Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West (27 page)

4.4 False or true empowerment. Wojciech Weiss, ‘Manifesto’, 1950. In Socialist Realist painting people were bigger than life.

Both couldn’t have made a different impression, which rather undermined the intentions of the Warsaw MoMA’s curators. The Bratislava National Gallery – in itself a stupendous example of socialist modernism, with its cubist, experimental form, - presented ‘sotsrealism’ in its all visual forms, from paintings to street decorations and banners, to the design of a flat and souvenirs. If anything, this
Interrupted Song
showed sotsrealism as a prisoner of its conventions and political conditions. Uncountable amounts of canvases, over and over, of heads of state, boring, repetitive identical depictions of street demonstrations, colossal, monumental figures of workers like gods. And, at the same time, a feeling of inappropriateness: should we really
look
at them? Sotsrealist paintings now made an impression similar to pornography: we feel we shouldn’t be looking and yet there’s something in it, the feeling of the
Verboten
, that makes it
exciting. This is also the way Boris Groys writes about socialist realism: today, hidden in the museum magazines, it is not the avant-garde that seems to retain a subversive power. But can we honestly say that it can be found in paintings which were often endorsing dictators, turning famines and bloody events into kitschy neo-tsarist poetry? What impressed in the Bratislava show, apart from the sheer quantity, was the seeming ‘amateurism’ of Sotsrealist art, seeing how many of the previous styles and poetics persisted within the new, obligatory style, unnoticed or rather transferred too amateurishly so be taken seriously.

Interrupted Song
showed how within sotsrealism we can seldom find the things we usually associate with artistic excellence: the notions of originality, individuality or technical accomplishment, cease to exist. Instead, we encounter rooms full of almost identical paintings, in which we wouldn’t be able to distinguish the artists if not for the labels next to them. Sotsrealism encouraged nationalism, but was selective about which elements of a particular country’s patriotic traditions could be used – after all, they could start giving people ideas. In this way the impeccably folksy, reactionary nationalist Slovak painter Martin Benka was banned as a “formalist”. Czechoslovakia had strong pre-war avant-garde traditions, especially surrealism. So we still find some quite stupefying examples of Sotsrealism informed by pre-war ideas, like Ladislav Guderna’s constructivist, aggressively colored
New Machine Station
, or Edita Spannerova’s
In the Kindergarden
, where an uncanny, brightly lit group of little children and their maids sits closer to Balthus’ underage Lolitas than to the distinguished men of Stalin’s portraitist Gerasimov. We can also spot hints of Gustave Dore, Gustave Courbet or Expressionism. But mostly, the rooms of the gallery were filled by insipid large-format portraits, pathetic, metaphorical visions of worker’s labor and the forthcoming Golden Age. Individual talent ceased to have any importance. What was important, at least in intention, was how art will
transform
their lives, how it’ll play a role within their most
everyday life: lets remember sotsrealism wasn’t only, although it was in huge part, monumental paintings cherishing agriculture and heroic labor. Sotsrealism was supposed to encompass the
totality
of human life – which today, with the complete dismissal of any project of totality as totalitarian, is completely rejected, supposedly for the sake of ‘pluralism’. It’ll be better to understand the specificity of sotsrealism by remembering what came directly afterwards: Poland and other more liberal satellites adapted a more modern style in art and design, a Brussels Expo ’58 colorful optimism, while Russia remained skeptical towards abstraction until the end.

Another level of sotsrealism is architecture, which was, as some say today, pioneering of postmodernism, in its neoclassical or eclectic revival. Maybe that’s why there wasn’t a great deal of controversy when the infamous publishing empire of Dr Andreas Papadakis, with its flagship magazine
Architectural Design
, was in the 1980s regularly publishing outpourings of Charles Jencks in praise of the tastes of HRH Prince Charles, Leon Krier’s praise of Albert Speer and Anthony Gormley’s monumental, figurative sculptures next to Russian correspondence on the Sotsrealist mosaics of the Moscow Metro and the fair at VDNKh (the All-Russian Exhibition site in Moscow, representing an especially flamboyant type of Sotsrealist architecture), often by the great specialist in Russian avant-garde, Catherine Cooke - because in the end they all expressed the same aesthetic sensitivity. “Pluralism”, as understood since the 90s, meant usually the horrific monumental neoclassicism of sculptors like Igor Mitoraj or Zurab Tsereteli, not dissimilar to the ‘Gormleyism’ spreading across the British Isles.

By contrast Warsaw MoMA, normally devoted to sophisticated conceptual art or rediscovering socialist modernism (like the pioneer feminist sculptor Alina Szapocznikow), for the whole summer of 2012 was a strange house for the creativity of the political “other side”, showcasing the aesthetic expressions of the recent right wing movements and its sympathizers in Poland.
Among them were “flower carpets” made by women from the church circles during the processions of the Corpus Christi holiday, fragments of the gigantic figure of Jesus (bigger than in Rio de Janeiro) from the small town of Swiebodzin, visual frames from football matches (e.g. mass ornaments on the terraces, with a gigantic face of Jesus inscribed into the team logo), covers of the “intellectual” journals of the Polish right like
Fronda
, clips/visuals from Polish nationalistic hip hop, and most preeminently, artworks and projects associated with the infamous Smolensk plane catastrophe.

