International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management 2006, no. 5(3), pp. 107-116.
Katarzyna Kosmala MacLullich
What it Feels Like to Be a Professional Artist in Central and Eastern Europe? Individualised Reality of the Other in Zofia Kulik’s Arts.
I wrote once ‘order and self-subordinations account for a powerful inner urge that makes me behave and act in a given way; both in so-called life and in so-called art’. By visualising the ‘subordinations’ do I appreciate and praise it, or do I mock it and abolish it? Accepting the ‘subordination’ as my problem and theme, full of fear and hatred toward the situation in which ‘the urge of subordination’ occurs, I take an artist revenge with every weapon (symbolic and formal) that has been used against me
(Zofia Kulik) 1 Zofia Kulik retrospectively in Darc Decor Independent Curators Incorporated ICI, USA
Introduction
In everyday life we routinely engage in processes of self-shaping and self-cultivating, acting on the world and on others through our need to give a form and a content to our identity, to our reality, to our memory and to our sense of the self. The self is always in a process of ‘catching up’ with the deferred meanings of its experiences which at the point of actions remain in darkness 1 The notion of identity, of the self have been a subject of philosophical inquiry as from the 17th c with Decartes’ Cogito Ergo Sum. Empiricists’ (e.g. Hume) and Idealists’ (e.g. Kant, Hegel) response resulted in different accounts in questioning the self as proclaimed by Decartes.. Nietzschean questioning of the possibility of knowing the self is echoed in Western contemporary thought of the alienated subject 1 Critical reflections on the subject influenced by Nietzsche are also embedded among others in Freudian analysis of unconscious and Lancan’s Mirror Phase. Also performative theories of identity (e.g. Butler) echo Nietzsche’s stance. . The self and its masks are socially produced and controlled whereas ‘moral actions are always something other (Nietzsche, Daybreak, para 16). As there seem to be no essential, true self, identities are constituted and enacted through our positioning with the others through language and wider forms of cultural codes Hall (1996).
The self, however, although constructed in a socially and historically localised moment (Foucault, 1989), cannot be explored in an isolation from interpretations of the individual experiences and its specificity for a subject (a person) (Taylor, 1992); the interpretations of the self and of the others (Geertz, 1973). The aim of this paper is to explore the evolving artistic identity of a Polish female artist, Zofia Kulik. In particular, I intend to look at the ways through which she engages her life experiences in questioning of the identity construction. It seems that through her artistic practice Kulik writes ethnography at ‘home’ 1 A term ‘home’ is perceived symbolically (a local context) and physically as Kulik produces her works in her house. (The author’s information obtained from the artist, Warsaw, 2003).. A complex layering and interpreting of conflicting elements of her own (private) identity formation, echoed in her practice, could be envisaged as deriving from both her inner history (as a private person) and from the external social environment (the art world, its institutions and its politics). Hastrup (1987) described such practice in the field of anthropology as a peculiar reality of self-ethnography: ‘it is not the unmediated world of the others but the world between ourselves and the others’. Kulik mediates between what is a person and the world. The key aspect,s of her critically informed art combine redefinition and an exploration of the self, the questions of ideology and subordination, and in particular ways of disciplining the mind and body.
Both, societal ambivalence and private desolation leads us to see that identity is fluid, thus, the self is in part a symbolic project that we actively and creatively recreate, refashion and re-fabricate, juxtapositioning what is private and public, personal and political, individual and historical (Elliot, 2001, p. 6). These processes of Kulik’s artistic identity formation constituted her involvement in the underground and sublime art, her critical performances with Przemyslaw Kwiek under communism, the era of the political and personal transformation in the 1980s, and finally, her most recent individual practice as a visual artist.
Identities are constituted in and through difference and subsequently are inherently dislocated (Du Guy et al, 2000), that is, dependent upon outside that both denies them and provides the conditions of their possibility (Rorty, 1988). Therefore, in a discussion of Kulik’s artworks, I acknowledge the historical and cultural contingency and plurality of her personae, as the artist, and subsequently, the necessity of not abstracting the properties of particular forms of personhood from the specific cultural milieus in which they have been formed and contested (here a local milieu of the Central and Eastern Europe, hereafter the CEE). Kulik explained her particular geo-political location and temporality as her ‘Polish hunch-back’ which evokes ‘a certain helplessness. It is not the lack of intelligence or talents, it is the lack of rational, efficient and proper functioning of everything and the lack of the normal attitude to everything, without cynicism, without all those ambiguities, without the ‘pissed-off’ approach. This, obviously, has an impact on art, and also our behaviour and feelings with others’ (Kulik in the interviews with Sitkowska, 1986-1995).
