Art in WarsawPosted by ArtReview magazine on June 3, 2010 at 2:30pm
Issue 42, Summer 2010
By Laura McLean-FerrisLet’s start with a communist joke, if you can even call it that: under communism, Polish dogs dreamed of going to
Czechoslovakia so they could eat; Czechoslovakian dogs, meanwhile, dreamed of coming to
Poland so they could bark. A canine metaphor for saying that in
Warsaw contemporary artists were freer to experiment than in other communist countries, but didn’t have many resources to do so.
And while the situation has now dramatically changed, part of that legacy – of using the stuff that is cheap or already around you as a conceptual material – has had an indubitable influence on the generation of
Warsaw-based artists that has emerged since the millennium. Wallpaper, furniture, architecture and performance feature heavily – artists making work out of the city, objects and history that they have been left with.
Painter Jan MioduszewskiHow else can you explain
Jan Mioduszewski, who greets me at his studio in Praga, an eastern district of the Polish capital, wearing a yellow suit that he has painted with a brown wood-grain pattern? And who then proceeds to put a wearable trompe l’oeil painting of a wooden cabinet over his head, and stand stock-still in the corner, his suit matching the fur of the studio tabby cat that stalks past. Mioduszewski, a painter, has done several such performances: curling up in a cabinet, camouflaging himself inside it and drawing attention to the relationship Poles have to the types of standard-issue furniture that at one time could be found in every home, while also forcing an aesthetic appraisal of them. Upstairs I find
Karol Radziszewski, artist and founder of DIK Fagazine, who often deploys wallpaperlike murals in apartments, tower blocks and subways. Radziszewski’s humorous take on homophobic fears in this conservative country is manifested in f*g Fighters (2007–), a series of installations and videos featuring a group of macho men in fluorescent pink balaclavas – knitted by the artist’s grandmother – fighting and sexually attacking straight men. The phobia is amplified to the point of absurdity and neutralised along the way.
Karol RadziszewskiContemporary Polish artists are prominent in the international artworld:
Miroslaw Balka,
Paulina Olowska,
Pawel Althamer,
Monika Sosnowska and
Artur Zmijewski are just some of the names you’ll find displayed on banners outside many of the world’s leading art institutions. But where might you find contemporary art in the Polish capital? There’s the
CCA Ujazdowski Castle, a slightly beleaguered yet high-achieving institution with a dizzying number of exhibitions from international and national figures. There’s also the
Zacheta National Gallery of Art, a stunning historic building that survived the city’s near-obliteration by bombing. It has a surprisingly risky programme, which last year included an annual art prize, an exhibition from the collection curated by
Karol Radziszewski, a
Paul McCarthy and
Benjamin Weissman show, an exhibition investigating performance and a
Zbigniew Libera retrospective.
Agnieszka Morawinska, the outgoing director of the gallery, was appointed because she was a specialist in historical art and therefore presumed to be too conservative for this kind of thing. “
I hope I proved them wrong”, she says, winking. On her appointment ten years ago, she promptly handed the bulk of the responsibility for the programme over to a group of young, ambitious curators, and now, seeing that the museum’s progressive reputation is secure, is voluntarily stepping down to let a new director take over.
Miroslaw Balka512 × 416 - ... The Unilever Series: Miroslaw Balka, Tate Modern, London, ...388 × 344 - Paulina Olowska. And in 'Head Wig', at London's Camden ArtsPawel AlthamerMonika Sosnowska448 × 336 - Rozmowa z Moniką Sosnowską. Sebastian Cichocki: W jakiIt’s the capital’s artists, foundations and commercial galleries, however, that have been driving the Polish art scene into the international spotlight. The so-called
Grupa Ladnie (‘
Pretty Group’) of artists who came of age during the 1990s, the best known of whom is
Wilhelm Sasnal, were distinctive for their paintings of flatly banal beauty and everyday life in
Poland, which subtly ridiculed their art-school education and its focus on the production of ‘
nice’ paintings. These artists emerged in tandem with the magazine
Raster, run by
Lukasz Gorczyca and
Michal Kaczynski. Notable for its irreverent tone and dressed-down language, the magazine eventually became
Raster gallery, one of
Poland’s first and most important commercial galleries, now located on the fourth floor of an old building in the centre of the city. It doesn’t feel like a standard commercial gallery, however, as artists and visitors sit around the apartmentlike space chatting and drinking coffee. The gallery, which represents
Libera (an artist most famous for his
LEGO Concentration Camp, 1996) and conceptual painter
Zbigniew Rogalski, among others, is hosting its annual display of affordable artworks when I visit. Along with the gallery’s domestic atmosphere, it’s part of an attempt to develop a local culture of collecting,
Kaczynski explains, but it’s proving no easy task in a capitalist economy that’s still only two decades old. Art fairs have made international connections easier, and
Raster is notable for its collaborations with other commercial galleries, such as the 2006 Villa Warsaw programme, in which ten galleries, including Milan’s Zero,
Jan Mot, from
Brussels, and
London’s Hotel, spent a week, together with their artists, collaborating on events, performances and discussions. A similar project is planned in
Reykjavik this summer.
