards into the sky and cloaked by swirling snow flurries, was a somewhat run-down former castle that is now the Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle. The castle already hosts an International Artist-in-Residence programme, but the condition of the exhibition spaces leaves much to be desired. The castle is currently hosting two exhibitions: the first is a scrappy exhibition of production shots, set pieces, costumes and archival material from the films of the German independent film director Ulrike Ottinger. Homemade Viking helmets and crocodiles wearing boots joined ample video clips of little people and transvestites. But most striking was the shabby installation – bumpy carpet and fabric haphazardly stapled to the wall did little to help the cause. The larger exhibition spaces were dedicated to ‘May Man Rot’, which, as stated on the press release, celebrates the ‘300th anniversary of Lodz Kaliska’, a radical artist’s collective. As it turns out, this is actually their 30th anniversary (not 300th) and despite the feminist rhetoric, the collective consists of four men. Even more strangely, the exhibition comprised room after room of large photographic murals of naked, large-breasted women performing ‘male-oriented’ labour, such as naked, large-breasted women felling trees and naked, large-breasted women mining coal. I thought perhaps these were pioneering feminist performances from the 1970s, but that was impossible, since all the naked, large-breasted women were wearing brightly colored Crocs. According to Warsaw locals, the group of men responsible for these male-fantasy murals were once important members of the critical art scene in the late ’70s, but, since then, apparently, they may have failed to realize how out-of-step their current work is. Unfortunately none of their influential early work was on view to suggest otherwise.
A new gallery guide published by Zacheta National Gallery, ‘What’s On in Warsaw Galleries’, makes navigating the local galleries relatively easy. My first stop was Galeria Leto, a recently founded gallery which represents Wojciech Bakowski, one of three Polish artists who will be featured in the upcoming New Museum show ‘Younger than Jesus’. Director and founder Marta Kolakowska gave us a comprehensive overview of the current scene in Warsaw. All of the artists she represents are Polish, and many of them hail from nearby Poznan, which, according to Kolakowska, has a burgeoning artistic scene, developing at a distance from the current trendiness of Warsaw.
It was there that we also got our first lesson in a subject that has always confused me: the difference between Galeria Foksal [the not-for-profit space opened in 1966 and the most influential and important avant-garde gallery of its generation] and Foksal Gallery Foundation [the commercial gallery established by one of the founding members of Foksal Gallery, Wieslaw Borowski, in 1997, as a way of earning money to fund activities of Foksal Gallery and continuing its traditions]. Even the local journalists in Warsaw occasionally confuse the two, but in fact, the two spaces operate independently of each other, with none of the associations that their similar names might imply.
Though we didn’t have a chance to visit the original Foksal Gallery, we did make it to the Foksal Gallery Foundation just in time for the final screening of a film by young local artist Anna Molska (born 1983, freshly plucked from the influential studio of Grzegorz Kowalski at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw). But Molska’s work shows nothing of her youth and relative newness on the scene. The Weavers (2008) is based on considerable arcane references: the dialogue, uttered in Polish by three miners from the Silesia region, is based entirely on Gerhart Johann Hauptmann’s 1892 eponymous play. Though the original play is about the mid-19th-century revolt of textile workers in the Owl Mountains, the action and dialogue translate aptly to the current conditions of the Polish mining region, and, by extrapolation, to the global economy. The grizzled workers are shown working in dank underground tunnels and traipsing through poorly lit corridors, stripping out of their heavy uniforms, showering naked and soaping each other’s backs – while not oblivious to the young artist filming them. Molska’ work somehow has the feeling of both a gritty documentary and high artifice and theatricality, gracefully choreographed to an antiquated play.
After the show, we were lucky enough to by given a tour of the former studio of Edward Krasinski, the Polish artistic legend whose reputation has been revived and preserved through the efforts of the Foksal Gallery Foundation, which has kept the studio intact and organized an exhibition and publication around it. Tours are available by appointment, and I can only say that a trip to this studio is worth a trip to Poland.
