Alina Szapocznikow: Awkward Objects ebook

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ALINA SZAPOCZNIKOW—WORKS

AND INTERPRETATIONS

ALINA SZAPOCZNIKOW—

FROM THE ARCHIVES

Alina Szapocznikow: A Biography

Contributors

List of Works and Photo Credits

AGATA JAKUBOWSKA

JOANNA MYTKOWSKA

INTRODUCTION

It was research, as well an attempt at interpretation and popularization of the œuvre of Alina Szapocznikow, that constituted, in part, the key tasks which the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw decided to go for at the beginning of its activities. Seen as a great artist in Poland, Szapocznikow has until recently been relatively unknown abroad, though now enjoys the status of a new discovery. The presentation of her art at subsequent international exhibitions and the acquisition of her work for various museum collections (e.g. the presentation of Photoscultpures at Documenta XII in 2007 and their procurement by the Centre Pompidou) have drawn increased attention to the artist. These events have also revealed the modesty of the bibliography of research on Szapocznikow, especially in languages other than Polish. The archival studies conducted from the mid-1990s by the Warsaw-based art historian, Jola Gola, have become the basis for most of the publications and the two exhibition catalogues also available in English: one from Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw (1998) and the other published by Krakow’s IRSA Fine Arts Gallery (2004). The works available only in Polish are Katalog rzeźb Aliny Szapocznikow [A Catalogue of Sculptures by Alina Szapocznikow] (2001) and the first monograph on the artist written by Agata Jakubowska and titled Portret wielokrotny dzieła Aliny Szapocznikow [A Multiple Portrait of Alina Szapocznikow’s Œuvre] (2008).

Understanding and supporting the interest in Szapocznikow, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw has undertaken challenge of a wide-ranging project which included the organization of an exhibition of the artist’s “Awkward Objects,”1 as well as an international conference2 and a digitalization of the sculptor’s archives. The huge body of material at hand—research, visual and interpretational—that has been gathered as a result, served as inspiration to organize, in cooperation with our Museum, the first extensive exhibition of Szapocznikow abroad since her death in 1973. “Alina Szapocznikow: Sculpture Undone (1955–1972)” opens in 2011 at WIELS Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels, and will travel in 2012 to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the Wexner Center for Arts in Columbus, Ohio, and in 2012–13 to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This will be the fulfillment of the efforts of a whole group of art historians of different generations, who have for years been trying to draw the attention of the international audience to the extraordinary œuvre of this Polish artist. It will also be a fulfillment for the Polish public for whom Alina Szapocznikow is a true legend. Finally, the artist will be given due recognition—Szapocznikow had always placed herself in the difficult position of a pioneer, inclined towards the new and unknown, for which she had to pay the price of remaining unappreciated and not understood.

The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, which is just at the beginning of building its collection, has decided to reserve an important place in it for Alina Szapocznikow. We have purchased three sculptures: Breast Illuminated (1966), Belly (1968), and Sculpture–LampIII (FetishIX, 1970). The artist’s son has also presented us with the drawings for Journey from 1967 (the sculpture itself is now at the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź). These works come from the late period of the artist’s career, when Szapocznikow had already moved to France and participated, if only to a limited degree, in the world art circuit, from the mid- 1960s until her death in 1973. In her work from that time we find motifs of utmost interest to us today: the exposed body, traces of illness, and recollections of the Holocaust, plus an extremely intense flirtation with popular culture. These all have become important themes exposed in the “Awkward Objects” exhibition. Also quite significant was the proto-feminist dimension of Szapocznikow’s art, which was explicitly accentuated in the presentation by juxtaposing the artist’s pieces with others by Maria Bartuszova, Pauline Boty, Louise Bourgeois, and Eva Hesse.

By calling our 2009 exhibition “Awkward Objects,” we sought to propose a new take on Szapocznikow’s work. “Awkward objects” are words taken from one of the best known texts by the artist—a note she made in 1972, which is now seen as her artistic manifesto of sorts, written close to the end of her life. The most frequently quoted fragment is the one in which the sculptor writes,

My gesture is addressed to the human body, “that complete erogenous zone” … I am convinced that of all the manifestations of the ephemeral the human body is the most vulnerable, the only source of all joy, all suffering and all truth.

These two sentences have always been of key importance to interpreting the art of Szapocznikow as, first of all, being predominantly focused on the body and its sensations, and secondly, serving as an autobiographical record of both the harsh experiences the artist had lived through, as well as her unfaltering enchantment with the world despite her difficult life.

What was just as moving and, at the same time, offering a different perspective on Szapocznikow’s art in the eyes of the creators of the exhibition was the confession contained in the above mentioned text. The artist says, “As for me, I produce awkward objects.” While not attempting to deny differing interpretations of the text, the statement draws one’s attention to the manner of her work, to her technique, experiments with form and materials, as well as her conceptual explorations. All this invites us to ponder the artist’s own attitude towards her œuvre, to the status she had assigned to its different realizations, and to her art as a whole. It also makes us reflect on her extraordinary artistic prolificacy, indeed her compulsive need to create. Finally, it leads us to consider the aesthetic dimension of her projects.

The conference held in conjunction with the exhibition, “Alina Szapocznikow: Works. Documents. Interpretations” was the first international academic meeting devoted to the artist, a gathering of Polish and foreign researchers who debated the whole of the life and work of the artist. For the purpose of the present publication, we have made a selection of conference texts which concentrate on the period presented in the exhibition. The book opens with contributions which provide a more general focus. Marta Dziewańska interprets the concept of the exhibition and the motif of the cast that she finds significant. Jola Gola revisits her interpretations of the art of Szapocznikow, looking at it with the eye of Bataille. By assuming that the clash of eroticism and mortality in the sculptor’s œuvre presents a particular challenge for the viewer, Griselda Pollock asks the following question, “Was the project of Alina Szapocznikow’s work to escape or to seek an encounter with trauma?” Anda Rottenberg traces, among other things, the ambiguity of the titles of the sculptures, and asks about the relations between the artist’s work and her dramatic biography. Ernst van Alphen, on the other hand, tries to analyze the sculptures which were created beginning of the 1960’s, applying, in his attempt, the concept of “skin ego” coined by the French psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu. The next four texts are devoted to analyzing the later work of Szapocznikow. The essay by Agata Jakubowska is an effort to interpret the first works in which Szapocznikow used casts of a female body—Leg and Goldfinger. The two texts which follow are aimed at tracing the conceptual motifs in the artist’s œuvre. Manuela Ammer proposes an in-depth interpretation of the two projects My American Dream and Photoscultures, while Anke Kempkes draws a broader picture of the connections between these and other conceptual works by Szapocznikow with the art of her contemporaries. Paweł Leszkowicz offers an interpretation of the work titled Piotr, which is exceptional not only because in most of her works Szapocznikow focused on the female body but also, as Leszkowicz points out, it was the artist’s son, Piotr, who was the model here—just as in the case of one of her last works, Herbarium XII (Head of Christ), which is the focal point in the paper presented by Sarah Wilson (who also considers the posthumous reception of Szapocznikow’s art in the Paris milieu, comparing it to the place occupied there by other female artists).

The collection of views presented at the conference ends with a text by Tomáš Pospiszyl. The Czech researcher tries to provide an answer to the following question: how did Szapocznikow become a sculptor? Here, Pospiszyl focuses on the early years the artist spent in Prague after World War II. He uses both materials gathered from the artist’s archives, as well as documents from other sources—and showing how many question marks there are in regard to seemingly established facts in the artist’s biography. His text thus opens the last section of our book, entitled Alina Szapocznikow: From the Archives—a selection of photographs from the artist’s archives maintained by the National Museum in Krakow, which have recently been digitalized and made available online by the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.3

We are very keen on providing public access to archival sources and on continuing the research on Alina Szapocznikow’s œuvre, as we are convinced that the project could be one of the most interesting challenges to academics specializing in the art of the twentieth century. The art and life of this artist, who has remained outside the cultural center, are now revisited and read anew, revealing the possibilities open to contemporary art history, which welcomes new interdisciplinary inspirations. For that reason, all the elements of the project devoted to Alina Szapocznikow at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw—including the present publication—have been intended as a forum for art historians, critics, and curators who wish to join in the research on her heritage.

ALINA SZAPOCZNIKOW—MY WORK HAS ITS ROOTS…

handwritten: I was educated as a classical sculptor

My work has its roots in sculpture. For years I threw myself into studying problems of balance, volume, space, shadow and light. All in order to arrive at what I am today: nothing other than a sculptor who has experienced the failure of a thwarted vocation. I took stock of the awareness of our time. I used my knowledge of the craft, my intuition and my intelligence, to note with increased clarity the poverty of my methods in comparison to modern techniques. I have been conquered by the hero-miracle of our age, the machine. To it belong beauty, revelations, testimonies, the recording of history. To it belong, in the end, truthful dreams and public demand.

As for me, I produce awkward objects. This absurd and convulsive mania proves the existence of an unknown, secret gland, necessary for life. Yes, this mania can be reduced to a single gesture, within the reach of us all. But this gesture is sufficient unto itself, it is the confirmation of our human presence.

My gesture is addressed to the human body, “that complete erogenous zone,” to its most vague and ephemeral sensations. I want to exalt the ephemeral in the folds of our body, in the traces of our passage.

Through casts of the body I try to fix the fleeting moments of life, its paradoxes and absurdity, in transparent polyester. My work is difficult, as sensation that is felt in a very immediate and diffuse way is often resistant to identification. Often everything is all mixed up, the situation is ambiguous, and sensory limits are erased.

Despite everything, I persist in trying to fix in resin the traces of our body: I am convinced that of all the manifestations of the ephemeral the human body is the most vulnerable, the only source of all joy, all suffering and all truth, because of its essential nudity, (handwritten: is) as inevitable as it is inadmissible on any conscious level.

Alina Szapocznikow

March 1972

92 Malakoff

handwritten: Nothing is definitive in my work, if not the immediate pleasure of feeling the material, of touching and palpating (handwritten: the distinct material of) the mud as children (handwritten: do) on a riverbank.

handwritten: Alina!

Here is your text, which is beautiful. I’m sending it back with some French “sauce,” a little late. Don’t hate me. Love,

P.R.

March 27, 1972

PART I

ALINA

SZAPOCZNIKOW

WORKS AND

INTERPRETATIONS

From the editors

This publication provides photographic reproductions of works by Alina Szapocznikow discussed by the authors of the individual essays, not a full presentation of the artist’s œuvre, a complete record of which may be found on the website of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, at www.artmuseum.pl.

            Marta Dziewańska is curator for research and publications at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. In 2007 she received her master's degree in philosophy at the University of Paris I–Sorbonne, and in 2006–7 worked at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. She is the co-editor, with Claire Bishop, of 1968–1989: Political Upheaval and Artistic Change (Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2009), and editor of Ion Grigorescu: In the Body of the Victim (Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2010). In 2010 she organized, with Claire Bishop, the research seminar “Where the West Ends?”, devoted to the art and culture of today’s Russia. She has collaborated on several exhibition projects, among them “Awkward Objects: Alina Szapocznikow and Maria Bartuszova, Pauline Boty, Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, and Paulina Ołowska” (with Joanna Mytkowska, Agata Jakubowska and Maria Matuszkiewicz) and “Ion Grigorescu: In the Body of the Victim (1969–2008)” (with Kathrin Rhomberg). In 2011 she was involved in the preparation of a monographic show of the work of Alina Szapocznikow at WIELS Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels, “Alina Szapocznikow: Sculpture Undone (1955–1972)”, with Elena Filipovic and Joanna Mytkowska.

MARTA DZIEWAŃSKA

AWKWARD OBJECTS:

CREATIVE BARBARITY—

ON AWKWARD BEGINNINGS

Being a monographic look at the work of Alina Szapocznikow of sorts, the exhibition “Awkward Objects”, organized in 2009 at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, was the first to confront in such bold fashion the work of Szapocznikow with that of other female artists of her time: Maria Bartuszova, Pauline Boty, Louise Bourgeois, and Eva Hesse.1 As such, the exhibition was an attempt to show in a congruous manner works that until then had been considered incongruous, linked by purely academic ties but all the while surprisingly synchronistic.

Featuring works from the 1960s and early ’70s, “Awkward Objects” focused on a moment when classical artistic vocabularies were being revaluated, when the urgent need for change was not yet defined as either destroying or creating history, and when the new was only an intuition. Summoning these inspiring intuitions, doubts, and illusions experienced by these pioneer artists, the exhibition was an attempt to capture a moment when their history was only beginning to be recorded.

Viewed from today’s perspective, the dialogue of these artists seems to raise an important question about time: about its beginning (or rather beginnings), about initiation, intuition, and the opening up of the new, and about the barbaric and alienated nature of any origination. The confrontation of different artists and their works in this exhibition is not aimed at merely exposing any formal or biographical links between them, but rather at indicating their common attitude towards time: an attitude of contestation and rebellion, an intuition that the creation of history is not really about continuity, preservation, or simply “caring” about lasting, but more about continuous denial: breaking off and pulling out of context.

Such an attitude corresponds to the classic “dialectical image” as described by Walter Benjamin. Here, the new and the old meet not according to the traditional principles of continuity, accumulation, and development (chronos)—but in a flash, through destruction, mutual criticism, or clash (kairos, tuchē).

By combining elements that were “taken out of context” (fragments, remnants, citations), it functions as a peculiar collage, which, without going as far as to completely break (as this would be impossible) with history and tradition, proposes an entirely new way of relating to the past. By making reference to the quotation (broadly understood as a snapshot or trace, a fragment of single sentences and images), it creates “constellations” of dynamics and times, of unequal, mutually inadequate, incompatible elements that obliterate the smooth structure of both the past and the present.

Such awkward connections oppose both monumental narrations and artistic fictions and are always “happening” on the edge, the thin line which separates right from wrong, discovery from a missed opportunity, success from failure. Furthermore, by accepting the negation of memory as a rule and intuition as a law, these connections introduce chaos into existing vocabularies: blowing them up from the inside, they create a potential for and become an origin of the new. As Benjamin writes, “Origin [Ursprung], although a thoroughly historical category, has nevertheless nothing in common with genesis [Entstehung]. Origin does not at all mean the formation or becoming of what has arisen, but rather what is arising out of becoming and passing away. The origin is a whirlpool in the stream of becoming.”2 Origin as such is both the beginning and the end, the “internal disaster of becoming,”3 simultaneously a creation, initiation, disturbance, and loss.

In the beginning, a gesture of initiation described in this way is never anything but a hypothesis, an attempt, and a test. Its departure point usually consists of objects from the nearest surroundings, or even more frequently, one’s own body, which is detached, treated as a phenomenon, a marker of boundaries. Extrapolation of conclusions from these observations often becomes a zero point for pioneering divagations, the opening of an entirely new way of perceiving. The imprint, that awkward object appearing so many times in “Awkward Objects,” is precisely this type of movement-experiment, a consequence, fruit, product of the simple gesture of touching. As elementary and anachronistic as it may be, this decontextualized fragment, this delocalized quotation functions as a sort of “technical hypothesis,” which is proposed only to see “what comes of it.”4 It is a kind of horizon and the potential to begin an entirely new history.

Alina Szapocznikow described creating her “awkward objects” as an “convulsive and spasmodic mania,” which is an affirmation of “human presence.” Leaving awkward imprints of the body in the material was for her a way of fixing the “paradoxes” and “absurdity” of life: such immediately registered sensation, she wrote, “is often resistant to [any] identification.”5 These awkward objects do not represent any kind of thesis, but rather a controversy and a question pointed equally at art (both its material and its concept), at the artist’s profession, and at time.

Apart from the pioneering formal elements, one of the key aspects of her complex art is an innovative approach to the body and its representation. The body is not only a subject, a problem, or the reason for Szapocznikow’s art, but its substrate and material starting point for any creative process.

