One of Zmijewski’s most recent videos, Our Songbook (2003), shot in Israel, is among his most moving and painful. In it, he asks elderly Polish Jews living in nursing homes in Tel Aviv to sing songs, in Polish, remembered from their pre-war childhoods. The fragmentary songs, sung in frail, laboured voices, are often patriotic. Several of the people Zmijewski approached fiercely refused to participate, one of them shouting (in Polish) “I don’t want to speak your language, I don’t want to hear your voice!” Zmijewski’s comment on this was curious. “I’m interested in anti-Semitism in Poland,” he said, “and anti-Polishness in Israel.” This may seem merely naive or, worse, disingenuous, but it isn’t. Most artists in Poland insist upon viewing Poland’s significant Jewish cultural past as part of a complex but specifically Polish history that was erased by the Nazis and Soviets. “There is nothing between Russia and Germany. This part of Europe is invisible for the West,” he said, suggesting that the work of the Soviet and Nazi imperiums was complete. Our Songbook, with all the agonizing irony in the “our” of its title, brings back to consciousness a form of identity that has become virtually inconceivable. But Zmijewski is deluded when he insists that this work is about Poles in Israel and not the Holocaust, about now and not the past. When history is as unresolved as it is in Poland, when its meanings are still so difficult to sort through, it is impossible to remain wholly in the present.
On a bleak, snowy Friday evening in February in Lódz, the Atlas Sztuki Gallery, set in a spacious, elegantly renovated nineteenth-century Jewish market hall, was packed with an upscale crowd of TV camera operators, photographers, reporters, professors, and artists. Waitresses in skimpy black dresses whisked glasses of wine to the guests; burly guards in tight-fitting suits flanked the glass front doors; the gallery director rushed about with harried self-importance. This was the new corporate Poland, confused and on steroids: the menacing bouncers drove drunken guests back out into the alley. When the gaunt figure of Zbigniew Libera arrived to deliver a speech introducing his first solo exhibition in Poland in eight years, a big, derisive smile on his face, the crowd surged and cameras flashed.
After coming of age during the Polish conceptual art movement in the late 1970s, Libera spent a traumatic year in prison during martial law for printing illegal brochures containing, among other things, his own satirical political cartoons. That an artist of Libera’s stature has not had an exhibition in Poland in eight years is partly explained by his intransigence. He withdrew from the 1997 Venice Biennale, for instance, when the curator refused to include his infamous Lego: Concentration Camp (1996), an edition of Lego sets with images of meticulously built concentration camps on the cover.
Formerly a writer for a Warsaw newspaper, Libera is attuned to the ways in which the media, art, politics, and history are perceived. In his most recent project, Libera staged “positive” or “happy” versions of canonical historical photographs with perverse veracity, printing some as enlarged magazine covers and the rest as press photographs. In one, he takes the famous image of skeletal death-camp survivors in ragged striped uniforms, pressed up against barbed wire and staring hollowly toward the viewer, and turns it into an image of happy campers, well fed and smiling, mugging for the camera. Another image re-enacts the equally famous photograph of villagers fleeing an American napalm attack in Vietnam. In Libera’s version, the naked girl is white, attractive, and ecstatic, the people around her are recreational parachutists, and a beautiful black-and-white thunderstorm rises in the background.
If Lego: Concentration Camp suggests the ways in which the Holocaust has been absorbed into popular culture, the happy magazine covers mirror the uncritical pleasure with which we consume historical tragedy through the media. Libera’s humour is sharp and whimsical, but in the end these images feel sinister, the original photographs hovering beyond reach behind them.
Outside the gates of the legendary Gdansk Shipyard, there are three towering steel crosses with ships’ anchors (symbol of the Polish Home Army resistance fighters during World War II) looped around their tops. Set in the crosses’ bevelled shafts are huge bronze-relief sculptures of heroic shipbuilders wielding the tools of their trade. On the outer walls of the shipyard are wreaths of flowers, plaques commemorating those killed during the strike of 1970, photographs of Pope John Paul II, and reproductions of paintings of the Madonna. Hideous though this monument is, it is historically important and enormously popular. Designed by a shipyard worker and constructed during the year of Solidarity—such a monument was one of the workers’ demands in the pivotal strike in the summer of 1980—it is a shining example of the problematic unity of Christianity and Polish nationalism.
Inside the gates, a poorly maintained memorial to the collapse of communism called “Roads to Freedom” contains Grzegorz Klaman’s The Gates (2000), a very different kind of monument. Commissioned to recognize the twentieth anniversary of Solidarity, it has two parts. The first resembles the hulking, rusted bow of a sinking ship, and inside are electronic light boards, across which stream alternating statements from communist, Solidarity, and other ideological voices that are surprisingly difficult to distinguish from one another: “Each factory should become our fortress.” “Giving up agitation is a total and irreversible resignation from democracy.”
The second part is a precariously tilted, clunky version of Russian constructivist Vladimir Tatlin’s model for the spiralling Monument to the Third International (1919– 1920). The Gates is an ambiguous but provocative work, insistent upon the importance of historical thinking in democracy. The sinking hull is a kind of archive where conflicting discourses remain open-ended, and the evocation of Tatlin’s tribute to the revolution suggests the collapse of utopian ideologies, as well as the importance of utopian vision. Unlike the triad of crosses, Klaman’s piece was received by the city authorities, the shipyard workers, and the public at large with hostility and derision. “They wanted a memorial,” Klaman told me, “and I wanted an anti-memorial.” Joanna Rajkowska’s palm tree anti-monument is allusive and absurdist; Klaman explicitly invites dialogue, viewing history and our understanding of it as unfinished.
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