Between the Cross and the Jewish Graveyard

I met Grzegorz Klaman and the writer and curator Aneta Szy?ak, Klaman’s long-time partner and collaborator, at the shipyard gates. Klaman and Szy?ak are both energetic, combative, and polemical. We took the road into the shipyard. It is owned by developers, operates at a fraction of its capacity, and is now mostly abandoned—huge, empty factories with their windows boarded up, rusting conveyor belts and cranes, and heaps of scrap metal. In an enclave of arts organizations that lease space from the current shipyard developers is Klaman and Szy?ak’s Wyspa Progress Foundation. This wildly ambitious space will be used for special projects and storage until the millions of zlotys required for renovation are secured.

One of Grzegorz Klaman’s most talented former students in the sculpture atelier at the Fine Arts Academy in Gdansk, Dorota Nieznalska, exhibited Passion from December 2001 into January 2002 at the Wyspa Gallery. Described by some as “the penis of Christ,” Passion consists of a large metal cross suspended by a chain, in the centre of which is a close-up colour photograph of male genitals and a projected video of the silently straining face and torso of a man bench-pressing weights. According to Nieznalska, who was raised in a devout family, Passion is not intended as a transgressive attack on Christianity but is rather an exploration of the male cult of the body. Nonetheless, after the work appeared on television, the League of Polish Families (and a member of parliament) filed a complaint with the regional prosecutor’s office under Article 196 of the Polish Penal Code for “offence against religious sensitivities.”

The League of Polish Families is a highly organized group whose leaders have become adept at exploiting loopholes in Polish law. Article 196, for instance, was originally ratified in order to protect religious minorities from harassment and defamation. Nieznalska’s ten-month trial between September 2002 and June 2003 was presided over by Justice Tomasz Zielinski, who permitted the prosecution to bring forth a procession of witnesses to testify that the conjunction of the cross and male genitals would, under any circumstances, offend their religious sensitivities. The expert witnesses in art history, law, and religion proposed by the defence, however, were summarily excluded as redundant and irrelevant.

What testimony there was on Nieznalska’s behalf, such as Aneta Szy?ak’s admittedly forced suggestion that in Passion the cross might be read as a more general symbol of suffering, was treated with condescension and contempt. “[I]t remains doubtless,” Zielinski wrote, “that in the Polish context, in the Polish tradition of civilization, the cross is unambiguously associated with the martyrdom of Christ.” As for Nieznalska’s underlying motives, which had to be established for a conviction: “the Defendant strived to achieve an artistic and personal success and to do so she was even ready to offend religious sensitivities, as the Judge finds it impossible to accept that a person with a degree, living in Poland where 95 percent of the population are Catholics would not realize the repercussions of placing male genitals on the cross where usually there is a figure of Jesus Christ to be found.” For Zielinski, the Catholic character of Polish civilization is fixed and uncomplicated.

Dorota Nieznalska was convicted under Article 196 and sentenced to six months of limited freedom, twenty hours of social work per month, and financial responsibility for the cost of the trial. While artists signed petitions protesting her conviction, no politician from any party came out to support her or to defend the broader issue of freedom of artistic expression. Even Lech Walesa, hero of the Solidarity movement and the “road to freedom,” came out publicly against Nieznalska, commenting that her sentence had not been nearly severe enough.

The Nieznalska affair signals the degree to which the cultural freedoms promised in the early 1990s have been retracted. “There was a chance to move forward,” Artur Tajber, professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow, told me one night, “but by the mid-1990s we lost energy.” There is, however, a ray of hope. In May 2004, the regional appellate court in Gdansk overturned Judge Zielinski’s ruling on the grounds that Nieznalska’s right to full defence had been violated. A new trial will take place next year.

Whereas Grzegorz Klaman and Aneta Szy?ak are both worldly and sophisticated thinkers, Dorota Nieznalska, now in her early thirties, comes across as shy, intense, and in many ways naive. The force of her work rests in its earnest wilfulness. Early pieces, such as The Thighs in Camelias (1995 ), a pair of thighs modelled in resin and leather with artificial flowers sprouting between them, and Fetish (1997), which includes a hammock woven from willows, beeswax, and women’s hair, use materials in a luxurious and allegorical way. Her more recent work, however, has tended toward austere multimedia installations. In an untitled piece from 1999, she photographed a naked man with a whip in front of a pregnant dog, wearing a sinister leather muzzle over his penis. In Omnipotence II, Gender: Masculine (2000), a precursor to Passion, steel mirrors are mounted on scaffolding on the wall, a chalk-covered exercise mat lies on the floor, and a recording plays the groaning sounds of a man lifting weights. The whole installation is bathed in lurid red light. Justice Zielinski’s interpretations aside, Passion surely needs to be understood in the context of Nieznalska’s explorations of the body and gender in a male-dominated religious culture.

The consequences of the trial for Nieznalska have been far-reaching. Solo exhibitions in the provincial towns of Slupsk and Ostrow Wielkopolski were cancelled due to the intervention of the League of Polish Families. Unlike savvy artists such as Katarzyna Kozyra, the ferocious Alicja Zebrowska (who made a photograph of herself defecating in front of an image of her mother), or even Zbigniew Libera, Nieznalska is not by temperament a fighter and she was genuinely shocked by the reception to her work. Several prominent Polish artists think that the domineering Klaman and Szy?ak pushed Nieznalska to create art whose implications she did not fully understand in order to advance their own radical aesthetic agendas. Artur Tajber complained that they should at least have warned Nieznalska about what might happen, and performance artist Wladyslaw Kazmierczak, director of the Baltic Gallery of Contemporary Art, commented bitterly that Passion was virtually created by Szy?ak and Klaman.

And now Nieznalska herself seems trapped in the role of victim. In a recent group exhibit, Nieznalska simply displayed footage from her trial, which was shot by Kazmierczak. She admitted to me that she obsessively follows the blogs on a website devoted to her case.

In the meantime, Klaman and Szy?ak forge ahead with the new Wyspa Progress Foundation, which, given Szy?ak’s rising international career, is virtually guaranteed success, and they continue to curate Nieznalska’s work. “We are a generation who saw communist times,” Szy?ak told me, breathless. “Like the people of the forties, we saw both, and for us this past is not just a generational responsibility but a kind of fate. We hope to build a new foundation.”