Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West (18 page)

Still, the fashion for the DDR never dies, recently confirmed by the
Electronic Beats
magazine, which compiled a multi-part DMGDR series, centered around Depeche Mode fandom in East Germany. In another regular series,
EB
does a “24h in (insert a city from the former East here)”, in which a correspondent goes to another burgeoning “creative hub”, asking its creative class (DJs, promoters, copywriters, bar/club PR/owners) to boast about two things: how much it has changed (read: since the end of communism) and how much resemblance their city bears to the obvious ideal, the only one worth comparing to: Berlin. Any political event is assessed according to how much it is going to affect the ‘creative sector’, it behaves as if possessing such sector was the only thing that mattered, also as something that somehow helps to fight contemporary fascism. If they complain about the recent neoliberal or fascist politics, creatives from Budapest, Prague or Moscow do so only in as much as it blocks the ‘hubs’. Basically, you know how close you are to becoming a modern, creative city if you’re able to approximate it towards Berlin. ‘Nearly like Berlin’ or ‘As good as Berlin’ were the words I heard only too often when still living in Poland (I was later assured by UK friends they heard exactly the same in various artsy colleges around the country). And given the trouble Berlin is now in, and the unique, not really repeatable status it has due to its history, I don’t think this dream is ever going to come true. This is yet what our creatives, if not always our authorities would like to see us as.

Recently it was young Berliners, that is people who cannot remember it personally, who defended the East Side Gallery, the remnants of the Wall that were preserved around the district of Friedrichshain, preserving the artworks endured as fragments. What keeps attracting the youth to that myth is the sense of community, political radicalism and history attached to the Wall and Cold War, that they feel profoundly lacking in their own lives,
in a depoliticized time where there is no alternative.

Warsaw during communism was a city that had to change dramatically into a completely different place than it was before the war. It is a miracle, and proof of an extremely strong identity and the love of its inhabitants, that despite this drastic change Warsaw still lives all of its previous lives, and one can easily trace every era of its life. There’s a legend that during his two hours train-break in 1976 Bowie stepped out at Dworzec Gdański, and walked towards the modernist area of Paris Commune Square (now named after Woodrow Wilson), where he allegedly stopped at the record shop and purchased some folk music LPs. It remains unconfirmed by Bowie himself, but very likely one was by Silesian folk dance ensemble “Śląsk”, who were then directed by Stanislaw Hedyna and his original interpretations of native music. Śląsk’s ‘Helokanie’ is shockingly similar to Bowie’s ‘Warszawa’, and the brief visit is to this day mythologized by Polish fans. ‘Warszawa’ was a later, much more mature version of Bowie’s earlier vision of
1984
, minus the glamor and camp, but with a dramatic, heavy beauty. For ‘Warszawa’ Bowie reserved a sombreness and seriousness typical rather for modern composition. It remains his most mysterious track.

And how was it heard in Warsaw itself? The Polish punk rock groups of the late 70s and early 80s tended to draw on other influences than Bowie. Yet it was a touchstone for the later, 1990s poet Andrzej Sosnowski, now our foremost neo-avantgardist, who would use “Warszawa” as a hidden reference in his work. Sosnowski’s Warszawa is always filtered through Bowie’s Warszawa, meaning there’s a mythical, concrete, bleak Warszawa that Bowie had in mind, that only partially is the real Warsaw. In Sosnowski’s vision Warsaw is a late-postmodern, bleak Baudelairean vision (immortalized also in ‘The Waste Land’, quoting his
Fourmillante cite…
from
Fleurs du Mal
). In this Warsaw
we encounter a similar mixture of flattened eroticism and feelings from different orders, metaphysical, sexual and bluntly mundane, all mixed up. A shop mannequin gives him an erection, and the crotch and the wallet seem to be erect in the same place.

PRL’s dull fashion somehow went together with punk. In a way the ugly clothes made of poor quality fabrics, badly made angular shoes, suits and shirts were already very punk. The tasteless, shoddy and shabby, cheaply produced Eastern fashion, making things look not obviously pretty, against conventional beauty, turned them into an anti-fashion. To look deprived, to look as if a bomb exploded next to you, was to contest capitalism – but what about countries without capitalism? If in the West the ostentatious fashion a la dispossessed was a political statement against the society of the spectacle (and at the same time, a signal of its material decay), what did it mean in the East? Perhaps both should be put as expression of late capitalism, in their rejection of order and beauty as equally banal and uninteresting, and often hypocritical. Lacking the funds for consumerist transgressions, Polish punks made up their own, often sexual. One of the open secrets of the scene was its sexual excess. Festivals were also not free of such debauchery. During one Jarocin festival gig of the punk band Zbombardowana Laleczka (Bombarded Doll), the vocalist started to perform fellatio on one of the musicians, and photo reporters jumped over themselves to immortalize this scene of ultimate Polish transgression. Yet, despite the band winning the audience prize because everybody hoped for a repetition, sadly this never occurred.

In Russia the reaction to the system could be in itself reactionary. Yet the strange continuation the subculture world has in Russia until today, means the parallel world called at the time SISTIEMA, the counter, alternative system to fight the other system, is still at play. Yet subcultural life in the Bloc wasn’t always just simply against the system. 50s Stilyagi definitely were contesting it, but the later emerging thaw generation, who often
became dissidents, like Yevtushenko, were those who wanted to reform the system, not simply to abolish it. Anyway, the Stilyaga weren’t militant either.

It is understood differently now in Poland and Russia. Several books, which came out recently capitalizing on the punk legend, usually universally dismiss a system which didn’t allow young people to be the way they were. Censored and often arrested, they still seem not to notice that at the very same time in the dark, industrial Poland of the early 80s another dream was burgeoning: a dream of quasi-efficiency, as if aimed against the authorities. People’s Poland, as is not mentioned enough today, provided a stable cultural system within its planned economy, of Domy Kultury (local culture institutions, helping to find talent), phonography, festivals, creating a circuit in which musical culture could flourish. Everyone in Polish punk who mattered made their début this way. In communist reality, especially the late one, music existed in state controlled festivals. In the punk era, each band had to get an official approval from the censoring organs to get to play at one of the main events of the time, Jarocin punk festival. It was allowed by communist powers in the 70s, including the then-sport minister, Aleksander Kwaśniewski, the future president of democratic Poland, some say, as a safety valve, so that after the protests on ’68 and in the 70s the youth got their music and calmed down. Yet it was still often raided by the police with truncheons.

Simultaneously to this, as a result of the post-Martial Law years of depression, other, independent channels of counterculture emerged. The counterculture was determined by the conflict between the communist authorities and the Solidarity alliance with the Catholic church – punk’s sympathies may have been with neither, and they shared this with several punk-influenced artists who favored a dirty, black realism. Out of that period emerged Łódź Kaliska – a radical movement combining pornography, anti-bourgeois, anti-moralism and political sloganeering for the sake of a loosely understood “freedom”. Then there was the so-called
Culture of Gathering. The members of this ‘tribe’ were creating something – lacking means, often endangered by prison, they created out of anything that could’ve simply been ‘gathered’ by the other group members. To this group belonged artists later renowned for Critical art, like Zbigniew Libera. There was also the continuation of the experimental film movement, growing from Polish conceptualism in the 70s, with Jozef Robakowski. In Poznan, Kolo Klipsa applied the dark, punk imagery to late conceptualism, and the blasphemous Group Luxus, experimented with a trashed, impoverished version of pop art, and with striking intelligence and vulgarity analyzed the primary elements of the rough 80s Polish reality.

In Russia the movement developed differently. Under much more pressure, they only could have the expression of punk late, during the
perestroika
and
glasnost
period in the mid 80s. The stylings of the Sov-punks are often astonishingly sartorial and various, as if against the stagnant politics. Described as an “aesthetic war between Soviet couture and black market fashion”, it brought back lots of the early Soviet fashion, which was forgotten in the era of late Soviet blandness, which was to be followed by dull import in the 90s. One of the most intriguing and puzzling elements of the 80s underground look and subculture is a weird revival of the 50s – elegant dresses, clips, neat hair and film-noir trench coats (yearning after the New Wave 50s/60s cinema that missed them). In terms of image, punkers were skilled postmodernists, applying various looks with a chameleonic easiness. The reference to the glamorous female workers with headscarves, ear-clips, and nice knee-length skirts and for boys, the look perfected by Kraftwerk. For the punk generation it meant the rejection of everything hippie – the hippie generation was the one to have it all and exchange it for depoliticized drug-haze. The 1980s version of post-punk was someone who had his mind drugged enough by media and politics, with a much more rigorous attitude towards reality. For the Sov-punks, it means they could catch up with all the
decades where they weren’t allowed to flourish: hippies, rocka-billies, metalheads, punks, breakdancers, rockers and New Wavers. A popular trend was wearing “smoky makeup”, dressing as robots. For everything there was a metaphorical name. A ‘nightingale’ meant a heavy drinker, who could stay up all night. A decade later and most of these movements were eclipsed by the commercialism of mainstream fashion. It is characteristic for contemporary times how many glossy, coffee-table punk albums were published, speaking nostalgically about fighting communism with clothes, at the time when all the possibly positive elements of this reality were dismantled. In Poland it was
Generacja
and in Russia
Hooligans80.

Misha Buster, who authored the latter, says “In the
perestroika
period many adolescents took up brutal non-Soviet concepts characterised by anti-heroism, bravado and the originality of the hooligan. All this happened as part of the clash between the ‘normal’ and the ‘abnormal’ and these style images, in turn, protected our own adolescent idealism and became key criteria in the search for others like ourselves on the streets of many Soviet cities.” With that there were bands: Grazhdanska Oborona, Kino, Bravo, and characters: Zhanna Aguzarova, Garik Assa, Alexander Petlyura, Andrey Bartenev, Viktor Tsoi…The variety of photos show the fascinating Soviet city spaces: metro, escalators, railway, bus stops, stadiums…But as the clothes were to shock, or challenge the social conventions, they weren’t creating a real menace anymore. The never-ending, even until this day, rhetoric of ‘fighting the system’ hides another apology, this one of contemporary appropriation, of Russian ‘creative hubs’ that are supposed to change the subject from its grim current politics. As we know, the colorfully dressed punks didn’t actually create an alternative, nor construct any political force in the new Russia. But perhaps that was the short moment, when young people experienced new freedoms, not yet filtered by the capitalist market, possibilities of life-experimen-tation. Of course, it wasn’t their fault, as the fast-changing post-Soviet reality of the country didn’t leave them much choice. Yet I
see the current nostalgic trend of remembering punks as largely reactionary. In the
Generacja
book, characters are largely disappointed with their lives.

One exhibition press release on late Soviet underground lists combinations of “hoop petticoats made of climbers’ blankets and French lace, uniform tunics boasting open backs, and skirts with folds suspiciously reminding of draperies.” And as we can see later, this initial fresh amateurism was changed into professional, capitalist fashion, as if it was from the beginning only there to attract the West. Vivienne Westwood, who allegedly said “there could be no fashion in the country of sickles and hammers”, together with other Western designers, was coming to the specially organized shows. Slavonic women were becoming Miss World in a timely moment: Aneta Kreglicka in 1990 and Bronya Dubner becoming Alternative Miss World 1998.

2.13 Made in Poland frontman Rozzy at Jarocin 1985 photographed by Tomek Barasiński