While FGF is located on the third floor of what could pass for a small office building or doctor’s practice, Raster can be found on the top floor of a dilapidated flat, and approaching the door is like knocking on the door of a college dorm room, complete with peeling paint and stickers. There’s no concern with pristine white-cubeness here. The front office hosts a cosy bookshop that also sells t-shirts and a selection of records and CDs. Serving multiple purposes, the gallery also publishes an online art magazine about the Polish art scene (in Polish). The exhibition space itself consists of two very modestly sized rooms, currently showing Aneta Grzeszykowska’s 2008 film Headache, which – and I was getting used to it by now – featured the performance of a naked dancer. Each of her four disembodied limbs performs a choreographed pantomime against a pitch-black background. The effect of the limbs performing in concert, yet detached from her body, is seamless, and the film ends at the exact moment when the woman’s torso is reunited with her dancing arms and legs.
The performance was a fitting prelude to the opening night of the ambitious exhibition ‘Performer’, on view at Warsaw’s largest contemporary exhibition space, Zacheta National Gallery of Art. The exhibition featured a crowded, rather overwhelming collection of film and video performances, primarily historical, which included violent or extreme mutilations of the body by well-known artists such as Marina Abramović, Carolee Schneemann and Hermann Nitsch, alongside archival documentation of performances and rehearsals with renowned Polish theatre director Jerzy Grotowski. Unfortunately the significance of the director’s work was overshadowed by the looming presence of works by artistic giants like Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman and Otto Muehl. To round out the already bizarre preponderance of male genitalia I’d seen on the trip, the museum was also showing a vast exhibition of drawings collaboratively made by Paul McCarthy and Benjamin Weissman, most of which featured their doodles, watercolours and sketches of testicles and penises.
Our last stop in Warsaw was the temporary home of the Museum of Modern Art, not far from its future site, which will be directly adjacent to the Palace of Culture and Science, and is slated to open (after considerable delay already) in 2014. The temporary site is a pleasant two-story glass-faced building, featuring a permanent neon installation by Paulina Olowska and a sculpture at the entrance by Monika Sosnowska. On view is the first retrospective of the influential Romanian artist Ion Grigorescu, ‘In the body of the victim 1969-2008’. The exhibition spans Grigorescu’s entire career, from his early 8mm films from the 1970s, which documented the changes imposed by Nicolae Ceausescu in Bucharest. The highlight of these early, political works was an imaginary conversation that the artist staged between himself and the Romanian dictator, Dialogue with Ceausescu (1978, 2007). Less interesting were his extensive series of films from the late 1970s, which documented the artist conducting various performances in the nude, and his latest work Sleep (2008) which recorded the artist’s thin, pale, naked frame while asleep on a sofa. Notably, the exhibition also contained a significant archival element, a row of vitrines displaying Grigorescu’s notebooks, diary entries, sketches and recordings of his dreams.
Before departing for the train station to get the six-hour ‘Warsaw Express’ back to Berlin, I dined on some traditional Polish soup and dumplings. For some reason, I just wasn’t in the mood for sausage.
I saw more naked bodies on display on my one-day mid-winter trip to Warsaw then I am used to or comfortable with. Performances involving the body, primarily the naked one, have been and continue to play a large part in the Polish artistic tradition. But there is much more to the Polish art scene than men with no pants, which I had the chance to learn thanks to the incredible openness and frankness of the members of the small but ambitious artistic scene of the capital city.
Visiting galleries in Warsaw is what I imagine it might have been like to walk around Berlin’s galleries 10 or 15 years ago. There are no outward displays of wealth from these spaces, no opaque brushed-glass windows or large vertical metal door handles. For the most part, galleries are housed in modest, sometimes crumbling flats, or tucked away in backyard buildings. It’s hard to tell whether these traces of decrepitude are partially an affectation, or whether they’re due solely to a lack of funds. Either way, there is a refreshing lack of pomp and bling on show.
There are also apparently less rigid professional boundaries in the art scene. Colleagues talk openly about fellow colleagues, galleries are eager to promote not only their own artists, but others, too. There is a vague sense of patriotism – while galleries here might be able to cash in on artists from nearby burgeoning scenes in the Baltic states, Ukraine, Romania or Russia, they prefer to represent primarily Polish artists. Members of this tight-knit artistic community are glad to wear multiple hats; many galleries for instance, function simultaneously (if not confusingly) as commercial and non-profit spaces.
Another sign of the lack of precious elitism in the art world in Warsaw is that local and national politics are often tangled up in art – there is no high-brow disengagement from the national political landscape, as may be found in other countries. Political activity is a deep-rooted part of the artistic tradition. Artur Żmijewski, for instance, has recently joined the leftist political movement in Poland, openly mingling his artistic and political beliefs.
My first stop after exiting the train station and running smack into the ominous, looming figure of the Palace of Culture and Science stretching upwards into the sky and cloaked by swirling snow flurries, was a somewhat run-down former castle that is now the Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle. The castle already hosts an International Artist-in-Residence programme, but the condition of the exhibition spaces leaves much to be desired. The castle is currently hosting two exhibitions: the first is a scrappy exhibition of production shots, set pieces, costumes and archival material from the films of the German independent film director Ulrike Ottinger. Homemade Viking helmets and crocodiles wearing boots joined ample video clips of little people and transvestites. But most striking was the shabby installation – bumpy carpet and fabric haphazardly stapled to the wall did little to help the cause. The larger exhibition spaces were dedicated to ‘May Man Rot’, which, as stated on the press release, celebrates the ‘300th anniversary of Lodz Kaliska’, a radical artist’s collective. As it turns out, this is actually their 30th anniversary (not 300th) and despite the feminist rhetoric, the collective consists of four men. Even more strangely, the exhibition comprised room after room of large photographic murals of naked, large-breasted women performing ‘male-oriented’ labour, such as naked, large-breasted women felling trees and naked, large-breasted women mining coal. I thought perhaps these were pioneering feminist performances from the 1970s, but that was impossible, since all the naked, large-breasted women were wearing brightly colored Crocs. According to Warsaw locals, the group of men responsible for these male-fantasy murals were once important members of the critical art scene in the late ’70s, but, since then, apparently, they may have failed to realize how out-of-step their current work is. Unfortunately none of their influential early work was on view to suggest otherwise.
A new gallery guide published by Zacheta National Gallery, ‘What’s On in Warsaw Galleries’, makes navigating the local galleries relatively easy. My first stop was Galeria Leto, a recently founded gallery which represents Wojciech Bakowski, one of three Polish artists who will be featured in the upcoming New Museum show ‘Younger than Jesus’. Director and founder Marta Kolakowska gave us a comprehensive overview of the current scene in Warsaw. All of the artists she represents are Polish, and many of them hail from nearby Poznan, which, according to Kolakowska, has a burgeoning artistic scene, developing at a distance from the current trendiness of Warsaw.
It was there that we also got our first lesson in a subject that has always confused me: the difference between Galeria Foksal [the not-for-profit space opened in 1966 and the most influential and important avant-garde gallery of its generation] and Foksal Gallery Foundation [the commercial gallery established by one of the founding members of Foksal Gallery, Wieslaw Borowski, in 1997, as a way of earning money to fund activities of Foksal Gallery and continuing its traditions]. Even the local journalists in Warsaw occasionally confuse the two, but in fact, the two spaces operate independently of each other, with none of the associations that their similar names might imply.
