No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Giving Back the Gift: Predicaments of Patronage and an Offering from Włodzimierz Borowski
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 August 2023
Abstract
At a 1966 Symposium hosted by a nitrogen plant in socialist Poland, artist Włodzimierz Borowski staged a performance. He declared the plant's urea furnaces to be works of art and returned them to plant management. With this “gift,” he reversed the Symposium's patronage model, which had put the plant's resources at his disposal: he gave back the gift of patronage. This article uses the device of returning the gift of state support to explore ambivalent engagements with the official art system. This formula is applied to two later actions giving back (or away) resources granted to artists by public patrons. The discussed artists—Borowski, Zofia Kulik and Łukasz Surowiec—use this device to contend with their complicity as beneficiaries of compromised funding arrangements. However, the article assesses their counter-gifts not as dissident acts against repressive regimes but as constructive efforts to arbitrate with authorities and gain purchase as working artists.
- Type
- Articles
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
References
1. By characterizing repression and thaw as complementary strategies of domination, Guzek sweeps all socialist-era cultural production into his totalitarian framework. See: Łukasz Guzek, “Władza vs. sztuki w PRL-u i dziś,” DYSKURS Pismo Naukowo-Artystyczne ASP we Wrocławiu, no. 21 (April 2017): 37.
2. Moskalewicz, Magdalena, “Who Doesn't like Aleksander Kobzdej?: A State Artist's Career in the People's Republic of Poland,” in Skrodzka, Aga, Lu, Xiaoning, and Marciniak, Katarzyna, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures (Oxford, 2019), 196–223Google Scholar.
3. Anna Maria Leśniewska uses the cited phrases to present the Offering in the sole book on the Symposium (Anna Maria Leśniewska, Puławy 66: I Sympozjum Artystów Plastyków i Naukowców [Puławy, 2006], 44, 46). Łukasz Guzek, presuming the Offering to be a straightforward critique of the regime, credits the action for deterring officials from supporting subsequent industrial Plein-Airs (Guzek, “Władza vs. sztuka,” 43).
4. Yurchak, Alexei, Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, 2006), 5, 7Google Scholar.
5. Smola, writing about late Soviet nonconformity, applies the concept of “community as device” to scenes external to official culture. I believe her perspective also services the Plein-Air “contact zones” between critical and official milieus. See: Klavdia Smola, “Community as Device: Metonymic Art of the Late Soviet Underground,” Russian Literature 96–98 (Spring 2018): 13–50.
6. On Russian Constructivism's post-1921 turn from aesthetic laboratory to industrial production, see Maria Gough, The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution (Berkeley, 2005), especially Chapters 4–5. For a text theorizing this development as it occurred, see Nikolai Tarabukin, Ot mol΄berta k mashine (Moscow, 1923).
7. See opening day program in Leśniewska, Puławy 66, 88.
8. Kemp-Welch, Klara, Antipolitics in Central European Art: Reticence as Dissidence under Post-Totalitarian Rule 1956–1989 (London, 2017), 35Google Scholar.
9. The term “playing field” (pole gry) was also the title of Borowski's 1972 retrospective at Galeria Współczesna.
10. Guzek emphasizes the non-urban locations of the Puławy Symposium and other Plein-Airs in order to downplay their influence (Guzek, “Władza vs. sztuki,” 40). I argue that if these settings were important, it is because they afforded flexibility to participants who pivoted between permanent urban institutions and durational festivals, testing the parameters of both and taking risks at Plein-Airs that might have lasting repercussions at their home institutions. I offer two examples: Marian Bogusz co-organized the initial Biennial of Spatial Forms while running the Warsaw gallery Krzywe Koło. The latter was shuttered in 1965, the same year the Biennial was launched. Ludwiński, likewise, ran the Mona Lisa Gallery (1967–71) in Wrocław while organizing and attending Plein-Airs.
11. Jacek Dobrowolski uses this phrase to describe artistic circles in the 1970s: “Counterculture, Hippies, and Alternative Social Movements in Poland in the 1970s,” in Łukasz Ronduda and Georg Schöllhammer, eds., KwieKulik: Zofia Kulik and Przemysław Kwiek (Warsaw, 2012), 512.