Inevitably, as from the perspective of the subject, there are tensions between the creative and destructive possibilities in the processes of the identity formation (Jeffcutt, 1993), it could be argued that what artists embedded in the other (here the CEE) context consider as their variety of historically informed traditions (the reality of underground opposition to the totalitarian system) and culturally constructed notions (the art establishment and the institutionalised market) are reproduced and re-created in the present. Kulik’s art is multi-layered, its uniqueness combines problems of power and subordination. In Kulik’s works the idea of identities are constituted through the reiterative ‘power of discourse’ (Foucault, 1989) which also names and regulates how we relate to the self and to the others. It is impossible to interpret the political, private and artistic threads separately in her artworks.
She somewhat ‘dissolves’ the notion of the self through evoking mechanisms of human subordination. Her works from 1990s onwards, are comments on the fluidity of identities, both sophisticated and delicate, politically charged and discharged, have been received differently nationally and internationally, at times with astonishment, at time with a revolt and, at times, went unnoticed. Now Kulik, as an established artist continues to create in the context of global capitalism and media culture; in her works the self seems even more frail, fractured and fragmented. Locally, the audiences somewhat unreceptive to problems of deconstruction of identity and questioning of ‘our’ reality, do not easily assimilate her works. When we look into the mirror of the past we fear to see the reflections of this past projected into the future.
The remainder of this paper proceeds as follows. First, I will discuss the context in which Kulik emerged as an artist; I will briefly outline the locale of the Polish art world in the 1970s characterised by a distance from the centres of power, political and cultural capitals, situated in the fringe, in the spaces in-between, in zones of insignificance in the power structures of Europe. Second, the ‘performing life’ and living art of KwieKulik will be examined, and in particular, its implications for Kulik’s identity. Third, I will discuss a period of Kulik’s personal and artistic transformation. Fourth, the aesthetics and critical content of the individualised reality of the other in Kulik’s contemporary art practice will be discussed. Finally, Kulik’s reception will be placed in the context of the new generation of artists.
On the fringes of the European arts
The ways the idea of identity is being realised in today’s Europe challenges the reality of harmonious ‘United Europe’. The mythologised otherness of the Central and Eastern Europe is echoed in the visual arts. Residual socially constructed ‘problems’ such as traditionalisms, historisms, historical myths and nationalisms, traditional motives and models all appear significant in the reconstruction of arts’ own self-images (Cvijetic, 1999). We find ourselves, however, incapable of distinguishing between the so called historical reality and its warped representations (Zizek, 1989). Although internationally the contemporary arts deems itself free of ideologies, through its rebellion and apolitical attitude, yet it perpetuates the distance between us and them, ourselves and others. The (artistic) identity in the CEE region is in a flux of ‘negotiations’ with the past and belonging to Europe 1 Despite then (in the 1970s) the images of the Iron Curtain and the Eastern Block which pervaded in the West, there was no homogenous common cultural identity of the CEE region.. A division between the active and creative self-shaping and the passive social determination has been translated in terms of cultural constrain, focusing on the status of social forces and institutional dynamics, as well as on personal agency, consciousness and desire (Elliot, 2001, p.2).
In the 1970s, a global phenomenon in which artists attempted to both challenge and transcend overly traditional means of art production and representation occurred worldwide. Art rhetoric located some artists in opposition to the mainstream and the power of art institutions; it was a stance perceived to contain a ‘romantic’ notion of rebellion. This was the ‘Western rebellion’. At that time, however, on the fringes of the European arts, in the CEE region, recognition and state funding of alternative arts was not forthcoming under the communist regime. The state ideology enveloped in a communist interpretation of socialism promised a ‘homogeneous’ society, where all differences in gender, race, ethnicity, class and culture were dispersed. There was a kind of a political censorship in arts, characterised by attempts of not financing or supporting those artists who engaged in any ‘substantial’ critique of the system (Truszkowski, 1999). The effect of this kind of censorship resulted in the silencing of critical and feminist art practices across the CEE region.
