Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West (24 page)

Szukalski and Miciński both represent the many undiscovered paths of the canon that were marginalised, mostly for ideological reasons. Their political incorrectness is punished with a lack of presence (absence from textbooks and any other circulation), and given a hallucinatory existence. From here it is only a step to ghastliness and fantasticality, continuing as a sequence:
invisibility– unburial– obliteration. This is a reverse strategy. Instead of entering the mainstream of official culture, and also – to quote Szukalski – the correct “sexless humanism” – it holes up even deeper under the hood of melancholia.

The subject of hiding away and shame was quite recently undertaken in an interesting manner by the project– book
Inhibition.
As its author, Roman Dziadkiewicz says, the inspiration for it was the discovery of non-canonical works in the archives of the National Museum in Krakow, and in those works, the displaced narratives of Polish art. “The project digs out the shameless emotions, at times charming, aristocratic, futuristic, and all of the sudden verging on fascism. Today they’re easily ridiculed by saying that they have survived in the caricatural form of the argot of right-wing politicians. Yet I am interested in what has become of them. Maybe the post-war, democratic, flattened culture failed to rework them and had them quickly displaced? And they were an important part of culture between the two world wars.” It is also a penetration of a toxic, contagious Kraków spirit in its numerous manifestations, as the symbol of Polish “culture” and “avant-garde”. Dziadkiewicz chose the person of Emil Zegadłowicz, an ambiguous writer of Young Poland, who knocks down our conventional thoughts on the era between the two World Wars. The Author of
Zmory (Nightmares)
, Zegadłowicz was perceived in his time as a leftist, but could also be associated with ‘National Democracy’, conservatism, praising the charms of the landowning lifestyle, rural character, and the specters of early Christianity. Dziadkiewicz “repeats” Zegadłowicz’s gesture through a book– reenactment, issuing a reprint of the “secret” erotic poem Wrzosy (Heathers) in five copies, repeating at the same time the artist’s gesture in making illegible his own strategy, so that the “modernist exaltations become a carrier of contemporary content, providing historical and psychological backgrounds.” Similarly, the anachronism of Kozak’s actions deciphers the works of Miciński and reverses the process of rendering his art illegible
through a range of falsified readings of previous interpreters. It is only in this manner that the deep traditions – and these are the traditions in the plural form – can be “delved into”. There are many more sources of contemporary emotions than are presented in official culture. Some needs were simply displaced from official circulation, yet they remained in hiding and this is why they may come to life at all. As Dziadkiewicz says, “in the unmanaged strands, demons or hallucinations start to be born.”

In searching for the “other Traditions”, as American poet John Ashbery put it in the title of his book, the marginalized narrations that break up the canon, the reclaiming of the “untimely” artists, discovery is coupled not only with the unearthing of shameful content but also with the overcoming of shame, dressing the melancholic wound, and breaking away from the vicious circle of phantasms.

So it seems the miasma is our pathological, guilty pleasure, we continue to live like zombies, cultivating our martyrology, relishing in death. I seldom see my country as ravingly happy as when somebody dies, as if we were secretly waiting for it. Even when Margaret Thatcher died, there was something to the coverage and the politicians’ behaviour, as if they got a new spur in life, now planning to call squares after her and erect memorials. But in a greater sense this means a traumatophilia which doesn’t let us get over the past. The Other in Polish history and of the whole East are of course, its Jews.

But how can you psychoanalyze the whole nation? With history “visited by the smoke”, to use the expression of Polish feminist writer Agata Araszkiewicz, over and over, way too many times? In a city with a history of uprisings, and all of them lost? The painful method is to recall the tragically erased Jewish presence and its forms of life on the eastern European lands. There appear new attempts on behalf of the remaining Jewish community, shrunk now to 20,000 people, strategies to fight the noxious feeling induced by yet another Catholic feast of vainglory and vampirism in our
states. Foreign minister and Bullingdon club member Radek Sikorski and his like go on non stop in the EU parliament about how Europe can only unify when Western Europeans will “feel our pain” from the twentieth century. We’re always willing to play the suffering card. And yes, to an extent it’s justified. Poles feel their history hasn’t been recognized enough in the world. Yet what we need is not another attempt to induce more Polish martyrology, we need more counter-attempts to ground it in the counter-history, to recall the forgotten Jewish past, then we’ll try to reconciliate with it. To commemorate the Ghetto Uprising against an increasingly sickening stuffing of the Warsaw Uprising gives us more alternative heroes, more reassessment of the “red”, unwanted history of Poland, before the war and during People’s Republic, instead of relishing in the most reactionary elements of interwar period, with all its xenophobia, anti-Semitism and nationalism. Let’s, even if that seems crazy enough to a Pole, make it more rational, humane, reconnect with the unrealized socialist past, which was suppressed, and for which, our unsung heroes, like those in the Warsaw Ghetto fought, to the silence on the other side of the Wall.

