Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West (39 page)

5.15 Sucking it up. Natalia LL in her dairy delirium.

The Croatian artist Sanja Iveković, coming from the much more liberal Yugoslavia, similarly thematized woman’s role as a ‘sex kitten’, in the women’s magazines promoting consumerism and ‘self-care’, of endless making up, beautifying, sexing-up through buying clothes and cosmetic products. She exploited this in the hilarious series
Double Life
(1975), where she put together magazine advertisements with photos of sexy half-naked models in erotic poses, with her own self-portraits miming their seductive gestures. Unlike Cindy Sherman, ‘deconstructing’ the rules of the capitalist spectacle by pretending to be various people, Iveković stresses the sheer idiocy of porn or consumption in a country that remains much poorer than the West, with its ridiculous pretensions to Western ‘glamour’. But there are much darker undertones to it yet. In the compulsory consumption of the Yugoslavian state she saw the obliteration of women’s reality: in
Black File
(1976) she juxtaposed the photos of sexy pin-ups from men’s magazines with paper cut-outs about missing women arranged like a police file, “Where is Liljina?” or “Brankica gone missing”. Women under pressure come back in
Structure
, where Ivekovic again plays with the ironic caption-image pairing, putting old photographs of women, some looking like from they were taken from nineteenth-century
physiognomy books or catalogues of mental diseases, and pairing them with ironic commentaries, like “Expecting her master’s return”, “Sought consolation in horse racing and nightlife”, “Had enough of being a good girl” or was “Executed in Bubanj in 1944”. As if death was the only apt punishment for the nice girls gone bad.

The late 1970s, the end of the Edward Gierek era, when the bill for Poland’s attempt to borrow its way into consumerist abundance was called in, was a moment when all the dreams of efficiency must have had reached their end. There was no possibility of pretending anymore, the decade’s prosperity was a sham. The affluent 70s started to reveal itself as a delusion of wealth: achieved due to massive loans which threw Poland into a dangerous debt. A decade which started with the tragic repression of strikers on the Baltic coast, ended in the massive economic crisis that started to reach every level of society. Aptly, the Gdansk shipyard strikes were prompted by the fact that meat prices were too high. Then Martial Law came in December ’81, the coup led by General Jaruzelski and his army junta against its citizens. Curfews meant people often had to stay together at each other’s houses.

One of the best Polish post-punk bands of this era, Kontrola W were originally named “Kontrola Władzy” (Control of Power), but probably because the group didn’t want to get in trouble, they decided to shorten it – at some gigs when they were announced, someone from the crowd said:
but you can’t control power! But it’s about us being controlled
by
power
– the band allegedly replied (later they claimed that the W stood for
Wrażenia
(Impressions)). Still, the lyrics remained militant and pugnacious, with the music merging retro rockabilly elegance and postpunk erudition, bringing to mind Burroughsesque topics of control from the state, communist newspeak, atomic war, nuclear crisis, hiding in bunkers, imagining the end of the world, fear of pollution and radioactivity, state-controlled media brainwashing society, erasure of the self by the
mass culture, personality crisis. Sound familiar? These were typical disillusioned subjects for punk and post punk, but they had an extra resonance here. For instance, they ridiculed and questioned the efficiency of Poland’s collapsing post-81 economy. Like Xex or Devo earlier, they reacted with its absurdization:
Your factory leads in the world/they make everything the best in the world/ radioactive!/Radioactive little balloons/Radioactive ties/Radioactive lipsticks/Radioactive dummies!
Then the song comes back to the bleak reality of work:
Your leading factory/you work there four shifts a day/ and have no time/for romances/no time/to be intellectual!
The factory existence influences the whole worker’s body and physiology:
Radioactive are your eyes/your hands/your heart/your brain!

On the top of that Kontrola dressed like something between Russian futurists and post-war Polish pioneers. But we must remember what was actually happening in Poland around the time the band came to existence. Shortly after they got together, Martial Law was proclaimed, which in its first phase was like a real war for many people: tanks, food crises and rationing, curfews, people arrested, ‘accidental’ deaths on the streets, terror. In this atmosphere Kontrola W took part in youth festivals from 1982, and in 1983, only when the repression began to be relaxed.

Leader Darek Kulda says in an interview from 1984:
I wanted to make an ugly music. It was a period when on Polish radio there was nothing apart from hard rock, which I was sick of. I decided to create a band whose music would be unclassifiable, neither rock, nor jazz, nor nothing. We failed, cos they put us under a label: new wave.
Listening to the 6 salvaged Kontrola W tracks that have survived, despite their poor recording quality, they possess an instantly recognizable originality: a precise and smooth as hell rhythm section (drummer Wojtek Jagielski, who in ‘free’ Poland became a talk-show celebrity) drives the motorik of
Bossa Nova
, which starts with a few seconds of scratching, compulsive guitar strings. An out-of-tune, sick, broken rockandroll, the song progresses in angular groans and whines of guitar, accompanied with the self-possessed, very capricious screech of Kasia Kulda, in which she’s trying to get rid of an importunate lover:
When there’s nothing to talk about/ you persecute me at every step/ Crawling upon my feet (…)/ and if this doesn’t bring effect/ you can only sing this old tune: Bossa Nova!
Kulda sings with a sharpness and panache that Siouxie Sioux would be jealous of, if she had only known about it.