Libera' LEGO Concentration CampLibera' LEGO Concentration CampZbigniew RogalskiZbigniew RogalskiTwo of the gallery’s artists –
Rogalski and
Oskar Dawicki – are there when I visit. In his performances and videos,
Dawicki plays the part of the tragicomic stand-up, always dressed in a blue-and-purple-sequinned showman’s jacket. He has created several works in which he apologises for his bad performance (he has not prepared, he is late, he is not very good, he is sorry for making the museum staff work), which seem like a hilarious, yet moving relief from the often unbearable burden of expectation that’s placed on an art performance.
Dawicki has a flat, deadpan sense of humour, also evident in
Everything Has Been Done (2003), a work he produced with three other artists as part of
the Azorro Group. I see it later at the nearby Museum of Art, in
Lodz: the group sit around trying to come up with ideas for artworks, only for the ideas to be shot down on the basis that someone else has done it first. “
We could shoot ourselves?” That’s been done.” “
We could do nothing?” “
Been done.” Before I leave,
Dawicki draws me a little picture in pen of a work he would like to make: it is of himself, wearing the sparkly jacket and hanging from a noose, but supported by a bunch of helium balloons.
632 × 672 - Oskar Dawicki, Kaprys, 2007, fot. dzięki uprzejmości artystyIf Raster can be characterised by its affable humour, then at first glance
Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw’s other big commercial gallery – austere website, minimal information and a crisp bright space high in a communist block –appears somewhat standoffish and serious. It was established in 1997 by three rather inspired curators –
Adam Szymczyk (now director of
Kunsthalle Basel),
Joanna Mytkowska (now director of the Museum of Modern Art in
Warsaw, of which more in a minute) and
Andrzej Przywara – in order to preserve the archive of
the Foksal Gallery, an avant-garde public gallery set up in
Warsaw in 1966 that managed to operate with a highly conceptual programme throughout periods of communist repression. Confusingly, the foundation operates in a manner you’d associate with a commercial gallery, representing curatorial favourites such as
Althamer,
Sosnowska,
Anna Molska and
Robert Kusmirowski.
“
Warsaw now has the chance to be an important city for art, like Berlin”, says
Przywara, its remaining director. “
We don’t want this chance to pass us by.” The gallery is showing a particularly graceful exhibition from
Thea Djordjadze, a Georgian-born, Berlin-based artist, who has chosen to respond directly to the gallery’s architecture and in particular a row of windows that offer views of
the Palace of Culture and Science, a huge neoclassical tower imposed by
Stalin on the city during the 1950s, which dominates the skyline.
Despite the fact that it doesn’t exactly invite visitors in, many of the projects carried out by the gallery take place in the city – oddly, it seems more ‘
public’-minded than many public galleries. Indeed,
Foksal also programmes and administers
the Avantgarde Institute, the former studio of artists
Edward Krasinski and
Henryk Stazewski. Located at the top of another tower block, the artists’ studio houses an installation by
Krasinski created after his studio-partner’s death.
Foksal has left it in situ, adding a pavilion and a series of conferences, events and artistic interventions made in collaboration with students. The studio is a ruin, punctuated throughout by Krasinski’s signature blue Scotch tape line dividing the space horizontally.
Daniel Buren, who visited the studio apartment in 1974, stuck stripes of tape on the windows, which continue to rot and peel with each passing day. The pavilion, when I visit, also houses a temporary installation by
Monika Sosnowska – a carpet with lumpy piles of rubbish underneath, virtually impossible to traverse without violently wobbling. Visiting students have left a pile of photographic scraps in response to a lecture. It is caring for this small fragment of avant-garde history, and continuing to make it vital – ‘vivid’ is the term that those involved seem to use – that puts the current Polish art boom within the context of its history. It’s impossible to escape the conditions of living and making in this space.
Henryk StazewskiEdward KrasinskiFoksal also recently rehabilitated a huge neon sculpture of a female volleyball player on top of a tall building in the city at the behest of Olowska, who showed paintings based on her research of the city’s neons at the gallery, on the condition that any proceeds from sales be used to refurbish the neon. Warsaw was once a city of neons – meant to prove that one doesn’t need capitalism to have a bright and beautiful city of modern light. Now, however, most are broken. Reignited, they seem, like the volleyball player, distant and unfamiliar – the wholesomeness of sport, health, colour and movement occupying a space normally reserved for brand logos. There’s another neon in Kepa Potocka park, a small patch of green in the middle of several noisy roads, surrounded by the ubiquitous Soviet tower blocks. This is artist Maurycy Gomulicki’s homage to Oranzada, the only fizzy drink available in Communist Poland; my friend describes the special bubbling feeling of Western glamour this drink offered her and her friends as children.