12. On escalating conflict at the 1981 Osieki Plein-Air in its political contexts, see: Łukasz Mojsak, “Kontestacje osieckie w latach 1967–1981: Dwa przełomy,” in Jerzy Buziałkowski, Piotr Pawłowski and Ryszard Ziarkiewicz, eds., Kolekcja Osiecka Muzeum w Koszalinie: Katalog malarstwa, rzeźby, grafiki i fotografii uczestników plenerów w Osiekach w latach 1963—1981 ze zbiorów Muzeum w Koszalinie (Koszalin, 2018).
13. Luiza Nader, “Wspólnota Wyobraźni Jako Dyssensus. VIII Spotkanie Artystów i Teoretyków Sztuki Świdzin/Osieki 1970,” Sztuka i Dokumentacja, no. 18 (2018): 52; Piotr Piotrowski, Znaczenia modernizmu. W stronę historii sztuki polskiej po 1945 roku (Poznań, 1999), 125.
14. I am referring to the use of police and military violence to quell protests and strikes. In 1968, the state's repression of student demonstrations was compounded by its concurrent antisemitic campaign, which ultimately drove a “forced exodus” of Polish Jews. See: Stola, Dariusz, “Anti-Zionism as a Multipurpose Policy Instrument: The Anti-Zionist Campaign in Poland, 1967–1968,” The Journal of Israeli History 25, no. 1 (August 2006): 175–201CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the 1968 and 1970 conflicts as blows to the revisionist opposition's confidence in agonistic engagement with the state, see Ost, David, Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-Politics: Opposition and Reform in Poland since 1968 (Philadelphia, 1991), 49–53Google Scholar.
15. Piotr Piotrowski argued that artists embraced official socialist values at Plein-Airs with a mixture of “political naivety” and “pragmatic resourcefulness.” Piotrowski, Znaczenia modernizmu, 124–25. Qualifying this claim, Magdalena Moskalewicz writes: “Rather than a cunning trick played on the communist authorities . . . this performance of ‘pragmatic opportunism’ . . . should be seen as a reflection of the congruence between the artists’ belief systems and the official ideology. Both parties shared interests and goals.” “Formula and Factory: Jan Chwałczyk and Jerzy Ludwiński's Highly Material Conceptualism” in Christian Berger, ed., Conceptualism and Materiality: Matters of Art and Politics (Leiden, 2019), 111.
16. Smola, “Community as Device,” 14, 20.
17. Nader, “Wspólnota Wyobraźni Jako Dyssensus,” 49–51.
18. Guzek, “Władza vs. sztuki,” 38–39.
19. Struktura kryształu. Directed by Krzysztof Zanussi. Warsaw: Studio Filmowe Tor, 1969.
20. On discourses of “democratizing” [upowszechnianie] art (facilitating mass access to art) in state policies and as conceived by artists, see Bernadeta Stano, Artysta w fabryce: Dwa oblicza mecenatu przemysłowego w PRL (Krakow, 2019), 351–76.
21. A day-to-day event schedule can be found in Leśniewska, Puławy 66, 89–115.
22. To enshrine 1966 as a milestone connecting Poland's origins to its bright future, state leader Władysław Gomułka launched a campaign to build one thousand new schools honoring the millennial anniversary. Using modular designs and prefabricated construction, this massive infrastructural project brought modernized schools to rural areas, making tangible progress toward socialism's promise to equalize living standards for all. See: Anna Cymer, “Tysiąclatki—szkoły na rocznicę,” Culture.pl, at https://culture.pl/pl/dzielo/tysiaclatki-szkoly-na-rocznice (Accessed January 24, 2022). The Puławy Symposium transmitted the related promise that cultural amenities should be equally accessible to rural and urban populations.
23. “Pamphlet for Participants of the First Symposium of Visual Artists and Scientists in Puławy” cited in full in Leśniewska, Puławy 66, 12–13.
24. “Puławy 66,” Polska, no. 11:42, introduction accompanying essays and photographs, author unattributed.
