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Szymon Wróbel Home, Homelessness, Domestication
Man is deprived of the possibility of
making himself at home anywhere in the cosmos without having earlier
experienced homelessness. The author defends the thesis about the
three ontogenetic stages which co-create the biography of our life -
the home (childhood), homelessness (growing up), and domestication (adulthood),
present also in the great novels which co-constitute the canon of
Western literature. Within the political context the ideology of
domestication is neo-conservative, the ideology of homelessness is
postmodernistic, and the ideology of domestication is modernistic.
Moreover, conservative nostalgia for the home and the promise of
apocatastasis are false, since the home (the sort dreamed about by
the conservatives) has never existed. We are doomed to an endless
effort of transforming the savage nomad quality of life, discovered
in the postmodern world, into domesticated fragments of reality.
There is a chance of finding the home only somewhere on the very
edges of reality, far away from home.
Zbigniew Mikołejko The House of God and His People
An attempted recreation of a play of
meanings involving the concept of the “house” (bet) in
the first seven book of the Bible - the Pentateuch, the Book of
Joshua and the Book of Judges. The present-day arrangement of the
Holy Scripture suggests that a radical sacralisation of the house
had taken place already in the mythical beginnings of the history of
Israel, at the time of Abraham and his successors. Meanwhile, an
interpretation of the first Biblical books in their actual
chronological order based on the dates of origin, proves something
quite different: true, in the oldest, the Book of Judges, the house
is special and sanctified, but its sacralisation is discreet and
almost imperceptible. It assumed an extreme form in the later myth
of the “exodus” from Egypt, which was constructed upon the basis
of a fundamental anti-thesis of the house-cosmos and the world
(chaos, darkness and evil), the “house of Israel” and the
“house of bondage”. Subsequently, the myth became a paradigm,
and the dualism created in its interior, symbolically reinforced
with the blood of the paschal lamb, was subjected to absolutisation.
As a result, the people of Israel can be interpreted as the “house
of the Lord”, and both its particular offshoots (tribe, clan and,
in particular, the family) as well as the very manner of conceiving
the house (from its material bases to the religious dimension, even
in those instances when a house is associated with the forbidden
syncretic, Yahveh-idolatrous culture) will be sanctified.
Beata Spieralska A Roof over the Head. The Concept of the
“Home” in Indo-European Languages
This article is, first and foremost, a
voice in a discussion on the ambiguity of the proto-Indo-European root
*d e/omh2. The presented thesis, illustrated by means of numerous
parallells from assorted Indo-European languages, proposes that two
basic meanings confirmed for *d e/omh2, namely, “home as a unit of
social division” and “home as a construction”, be recognised
as occurring next to each other already during the
proto-Indo-European epoch, and as closely connected. The social
application of the concept of the “home” implies its material
use. The distinction of a social group calls for territorial
distinction. The feeling of security linked with “being at home”
can come into being only thanks to the differentiation and
construction of an inner space opposed by the outer world, full of
unidentified threats.
Jan
Gondowicz
The Shelter
The Shelter (Der
Bau, 1923),
an example of Kafka's late prose, is a disturbing description of the
mental situation in which a fantastic subterranean animal harbouring
the ambition of creating the perfect shelter, has found itself. As
it recognises the futility of this endeavour the hapless creature
succumbs to a paradox, inseparable from attempts at isolating itself
from the world. This paradox of the boundary has two interpretations,
paranoiac and existential, which suggest that full security can be
discovered only on the other side of existence. The paradox in
question, Kafka proposed, comprises an aporia contaminating all
reflection about identity.
Anna E. Kubiak Nostalgia and Confluent
Communities
The article brings the reader
closer to the concept of “nostalgia” envisaged as a narrative
cultural practice. Nostalgic narration is described by resorting to
references to the category of memory, time, experience, and
mythisation. The author analysed nostalgia as cultural praxis within
a perspective described by James Clifford as “troubles with
culture”. This practice has become a remedy of sorts for creating
artificial distances which restored the distinctions, oppositions
and species lost in contemporary culture. A representative example
is the problem with the interpretation of popular culture whose
critics are embroiled in a nostalgic paradigm of culture. A further
part of the text presents an abbreviated historical intepretation of
nostalgia as a melancholic state of the spirit. Finally, the author
proposed the concept of “confluent communities” for the purpose
of characterising contemporary social groups possessing the features
of “communitas” (according to Victor Turner), but sustaining the
individualism of the participants.