Even before the dissolution of the Cold War order, post-communist studies within post-colonial discourse were mapping the problem of the way our dependency influences our psyche. This is even often called post-dependency studies. Yet another dependency was less direct, yet as influential - that is, upon Western, capitalist imperialism. Such groundbreaking books as Maria Todorova’s
Imagining the Balkans
or Ivan Colovic’s
Balkans – terror of culture
analyse the idea of balkanization and the influence of self-colonization as one of the responses to westernization since the ninteenth century. At a recent series of events in Warsaw,
Panslavisms
, scholars and artists from the former republics debated over how they might save the idea of the East without it becoming chauvinistic. They proposed among other things the rethinking of Polish ninteenth-century nationalism, with its slogan
For Our Freedom and Yours
, which meant that one nation’s liberatory fight
would liberate the others, in this case other eastern countries from the Tsarist, Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires; the group Slavs and Tatars contributed a poster translating the slogan into Russian and Farsi. Today, that may mean liberation from a westernizing neoliberalism, which is experienced acutely in Eastern Europe. They also seem inspired by the idea of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as a multi-racial, ‘Sarmatian’ eastern empire of Poles, Lithuanians, Jews, Ukrainians, Armenians and Tatars, while criticizing the actual reality of it, in the colonial relations Poles had towards the
Kresy.
I was surprised though, that throughout the many discussions over how this new eastern international association could look like nobody even mentioned the most obvious one, that actually existed for decades: the Soviet Union. The answer to that is obvious – it’s too discredited in the intellectuals eyes to seriously consider it. But the USSR at first wanted to be the most accomplished realization of eastern internationalism. Even in its name, it refused to use any national territory, proposing instead a perfectly abstract association of territories run by workers councils. In reality, it eventually became just another realization of Russian Empire. The next chapters will discuss more at length the communist culture of this Empire, and the reality of communist ideals.

If by chance you’d had gone back in time to 1990s Poland, you’d have been struck how ‘reality’ had been suddenly changed into an augmented cardboard maquette made up of commercial products.
Buildings become mere canvases for gigantic bottles of Coca-Cola, Snickers or West cigarettes, old neon signs were taken down for the sake of big logos of McDonalds and Burger King, the familiar grey newspapers started to have tons of very bright colors applied to them, and the marble of Stalinist buildings was covered by big stickers, where somebody’s teeth were bigger than people’s heads. It was like that in the whole Bloc. “Advertisements have conquered civilisation,” Russian writer Arina Kholina said in 2011 in a Russian literary journal, where she compared bannered promotions to “knickers drying on a balcony”. Public space was swamped:
Turn left after Toyota, there you will see L’Oreal, and after Pepsi turn right – for the house where Sony is
, sounded the typical directions. Many of the new ads were illegal, contributing to the general image of the former East as an easily conquerable no-man’s land. To this day not much has changed. Yet, today not only the East, but the whole neoliberal capitalist part of the world finds itself in a great crisis of representation, sitting somewhere between the big Virgin Media signposts and the “tasteful” retro of Keep Calm and Carry On. Despite it touching both political sides, the aesthetic crisis doesn’t bother the ruling class nearly enough. More worryingly, this also concerns the progressive side, whose political paralysis paralyzed its aesthetics too. Between gifs, the hideous layout of social networks and tumblr, rots the corpse of reality. As this book is interested in looking back at the reality of socialism, this chapter wants to go back – as you do these days - against what Brecht and others wished for, and ask archaeological questions about Realism as the lost model for involvement in reality. What was the realistic solution in the state controlled art and later, in democracy?

‘Socialist realism’ was a style that transcended both Russia and the 1930s. The first Western reactions to sotsrealism were hostile. America before the Cold War was a country in transit where socialism was popular, and the two empires were watching each other closely. As English art historian Herbert Read justly pointed out in the 1950s, sotsrealism was not simply kitsch, but derived from the general nature of the popular arts in various epochs - art which “had never been of any great cultural or aesthetic significance, and the reason for this we ascribed to its realistic nature – the very quality which is in Russia extolled as the supreme aim in arts”. An example of this is Mexican muralism and its great influence on American art of the New Deal era, which was a contemporary to Soviet sotsrealism and was made overwhelmingly by Mexican communist artists. It’s a rare example of art’s influence going from a poorer country to the more powerful one, bottom-up, and not top-down. There was also an uncanny similarity between the mass culture in the States and Soviet Russia, where in both cases, grand scale realism was a low, popular art. Simultaneously with the invention of the New Person in USSR – a sporty, cultivated, harmoniously built man - you had the
emergence of comic Superheroes, equally unreal in their fitness. Both were ‘men of steel’.

4.1 Human species, man and woman - crude Sotsrealist gendering. Peasant Man and Woman on the Green Bridge, Vilnius

Yet avant-garde and realism were constantly opposed to each other. It mostly derives from the reading of post-war (sometimes even pre-war, like Clement Greenberg) critics, who were to quick in interpreting the new realism of the 1930s as necessarily complicit in totalitarianism, ignoring the political nuances of certain forms of realism. In this chapter I’ll seek a theoretical redemption of realism, that at the same time could serve for a better interpretation and historicization of ‘real socialism’ and the current difficulty in which militant art has found itself. It will be necessarily a tough task, but realism needs no redemption – it still happens in arts, only popular arts, like TV shows and still sometimes happens in its critical, Brechtian, form. It goes largely unnoticed by the critics, with the prominent exception of Fredric Jameson, who has promised to devote a still unpublished book to the question of realism, and wrote extensively on the contemporary historical novel and ‘realist’ TV serials like
The Wire.
Realism seems an unfashionable position to take, which necessarily re-emerges within the post 9/11 world, and especially, in the post-2008 financial crisis world. If 2011 started what can be interpreted as the gradual rejection of the 1980s order, both factors – financial and political - seek their expression via the most available channels – internet, youtube, social networks. Cell-phone films pose the question of reality vs. simulacrum, in which we have to believe in reality again, a reality for so long smashed to pieces by the mediation of TV news and computer simulation. The greatest success of postmodernism is that we still behave as if we don’t believe what was going on. The mass of depictions of current wars, revolutions, riots, protests, show trials doesn’t seem to make them
real
enough.