25. (Pierwsze propozycje artystyczne, wrzucone do tygla “Azotów”). “Pamphlet” cited in Leśniewska, Puławy 66, 12.
26. (Nowoczesna nauka i technika podają dłoń nowoczesnej sztuce, żeby czerpać nowe siły z wytwarzanych przez nią ożywczych napięć i odnajdywać w nich własne humanistyczne oblicze). Lecture by Symposium commissioner Mieczysław Porębski, cited in Leśniewska, Puławy 66, 30, amended translation.
27. Porozumienie zawarte pomiędzy Centralną Radą Związków Zawodowych a Zarządem Głównym ZPAP w sprawie udostępniania i upowszechniania sztuk plastycznych, AAN Warszawa zespół ZPAP, no. 1/104. See: Bernadeta Stano, “Plenery pod skrzydłami Wielkiego Przemysłu. Mity i próby ich wskrzeszenia” in Alicja Kisielewska, Monika Kostaszuk-Romanowska, Andrzej Kisielewski, eds., PRL-owskie re-sentymenty (Gdaǹsk, 2017), 217–18.
28. The term “spatial form” (forma przestrzenna) in the Biennial title elaborates on the spatial constructions (prostranstvennye konstruktsii) of Russian Constructivism (imported into Polish art by sculptor Katarzyna Kobro as “spatial compositions” [kompozycje przestrzenne]). Anecdotal accounts present Zamech's patronage as a casual, consensual arrangement between Kwiatkowski and Zamech workers. Janusz Hankowski, co-founder of Galeria EL, recalls how Zamech supplied electricity to the gallery thanks to a cooperative worker who quietly set up a link to Zamech's power grid. Kwiatkowski was employed at Zamech's Decoration Workshop and had participated in cultural initiatives with the Zamech workforce since the 1950s. When it came time to organize the inaugural biennial, support from Zamech was the natural extension of a cooperative relationship already in place. See: Dzieweczyńska, Karina, ed., Gerard Kwiatkowski/Jürgen Blum: Założyciel Galerii EL w Elblągu (Elbląg, 2014), 50–51Google Scholar. This grassroots model was a singular case among factory-hosted Plein-Airs.
29. See: Jarosław Denisiuk, Otwarta Galeria. Formy przestrzenne w Elblągu. Przewodnik (Open Gallery: Spatial Forms in Elbląg. Guide, Elbląg, 2015), 22. The division of labor casting artists as creators and workers as builders was complicated by the fact that many artists were themselves accustomed to fabricating others’ designs. Artists commonly earned income by taking commissions from the State Enterprise Fine Arts Studios (PP Pracownie Sztuk Plastycznych), which often delegated design and execution phases to separate artists. On this practice, see Załuski, Tomasz, “KwieKulik and the Political Economy of the Potboiler,” Third Text 32, no. 4 (October 2018): 394–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
30. In addition to Kwiatkowski, artists Henryk Stażewski, Jan Chwałczyk, Alfred Lenica, and Edward Krasiński attended both events.
31. Photographs of the Symposium made on commission by photojournalist Eustachy Kossakowski for the official magazine Polska offer a vital resource for taking up Klavdia Smola's call to reconstruct lifeworlds underlying cultural artifacts. Kossakowski's photographs provide a richer record of social interactions at the Symposium than textual chronicles of the event.
32. “Program Premises” cited in full in Leśniewska, Puławy 66, 87–89.
33. See excerpts of Mieczysław Kołodziej's speech cited in Leśniewska, Puławy 66, 89.
34. This exhibition was curated by decorative artist Jan Bruzda, who researched artistic applications of polymers and spent his career promoting their usage, publishing books on the topic such as: Jan Bruzda, Tworzywa sztuczne w plastyce (Synthetic Products in Art, Warsaw, 1973).
35. Artists had incentives to embrace this prompt. It was compatible with the interest in scientific discourse pervading art at this time and, as Magdalena Moskalewicz notes, artists accustomed to conditions of scarcity welcomed free access to materials: Moskalewicz, “Formula and Factory,” 111.
36. Luiza Nader traces Ludwiński's role in this tendency in the case of his lecture “The Post-Artistic Era” and its reception at a 1970 Plein-Air in Osieki. See: Nader, “Wspólnota Wyobraźni Jako Dyssensus,” 49. This tendency is also signaled in the title of Kwiatkowski's gallery in Elbląg—Galeria EL: Laboratorium Sztuki (Gallery EL: Art Laboratory). The keyword “laboratory” was associated with pre-war constructivism.
37. See: Laberschek, Marcin, “W cieniu fabryki. Wizja katastrofy Zakładów Azotowych w Mościcach w pomniku Wilhelma Sasnala,” Zarządzanie w Kulturze 21, no. 4 (December 2020): 337CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
38. Jerzy Ludwiński, “Włodzimierza Borowskiego podróż do kresu sztuki,” Kresy, no. 4, cited in the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw's online archive: https://artmuseum.pl/pl/archiwum/archiwum-wlodzimierza-borowskiego/1242 (accessed May 29, 2023).
39. Borowski's career-long friendship with Ludwiński likely explains his logo submission. On their rapport, see Borowski's commemorative texts “Jurek i Włodek w drodze” (Jurek and Włodek on the road, 2001) and “Metody Jurka” (Jurek's methods, 2001). These and other texts by Borowski can be found in the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw's online archive, at https://artmuseum.pl/pl/archiwum/archiwum-wlodzimierza-borowskiego/1166 (accessed January 29, 2022).
40. All excerpts of Borowski's description are amended translations from where they appear in Leśniewska, Puławy 66, 45–46. The full description in Polish can be viewed online, at https://artmuseum.pl/pl/archiwum/archiwum-wlodzimierza-borowskiego/1219/79379 (accessed January 24, 2022).
41. I am grateful to Andrea F. Bohlman for her observations on the sheet music.
42. This theme guides art historian Rachel Haidu's interpretation of the performance. Rachel Haidu, “Humiliation and Resistance: Borowski's 4th Syncretic Show” (Works and Reconstructions, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, 2010).
43. This procedure inverted Borowski's earlier production of objects quasi-organic in appearance and titled Artons (Artony): “Just as I had formerly negated the ‘Biological’ by denying its logic, this time I negated the functionality of utilitarian objects by assigning them organic qualities.” Włodzimierz Borowski, Pole gry (exhibition catalog, Galeria Współczesna, Warsaw 1972).
44. (prowokacja wobec Sztuki? Wymuszenie czegoś na niej?) Włodzimierz Borowski, “Opis III i IV Pokazu Synkretycznego” in “Pokazy Synkretyczne. Po latach. Impresje” (handwritten manuscript, 1996): https://artmuseum.pl/pl/archiwum/archiwum-wlodzimierza-borowskiego/1703/79372 (accessed January 24, 2022).
45. Maciej Gdula, “KwieKulik: Defying Cynicism, Defying Anti-Politics,” in Ronduda and Schöllhammer, eds., KwieKulik, 513.
46. A description and video recording of “Ofiarowanie bunkra” (Offering of the Bunker), found on the Raster Gallery website, at http://rastergallery.com/galeria/blog/ofiarowanie-bunkra/ (accessed January 24, 2022).
47. Berlant, Lauren, “Structures of Unfeeling: Mysterious Skin,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 28 (2015), 193–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
48. Azoty Director Mieczysław Kołodziej described worker-artist interactions at the Symposium as a reciprocal “shock method” stimulating a “beneficial reassessment of worldviews” (pożyteczne przewartościowanie światopoglądowe) in artists and “sensitizing the still-naïve [workers] assisting the creative process” (Artyści . . . uczulili ludzi nierozbudzonych, asystujących i pomagających w procesie twórczym). Mieczysław Kołodziej, “Piękne obowiązki,” Polska, no. 11:42.
49. Among these multiple meanings, Borowski's intentions do not necessarily reign sovereign, for we can also privilege the performance's reception by his audience (or sectors thereof). This would be in keeping with Borowski's career-long tactic of self-effacement, which Piotr Piotrowski interprets in the context of the postmodernist death of the author (pronounced by Roland Barthes). See Piotr Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-garde in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989, trans. Anna Brzyski (London, 2011), 192–95.
50. Smola, “Community as Device,” 42.
51. See Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago, 1992), particularly pages 13–14, 26–27.
52. See Nader, Luiza, “A Summons to See: It Looks Pretty from a Distance,” trans. Rose, Eliza, in Szymczyk, Adam, ed. Wilhelm Sasnal: Untitled (Reader) (Cologne, 2022), 190Google Scholar.
53. Despite this generational difference, Kulik and Borowski's social and professional milieus overlapped: for example, Borowski participated in the 1971 Biennial of Spatial Forms (subtitled Zjazd marzycieli [Dreamers’ Congress]) briefly attended by Kulik during the Legnica Plein-Air. When asked if she and Przemysław Kwiek were conceptualists, Kulik objected on the basis that conceptualism in Poland was “academic, turned away from the current conditions of reality, from concrete, contextualized existence.” KwieKulik aimed instead to “expose the conditions” (ukazywać uwarunkowania) of the prevailing order. See: Tomasz Załuski, “KwieKulik i konceptualizm w uwarunkowaniach PRL-u. Przyczynek do analizy problemu,” Sztuka i Dokumentacja 6 (2012), 79.
54. Wiktoria Szczupacka notes Dobrowolski's wariness toward this moniker in her lecture on KwieKulik's art worker positions. Szczupacka's approach aligns with my own in that she takes a revisionist stance against the state repression thesis (what she calls the “totalitarian approach”). See: Wiktoria Szczupacka, “Art Workers Between Avant-Garde Art Circles and the Cultural Policy of the Late Communist State—KwieKulik's Artistic Practice and the Issue of Work during the 1970s in the People's Republic of Poland” (paper presented at the conference “To the Left of Power? Radical Culture in Eastern Europe in the 1960s and 1970s,” Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, Riga, September 27, 2021). KwieKulik shared the term “art worker” with Gerard Kwiatkowski, who organized the above-mentioned Biennial of Spatial Forms. A rich record of activities related to this identification by Kwiatkowski, KwieKulik, and their peers is Kwiatkowski's five-volume zine Notatnik Robotnika Sztuki (Notebook of an Art Worker), (Elbląg, 1972–73).
55. Jacek Dobrowolski, “Counterculture, Hippies, and Alternative Social Movements,” 512.
56. See Maciej Gdula, “Defying Cynicism, Defying Anti-Politics.”
57. Their series Earning Money and Making Art is one example of how they absorbed commission work into their independent activities in order to expose their working conditions. See Załuski, “KwieKulik and the Political Economy of the Potboiler,” 396.
58. For example, they continuously applied to obtain funds and official status for their initiative to document ephemeral art—Pracownia Działań, Dokumentacji, i Upowszechniania—PDDiU (the Studio of Activities, Documentation and Propagation). Their proposed budget included two full-time salaries for their labor. Their application for funds and related correspondence (drawn out 1974–80) is detailed in Klara Kemp-Welch, “Art Documentation and Bureaucratic Life: The ‘Case’ of the Studio of Activities, Documentation and Propagation,” in Ronduda and Schöllhammer, eds., KwieKulik, 515–17. For an earlier letter of complaint addressed to the Minister of Culture and Art, see: Zofia Kulik and Przemysław Kwiek, “Petition—Compliant” in Ronduda and Schöllhammer, eds., KwieKulik, 437–39. On their petitionary letters, see Załuski, “KwieKulik and the Political Economy of the Potboiler,” 398–400.
59. Zofia Kulik and Przemysław Kwiek, “Our Comments on the East and the West,” in Ronduda and Schöllhammer, eds., KwieKulik, 446.
60. Adam Szymczyk and Andrzej Przywara, “Niech archeolog nie odkłada łopaty. Wywiad z Zofią Kulik,” Materiał, no. 1 (1998), accessible on Zofia Kulik's website: http://kulikzofia.pl/archiwum/niech-archeolog-nie-odklada-lopaty/ (accessed January 24, 2022).
61. Natalia Sielewicz and Łukasz Ronduda, eds., Chleb i róże. Artyści wobec podziałów klasowych / Bread and Roses. Artists and the Class Divide [exhibition catalog] (Warsaw, 2016), 50.
62. On the Biennial's diminished focus on Zamech workers after its first edition, see Eliza Rose, “Single-Minute Communities: Assembling Collective Agency with Paweł Kwiek,” Studies in Eastern European Cinema 13, no. 1 (July 2022): 79–80.
63. She eventually sent one photograph to Kwiek. Luiza Nader cites this as an initial expression of Kulik's persistent affective intensity. See Luiza Nader, “Konceptualne afekty. Dyskurs miłosny ‘listu z Mediolanu’ (1972) Zofii Kulik,” Miejsce, no. 3 (2017), http://miejsce.asp.waw.pl/konceptualne-afekty-3/ (accessed January 24, 2022).
64. Załuski, “KwieKulik and the Political Economy of the Potboiler,” 405. Załuski notes that their blackmail was ineffective only because by the 1970–80s, statesmen no longer cared about the socialist values KwieKulik petitioned to protect. Maciej Gdula relatedly argues that KwieKulik protected socialist values at a time when they had been abandoned by both the cynical regime and its newly anti-political opposition: see Gdula, “KwieKulik: Defying Cynicism, Defying Anti-Politics.”
65. Using art to devise and test solutions that tangibly aid Poland's unhoused populations has been a recurring objective for Surowiec. One year after his proposal in Sopot was turned down, he carried out the work Poczekalnia (Waiting Room) at Bunkier Sztuki by converting the Krakow museum's basement into an all-access space open around the clock for people to use as they saw fit. The waiting room became, in Surowiec's words, a “prototype” for an “anarchic social space,” serving as a self-organized shelter for many unhoused Krakow residents. Documentation of Waiting Room can be found on the project's blog: http://dziadypoczekalnia.blogspot.com/ (accessed January 24, 2022).
66. For recent manifesto-like texts on art's social utility by Polish artists, see Artur Żmijewski, “Stosowane sztuki społeczne,” Krytyka Polityczna, no. 11/12 (October 2007); Krzysztof Wodiczko, “The Transformative Avant-Garde: A Manifest of the Present,” Third Text 28, no. 2 (March 2014): 111–22.
67. (now[e] oparci[e] w świecie, który tę twórczość otacza i współkształtuje), Mieczysław Porębski, “Udany debiut,” Polska, no. 11: 42.
68. Moskalewicz, “Formula and Factory,” 105–6.
69. In dissent to “toxic philanthropy” and in solidarity with activists and concerned Whitney staff, Michael Rakowitz announced his decision not to participate in February 2019: Margaret Carrigan and Victoria Stapley-Brown, “‘I stand in solidarity with the staff and say no’: Michael Rakowitz on why he turned down the Whitney Biennial,” The Art Newspaper, February 26, 2019, at https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2019/02/27/i-stand-in-solidarity-with-the-staff-and-say-no-michael-rakowitz-on-why-he-turned-down-the-whitney-biennial (accessed January 24, 2022).
70. Hannah Black, Ciarán Finlayson and Tobi Haslett, “The Tear Gas Biennial: A Statement from Hannah Black, Ciarán Finlayson, and Tobi Haslett Regarding Warren Kanders and the 2019 Whitney Biennial,” Artforum, July 17, 2019, at https://www.artforum.com/slant/a-statement-from-hannah-black-ciaran-finlayson-and-tobi-haslett-on-warren-kanders-and-the-2019-whitney-biennial-80328 (accessed January 24, 2022).
71. Zachary Small in Neda Ulaby, “At Whitney Museum Biennial, 8 Artists Withdraw in Protest of Link to Tear Gas Sales,” Morning Edition, July 21, 2019, at https://www.npr.org/2019/07/21/743993348/at-whitney-museum-biennial-8-artists-withdraw-in-protest-of-link-to-tear-gas-sal (accessed January 24, 2022).