Polish Media Art in an Expanded Field

Aleksandra Kaminska

Description

From an Eastern nation on the global periphery to a European neoliberal democracy enmeshed in transnational networks, Poland has experienced a dramatic transformation in the last century. Polish Media Art in an Expanded Field uses the lens – and mirror – of media art to think through the politics of a post-socialist 'New Europe', where artists are negotiating the tension between global cosmopolitanism and national self-enfranchisement. Situating Polish media art practices in the context of Poland’s aesthetic traditions and political history, Aleksandra Kaminska provides an important contribution to site-specific histories of media art. Polish Media Art demonstrates how artists are using and reflecting upon technology as a way of entering into larger civic conversations around the politics of identity, place, citizenship, memory and heritage. Building on close readings of artworks that serve as case studies, as well as interviews with leading artists, scholars and curators, this is the first full-length study of Polish media art.

Sujets

• Loisirs
• Arts Numériques
• Art numérique
• ART
• Poland
• European
• General
• Design
• Media studies
• General officer
• History of art
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• COMPUTERS
• Political Process

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 10 janvier 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783205424
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2016 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2016 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2016 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library.
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Cover designer: Jane Seymour
Cover image: Agnieszka Kurant, Emergency Exit (collaboration with Aleksandra Wasilkowska), Polish Pavilion at the Venice Biennial 12th International Architecture Exhibition, 2010. Fog machines, metal, fans, neons. Dimensions variable. Courtesy National Art Gallery Zachęta, Warsaw. Photo: Maciej Landsberg.
Production manager: Claire Organ
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-540-0
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-541-7
ePUB ISBN: 978-1-78320-542-4
Printed and bound by Gomer
For my parents, Bożena and Andrzej
across a country
of low trees
low words
there crawls
there wends
a snail
on its back
it carries its home
dark
uncertain
– Zbigniew Herbert (2007/1990)
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Country on the Moon: Or, Artists Reclaim the Polish Site
Chapter 2: Media Art, the Expanded Field: Legacies of Experimentation
Chapter 3: The Many Stories of Site: Looking Back to Move Forward
Chapter 4: Spaces of Appearance and Communication: The Public and “Me”
Chapter 5: Fantasies of a Media Age: Mediations of Self and Site
Coda
References
Index
Acknowledgements
The book was written and rewritten over a number of years. It began as my dissertation at York University and I am thus foremost grateful for the enthusiasm, intellectual and collaborative generosity, and encouragement of my supervisor Janine Marchessault, who is an ongoing source of insight, inspiration, and friendship. Thank you also to the faculty that provided discerning advice and critique along the way, including Kate Eichhorn, Temenuga Trifonova, Anna Hudson, and Dot Tuer. I am also thankful for the incredible friends and colleagues I have made in Toronto, whose creative energy and political commitments are an incomparable motivation. In particular, I owe a deep gratitude to my writing and graduate school companions: Nicole S. Cohen, Michelle Coyne, Matthew Flisfeder, Alison Harvey, Christine Korte, Sara Martel, and Eva Nesselroth-Wozybun.
The book is a tribute to and reflection of the energy of the Polish arts community and I am grateful to the many artists, curators, critics, and scholars I met during my fieldwork in Poland. They patiently shared their knowledge and experiences, and this book would not be what it is today without them. Any misinterpretations or mistranslations of their words or works are entirely my responsibility. Thank you also to the artists who have given me permission to use images of their works here, with a special gratitude to Agnieszka Kurant, Aleksandra Wasilkowska, and Maciej Landsberg for the cover image. My fieldwork benefitted from the generosity of the Michasiewicz family in Warsaw whose remarkable warmth and helpfulness made me feel like one of their own while I was away from home. Walentyna and Kazimierz Czekała in Wrocław provided respite along the way.
I would also like to thank those who have helped in the preparation of this book, particularly the team at Intellect Books: Jelena Stanovnik for her original excitement for the project and Claire Organ for her availability and efficiency. Thanks also to Jessica Marion Barr for her careful work on the index, and the anonymous reviewers. An early version of part of Chapter 3 was published as “Site Specificity in the Postsocialist City in the Work of Polish Artists Aleksandra Polisiewicz and Rafal Rakubowicz” in Space and Culture 16.4 (2013). While many of the ideas were presented at conferences over the years, Chapter 5 especially benefitted from the RENEW Media Art Histories conference in Riga.
This project is an exploration of the persistence of cultural heritage in a world “without borders,” and in the making of personal histories, and I am thus especially indebted to my family. Thank you to my mother Bożena, for her unwavering optimism, and for being an encouraging voice every step of the way. To my father Andrzej, for his curiosity in my work, and his passionate commitment to caring for one’s heritage and community. To my sister Marta for her well-tuned thoughtfulness, as well as to the entire Ciałowicz family—Witek, Mateusz, and Olivia. Many thanks also to my brother John, for his resilience, humour, and free-spiritedness, and to my aunt Grażyna for sharing with me her own creative journey, as well as, on a pragmatic note, helping with translations. And finally, to Jonathan, for the care, laughter, and love.
Introduction
People…cannot live without being attached to a place, because only then do they become real.
Olga Tokarczuk (2003/1998)
Globalization…is nothing more than a fiction.
Piotr Piotrowski (2009a)
I n his Polish Year in Madagascar (2006), the artist Janek Simon curated an exhibition of contemporary Polish art in Antananarivo, the capital of the African island, that did not feature a single Polish artist (see Figures 1 and 2 ). The artists instead came from other countries in East-Central Europe (ECE), including Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. While on the one hand this choice was meant as a statement against nationalism, on the ability of artists from outside of Poland to provide a meaningful reflection on Polish reality, on the other, the decision to limit the choice to East-Central Europeans asserts what the artist calls “some kind of Central European likeness” (Simon 2006). The fact that Simon’s exhibition had no Polish artists was also a critique on the surge of “Polish Year” festivals or Polish-themed exhibitions around the world, where often, as he says, “there is no concept behind most of the projects, their only ideas seem to be something like ‘Let’s present seven Polish artists’. Nothing comes of this, doesn’t produce any value, any discussion” (2006). Simon played with these ideas in his Polish-but-not “retrospective.” Elements of the exhibition first shown in Madagascar were then presented at Atlas Sztuki, a gallery in Łódź, Poland, as part of a show that also included documentation from Simon’s trip to Africa, and archive materials of Polish plans from the 1930s to colonize the island (see Figure 3 ). 1 The plans offer a biting reminder of Poland’s wishful colonial aspirations between the wars, a time when the country hoped “to place itself within the world elite” (Sienkiewicz 2006). The trip, which Simon undertook with minimal preparation and information, was based on a kind of engagement with the world that is not preceded by knowledge or mediated by information technologies, allowing him to assume the “imaginary role of a discoverer left to his own devices, a traveller, and a colonizer at the beginning of the twentieth century.” This idea of an intrepid adventurer who could “conquer” the world and also understand it is, in a sense, a longing for a kind of simplicity “where every civilized person was capable of grasping operating principles of every technological device” (Łukasz Ronduda quoted in Ujma 2007, 101). Moreover, this effort to somehow bring together Poland and Madagascar, countries with such disparate geopolitics and histories, was a comment on the relationships between nations, on the categories of colonizer and colonized, as well as on the ambitions of creating a coherent rubric of “Polishness” for the outside world. All of these, as part of larger histories of Eastern European “otherness,” national coherence, and technological experience and engagement with the world, are motivating themes of this book.