Two other particularly interesting galleries have emerged in recent years: Lokal 30 and Czarna Gallery. The former, run by curator Michal Suchora, artist Zuzanna Janin and writer Agnieszka Rayzacher, is staging a solo show by Bulgarian artist Kamen Stoyanov when I visit. There’s a growing international remit for the space, including the opening of a UK outpost in East London last year. And for a relatively young outfit, they have scored some big hits beyond the Warsaw base: they work with Ming Wong, who represented Singapore at the Venice Biennale in 2009 (and took the cover of ArtReview’s April issue); and gallery artist Agnieszka Kurant, together with architect Ola Wasilkowska, is working on a project for Poland’s pavilion at the Venice architecture biennale this summer. The gallery also represents Karol Radziszewski and Jan Mioduszewski. Czarna, meanwhile, situated in a hundred-year-old tenement building, is exhibiting work by Olaf Brzeski, who has painted nightmarish plans for some of his most bizarre, surreal projects (some unrealisable, such as crashing huge carlike sculptures into lakes and letting strange liquid forms drift out of them) on porcelain plates.
So if it’s got established commercial galleries, emerging ones and public art galleries, is there anything else that might make the Warsaw art scene complete? The missing piece is a permanent home for the Museum of Modern Art, and the perfect place is a troubled plot, empty for 60 years, in front of the gigantic Palace of Culture and Science. Discussions about a modern art museum have been going on for decades, but a seemingly concrete (ahem) plan came into being after the millennium. And by 2007, following an arduous architectural competition involving several high-profile spats, Swiss architect Christian Kerez’s plan was selected by an international jury to fill the site. His proposal appears unassuming and minimal from the outside (starchitecture it’s not), though it contains extravagant undulating domelike ceilings for the gallery spaces within. The Polish media initially rejected the plans, printing an image of the museum design with the logo of French supermarket chain Carrefour on it, and the museum’s director, also turning his back on the winning proposal, resigned. According to reports from the time, many Warsaw residents, considering their city to be ‘ugly and dull’, didn’t want more of the same – concrete blocks. Kerez, for his part, claimed to find the city inspiring, adding that he was responding to its space rather than its history. And slowly, as Kerez spoke more about his idea in public, the city came round to the idea. A new director has been appointed: Foksal’s Mytkowska, who has created a museum programme that is as inventive as you might expect.
Currently operating out of an old furniture shop (Kerez’s project is scheduled for completion in 2014), the museum has already begun collecting and exhibiting. Shows range from rehabilitating important historical figures in Poland, such as the late Alina Szapocznikow (whose 1960s and 70s bodily sculptures of mouths and stomachs in polyurethane and latex are starting to be rediscovered internationally, after her inclusion in Documenta in 2007), to inviting the public and artists to come and present their plans and ideas for Warsaw and the museum under the rubric Warsaw Under Construction. The museum has also taken account of its complex emergence, displaying a film by Artur Zmijewski, showing traders being sometimes violently removed from the museum’s site, in the exhibition Early Years at KW Institute in Berlin this winter and spring.
A different market site, Warsaw’s 10th-Anniversary Stadium, was the inspiration for another recent set of projects, conceived by Joanna Warsza, who runs a tiny, difficult-to-categorise art organisation called the Laura Palmer Foundation (yes, after you-know-who from Twin Peaks). Warsza, herself difficult to characterise, in her facilitation of itinerant projects that might be termed dance, performance or curatorship, investigated the stadium as nonplace, probing, as she puts it, “shifts in the real” – broadcasting in Vietnamese for the usually invisible Vietnamese traders at the local market, or calling for a botanical analysis of the stadium. A spectacular example of these interventions was her 2007 restaging of a 1982 World Cup match in Spain between Poland and Belgium, at which Solidarity flags were seen on television. The new version features only one player, the Polish star Zbigniew Boniek, his 90 minutes of movement memorised and performed by a solitary dancer.
Warsza worked in collaboration with Bogna Swiatkowska, who has begun running another foundation, the Bec Zmiana Foundation, out of a shopfront (interestingly, it’s one of the only contemporary art organizations that has a presence at street level), from which they facilitate projects that are “fully experimental… with public money”. Last year Bec Zmiana asked artists to investigate the idea of disappearance, creating several sculptures and projects that, in effect, came to nothing except a guide to the act of disappearance.
There are many more things about Warsaw that I could try and squeeze into the little space that’s left – I could tell you about the vodka, the architecture, the communist milk bars, a delicious and mysterious ‘white cheese’, strangely helpful people assisting my companion and me (“a hangover from Solidarity times?” she suggests) as we stumbled around the Brodno Sculpture Park looking for a broken Olafur Eliasson sculpture – but none of them would be as important as the sense of excitement you get from a smaller art scene whose structures are still being invented. With no inherited system of dichotomies along the lines of public/private or museum/commercial gallery, everything seems available to be built anew. Many of the key figures in Warsaw’s artworld, previously operating at the fringes, now find themselves at the centre, in positions of power. “This is what is unique about Warsaw”. Swiatkowska tells me as I leave. “It was taken over, and I’m not really sure if people realise it yet.” Perhaps that’s Poland’s best postcommunist joke.