Now in his mid-sixties, Warpechowski is a squat, stocky man with long white hair, a drooping moustache, and a thick red face. Dishevelled and wearing an old embroidered vest, he looks less like an influential avant-garde artist than an eccentric peasant from the marshy plains of Volhynia, where he was born and then expelled with his family during the brutal migration Stalin forced on hundreds of thousands of eastern Poles after the war. The objects of his art—fish, skulls, crosses, coffins, worms, massive stones—are melodramatic, but employed comically. And in performance, Warpechowski is by turns grandly romantic, earthy, quarrelsome, and even buffoonish. He claims that his mature works eschew weighty symbolism for spontaneity, improvisation, and unmediated dialogue with spectators. Yet history and religion, the cross and the endless graveyard, are ever-present in his work. Late one night, sitting in Warpechowski’s modest, book-lined attic study, I noticed a small painted icon of the Virgin Mary on the wall. “I painted that,” he said, chuckling.
Arriving in Warsaw by a dilapidated city bus, I passed through the post-industrial desolation I associate with former Soviet bloc countries, especially Poland: rail yards choked with dead weeds and rotting wooden cattle cars, vast silent factories heaped with scrapped machinery, warehouses with their windows smashed out, piles of garbage and coal, drunks reeling down muddy streets, and the grimly authoritative cement and steel crosses that reflect the enduring power of the Catholic Church. The ugliness is monumental, and has an eerie, tragic grandeur all its own.
On an island in the middle of the busy intersection of Aleje Jerozolimskie (Jerusalem Avenue) and Nowy Swiat (New World Street) in the heart of Warsaw, is an artificial date palm tree rising some fifty feet high, its bright green fronds ratty from the wind and weather and exhaust. The trees all around are stripped and black, and the streetcars clatter down the centre of the avenue past soot-stained buildings. In the midst of all this, the palm tree is a gleeful absurdity, almost thumbing its nose at a city freighted with monuments to futile resistance movements and failed insurrections. But while the palm tree seems at first glance a lighthearted anti-monument, its presence turns out to be far more ambiguous. Titled Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue, it was conceived and constructed by Warsaw-based artist Joanna Rajkowska.
“I realized that convincing people to do it was part of the project,” Rajkowska told me. “[The Warsaw municipal government] had to create a category of public art for the project, and so it became political. The previous government wanted to give the new right-wing regime a hot potato.” Rajkowska is an energetic woman in her mid-thirties who has earned a reputation for her quirky conceptual projects, such as Satisfaction Guaranteed (2000), in which she produced a line of soft drinks purporting to contain her own bodily fluids and tissues (“watermelon-flavoured drink containing extract of the retina”), and Diary of Dreams (2001), where she organized volunteer groups of total strangers to sleep through a day on the floor of Warsaw’s xxi Gallery, then write down their dreams. Rajkowska likes to present herself as a mischievous entrepreneur, and the idea for Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue came to her upon returning from a vacation in Israel. But it would be no more possible for Rajkowska to transport an idea from Israel to Jerusalem Avenue without touching the raw nerve of Polish guilt and ambivalence toward Jews than it was for Warpechowski to wrestle with a dying carp without evoking the demons of Christianity.
The initial response from newspapers to the planting of a fake palm tree in the middle of the city was divided, but the public was hostile. According to Rajkowska, she frequently heard people on the street speculating that the offending tree was put there by Jews in order to mock Christian Poles. When I asked her why anyone would think this seemingly silly palm tree was a Zionist conspiracy, her response was slippery: she suggested that any tree not indigenous to Poland would be regarded as an affront and that at Christmas there was usually a huge fir tree on that particular island. But then, as Rajkowska herself noted, the intersection of Aleje Jerozolimskie and Nowy Swiat is near the site of an affluent eighteenth-century Jewish enclave that was looted and driven out, and Jerusalem Avenue itself is a constant reminder of a population that was slaughtered and expelled. The odd story of Warsaw’s one palm tree has still another twist. The vehe- mence of people’s response to Rajkowska’s claims about the palm tree is itself symptomatic of Poles’ often schizophrenic relationship to their own history. The tragedy of Jewish history in Poland often seems to be an affront to Poles’ own well-developed sense of betrayal and victimhood.
National identity, religion, and what can only be described as the palpable absence of Jews are divisive themes in contemporary Polish art, and no one has confronted them with the boldness, rigour, and simplicity of Artur mijewski. Represented by the Foksal Gallery Foundation in Warsaw, the hippest and most ambitious independent gallery in Poland, Zmijewski is on the cusp of a significant international career—a survey of his work opened at the prestigious mit List Visual Arts Center in Boston in May 2004, and he represented Poland at the 2005 Venice Biennale.
Zmijewski is a big, awkward, bear-like man with dark, intelligent eyes. He is also extremely reticent, even cryptic. Many Polish artists are defensive when speaking of Polish history, especially the history of Polish Jews, as though a foreign writer could never grasp their point of view and as though the issue itself would plunge them back into the stereotypes Poles have often been saddled with—as violent, nationalistic rabidly Catholic, drunken anti-Semites. As Norman Davies emphasizes in his epic narrative of the Warsaw Uprising, Rising ‘44: The Battle for Warsaw, the dizzying scale of the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis and the Soviets during their respective occupations, and the communist regime’s campaigns of misinformation, have made the character of twentieth-century Polish history little known. For these reasons and more, Zmijewski is extremely sensitive to the ease with which his work could be misread.
Zmijewski orchestrates situations, then films them in a spare, classical style. In the first and most affecting incarnation of Singing Lesson (2001), he employed a conductor to teach students from a school for the deaf to sing composer Jan Maklakiewicz’s stirring, romantic Polish Mass. The video follows the often-painful lessons and rehearsal process through to a weirdly magisterial formal rendition of a fragment of the Mass in a Protestant church in Warsaw. The stone-deaf choir remains in time and on cue, but their voices are not only grotesquely off-key, they are entirely out of control, trailing into guttural moans and shrill screeches.
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