Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West (40 page)

All this she sung with a flirty flippancy. Her character was too disillusioned, too cynical to believe either the authorities or the men’s promises. She looks with pity at the boy, who talks about the bright future,

Iza paved the way for several sharp female performers who appeared soon after. A French migrant, Richard Boulez, known for
wearing colorful clothes in Poland, became the chief stylist of Kora, the charismatic singer of Maanam. Boulez and Kora were like the Halston and Jerry Hall or Grace Jones and Jean Paul Goude of Polish new wave: the stylist-artiste and the it-girl who has it all. Kora wore Bowieesque kimonos and excessive heavy jewellery, on synthetic bright-colored vampish sets specially designed by Boulez. Shocking the public at the Opole ’80 festival in dayglo-colored clothes singing
Divine Buenos Aires
, Kora was all desire: to travel, to meet people, to shag men, to explore, to have everything she wanted.

Another ‘hot chick’ was Urszula, a big glossy synth-pop diva, whose productions were close to Trevor Horn’s ZTT or Art of Noise. Her composers dwelled on the earlier synthesized disco of Giorgio Moroder, but gave it the sassiness of Blondie and the sublimity of ‘Blue Monday’. In Urszula’s songs the most mundane neighbored the most fanciful. She also fantasized about luxurious commodities, as in the ultra-synthy
The Seasonal Fashion Frenzy
, where her character can’t stop thinking about buying new glittery clothes. One could ask, where in the grey 80s could she find any? In her songs there appeared surrealist flights of fancy or tales of journeys to outer space, which also appeared in Polish post-punk and new wave music, as in Kapitan Nemo’s heavily synthed ‘Electronic Civilisation’. Kapitan Nemo aka Bogdan Gajkowski, self-styled minimal-wave futurist in a quirky bohemian black beret, was the great uncle of all today’s 80s revivalists. In his
Wideonarkomania
he pioneered a still-fresh in PRL topic of addiction to television and the suddenly available world of VHS, with a pulsatingly colorful video, where sexual lust gets confused with Cronenbergian
Videodrome
fantasies. He sounds as if he already knew that 30 years later the generation of lo-fi “hypnanogics” and Hauntologists will put the washed out distorted VHS image retro aesthetic onto the pedestal of a hipster absolute.
‘This is a new hash for the masses/White screen is shaking/One move and you already live in it! And after Bruce Lee/ a bit of sex before you fall asleep.’
Delicate female backing vocals,
heavy synths and an interest in the harshest modernity put him close to a Polish Phil Oakey with touches of Gary Numan. There are also common references to sotsrealism: in
Factory Love
, love is of course “tough as steel” and “according to the safety rules”.

Unfortunately, in reality, we couldn’t be driving further away from space and the computer world, as Soviet technology had its most modern, forward-thinking years already behind it. Paradoxically, when we caught up with the dominating futurist fashion within pop-culture, time-traveling and computer technology, as in the children’s trilogy of
Pan Kleks
, we had lost any potential to even overtake the West with our ideas. Post-81 the socialist utopia started to growingly morph into dystopia.

The catastrophic SF of Piotr Szulkin, one of the most distinctive 80s Polish visionaries, disclosed a quite different realization of the futuristic dreams, filled with fear first at the communist, and then capitalist versions of totalitarianism. It’s an Orwellian vision immersed in philosophical existential deliberations over the media, cynicism and the mental destruction of the individual. According to Szulkin’s films, the Soviet Bloc will be destroyed by communism, after which capitalism will take over, and turn out to be equally destructive. In a very loose adaptation of Wells’s
War of the Worlds
(1981), one country, which due to English names could seem Western, is invaded by Martians, who are a ‘higher’ civilisation - one which ruthlessly oppresses the lower one on earth, as the Martians are bloodthirsty, horrific creatures, who vampirically live off humans. The world becomes overpowered by cynical media exploitation, and a brutal state apparatus assumes absolute control.

Even if the intention was for Martians to stand in for the Soviet Union (who were supposedly on the verge of invading Poland in 1981, which was then “prevented” by the introduction of Martial Law by General Jaruzelski’s junta), in fact they rather resemble the other Cold War Empire – The United States of America. Their omnivorous media, popular culture and capitalist greed seem to be something that bothers Szulkin even more than the Soviet reality,
as in
Ga Ga – Glory to the Heroes
(1985), where in post-communist, twenty-first century Americanized reality, humanity has conquered other planets. But on the colonized new worlds, mankind installs prostitution, vice and omnipresent media rule. In the finale, the hero is to be executed at a gigantic stadium media event broadcast across the entire solar system. We live in the world after the apocalypse, that’s obvious: in 1984’s
O-Bi, O-Ba, End of Civilisation
, after the nuclear war the whole humanity is reduced to living underground, like worms (several years before, and in a much more convincing way, than it was done by Emir Kusturica in
Underground
) and in these humiliating conditions they wait for the mythical Ark to take them away, the Second Coming, not knowing it’s only the criminal state apparatus’s propaganda. Instead of the Ark coming, the copula over the pitiful hole humankind lives in is collapsing. Still, the light revealed by the cracks is taken by the humans as the arrival of the Ark. Space in Szulkin’s films is nearly always one or another form of prison: people vegetate in claustrophobic, dirty hovels, waiting for miracles that never come.