Figures 1 and 2 : Janek Simon, Polish Year in Madagascar , 2006. Interactive installation. Courtesy of Raster Gallery .

Figure 3 : Janek Simon, Polish Year in Madagascar , 2006. Interactive installation. Courtesy of Raster Gallery .
Before 1989, ECE 2 was regularly neglected and absent from the Western art world, which “did not reveal any serious interest in the art of its close neighbors” (Piotrowski 2003). With few exceptions, ECE was missing from “Western exhibitions and studies of art history to such an extent that, during the Cold War for example, the “West lived in the belief that no true values could emerge behind the Iron Curtain” (Rottenberg 2011, 8). This situation was radically problematized and redefined after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, when suddenly there was “a boom in museum exhibitions that survey[ed] the wreckage of socialism and its industrial remains” (Scribner 2003, 3). The “paradigmatic” exhibition of the time was Europa, Europa (1994) (Kazalarska n.d., 3). Curated by Ryszard Stanisławski and Christoph Brockhaus at the Kunst-und Aussteslungshalle in Bonn, this ambitious show was one of the first in the West to provide an overview of modern and contemporary art from the former Eastern Europe (including Russia). It still revealed, however, a prevalent colonial attitude that was trying to understand “how to integrate the region’s art practice into the universal art canon, or, more precisely, into Western art history” (Piotrowski 2009a, 12). 3 Other retrospectives on the East by the West during this decade included Der Riss im Raum at Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin (1994); Beyond Belief at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (1995); Aspekte/Positionen: 50 Jahre Kunst aus Mitteleuropa, 1949–1999 at the Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna (1999); and After the Wall at Moderna Museet in Stockholm (1999), for example (Piotrowski 2003). 4 A turning point in t