5.16 Kontrola W. Jarocin 1983, photographed by Ryszard Gajewski

In the complicated ways of the development of popular music in the Soviet Bloc it’s easy to classify bands immediately as some sorts of poor, oppressed oppositionists. On both sides of the Curtain the youth felt that the current political order was wrong, that there were no opportunities for people like them. The music arising everywhere in the punk era, regardless of whether it was Eastern or Western, was directed by a similar impulse of disillusionment, of taking things in one’s hands, an ability to express anger and dissatisfaction. On both sides it was a manifestation of the dispossessed: the fact that the Western youth were rejecting the
comfortable lifestyle of baby boomers, and the fact Poles had nothing to lose doesn’t change this. This strange time between the fake promise of bling and the grey, concrete reality resulted in a sudden change in more mainstream Polish pop, which embraced and flirted with the fallen dreams of beautiful commodities that hadn’t exactly turned into reality. The historical, economic and cultural moment was perfect for this: the old cynicism of the Party was replaced by the enthusiasm of Solidarity, and the old truths didn’t matter anymore. Be it the scarcity of the official culture or the hunger for emancipation, Polish popular music in the break between the 1970s and 1980s spawned more interesting female vocalists and music personalities than ever before or after.

Izabela Trojanowska was a one-woman Polish New Wave movement, whose populist songs picked up where punk left off. Drawing on the empowered feminine-but-tough girls of post punk and pop-punk - rapaciousness of Siouxie Sioux, the girlie charm of Debbie Harry or the boyishness of Chrissie Hynde - she added a completely new air of a mature sexy femininity. In Poland, she represented a completely new kind of a pop female performer with a quite shocking demeanor of self-confidence, sex and modernity. She wore short, predatory hair, strong make up with compulsory blood-red lipstick, and an aptly
garconne
wardrobe. Androgynous suits with a feminine, perverse twist, sequin blouses in dazzling whites and zero degree of sentimentality. Walking on her red stilettos with exaggerated puff shoulders, Trojanowska was rather a communist David Bowie/Klaus Nomi, a Thin White Duke and a Bauhausian doll, and harsher than any male performer ever in the Soviet Bloc - maybe, because she understood and played well with androgyny. In several photos she assumes a pose similar to Bowie, and in one TV programme even performed dressed as a Bowieesque New Romantic Pierrot, with glitter-brocade make up on her face. Iza wore both male and female clothes, always with a dominating air: jackets with spiky, “neo-gothic” collars and shoulders in striking, saturated colors, red and amaranth leather dresses and jackets; metallic, futuristic coats, like an elegant cyborg, akin to Sean Young in
Blade Runner
, and huge, futurist sunglasses. The whole of her person seemed to exude the metallic sheen of a sexy robot.

5.17 In Poland, David Bowie was a woman. Izabela Trojanowska.

In this she was also predestined by the self-irony with which she smilingly rejected any possible feminine clichés of life in the Bloc. She was a Helmut Newtonesque scary businesswoman, who didn’t have anywhere to go to work, so in her videos she posed by the only ‘modern’ looking shiny skyscrapers she could find in Warsaw. She used men like toys whenever she fancied, but mostly she was self sufficient, with strong
lesbienne
undertones a la Dietrich, or flirting with a glam vampirella look. A sharp gal who couldn’t stand the failure of a boyfriend to give her
all she wanted, now.
No wonder one of the first drag queen shows in early 90s Poland was an Iza T. impersonation. Imagine the shock which this caused any typical Polish man, used to a housewife who’d hand
him a hot meal and slippers in their much– awaited two-bedroom flat. In her lyrics, she was shockingly sarcastic towards socialist efficiency, mocking both Socialist Realist Stakhanovites, and the prosaic reality of endless material lacks which was everything but glamorous. The heroic times of socialism were clearly gone, as Iza T. commented with a bored, sarcastic voice:

By then nobody believed in the system anymore, but here punk nihilism was taken up by commercial pop. As Iza rejected the idea of shacking up with a boy and waiting 10 years for a council flat, she mocked the scarcity of means, most famously in ‘The Song of the Brick’ – in which the chorus line “pass me a brick” is a reference to a 1950s Stalinist slogan of building communist Poland. There she was in 1980, recalling the times everybody wanted to forget: just like Wajda, bringing back the trauma of sotsrealism. During a memorable televised performance at the Opole festival in 1980, dressed in the exaggerated red cravat of a communist youth organisation member, surrounded by naked
musclemen painted gold (!) she parodied the positivist, brightly colored sotsrealist boom of growth and prosperity: