There is a raging battle taking place in the capital of Poland. But for the uninitiated visitor, it will probably go almost unnoticed. Unless, that is, they are able to follow Polish-language media, or are lucky enough to have members of the Warsaw intellectual milieu explain it to them (for me, the latter thankfully was the case). It’s a battle over commemoration and the construction of national identity.
I was in Warsaw to give a lecture in connection with a project by artists Agniezska Kurant and Anna Baumgart, which is a temporary monument entitled ‘(…)’, commissioned by the Museum of the History of Polish Jews to be inaugurated in mid December at the precise spot on Chlodna street where in early 1942 a wooden footbridge was in place, a chilling construction that connected the smaller with the larger part of the Warsaw Ghetto, leading over, and separating Jews from, the ‘Aryan’ street where trams were passing.
My lecture took place in the evening at Nowy Wspanialy Swiat (Brave New World), a former KGB club which has been turned into a casual bar and cultural centre very recently, and with support from the city council, by “Krytyka Polityczna”: http://www.krytykapolityczna.pl/English/menu-id-113.html, a leftist political-philosophical magazine.
the opening of Nowy Wspanialy Swiat in early November
During the day, I had visited the famous Jewish Uprising Monument by Nathan Rapoport,
photograph from 1948, the year the monument was erected
which now is right next to the construction site of the Jewish Museum to be opened in 2012 (its modest design is by Finnish architects Lahdelma & Mahlamäki).
Thanks to the thoughtful guide Kornelia Cecerska, who on behalf of the Jewish Museum also took me the the Umschlagplatz monument – at the site where Jews were rounded up to be taken away on trains to Auschwitz and Treblinka –
and the spot of the footbridge, I learned a lot about the difficulties of commemoration in a spot that was so thoroughly destroyed by the German army, and then further twisted by the changes through post 1950s socialist housing and post-1989 commercialization.
But to come back to that battle: in recent years, there has been a resurgence amongst mainly conservative and right-wing factions of the political landscape that have turned the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 – initiated by the exiled conservative Polish government in London against the Nazi Germany occupiers – into a national founding myth. This is maybe most vividly incarnated with the establishment of the Warsaw Rising Museum, which provides a vivid experience of the insurgents’ desperate fight, largely lead from the underground canal system of the city, until it was devastatingly crushed by the Germans (resulting in more than 180000 deaths), while the Red Army was lying in wait on the other side of the Vistula river. The museum – as Joanna Mytkowska, director of the Museum of Modern Art, told me – has been a big hit with the general audience and has attracted about a million visitors last year, often families with their kids, which the museum caters to with themepark-type instalments (walk, like the fighters did, through a mock sewer). Incidentally, the construction of the Museum of Modern Art – which temporarily resides in a beautiful 1960s building also housing a furniture shop – will take place in the centre of Warsaw right next to the Stalinist Palace of Culture and Science;
the design is by Swiss architect Christian Kerez, again a modest construction from the outside which will only reveal its spectacular roof either from inside, or as seen from above from the top of the Palace.
However, again this is a historically conflicted site: not only are there numerous mostly rightwing factions that would hope to erase the Palace, seen by them as nothing but a reminder of Stalinist oppression, while at the site of the future museum there is still a market hall construction that was put there in the 1990s as an attempt to organise the new anarcho-capitalist street market that had developed there (see image below, to the left).
The street traders, evicted without replacement, organised a protest this summer that resulted in a fierce confrontation with the police.
It’s not the museum’s fault that the city failed to provide alternatives for the vendors. But it seems hard in Warsaw to establish one kind of history – in this case, a contemporary Polish art scene very conscious of its Modernist avant-garde heritage – without simultaneously erasing visible signs of another; in this case, the anarcho-capitalist suitcase economy of the immediate years after 1989.
In this sense the problem with the resurgence of commemoration in regard to the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 is not the commemoration as such, but a more complex problem that amounts to a bitterly ironic historical twist. To put it in probably over-simplified terms, distilled from the helpful comments of Agnieszka Kurant, Anna Baumgart, Agnieszka Rudzinska of the Jewish Museum, Kornelia Cecerska, Joanna Mytkowska, Andrzej Przywara of Foksal Gallery Foundation, and numerous others: during socialist times well into the 1980s the Warsaw Uprising was entirely erased from state commemoration – because it was anything but a socialist uprising, and because it was not carried out in the interest, or under the auspices, of the Soviets, quite to the contrary – while the Jewish Uprising was treated as if it was simply and purely an essentially socialist workers’ uprising, in this sense forcefully integrated into Polish state doctrine. After 1989, with the establishment of the marriage between turbo capitalism and catholic conservatism , it has tended to be the other way round: now it’s all about the Warsaw Uprising and the Katyn massacre (the terrible war crime of 1940 committed by the Soviet NKVD, involving the mass murder of thousands of Polish military officers, intellectuals, policemen and civilian prisoners of war), while the Jewish Uprising in the Ghetto of 1943 and the destruction of the Polish Jews connected to it is either silently ignored – or the Warsaw Uprising is even explicitly played off against it. The typical sentence accompanying this attitude, if openly uttered, would probably be: ‘…enough of the Jews, now it’s our turn’. A battle over who deserves commemoration at which point in historic times, underpinned with concepts that take it for granted that these were all separate issues – as if being Polish and being Jewish had always been mutually exclusive states of being. Which is even more disturbing since, according to what Kornelia told me, in fact a substantial number of Jewish fighters who had survived the 1943 Ghetto uprising where again fighting, and died, in the 1944 uprising – all of this against the background that the Home Army also apparently had a lot of anti-Jewish insurgents in their ranks.
Andrzej Przywara pointed me to the literal collision of the ‘competing’ manifestations of commemoration amidst the socialist housing blocks that are now in the area of the former Ghetto (which had been turned entirely to rubble by the Germans during the war). Just a stone throw away from the Umschlagplatz of 1988 is another one entitled Monument to the Fallen and Murdered in the East, which – unveiled in 1995 –
consists of an open freight car with crosses stacked in it, and a line of metal sleepers, commemorating the millions of Poles sent to Soviet gulags. Again it seems the proximity and signage leading you to either Umschlagplatz or the other monument inevitably suggest an evaluation as to which commemoration is more important, or more urgent. Not that it would be easy to prevent that effect, but nevertheless one wonders whether there had been an open debate about that question.
During socialist times, it wasn’t as if remembering the destruction of Jews of Europe on Polish soil was always held in high regard either. Quite to the contrary, there were anti-Jewish campaigns that led to the exodus of most of the remaining small Jewish community. As Agniezska Kurant told me, her family largely left Poland after the March 1968 events, where a scapegoat logic came into place blaming the protests of students and intellectuals, coinciding with the Prague spring events, on a supposed Zionist conspiracy.
This might be one of the reasons why tours of the former Ghetto for young Israelis – often before their military service, and usually ending with a visit to Rapoport’s monument – today still are often largely shielded off from the surrounding contemporary Warsaw experience. Which is yet another factor that seems to entrench any respective alienation rather than diminishing it, excluding one kind of memory when another kind of memory is concerned. Which makes a work by Pawel Althamer that Andrzej showed me at Foksal – while the Spanish artist Jorge Peris was busy transforming the gallery, with the help of a lot of salt, salt-eating protozoon and dried banana peels, into a strange micro-biotope – all the more interesting: in a session with a hypnotist (as part of a collaborative piece with Artur Zmijewski, the video Hypnosis of 2004)
he imagined himself as being the reincarnation of a small Jewish boy trying to flee from Nazi-occupied Warsaw with a little dog. A few years later Althamer turned this dream image – as kitschy sentimental as it is genuinely heart-rending – into a small bronze sculpture, erected in the suburban housing block where he lives:
Abram and Burus (2007) includes a real-life wooden stick that people can use for playing with their dogs. This piece is interesting in the regard of ‘competing’ commemorations because it inevitably reminds of another sculpture, that of the Little Insurgent (erected in 1981),
commemorating the young boys who fought in the Warsaw Uprising. It seems almost as if, more that 64 years after the war and 20 years after the fall of the Wall, it is only under hypnosis that the destruction of the European Jews by Nazi Germany on Polish soil, and the crushing of the Polish caught in the middle between Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union, can be thought together.
Established in Reykjavik in 2006, Sequences is an independent annual arts festival that was founded by four of the city’s many artist-run galleries: The Living Art Museum (which has been active for more than 30 years); Kling & Bang (established by a group of ten artists in 2003); Dwarf Gallery (a tiny space open several months a year); and the now-defunct Bananananas, along with the support of The Center for Icelandic Art (CIA.IS). With a focus on performance, though also incorporating a programme of seminars, lectures and screenings, Sequences remains the only festival in Iceland dedicated to contemporary art – an important position given the harsh recession that followed last October’s economic collapse.
When I visited Reykjavik last month, the headline on the cover of the Grapevine, the city’s listings guide, read: ‘ROCK BOTTOM PRICES! NO CREDIT? NO PROBLEM!’ – a pointed reference to the selling-off of energy resources to international corporations at kreppa rates. Many artists and musicians I met who had been abroad in October last year talked about the realization that their cards had stopped working or else that their money was worth half practically overnight. A year after the crash it’s perhaps still too soon to say exactly what has changed. Some said that the (officially bankrupt) oligarchs still control the industry, while one of the two daily papers is owned by the architect of the collapse, former PM (and central bank manager) Davið Oddsson. With this backdrop, Sequences’ ten-day programme looked something like a small-scale miracle.
The festival directors change every year: this year it was organized by the young duo Kristin Dagmar Johannesdóttir and Klara Dorhallsdóttir. On the opening night was a premiere of Tadskegglingar (apparently difficult to translate, it means something along the lines of ‘men who have horse manure in their beards’) at the Reykjavik Art Museum, a performance by the festival’s honorary artist Magnús Pálsson. Long and baffling, with some elements based (as far as I could work out) on elements of the sagas, Pálsson’s surreal performance – which incorporated around 30 performers from The Icelandic Sound-Poetry Choir – was oddly mesmerizing. Now 80, Pálsson founded the experimental theatre group Grima in 1962 and was also part of the SUM group – along with Dieter Roth, who lived in the city between 1957–64 – and represented Iceland in the 1980 Venice Biennale. SUM started as an exhibition in 1965 – it’s other founder was Hreinn Fridfinnsson, one of the best-known Icelandic Conceptual artists from this period (in the UK at least) thanks to a Serpentine survey in 2007.
Aside from big international successes such as Sigur Rós and Björk, my first contact with the unusually interdisciplinary Icelandic arts scene came about eight years ago, encountering the band Slowblow through the film they directed and scored, Noi Albinoi 2003, which led me to Bedroom Community / Kitchen Motors affiliates such as Jóhann Jóhannsson and Nico Muhly. This fertile relationship between art and music is being continued still by Egill Sæbjörnsson (whose quirky, interesting show – titled ‘Spirit of Place and Narrative’ – is at the Reykjavik Art Museum) and Ragnar Kjartansson (who represented Iceland at Venice this year), though goes back to Roth’s period. In 1965 he organized a concert inviting Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman. (Indeed, the Kitchen in New York was founded by an Icelandic couple in 1971.)
For a first-time visitor, one of Sequences’ virtues was that it sprawled across the tiny city centre, using public spaces as well as galleries. Later in the evening I stumbled across a crowd of people gathered in an outdoor car-park, with two vast projections – of a marching knight and a woman – being beamed onto the enclosing walls, while a metal band jammed in a small wooden cabin accompanied by men sitting on the floor breaking rocks with hammers. I thought that this was a standard Friday night fare, but it was actually artist Sigurður Guðjónsson’s contribution to the festival.
The footage was being projected from across the road, from a large studio space by the harbour called the House of Ideas. The complex includes designers, artists and students and has been running for around a year (a positive outcome of the crisis has been that such spaces are being turned over into similar projects). At the party were performances by Finnish artist Maurice Blok and a film, This dumb region of the heart, by Páll Haukur Björnsson (who was, I think, the model from Ragnar Kjartansson’s Venice pavilion). The latter was only shown on two portable DVD players at a time, playing in the back of a car while an uncommunicative driver sped around the harbour area.
That evening also saw the premiere of a new work by Spartacus Chetwynd and her Mime Troupe (a revolving cast of friends), who put on an inspired puppet show called Feminism, Little Tales of Misogyny. Dense with references, and influenced by the four-part structure of D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), the piece traced the history of modern feminism and women’s involvement with the early civil rights movement, from Mary Wollstonecraft to the Suffragettes, Ida Bell Wells-Barnett and Patricia Highsmith.
Other highlights were German duo Prinz Gholam’s calm, solemn performance Air, which comprised a 20-minute series of held poses from dance, statuary and pietas.
Odder was SCOURGE, pictured above, by Melkorka Huldudóttir at Dwarf Gallery (so-called because it’s a basement with a five-foot ceiling). At Lost Horse was an exhibition titled ‘(made up and let down)’, which included ‘I-Projector’ by Line Ellegard and Imagined Death by Anita Wenstrom. Lost Horse is a tiny wooden house near the old Sirkus, the artist hang-out that was transported to Frieze Art Fair last year as part of Frieze Projects. Kling and Bang, who ran the bar, have one of the better-known galleries, and currently have a show – titled ‘Black Swans’ – by The Icelandic Love Corporation.
The New York Times reports that a major survey studying the effect the recession is having on American artists has been published by non-profit artist-support organization Leveraging Investments in Creativity, in collaboration with Princeton Survey Research Associates International and the Helicon Collaborative, a consulting firm that advises non-profit groups.
When it comes to discussions about art and money, there is the popular and erroneous assumption (usually parroted in the UK by newspaper columnists who should know better) that, just because super-remunerated artists such as Jeff Koons or Tracey Emin earn a tidy wage, the vast majority of contemporary artists are rolling in cash. Although the Leveraging Investments in Creativity survey focuses on a range of creative people from the visual arts through filmmaking to architecture, music and writing, and how they have been affected by the economic downturn since last year, the survey also reflects the hard financial reality that most artists face, regardless of market boom and bust.
At BQ, Berlin, Alexandra Bircken's work threatens to spill messily from its frames and brings a subversive strain of hippyish chaos to the stiff upper lip of the surroundings
If you’ve ever wondered how an earthworm or a barnacle has sex, you’ve probably never thought to ask Isabella Rossellini. But she knows. And you can even watch her demonstrate it – in a series of short films Rossellini has developed and starred in for the Sundance Channel, entitled ‘Green Porno’. I admit, when I received a copy of the accompanying catalogue to ‘Green Porno’ recently – which looked like the kind of children’s book you might find in a museum shop and featured a photograph of Rossellini on the cover cuddling up to a giant shrimp made of construction paper – I dismissed her, and the project, as crazy. And she still, in fact, might be. But when I stumbled upon a few episodes of ‘Green Porno’ on television this weekend, I also discovered that these short films are an inspired kind of insanity.
Each of Rossellini’s campy, instructional films is not much more than a minute long, and each stars Rossellini as some kind of insect or sea creature, dressed in a makeshift costume made of paper or other disposable materials. In each one, Rossellini matter-of-factly describes, then demonstrates using extremely low-budget special effects, how – if she were, say, a dragonfly, or a mantis, or a starfish – she would copulate and reproduce with her animal mate. In the film beginning ‘If I were a snail…’, for instance, Rossellini explains: ‘I can withdraw my entire body into my shell, where I can hide my vagina and my penis,’ then gleefully whispers to the camera, ‘I have both!’ and retreats into her giant snail shell made of cardboard.
Don’t be too fooled (or excited) by the title of ‘Green Porno’: these films resemble middle-school biology film reels much more than they do porn (even the weirdest kind). But they could also be Rossellini’s version of feminist video art. Rossellini (who is the daughter of Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini), as an aging film star and an enduring sex symbol, plays the roles of both male and female insects with gusto. She adopts the giant nose of an angler fish or sucks food like an earthworm without any traces of self-consciousness, and with a deadpan knowingness. In fact, she says she was inspired to do the films by her childhood interest in entomolgy. And strangely, her roles as female whale, spider, or praying mantis seem to express the power of female animal sexuality as an extremely apt analogy for female human sexuality. In a short film simply called ‘Why Vagina’, she explains, ‘Eggs are precious; sperm are cheap… If I were any female, I would want to protect my precious eggs… I would have a tunnel, and it would be a labyrinth. It’s intricate and it’s unique. It’s species specific, so that I am not screwed by a bear…. That’s why I want my vagina.’
You can watch all of the Green Porno shorts on the Sundance Channel website.