Though we didn’t have a chance to visit the original Foksal Gallery, we did make it to the Foksal Gallery Foundation just in time for the final screening of a film by young local artist Anna Molska (born 1983, freshly plucked from the influential studio of Grzegorz Kowalski at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw). But Molska’s work shows nothing of her youth and relative newness on the scene. The Weavers (2008) is based on considerable arcane references: the dialogue, uttered in Polish by three miners from the Silesia region, is based entirely on Gerhart Johann Hauptmann’s 1892 eponymous play. Though the original play is about the mid-19th-century revolt of textile workers in the Owl Mountains, the action and dialogue translate aptly to the current conditions of the Polish mining region, and, by extrapolation, to the global economy. The grizzled workers are shown working in dank underground tunnels and traipsing through poorly lit corridors, stripping out of their heavy uniforms, showering naked and soaping each other’s backs – while not oblivious to the young artist filming them. Molska’ work somehow has the feeling of both a gritty documentary and high artifice and theatricality, gracefully choreographed to an antiquated play.
After the show, we were lucky enough to by given a tour of the former studio of Edward Krasinski, the Polish artistic legend whose reputation has been revived and preserved through the efforts of the Foksal Gallery Foundation, which has kept the studio intact and organized an exhibition and publication around it. Tours are available by appointment, and I can only say that a trip to this studio is worth a trip to Poland.
While FGF is located on the third floor of what could pass for a small office building or doctor’s practice, Raster can be found on the top floor of a dilapidated flat, and approaching the door is like knocking on the door of a college dorm room, complete with peeling paint and stickers. There’s no concern with pristine white-cubeness here. The front office hosts a cosy bookshop that also sells t-shirts and a selection of records and CDs. Serving multiple purposes, the gallery also publishes an online art magazine about the Polish art scene (in Polish). The exhibition space itself consists of two very modestly sized rooms, currently showing Aneta Grzeszykowska’s 2008 film Headache, which – and I was getting used to it by now – featured the performance of a naked dancer. Each of her four disembodied limbs performs a choreographed pantomime against a pitch-black background. The effect of the limbs performing in concert, yet detached from her body, is seamless, and the film ends at the exact moment when the woman’s torso is reunited with her dancing arms and legs.
The performance was a fitting prelude to the opening night of the ambitious exhibition ‘Performer’, on view at Warsaw’s largest contemporary exhibition space, Zacheta National Gallery of Art. The exhibition featured a crowded, rather overwhelming collection of film and video performances, primarily historical, which included violent or extreme mutilations of the body by well-known artists such as Marina Abramović, Carolee Schneemann and Hermann Nitsch, alongside archival documentation of performances and rehearsals with renowned Polish theatre director Jerzy Grotowski. Unfortunately the significance of the director’s work was overshadowed by the looming presence of works by artistic giants like Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman and Otto Muehl. To round out the already bizarre preponderance of male genitalia I’d seen on the trip, the museum was also showing a vast exhibition of drawings collaboratively made by Paul McCarthy and Benjamin Weissman, most of which featured their doodles, watercolours and sketches of testicles and penises.
Our last stop in Warsaw was the temporary home of the Museum of Modern Art, not far from its future site, which will be directly adjacent to the Palace of Culture and Science, and is slated to open (after considerable delay already) in 2014. The temporary site is a pleasant two-story glass-faced building, featuring a permanent neon installation by Paulina Olowska and a sculpture at the entrance by Monika Sosnowska. On view is the first retrospective of the influential Romanian artist Ion Grigorescu, ‘In the body of the victim 1969-2008’. The exhibition spans Grigorescu’s entire career, from his early 8mm films from the 1970s, which documented the changes imposed by Nicolae Ceausescu in Bucharest. The highlight of these early, political works was an imaginary conversation that the artist staged between himself and the Romanian dictator, Dialogue with Ceausescu (1978, 2007). Less interesting were his extensive series of films from the late 1970s, which documented the artist conducting various performances in the nude, and his latest work Sleep (2008) which recorded the artist’s thin, pale, naked frame while asleep on a sofa. Notably, the exhibition also contained a significant archival element, a row of vitrines displaying Grigorescu’s notebooks, diary entries, sketches and recordings of his dreams.
Before departing for the train station to get the six-hour ‘Warsaw Express’ back to Berlin, I dined on some traditional Polish soup and dumplings. For some reason, I just wasn’t in the mood for sausage.
