Aleksander Jackowski
The Institute of Art Seen by an Old Age Pensioner
Barbara
Magierowa,
Antoni Kroh
One Has to Live, or How the Town Population Coped in the Reality of
People’s Poland
This time, the authors of
Prywatny leksykon współczesnej polszczyzny
(in 2010 their files totalled about 13 mln characters) chose from
their archive a linguistic phenomenon illustrating the daily concern
of town inhabitants with all sorts of material aspects (in the
countryside the situation was slightly different, and thus the
vocabulary varied). The mass media spoke a language of their own, as
did the people, but for obvious reasons both sides maintained mutual
relations; this is the reason why the authors cite the language of
the street, private conversations and the press of the period. They
present examples of a vocabulary concentrated on the household,
money, prices, bribes, rationing, dollars and foreign currency
tokens.
Wiesław
Szpilka
The Republic of People’s Poland at the Foot of Mt. Giewont
The author recalls the communist era in the Podhale region and
analyses the phenomenon of the titular period as well as its myths
and symbols. In a comparison with pre-war Zakopane, he ironically
and by keeping a certain distance depicts the pettiness and
grotesque traits of the communist resort town.
Ludwik
Stomma
Strange, Complex World
The People’s Republic of Poland as a reality brimming with
historical and everyday paradoxes – such an image emerges from a
personal account by a Polish anthropologist and feuilletonist
Ludwik Lewin
Beloved Country
In this essay-reminiscence, the author accentuates the unobvious and
complicated character of stands and convictions shared by the
population of People’s Poland, especially during the early,
Stalinist period. Such an approach (which the author – a witness of
those years – supports) negates some of the black-and-white
historical interpretations written from today’s “objective” point of
view.
Tadeusz
Sobolewski
Poland of My Parents
”In 1956 Witold Gombrowicz predicted that once communism in Poland
collapses, the Poles will be already changed and never return to
their nineteenth-century national imagery. This prophecy pertains to
my generation – but not to those of its members who today march in
the costumes of the Piłsudskiites or the national democrats. I find
both those traditions equally alien. And I much prefer the tradition
of Wojtyła, Mazowiecki, Tischner, Kuroń and Michnik. (…) This vision
of a martyred nation, associated with the suffering of Christ and
bringing freedom to the whole world, has for two hundred years
burdened the Polish consciousness in the manner of a phantom. The
twentieth-century critics of this tradition – such as Czesław Miłosz
– blame it for favouring national idolatry and the creation of a
perverse megalomania of suffering and a cult of death. After 1956
the young generation wished to cast off this messianistic burden and
to turn towards life. The same goal was pursued by successive Polish
generations – the generation of ’68 and the Solidarity generation –
in their efforts of curing themselves of the national complex in
which an awareness of inferiority gives rise to megalomania” – wrote
Tadeusz Sobolewski.
Marek
Nowakowski
My Dictionary of the People’s Republic of Poland (fragments)
A subjective “dictionary” by a careful observer of the reality of
the People’s Republic of Poland.
Zyta
Oryszyn
"History of an Illness”, “History of Mourning”, “Black
Illumination”, “Madam Frankensztajn"
(fragments)
Fragments of novels by Zyta Oryszyn, originally issued by
underground publishing houses.
Dariusz
Czaja
A Hawaiian Dances with Reserve
This text about the singer Violetta Villas, popular in the People’s
Republic of Poland, was originally presented as part of the
cabaret-art programme of the spoken periodical ”Gadający Pies”. The
author traced in Villas’ life and performances ”exotic” motifs
transcending the gloomy reality of People’s Poland.
Karol Modzelewski
Political Grotowski
A recorded statement made by Karol Modzelewski at an international
conference:
Grotowski. Narrations
(Warsaw, 14-15 January 2010) organised by the Institute of Polish
Culture at Warsaw University and the Committee of Cultural Studies
at the Polish Academy of Sciences. Prof. Modzelewski recalled
Grotowski from the period prior to the latter’s involvement in the
theatre – the time when Grotowski was active in the Union of Polish
Youth. In doing so, author shows Godowsky’s departure from communism
and poses questions about the connection between the disappointment
caused by the impossibility of altering the communist system and the
beginning of the creative path of one of Poland’s greatest theatre
directors.