Antoni
Kroh
The Old River Valley III. The Infinity of Bitter Reflections. A Metal
Cash Box. The Female Body. A Seal Ring and a Ring
More miniature stories based on the
author's recollections about people, objects, fascinating cases and
events.
Aleksandra Melbechowska-Luty "To Lean My Head against Convent
Walls". A Chronicle of the Homlessness of Cyprian Norwid
Cyprian Norwid never enjoyed a real,
tranquil and happy home. Born in 1821, he spent only the four first
years of his life in the family manor house in the village of
Laskowo-Głuchy (Mazovia). Orphaned by his mother, he was brought up
by relatives and guardians, and spent some time in boarding schools.
An emigre since 1842, Norwid travelled a lot, frequently changing
his places of residence, ateliers, hotels and boarding houses.
Consequently, he envisaged the home as a mythical place, a permanent
“point” in the world, much desired and never attained. This is
the reason why his poetry and art bear the imprint of homelessness,
expulsion outside the bounds of normal existence, and the
experiencing of the ruins of life and home (but also of temples,
cemeteries and ancient buildings) . The endlessly accompanying
“voice of the ruins” became one of the key concepts in
Norwid's reflections launched within the range of the philosophy of
history and metaphysical experiences as well as in ontological and
transcendental categories, and as a projection of his own
experiences and the myth of the “poete maudit”. In 1840 Norwid
lived in Italy, where he toured numerous cities; he also went on a
sea voyage to Greece and travelled across Silesia, Greater Poland
and Germany. In 1846 he was arrested under political charges and
incarcerated in the Hausvogtei prison in Berlin, were he spent
several weeks “on damp straw” and then in the prison clinic.
Later, he moved to Rome; in 1848 his studio was described by Zygmunt
Krasiński in a magnificent “portrait in an interior” of the
young poet and painter. At the beginning of 1849 Norwid left for
Paris; since from the very outset his stay in France was marred by a
rising tide of misfortune, poverty and conflicts with those surrounding
him, in December 1852 he sailed for New York, where he worked as a
draftsman for the 1853/1854 World Exhibition Almanac. Two years later
he returned to Paris (via London), “broken for the rest of
my life”. His literary and artistic oeuvre, with its
characteristic innovativeness and profound reflections as well as
its moral and philosophical message, was regarded by Norwid's
contemporaries as hermetic, eccentric and pretentious, and thus
worthy of ruthless criticism as, i. a. the product of “crippled
genius, frenzy and folly”. The author of Promethidion was
ridiculed and disproved, and found it difficult to sell his
paintings, drawings, water colours and illustrations, and to publish
his literary works. Throughout his whole life he obsessively
returned to recollections of his childhood years, painted houses,
women and children, and just as obsessively contemplated the theme
of the abandoned, the rejected and the unjustly condemned, whom he
depicted in his writings and sketches. The years 1875-1876 brought a
loss of all hope and a deterioration of Norwid's health - he
suffered from tuberculosis. At the beginning of 1877 his wealthy
cousin, Michał Kleczkowski, forced him to concede to move to a
hospice - the St. Casimir Home, managed by nuns in Ivry, on the
outskirts of Paris. The poet, who arrived there on 9 February of the
same year, found his isolation from the world and people closest to
him a painful ordeal, and suffered from that “syndrome of
enclosure” which pervades all substitute homes intended for the
unwanted, the sick or the disabled, places governed by a system of
rules comparable to prisons, hospitals or sanatoria. He became fully
aware of the fact that “Hell is the others”, feared the lowly
inmates — old veterans prone to clashes and quarrels, and
requested to be permitted to take his meals after everyone else had
finished eating. Despite numerous obstacles, he continued to write
and paint (i.a. his fellow inmates and self-portraits). Norwid died
on 23 May 1883 at the age of
62. A
year earlier, Pantaleon Szyndler executed a large portrait showing
the author of Vade-mecum as the “ideal” inspired poet,
artist, thinker and prophet. The funeral was held at a small
cemetery in Ivry; after the concession expired, Norwid's ashes were
twice transferred to graves in Montmorency. In 2001, which marked
the 189th anniversary of Norwid's death celebrated in
Poland
, an urn containing soil from his third, mass grave, was placed on
Wawel Hill.