At the time Szulkin was developing his visions, People’s Poland was in some of its darkest periods. We had rather more mundane problems, with austerity after the Martial Law and a collapsing economy. The topic of scarcity strangely enough must have become domesticated in the pop landscape of late
komuna
, because it kept coming back obsessively in pop music. Too down to earth to seriously debate about flying to space, Izabela stuck to disillusionment.

One of the things that has been growing obvious in the most interesting contemporary art in Poland is an interest in the visual culture imagery of the communist past. With delight artists take up and paint or re-enact aesthetic elements of the everyday life of PRL. This trend remains charmingly and quite openly close to the more general, hipster gesture of cherishing retro for its own sake. Slawek Elsner repainted dozens of images from the popular weekly
Panorama
, in which he also mimed the poor print quality of 70s Poland. Paulina Ołowska, meanwhile, does not stop at re-enacting only the aesthetics, she re-enacts whole situations and elements of everyday life. She repaints the popular visual elements of socialist life: postcards with DIY fashion, often bizarre and on the verge of kitsch yet too strange to become it, or magazine covers and punk leaflets. She makes collages, merges the original print and her
creation, which become indistinguishable. Part of the appeal of Ołowska’s adaptations is the sheer love of clothes. In this way she builds a significant relationship with the period, and can’t be reduced just to empty retro posing of a fashionista. Maybe it’s the love of material culture that puts a bridge between an empty retro-mania and the ideology these aesthetics represent. But does Ołowska identify with the women who had to sew their own clothes, as there was nothing in the shops, or is she just amused with their earnestness? Using that expression from Tyrmand,
Applied Fantastics
, she stresses rather the ironic aspect of how living in PRL meant constant improvisation and miracle-making on an everyday basis. And somehow, she’s then seduced by this miracle.

5.18 Richard Boulez and Kora, 1983, photo by Tadeusz Rolke

It’s obvious that in the work of Elsner or Ołowska, where the communist past undergoes a painterly conceptual resurrection, there’s a strong hint of nostalgia - a nostalgia often inspired by the disappointment the post-89 culture brought, also visually. But this seeming longing for PRL has to be constantly disavowed. ‘Polish magazines stayed on a very poor editorial level, especially lithographic and print techniques’ says curator/gallerist Łukasz Gorczyca in his text for a catalogue of Slawek Elsner’s works. Yet, as we’ve seen, Polish magazines like
Przekroj
and
Ty I Ja
showed a rather high and even innovatory level of originality. Polish magazines weren’t just simply the poor imitation of the Western model of consumption, as Gorczyca suggests, they were often trying to build their own version of lifestyle. Yes, they were restricted by the shabbiness and limitations of real socialism, but the lacks they had made them aspire to create something on their own. Interestingly, whenever the topic of nostalgia after the aesthetics of Soviet times comes up, commentators and theorists rush immediately to assure us it has nothing to do with the politics. The recent interest of young Russians in Soviet cinema or old games, or anything connected with the system is, apparently, apolitical. Maybe this is typical of the weakness of so much of current political aesthetics, which is not politicized enough,
uprooted from its original meaning and in the end, pretty but meaningless. Photographs of people enjoying themselves in the DDR or USSR can be found all over the internet. But then people enjoyed their life and holidays also under fascism. An image proving that people enjoyed themselves playing ping pong under communism doesn’t actually prove anything in particular.

5.19a DIY as a way of survival. A popular series of ideas for knitwear which will inspire artist Paulina Olowska decades later. Here ‘Hunting’.

We’ll never get an honest reassessment of the past if we keep denying that this nostalgia at play is also political. Or rather – that it suggests the death or lack of the politics which made certain positive elements of this reality possible. Yet the nostalgia or even sheer curiosity after this period is enormous. Any books, gadgets, memoirs, films issued from the post-war era, regardless of their value, are meeting with popularity, not only in Poland, but in all ex-Bloc countries. Socialist modernist architecture is being constantly revived. The most popular current books are invariably either memoirs from PRL (Lech Wałęsa’s wife Danuta, the daughter of General Jaruzelski, or Jerzy Urban, the notorious government PR in PRL and in free Poland the king of the gutter press - to name just the biggest) or historical books, alternately endorsing and condemning PRL as a criminal regime or an “occupation”. Blogs of the gadget and
lifestyle aficionados mushroom everywhere. There’re even attempts to “live in PRL” – people who have decided to live as if 1989 never happened: for a year one couple wore, ate, read and consumed only goods produced in PRL, after which they published a book about the experience.