Tadeusz Konwicki, Adam Michnik
“I’m Considered Contrary” – a Conversation with Tadeusz Konwicki
A record of a meeting between Tadeusz Konwicki and Adam Michnik,
which took place in June 2009 while shooting the documentary film
What Am I Doing Here? Tadeusz Konwicki
(scenario and direction Janusz Anderman, premiere: April 2010).
Przemysław
Kaniecki
The Threatened Word. On the Interpretation of Konwicki’s Works in
the People’s Republic of Poland (1970s and 1980s)
An attempt at an anthropological interpretation of the situation of
the milieu of Polish studies at Warsaw University at the turn of the
1970s. The milieu in question is portrayed as a community (in the
meaning borrowed from A. P. Cohen), which in the conditions of a
threat to its fundamental value – the word – defends its boundaries.
The author accomplished this by, i. e. examining the “badly present”
authors and phenomena pertaining to domains affected by censorship.
The ensuing reading is based on analyses of selected scientific
interpretations of works by Tadeusz Konwicki.
Walentyna
Krupowies,
Lithuania of Miłosz, Lithuania of Konwicki.
On the Polish Strife with the Provinces
The article analyses the intellectual, spiritual and artistic strife
of Miłosz and Konwicki with their birthplaces. The first two of the
article’s five parts deal with the path traversed by Miłosz,
spanning from rebellion and the rejection of the private homeland as
well as certain forms of Polish culture that assumed shape in the
Eastern Borderland, the re-evaluation of the poet’s spiritual and
intellectual stand during the early stage of his life as an emigre,
up to becoming convinced about the value of the home and the “small
homeland”. The third fragment of the text shows how Konwicki
painstakingly constructed his own cultural lineage. Part four –
Time of Cultural Quests
– formulates five basic questions around which both authors built
the identity discourse of their own private homeland and the Grand
Duchy of Lithuania. The last part –
Time for Stories
– demonstrates how the writings of Miłosz, Konwicki and many other
authors create a textual space, in which the Wilno past is outlined
as a model for the coexistence of cultures and languages and becomes
a model of heterogeneous culture.
Paweł
Sowiński
Against People’s Poland. Glimpses from the Life of the Printers of
Forbidden Books 1977-89
This text is an introductory sketch to a presentation of so-called
second circulation printing in the People’s Republic of Poland.
Maintained in the style of an historical essay, it depicts scenes
from the life of underground printers working for the opposition
both in Warsaw and in smaller centres. With the assistance of
selected examples and generalising commentaries, the author shows
certain motivations, stands and experience as well as the conditions
of the development and infrastructure of printing. The research was
conducted by applying historical methods, and the analysis embraces
archival source material from the underground press and
reminiscences, including accounts by the participants of the
independent publishing movement. Pertinent bibliography has been
reduced to historical publications, rarely supplemented with loose
observations from other domains.
Julia
Holewińska
Home, Church, Street. Spaces of the Underground Theatre in the 1980s
The author writes about underground theatrical space in Poland in
the 1980s. During the martial law period space was outright
oppressive: the situation prevailing in the state forced artists to
seek new places where they could cultivate art free from the
intervention of censorship. Such space proved to be private
apartments, churches, parish halls and streets. The text contains
copious documentary material but also tries to show the ways in
which those “non-theatrical” spaces influenced the performance of
the actors, the repertoire, stage motion and the reactions of the
public.
Joanna
Olech
The Polish School of Illustrations
–
1960s and 1970s
In the wake of the systemic transformation, which took place in
Poland in 1989, the whole post-war past of the country became the
object of critical assessments. Values, views, predilections,
stereotypes, achievements and national sins – all were re-evaluated
and verified. As a rule, the balance sheet was pitiful – the
civilisational progress of our society, tightly constrained by the
“sole correct” ideology, could not be compared to Western standards.