While the prevalence of modernist paradigms began its slow collapse in the West, a process to which alternative (critical) artists made a significant and early contribution in the 1970s by questioning the elitist attitude and monolithically formalist concepts of art and art practice. The critical arts in the CEE had been marginalised. The movements of the alternative artists were recognised only by the underrated CEE counter-culture (Andreas, 1999), and in particular by its sublime ‘particularity’ 1 See also Andreas and Andrasi (1996) Vizproba : Water Ordeal Exhibition catalogue, Obudi Tarsaskor: Budapest.. The ‘underground’ art movements questioned the ideology of oppression whereby the artists were searching for a means to fight against the communist regime, to the extent that this was possible, that is, without directly attracting repression (Polit, 2000).These artists also questioned construction of identity and difference. Identification with the state, through formal art practice and state commissioning, was mocked and considered to be an instance of the co-option of conscience.
The female artists of the sublime and underground movements were in a particularly difficult position. A version of operational socialism and its welfare policies did cut back gender-based social and economic discriminations across the CEE. Instead, this happened at the cost of the state appropriating the so called ‘women’s question’ and diminishing it, in large, to an economic issue. Women became objects of social and political manipulation and this also applied to art practice. For instance, despite ‘women’s equality of rights’ rhetoric propagated by the communist Polish government, female position was disprivileged (Kowalczyk, 1999). The tendency of women to take an active role in the job market in the 1950s and 1960s occurred as the government’s response to a deficit of employment, especially in the services and trade. In the 1970s, however, the government invoked the propaganda of woman’s primary role as a mother, a carer and a wife. This socially constructed (dis)placement and a partial picture of womanhood was echoed in arts. This is why the tenets of Western version of feminism of that time appeared somewhat irrelevant in the CEE (Kowalczyk, 2002). Some female artists both benefited from certain state policies and simultaneously became members of the opposition through their involvement in the alternative and underground art scene.
1989 was the year of great shift from communist ideology towards capitalism and an emergence of consumer culture, spreading gradually across the CEE. As for art itself, the fall of the Berlin Wall did not bring either a paradigm shift in visual arts or a real dialogue with the Western art discourse. In a way, the CEE region was further slipping into the category of the ‘other’. This process has been traceable through Western writing about the CEE arts, evoking ‘authoritarian patronisation combined with stereotyping as a substitute for getting to know the other’ (Andreas, 1999), and it could be argued that unfortunately in art history such mentality continues in that way.
After 1989, art became dependent on private and corporate sponsorship and any form of the ‘controversial’ or sublime art of the CEE has become once again disprivileged as ‘such images could contradict the sponsor’s political interests’. As a consequence, a kind of new limitation was created, affecting a particular form of expression and artistic freedom for those artists working within the critical and feminist genres. For instance in Poland, the power of the conservative political forces and an authority of the Catholic church, although in different ways, started to propagate a return to traditional value systems, traditional families, fostering the model of a passive woman as a mother and a carer. ‘Democracy in Poland is gendered as male. People who dare to say this out loud are courageous’ argues Maria Janion, a Polish feminist theorist (in Kowalczyk, 2002). Instances of sexism, and at times quite vulgar misogyny, used from positions of authority, appear to be discrediting of artists working with questions of the other, either through a notion of identity, critical themes or feminism-related issues. For instance, Katarzyna Kozyra, through her video works and installations, explores the exploitation of the reality of the body and the self within a visualisation of contemporary culture, raising simultaneously issues of voyeurism and narcissism. Her works are often criticised the media and she was persecuted by right-wing politicians. Alicja Zebrowska through her works explores issues of identity and sexuality. In her video works she explores how private is constructed as political. She comments upon how female sexuality becomes the object of legal manipulations and Catholic morality (Original Sin, 1994). Her works are often objects of aggressive attacks by those who considered it to be breaking down morality of heterosexual values and as ‘pure’ pornography (Kowalczyk, 2002). In short, it could be argued that the social responses to the critical and feminist art of the 1990s reveal hypocrisy of a society unable to talk about the self and trauma in relation to recent history. Locally, it reveals many double standards in society today and deconstructs the privileged place of some groups while highlighting the marginalisation of others 1 Kowalczyk (2002) also explores other incidences of blocking freedom of expression in critical and feminist art in Poland..
In such a context, with great difficulty, critical and sublime artistic movements have been slowly evolving across the CEE, forming a more self-conscious programme of artistic identity. I would like to illustrate these processes though re-tracing aspects of artistic life and practice of Zofia Kulik.