Monika Rudaś-Grodzka
Europe and the Bull
The dominating motif in Polish national
literature, intent on inciting pro-independence strivings, was the
ideal of sacrifice and devotion. For centuries, the patriotic matrix
rendered indelible a stereotype claiming that male sacrifice differs
from its female counterpart. Courage, strength and valour accompany
the man, and devotion and fidelity - the woman. The man sacrifices
his virtues, while the woman is usually sacrificed. This relation is
illustrated, from the female vantage point, by the myth about Europe,
which additinally indicates fundamental features distinguishing
European culture: on the one hand, the power of sexual activity (rape)
and, on the other hand, unblemished innocence (submission); the
beast and the virgin yield dynamic tension.
In Quo vadis, the novel by
Sienkiewicz, the scene in which a bull carries Ligia evokes the
stirring history of Europe. Assorted interpretations frequently drew
attention to the fact
that the scene symbolises the triumph of Christians over pagans.
This is not the only approach: Ligia was perceived predominantly as
Poland extracted from the hands of the German invader. We are
dealing, therefore, with a characteristic sequence: Europe, Ligia,
Poland - the links in a national chain. In the case of Sienkiewicz's
novel abduction and rape denote in the mythical sphere the sacrifice
of a woman performed in order to secure the Polish nation victory in
the battle against its enemies. The death of an innocent
woman-Poland is the redemption of all the evil in the world. Such
distinct female characters include Danuśka, the heroine of Krzyżacy.
Abducted and tortured by the Teutonic Knights, she loses her
mind. In pain and deranged, she ultimately dies, while the untold
story of her rape remains part of the backdrop. The
Christian-patriotic myth concealing the traumatic experience is
placed in the foreground, thus condemning her true plight to
oblivion.
Once we ,,remove" the upper stratum of
the myth, well imprinted in our treasury of national symbols and
indicating the highly valued rank of a woman's sacrifice, we may see
the heretofore concealed meaning, and decipher the myth as a tale
about rape and the deprivation of its victim of the right to tell
her story.
Peter Martyn, Warsaw
-
a Digest
A review
of David Crowley's Warsaw, published by Reaktion, London
2003, in
a series of books dealing with the rapidly changing townscape of
such metropolies as Berlin, Paris, London and Tokyo.
Kornelia Binicewicz,
Green Room
An essay on the recurring recollections and
dreams about the childhood home. In her reconstruction of an image
of the home, the author cites numerous sources and literary
representations as well as theatrical spectacles by Tadeusz Kantor.
Tomasz
Szerszeń
The
Town and Photography
The
article is composed of four mini-essays showing multiple connections
between photography and the modern city. The essays situate the
symbolic beginnings of photography in the great transformation of
towns which occurred during the nineteenth century, and derive
modern familiarity with the town from an awareness of the
loss of a holistic contemplation of the world. The
Town and Photography also considers nostalgia in photography,
the nostalgic “penetration of the town”, the joint experiences
of the flaneur and the photographer, the “metaphysical”
structure of Paris from the turn of the nineteenth century, the
practice of collecting towns. All this remains within the context of
Rilke's poem which claims that the “real” world is being
destroyed, leaving behind its mere likeness.
Ewa Malec
Genius loci
in Wrocław
An attempt at capturing a fascinating and
unique phenomenon in the history and culture of postwar Poland - the
transference of Lwów, lost due to the Yalta pact, into the
post-German fibre of Wrocław (Breslau), obtained as a result of the
same pact. The author analyses the phenomenon of the residents of Lwów
living after World War II in Wrocław. The idealised lost Town,
which existed already only in their imagination, combined with an
entirely alien city whose indigenous inhabitants were also expelled,
created a new and incomparable quality in postwar Poland.
Ewa Domańska, Necrocracy
A presentation
of The Dominion of the Dead, a book by R. R Harrison, who was
inspired by the philology of Vico and the ontology of Heidegger.
Consequently, he wrote about the specific status of the dead and the
relations between the living and the deceased in Western culture,
both in the past and today. E. Domańska reconstructed the
theoretical basis of the book and indicated its thematic motifs,
important for contemporary humanistic discussions. Such motifs
situate Harrison's publication within a research orientation that
contests the fashionable “regime of the new humanities”; the
characteristic feature of this study is its anthropocentrism,
humanism, and enrootment in the Christian world outlook.