The Smolensk catastrophe spawned political divisions and many right wing conspiracy theories, but hasn’t, surprisingly, affected the polls – more people are still voting for the neoliberals of Civic Platform, leaving the right wing, Catholic and nationalist Law & Justice behind. Yet, ideologically, society is divided. Smolensk augmented the break within society that existed already. The works collected at the exhibition largely dwelt on emotions “repressed” from the modern progressive discourse, like patriotism, nationalism and piousness in the Catholic religion. Granting them a place in a prestigious gallery, seemingly brings these repressed discourses into art, which polarized Polish society after Smolensk. This is neither ‘relational’ nor it is simply ‘authentic’ art. It was rather folk art – fulfilling all the premises of this kind of expression. As Alex Niven in his
Folk Opposition
points out on the British context any spontaneous, anti-bourgeois, working/peasant class expression has been today either neutralized and taken over by the middle classes, or given a political label of far right. For the progressive, liberal art circles if means (mostly) “don’t touch”. Yet it could be felt that the show electrified the debate, as it gathered what perfectly fitted the fetishized category of ‘authenticity’, realness and all sorts of street-cred. The presented artefacts are similar to the art most willingly promoted by the progressive institutions: they are second or third circuit, and were done according to the DIY ethos. They are the ‘unofficial narrations’, those “other
traditions” we mentioned in the third chapter. Yet the same spirit is expressed by the popular and often reactionary historical superproductions at the cinema, ubiquitous in the former Soviet Bloc, with films like
Battle of Warsaw 1920
taking revenge on communist times. Made for millions of taxpayers money and promoting nationalistic behavior, they couldn’t be further from folk art.

The artefacts presented often came to existence in the process of collaboration, group activity and within the direct engagement in reality, and within unofficial, spontaneous channels, which sounds exactly like the community art ideal. Yet what “effect” these works may have – and do – on the reality, is strengthening the feeling of national identity, of feelings that are often xenophobic and lead to an exclusion of others, which of course couldn’t be further from the ideas of the leftist avant-garde. Coming back to TS Eliot’s essay title, where is the relation between the tradition (which the avant-garde rejected in strongest terms) and the individual artist? As for the aesthetics of the presented works, they were mostly complete amateurism combined with a reactionary mindset that sometimes produced accidental aesthetics, as if from a fanatic Sunday artists club: they dwell on the passeist aesthetics, freely mixing the imagery from different levels, pop with world art movements and sacred art. There are exclusions:
Fronda’s
covers from the beginning presented a very high level of graphic design. What of it though, if they’re serving a despicable cause?

If anything from the past, this art reminded me of the spontaneous artefacts created by the members of the Solidarity movement – by workers interned, under arrest or during the difficult period of strikes in 1980-81. Political, agit-prop leaflets, posters, banners, picket placards, stamps, postcards, badges, prints on fabric, magazines, even jewellery made of barbed wire - all DIY, all printed, Xeroxed and distributed with often the most primitive methods. Overnight workers had to become propagandists, paint their own posters, which often presented an extremely high and interesting level of graphic design. They combined collage, comic strips, quotations from older art, prison associations, elements of mass imagination, verbal jokes. They also use the visual symbols of the forbidden historical events – the Warsaw Uprising from 1944 or previous, bloody strikes. The symbol of the union itself, the famous red lettered SOLIDARITY in itself is a magnificently done logo. Although often expressing the anticommunism and devotion to Pope John Paul the Second, there was something carnivalesque to the way workers – artists, amateurs - treated any available element. The carnival of Solidarity, as those two years were called, brought
a short lived unity which, subsequently, was lost. The pre-existing divisions within the movement won out after the unjust division of power after ’89. The right wing within the movement formed a stubborn, closed front, where it was becoming increasingly reactionary.

4.5 Flower arranging at the New National Art exhibition at the Warsaw MoMA.

In PRL, in order to be considered an artist, one had to have permission from the state, with proper studies finished, and to be registered. Yet the contemporary sophisticated leftist movement don’t seem interested in working out a strong, appealing, powerful aesthetics, and reject it as kitsch or superficial. We used to have a powerful aesthetic of protest in the form of a strong grassroots movement, which today remains in the hands on the other side of the barricade, as the other side has a ‘cause’ it strongly believes in. Aesthetics develop alongside movements, and the greatest failure of the post-communist countries is the inability to create a strong labor movement. If the aesthetic of the right seems strong now, even if amateurish and not according with our sophisticated expectations, it’s a manifestation of a movement we ourselves don’t have.

The show revealed two Polands: one, which spoke though absence and which its liberal elites aspire to, and another one, abandoned by the state, used by the populists, but also poorer and less well educated people. Yet it retains a powerful position as “this is what the majority wants in Poland”, serving as an excuse for the politicians to continuously refuse rights for the minorities. We live in a reality in which those two groups are constantly and rightly, antagonized. The novelty is that the former are no longer happy with the status of the uneducated masses. There’s the new intellectual right, which takes the lesson from the sophisticated left by founding magazines and discussion clubs not dissimilar to the left. This is not a Polish specificity, as the most prominent example is perhaps the Italian Casa Pound. The anachronistic, national or even folk/legendary aesthetic is what the abandoned parts of Polish society hide behind, scared of modernity. Yet, unlike the Romantics, who wanted to re-examine and exorcise Polish traumas, they are
interested only in preserving the life-giving power of trauma, of mythological wars, without which they’d lose their raison d’etre. Yet it also discloses the great failure of the intelligentsia, who lost the battle for the forms of modernity. Instead of the modernity of socialism, we got a modernity entirely stolen by the neoliberal version of capitalism.