The imprinted figure begins to appear in Szapocznikow’s art starting in the early ’60s and is connected with the beginning of a new, more experimental period in her art, after her “adventure” with socialist realism. She begins to create artworks inspired by popular culture and mass media: monumental bronze is replaced by colorful plastic and viscous polyesters; classical representations are replaced by fragmentation, collage and mechanization; and mimesis by experiment. Everything happens amazingly close to the body, a body that touches and is being touched.

This radical reference to “the softest of all materials”—the individual, changing, and impermanent body—using it to stamp out individual moments and playing on the edge of realism—by the very fact of taking the absolute here and now as a starting point—brings up an important question about the origin, the beginning. This beginning clearly ceases to function in purely historical categories and becomes a “moment of truth,” a critical point of time: time brought to a halt, opened, disfigured, and rediscovered. This peculiar separation and refusal to be assigned to any history but one’s own can be interpreted either as a desire to get back to and establish a direct contact with the origin, or as the negation and rejection of the origin: a new beginning.

Another important feature of the imprint is connected with this ambiguity: by touching and being in direct contact, the imprint is a warrant of something unique and primary. But the imprint is also a matrix and a positive, and therefore a source of diffusion. A question about the nature of a gesture of imprinting raised by Georges Didi-Huberman is worth citing here: “Does it express authentic presence (like a gesture of contact), or is it just the contrary: a sign of the loss of uniqueness and a starting point for reproduction? Is it an origin of the one or of the dispersed? Of the auratic or the serial? Of the similar or the different? Does it mean identity or the lack of identification? Is it a decision or a coincidence? A desire or mourning? A form or shapelessness? The same or different? Is it familiar or foreign? A contact or a separation?”6 The imprint seems to function here as a type of “dialectical image,” which is both an affirmation and a negation of all of the qualities mentioned above. It suggests both “the contact (a foot leaving a trace in the sand), as well as the loss (the absence of the foot in the imprint); it suggests equally a contact with the loss and the loss of contact.”7

The nature of an imprint is defined by its physical relations with the referent.8 It consists in the repetition of the referent, which is essential and indispensable and, at the same time, absent in the imprint itself. Through repetition, which is here a kind of play, the art of Szapocznikow is therefore a way of testing the limits and the very possibility of similarity. It is a question about lasting, handing down, and genealogy. In the series of works titled Illuminated Lips, the parades of untitled imprints of bellies, different variants of half-faces or lips, repeating “the same thing” (the same element of the body, same gesture, same material) each time yields “a different thing.” The figures created in such a way might perhaps be formally similar (considering the procedure of imprinting), but the unsurpassable difference between them consists in their separation.

This is why repetition never means identity, and its paradoxical rule keeps balancing on the verge of its own impossibility. An imprint realizes and fulfils similarity. It is a disturbing (as it is always halfway between the “marked” and the anonymous object) duplicate of the referent, yet, in spite of this, it is something radically different from it, as if repetition was conditioned by difference, and at the same time, difference was possible only through repetition.

Such decentralized construction and specific asymmetry “should not mislead us: it indicates the origin and positivity of the causal process.”9 It is a way of “falling off the origin,” a place for a “vortex,” dethronement and the “withdrawal of the origin,” and therefore a sign of the new.10

Furthermore, it is precisely due to these constructions that an imprint stops us from thinking in binary categories separating the new from the old, the past from the future, fantasy from reality: an imprint is the new that detaches itself from the old, but without entirely breaking up. It is a possibility of the new thinking within the old. It is an image of a malleable history and a time that, like a multithreaded story, will flow in a desired direction.

All of these elements prevent us from interpreting an imprint as something static.11 To the contrary, an imprint contains a phenomenal dynamic (although the seemingly mechanical, unthinking, and anonymous procedure totally conceals this). The Contact, which, in a way, can be seen as the epicenter of this technique, is built from a number of relations combining not only inanimate matter with living matter, but also fragments of the body with the body-fragment, the unpredictable with the intentional, the quote with the present moment that meet in a powerful clash: at the same time they annihilate and complement each other. By giving up arbitrary antinomies and divisions, an imprint urges us to “mix” both the texture and intention, matter and concept, instrument and effect, means and ends. As a result, an imprint becomes the receiver of seemingly paradoxical questions, such as: What is the texture of an intention? What technical skill is presupposed by theoretical knowledge? What is the matter of a concept?12

“Contact,” “trace,” “imprint,” these words all seem too delicate for describing works executed as dynamically, with such ardor and even rapacity, as those created by Alina Szapocznikow. Why then not say “violation,” “indentation,” “fatal crush”?