Jadwiga
Rodowicz
Vision in a Mirror
A shining
surface of a mirror, and a vision of the image reflected in it, is
an important element of the traditional Japanese culture. A spotless
mirror has been compared to the pure, original human heart. In the
present article the author tries to concentrate on the mirror as an
object of ritual and religious reverence and trace down a few
instances of the “looking into a mirror” as an important
literary motif, as recorded in ancient texts. First bronze mirrors
arrived in Japan at the beginning of the
Yamato state, between 3rd and 6th
centuries, and were used mostly as ritual objects, and insignia of
power, bestowed on local leaders. Together with a sword and a
coma-shaped jewel they constituted a triplet insignia of the
imperial power. Bronze mirrors were placed in the tombs of the
aristocracy and it was believed that they not only reflect, but also
produce light and ensure a peaceful rest for the departed soul.
Patterns on the reverse of mirrors are studied as a source of
information on the ancient material culture of Japan, and they prove
strong links to the continental Asia (Korea and further West). The
most important change took place probably when the mirror was
enshrined as an embodiment of the Sun-Goddess Amaterasu in the grand
Ise shrine, around 5 th century. The Holy Mirror (yata-no
kagami) was then established as a substitute of the Goddes
herself, and had to be kept in imperial bedchamber. An image
reflected in the mirror appears first in Japanese literature in a
myth of marriage between princess Konohana and Hiko Hohodemi, who
actually meet at a well curb and see each other's face first in a
water mirror. This motif is echoed in a famous Noh play by Zeami
Motokiyo, when a woman looks into a well and sees the reflected face
not of herself, but of her late husband. Minors have been used by
crypto-Christians (kirishitan) in
Japan
as objects of religious worship in 17th century. The
mirror is an important element of the Noh theatre, as it is before
it that the actor changes into a character. Staring into a mirror,
with the mask on his face, is the last most important moment before
the actor enters on the stage. Also establishment of the oldest Noh
troupe, Komparu, is related to the cult of the mirror, as it was
built next to the Kasuga Shrine in Nara, where the Holy Mirror was
kept. The original name of the Komparu group was Enman'i-za, which
can be translated as a Group of the Round Disc, or Group of the Full
Circle.
Zuzanna Pędzich, The
Dance in the Mourning Ritual and Its
Application in Therapy
In her presentation of choreotherapy the
author considers dance in cultures of the past, conceived as a
specific mourning ritual, which fulfilled therapeutic functions and
which today could prove useful in the treatment of persons who find
it difficult to come to terms with their loss. Regardless whether
the latter concerns the death of someone close to us, or the loss of
physical prowess or health, the dance enables us to gain support
within a group, and makes it possible to express sadness, despair or
longing with the assistance of motion. Finally, by performing the
role of an unusual purification instrument, the dance assumes the
form of a true remedy.
Maciej
Rożalski
Butoh
Butoh is a Japanese dance which came into
being after the second world war, drawing inspiration from the
traditional No and Buyo theatre, the concepts of prewar German
Expressionism and Antonin Artaud's “theatre of cruelty”.
Emerging as an expression of protest against the expansion of
American culture in postwar Japan, Butoh was supposed to echo the
pain suffered by the victims of the nuclear holocaust. Owing to
shocking scenes stressing the biological aspect of the human body
and the themes of death and disintegration which pervaded the
earliest spectacles performed by the Butoh dancers, this form of art
became described as “the dance of death”. Although its
present-day version is much gentlier than the original, and its
contents exceed protest against Western civilisation, the daring
selection of motifs and intense forms of transmission have not lost
their stirring qualities.
Krystyna
Zwolińska Magic
against Reality. Distinct Painting
Jerzy
Nowosielski, the widely admired distinct painter, is the
author of the following statement: “I am not concerned with
painting. This is not to say that I am indifferent to the nude, the
landscape or still life. I am interested in the magic which we apply
towards reality with the aid of painting”. Those three sentences
contain the artist's abbreviated philosophy of art, and are the best
possible commentary to his canvases. The presented text is an
attempt at developing this succinct abbreviation and bringing it
closer to the contemporary recipient.