Nonetheless, there did exist certain enclaves of social life that
today do not provoke expiation and embarrassment; on the contrary,
they comprise reservations of freedom, which the ideological control
of the state did not reach. The more peripheral and distant from
politics the activity of the Poles – the greater the freedom enjoyed
by artists. Such a “reservation” was undoubtedly the children’s book
market in Poland during the 1960s and 1970s.
Krzysztof Bednarski
Page from a Diary (13 December 1981, Warsaw); Sphinx; Out of Africa
Three brief texts, which Krzysztof Bednarski added to the
photographic documentation of his works from the 1980s, referring to
the artist’s individual experiences associated with the communist
epoch in Poland.
Natalia
Kaliś
The Wonderful Awareness of Defeat. On “Wstyd” by Jerzy Bereś
The point of departure of this analysis of Jerzy Beres’
Wstyd,
realised in 1989 at the Centre of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko, is a
comparison of the feeling of shame experienced by the artist in the
course of the performance, and the indignity that is an important
component of a masochistic spectacle. Such embarrassment is a
confirmation of the unsteady position of the subject, his balancing
between two simultaneous positions – that of the object and the
subject. This situation in the artist’s activity is interpreted as a
private ritual of experiencing freedom while being aware of its
actual deprivation.
Wojciech
Bałus
The Poetics of People’s Poland in Paintings by the “Wprost” Group
and Jurry Zieliński
Painters belonging to the Cracow-based ”Wprost” group and Jerzy
Ryszard ”Jurry” Zieliński created two poetics making it possible to
take a critical look at the reality of communist Poland. Paintings
executed by members of the ”Wprost” group depicted the greyness,
poverty and hopelessness of the surrounding world but left a residue
of hope, usually rather “insubstantial”. Metonymic daily life merged
with moral and religious metaphors. The canvases painted by Jurry
were of a sheer dialectical nature and their recipient was compelled
to set into motion his aspect-perception (Wittgenstein) in order to
decipher their contents – he had to be capable of reading between
the lines.
Łukasz
Ronduda
The KwieKulik Workshop of Documentation and Dissemination
The independent institution managed by Zofia Kulik and Przemysław
Kwiek in their tiny apartment in the Praga district in Warsaw – “The
Workshop of Activity, Documentation and Dissemination” – was a
domain of a permanent problematisation of the boundary between the
public and private sphere, imposed by the Peoples’ Republic of
Poland. The artists tried to define the relations between those
spheres not upon the basis of binary opposition but permeation and
the creation of their unique “community”.
Barbara
Major
Exhibition “The Home in Photography”
The Home in Photography
is the fourth and last show in a series of the ”home” exhibitions
featured at the VII International Triennale of Art Sacrum held at
the City Gallery in Częstochowa:
“Home
– the way of existence”.
The author-exhibition curator discussed the most prominent recurring
motifs.
Tomasz
Szerszeń
Art,
Anthropology and…
Cheburashka
The
Villa Sovietica
project is composed of two equal parts: an exhibition held in
Conches and a catalogue combined with a visual essay (Villa
Sovietica. Objets Soviétiques: Import – Export,
ed. by Alexandra Schussler, photos: Willem Mes and Jonathan Watts,
Infolio Editions 2009). The text concentrates on one of the
project’s motifs: the creative obliteration of the boundaries
between anthropology and art, which leads to an interesting shift
within the museological discourse.
Alexandra
Schüssler
Villa Sovietica
The
Villa Sovietica
exhibition held on 2 October 2009–20 June 2010 at the Ethnographic
Museum in Geneva was an attempted presentation and conceptualization
of a collection of “Soviet objects”. The text is the opinion of the
exhibition curator, who has accepted a dual time perspective: the
catalogue text is combined with an “opinion after”, discussing its
reception.