Waldemar Kuligowski
,
Anthropology, Love, the Study
of Culture: Forgotten Bonds
In this introduction to material from a
scientific session entitled “The Anthropology of Love” the
author declares that love is a composite cultural construction
delineated by a relatively constant set of rules, which additionally
demonstrates regularities that make it possible to examine it. It is,
therefore, necessary to analyse love in the manner of ideas, styles
in art, discursive formations and political doctrines. The object of
anthropological interpretations would consist of cultural and social
images and “public symbols” of love; most generally speaking,
the stake would be to define and study the symbolic universe of love.
Waldemar Kuligowski
,
What the Heart Thinks the Mouth Speaks?
Fragments of Love Discourses
Roland Barthes wrote about the loneliness
of the love discourse. In the opinion of the author, present-day
love is the topic of no longer a single but of numerous discourses,
although such multiplicity does not signify the elimination of
loneliness as a feature. An attempted presentation of several select
l’amour-passion discourses found in contemporary culture
upon assorted levels. Some perceive contemporary passion as
unutterable (Wittgenstein, Lacan), others see it as a simple
strategy of choosing partners with the most perfect DNA chain (sociobiology),
while still others maintain that the union between a man and a woman
is the outcome of patriarchal tyranny (the feministic discourse).
The icon of love is also used as a measure for seducing clients and
multiplying capital (passion in an advertisement of a pub), while
the idiom of new dramaturgy becomes a series of brutal and
frequently obscene images (Sarah Kane, 4.48 Psychosis). What are we to do with such elements of this
puzzle, and will love continue to be the resultant pattern?
Agata Chałupnik, Schoppenhauerian Inspirations in
the Early Prose of Zofia Nałkowska
Alongside Baudelaire, Weininger and Freud,
Arthur Schopenhauer was one of those nineteenth-century thinkers who
established the identification of woman and nature within the
discourse of the epoch. Nature is rendered demonic, monstrous, and
threatening for man, envisaged as a pure creative spirit. Zofia Nałkowska
accepted this identification of femininity and nature, but
re-evaluated it. She conceived femininity as a spontaneous and
creative activity, as beauty and fertility. The second
Schoppenhauerian motif in Nałkowska's prose is love, which
indubitably remains the most important human, and particularly
female, experience. Love, even if humiliating, branding and deeply
painful, is better than its absence, as evidenced in almost all the
novels by the author of Granica (Boundary). More important,
inspired by Schoppenhauer, Nałkowska did not accept his misogynism,
and while swayed by “the greatest enemy of women” she affirmed
both women and femininity.
Małgorzata
Szpakowska, Sex and Power
The author puts into order the problem of
the relations between two spheres of reality: sex and power,
frequently described in literature. This proposal, which came into
being in the course of the seminar: “Nature in Culture. The
Anthropology of Sex and Gender”, conducted by the author, consists
of distinguishing four prime levels upon which the discussed
relation is situated.
The political-ideological level is composed
of two types of activity: propaganda and repression, the first being
presented upon the example of Nazi and socialist propaganda. The
second — exemplified by the Third Reich — is contained in the
extreme explication outlined by Wilhelm Reich (the path towards
political liberation involves extricating children from the
authoritarian family, sexual liberation, and universal orgasm) and
Alice Miller (persons who were physically assaulted in childhood
grow up to be tyrants and criminals). Upon the second level of
“gender politics” Kate Millet introduced a concept associated
rather with cultural gender than with sexuality, namely, gender
politics, conceived as all strategies aiming at the maintenance of a
(naturally, patriarchal) system. In this case, power denotes simply
the power of man, and its foundation is human sexual differentiation.
The third level - the distributed power of the sexual discourse - is
a conception formulated by Michel Foucault. Sexuality exists
predominantly in the discourse, and our culture is one of confession.
Finally, the level of the game of power signifies the dialectic game
described by, e.g. Slavoj Žižek Love does not entail reciprocation
— the desire of something unattainable, in other words, the
subjectivity of the other. It functions in accordance with a matrix
formulated during the thirteenth century as “courtly love”,
which claimed that the Lady was not to be a partner, but a radical
Otherness; she was an Alien with whom it was simply impossible to
enter into an empathic relation. This matrix proved to be extremely
durable, and we encounter it in much later literature and the cinema.