Katarzyna
Murawska-Muthesius
Café caricature as the medium of modernity: Michalik’s Den in Kraków
The significance of caricature for the aesthetics of modernity was
declared by Baudelaire in mid-nineteenth century Paris, while the
uniqueness of the coffeehouse as a hub of modernist literary
movement was discussed at large in the context of the turn of the
century Vienna. This article is about the symbiotic interaction
between these two: the medium of caricature and the socio-cultural
institution of the cafe and their joint contribution to the process
of fostering modern urban identities in fin-de-siecle Krakow, a
self-declared suburb as much of Vienna as of Paris. It examines the
affinities between cafe and caricature and it identifies a special
type of caricature which, produced in a cafe, serves as a
visualisation of a concept, an argument in a debate or a display of
skills, rarely entering collectors’ portfolios or cabinets of
drawings. Unrecognised so far in art-historical literature, the cafe
caricature – ephemeral, fugitive, contingent – better than any other
medium fits the definition of modernity as described by Baudelaire.
There are at least two ways to approach the interconnectedness of
cafe and caricature. One, is to look at this relationship in the
context of liberal modernity, identified with experiment,
synaesthetic impulse, performativity and subversion. Another way,
more political, is to admit that, in spite of the concurrency with
rebellion, both cafe and caricature served also as malleable tools
of the disciplining of modernity. Both were parading subversion
while hiding at the same time their inimical adherence to rituals
and formulas, and both were perfectly suited to essentialise and
ostracise the Other through the excuse of reforming urban society
under the veil of anti-philistine laughter. The text focuses on cafe
caricature produced at Michalik’s Den, the most famous bohemian
coffeehouse in Krakow, set up in 1895 with its walls covered with
caricatures from top to bottom, which has survived not only the
interwar years and the German occupation, but also its
‘nationalisation’ in the 1950s. The article claims that the
preserved caricatures of Michalik’s Den, provide thus the unique
material evidence for examining and defining cafe caricature as a
special type of art-making and for its contextualisation within a
wider field of pre-Dadaist rebellion against conventions,
definitions and boundaries, within the sphere of Polish Fin-de-siecle,
as well as for tracing its post-1945 echos in the art of the
unrelenting Polish modernist Tadeusz Kantor.
Jerzy
S. Wasilewski
Transgression and Death, Laughter versus Death
The author is working on a text about comical transgressions in
culture, entitled
Niepoważność;
the published article is a fragment. One of the mourners attending a
funeral of an English soldier is the deceased’s best friend, dressed
in a bright yellow summer frock and pink knee socks. This costume is
connected with a promise made by the two men on the battlefield: of
one of them were to perish then the other would dress in this way
for the funeral. The ethnologist places the event within a wider
cultural context, not satisfied with a psychological explanation. It
is precisely the anthropologist who can decipher in assorted ways
the symbolic content of the funeral transgression: in an individual
case he should perceive despair and rebellion, while a collective
act should be interpreted as an expression of the state of death,
its acceptance and overcoming.
Sebastian Borowicz
“Graus oinophoros”.
The Phantasmagoria of Death – the Phantasmagoria of the Image
Anus ebria
is an image created out of anti-ideas, cliches that violate or
distinctly undermine the cultural taboo, just as drunken women,
sexual promiscuity or emancipation from the rule of traditionally
established norms. As a comic and sneering ”discloser” of norms and
principles it becomes one of the most characteristic signs of the
”eschatology of inebriation”. This is not so much an ”old female
drunkard” as an ”old rebel”. In its visual and linguistic dimension
she assumes the shape of a lascivious old drunk whose vulgar
behaviour is a vivid reversal of the natural state of being.
Marcin Hinz, Maciej Wiktor Kornobis
We Ask So As to Not Stumble. “Eyes and Lenses” VII
Zbigniew Benedyktowicz, Krzysztof Kopczyński, Sławomir Sikora
Discussion Panel:
Document and the Anthropological Film
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