Anna Burzyńska-Kamieniecka, In Search
of Ideal Love. On
the Virtual Recipient of Matrimonial Announcements in the Press
The author analysed matrimonial
announcements placed by women in the national matrimonial-social
life monthly “Kontakt” from February to May
2002, in
order to reconstruct the image of the ideal partner and union. The
virtual recipient is ascribed concrete desirable features, which
indubitably testify to profound pragmatism. On the other hand, the
same texts contain conventional expressions referring to stereotype
imagery which identifies the beloved with a hero, a fairy-tale
prince. The ensuing impression could suggest that the model of ideal
love is close to the concept of romantic love. Nonetheless, such an
assumption is negated by the very set of traits of the potential
partner, precisely selected from the viewpoint of utmost usefulness,
camouflaged by means of conventional stylistic measures.
Agata Jakubowska, Mirror, Mirror on the Wall...
The presented reflections concern two
current aspects of gazing into a mirror — the negative and (by
referring to publications by Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray) the
affirmative side of a relation with one's own image. In the visual
arts the act of seeing oneself in a mirror is frequently regarded as
an allegory of vanitas as well as a motif that permits viewing the
naked female body. The process of looking into a mirror, conceived
as an act serving man, is regarded by the feminists as proof of
subjecting oneself to the terror of beauty obligatory in patriarchal
society. Today, the emphasis placed by the woman on her beauty is
frequently treated as a certain strategy, which is by no means a
symptom of objectifying oneself, but as a game, a pose, and an
attempt at regaining that space of the discourse in which the woman
is exploited. The author also analyses the problem of narcisstic
love. According to Kristeva, there is hope for Narcissus. She has in
mind such a self-love of the woman in which the image is not
rendered a fetish, nor is the mirror expected to provide
confirmation. It does not answer the question concerning one's own
nature, but makes it possible to “become oneself” without
halting the creation of identity.
Włodzimierz
Lengauer
Eros, Polis, the Citizen
The
approach to homosexuality in the culture and mores of the ancient
Greeks was, as a rule, rather one-sided. Emphasis was placed on the
educational aspect of the Greek paiderasteia, frequently perceived
as behaviour totally different from modern homosexuality. Meanwhile,
while writing about aphrodision chresis Aristotle (Historia
animalium 581 b 11? 18) treated all symptoms of sexuality nascent
during puberty among girls and boys on par, although in the case of
young males he mentioned an inclination towards both sexes. Other
traces too (the myth recounted by Aristophanes in Plato's Feast and
depictions on vases) distinctly indicate familiarity with, and
acceptance of sexual inclinations towards representatives of the
same sex on the part of both young boys and mature men. Approval was
expressed not only for relations between boys and adults who
introduced them to social life, but also among peers. The same
criteria of assessment were applied to erotic life as a whole,
encompassing relations with the opposite or same gender. Bilateral
emotional involvement was regarded as an indispensable element of
aphrodisia, supported by physical desire (erotike eunoia); at the
same time, every form of erotic relationships was required to
preserve decency and remain concurrent with the model of a
respectable citizen. The erotic domain, therefore, belonged to
behaviour important from the viewpoint of the polis and was
considered part of public life (ta demosia), and not intimate
privacy (ta idia). The morality and decency of a given citizen (sophrosyne)
were evidenced equally by his relations with women and members of
the same sex.
Filip M. Taranienko Wisdom
in Eurypides' Bacchae: Tragedy as an Initiation
The author of the article analyses notions
of wisdom and form in Eurypides' Bacchae. The analysis of the most
important appearances of these notions is based firstly on a general
vision of the whole play that allows him to recognize its internal
coherence and secondly on individual consideration of each analysed
character's aspirations. Religious context of the original
historical performance is strongly accented. Although a detailed
philological analysis of several passages of the play would allow
one to view it as a text by itself, the author of the article sees
it rather as a historical reality religious and ceremonial in nature.
Thus, the play is understood as a series of human attempts to
approach the divine and of divine responses to them (as in the
famous, frequently criticised, Eurypides' deus ex machina scene).
Such an understanding allows the author to argue for a connection
between the notions of divinity, form and wisdom, as they appear in
the play.
Małgorzata Baranowska
The
Non-ideal Collection (4). The Postcard and Truth
In these times of mega-scale qualities we
never know when we are seeing a copy; art collectors are interested
primarily in the original. Since the postcard is copied on a mass
scale and inexpensive, the problem of “truth” and “the
original” becomes particularly prominent. In a successive
installment of her Non-ideal Collection the author writes
exclusively about the photographic postcard in an attempt at
interpreting it in the categories of the truth of the postcard
universe. Not without reason, however, does the postcard belong to
those mass media which we may frequently suspect of a rather
“casual relation towards historical truth”.
Agnieszka
Kłos
Lomographers
Do Not Measure Time
Why the lomographers like to use the lomo
(small and old Soviet espionage photo camera)? For some it
denotes the registration of fleeting moments, and for others - a
cautious attitude towards the world. Lomographers are amateurs of
uncontrolled photography. This is the first text on the lomo phenomenon
to appear in a Polish periodical. The author analyses not only a
group of lomographers, but also presents the new fashion against the
background of the history of photography and the world movement.
Technical data and facts are entwined with anecdotes and sociological
observation.
Marta
Leśniakowska
The
Female Modernist in the Kitchen. Barbara Brukalska, Grete Schütte-Lihotzky
and ,,Kitchen Themes"
A gender
approach to the avant-garde kitchen. The author proposes a new
interpretation (deconstruction) of avant-garde architecture and a
disclosure of its actual strategies, hidden under the slogans of
modernistic universalism. At the same time, the text annuls
traditional interpretations of the avant-garde which function as a
canon in heretofore literature on the subject, especially in Poland.
The presented reflections deal with model kitchens designed by
female architects: the German Margarete (Grete) Schütte-Lihotzky (the
so-called Frankfurt kitchen, 1927) and the Pole Barbara Brukalska (the
so-called Polish kitchen or the WSM /Warsaw Housing Cooperative/
kitchen, 1927). The author discusses the destruction of the
traditional space of the home conceived as binary space, indelible
in Western culture starting with the modern epoch (the
representative zone versus the privacy, domesticity zone).
From the anthropological-cultural viewpoint this is a model example
of a socio-ethnological orbis interior-orbis exterior division.
In a system guaranteeing the retention of the order of the world,
based on a Thomist hierarchy of values, the kitchen was “the other”,
concealed zone, and as such it is in Western culture a figure of
that which is unambiguous, non-ethical, devious and tawdry. When
thanks to modernism the kitchen, together with its semantic messages,
became a “new stage”, the margin was shifted to the centre, thus
relegating the heretofore centre to the periphery and changing
traditional spatial/stratification relations. Subsequently, this
approach was rendered radical by the art of postmodernism (everyday
household activity became the “theme” of a new perception and
registration of reality in the form of “dayafterdayism”, a
record kept on a “day after day” basis) and feminist art.
Aleksandra
Łukasiewicz Cloakroom
An
attempted examination, conducted from a new perspective, of the
cloakroom, a place familiar to all. What does the priest in the
sacristy, the ballet dancer in the dressing room, and the actor in
the wardrobe share with us, in the act of handing over our coats to
the cloakroom attendant? Apparently, this common element consists of
a certain suspension between two spheres, the undefined nature of
our status. Based on examples taken from daily life and literature
the article brings the reader closer to the specificity of this
special place.
Aleksander Jackowski Budlewo
How
are folk culture and tradition to be preserved? Is this task
possible? The author describes his visit in the village of Budlewo
in the Podlasie region, where an intelligentsia husband and wife
team is embarking upon this difficult attempt with love and
expertise.
Agnieszka Tomaszczuk,
The
Floral Carpet and Its Role in the Life of Parishioners. On the
Celebration of Corpus Christi in Spycimierz
In Spycimierz, a small village near Uniejów,
Corpus Christi is not only a religious and family holiday, but also
an unusual event for the whole parish; its extreme importance lies
in the fact that all the parishioners join in a certain task and
become involved in a joint endeavour. An important part of the local
custom are the preparations for the Corpus Christi Holy Mass and
procession, which consist of creating a fantastic carpet composed of
the bountiful gifts of Nature. The author presents a detailed
description of the creation of the floral carpet, its appearance,
and social significance.
Monika
Kozień-Świca, Marta Miskowiec, Homeatmosphere. Between Image and Reality
A
description of an art project to take place in
Cracow
in 2004, involving exhibitions, art campaigns and meetings. The name
of the project originates from a popular expression which seems to
reflect the balance which the authors wish to maintain between the
universal comprehension of the ideal home and the diversity of
particular images and experiences.
Michal
Klinger, Eternal Memory
Reflections
on the previous issue of “Konteksty” devoted to Memory and
Oblivion, with particular attention paid to poems by Julia
Hartwig, which M. Klinger supplements with a theological commentary.
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