Such lack of distance, excessive adhesion and mimesis pushed to the uttermost limit are a perfect antithesis to any aesthetical thinking: the imprint eliminates and “precludes any ‘artistic’ distance; its essence is adhesion.”13 What kind of reflection does it express? What is signified by the traces of breasts, buttocks, thighs, eyelids, or palms left in the plastic mass? Is it possible to admire them in a “classical” way since they so incredibly touch the closest, the most intimate space (too close, too intimate)?14 Do they signify presence or absence (see archival photographs)? What is this presence; what it is like? Is this the presence of different objects in the hands of an artist, or the “footprints of time”—a time which is frozen, broken and split?15

Such impossible, phantasmatic proximity is associated with the empiricism of this technique which is connected with the fact that an imprint is always a representation of a fragment of the body (it is never a simultaneous duplicate of the whole,16 a kind of phenomenological focus on a certain aspect and its autonomization). Alina Szapocznikow’s LEGA (1962) is not just a simple representation and a fragment of her body, emerging from chaos, but by the virtue of the touch imprinted in it, Leg is a “living fragment that escaped from fading.”17 By bearing the traces of presence, it becomes both a reified organism and animated matter. Even more, this leg is not merely a part or a detail, but an autonomous organism in itself, containing all the principles of its own chaos and figurative destruction.18 These newly created hybrids are conflicted with their “own” time: they seem to be ahead of it, they seem to push it, fragment it; and from this perspective they surpass it and transform it into something “essentially anachronistic—something, which is neither ante, nor post, but a beginning of an entirely new form, an entirely new crystal of time.”19

This specific disappearance of a fragment of the body in favor of the body-fragment20 is yet another example of how an element of a whole starts to function as a self-forming form that has the power to be its own origin.21 The origin is not being denied or destroyed here, but rather isolated and decomposed. By the fact that it is shown all at once in its entirety and in the present moment, it negates the classical definition of the origin as a primary essence and becomes a symptom brought forth, an origin-vortex which, separated from the whole that precedes it, constitutes a new beginning. Its “seal” is at first glance interpreted as nothing but a paradox, misunderstanding or simply disorientation, but at the same time (and, in a way, beyond time) it is precisely this “seal,” so perfectly detached from any origin, that is the rudiment of the impossible and pioneer configurations, the creative negativity.22

There is another interesting feature of this dynamic configuration, which presents an imprint in terms of movement. An imprint is “the new,” which, however, is not “the previously nonexistent” that appears out of nowhere, but the new that is a fragment and a remnant of the old—it is its flash and a new incarnation. It is a new that does neither deny nor extend the old; instead, it “repeats” the old—a repetition, which is not a substitute, a reproduction or a replacement of the absent referent, but a repetition-quote; a quote, which, in the form of fragments and fractions of thoughts, is not supposed to save and “preserve, but to purify, to tear from context, to destroy.”23 It is a quote that “interrupts the stream of representation and simultaneously absorbs that which is represented.”24 It is a collage, which mixes, nuances, and complicates various models of temporality.

This is how an imprint is not only a type of duplicate or a substitute entity to replace the absent referent, but also becomes a kind of “replacing movement, a figurative labour of substitution,”25 and subsequently a “dynamic self-initiating movement, expanding through subsequent configurations.”26 The imprint figure as such is an active way of communicating with the past; it is a discoverer elevated by the idea of preserving.

It is worth noting that this peculiar collision of different temporalities is neither a result of nostalgia for the past or a manic desire to isolate the present,27 but a way of making history dynamic.

In the narrower context of history of art, an imprint, as Didi-Huberman describes it, is a certain paradigm that functions as a counter-model (contre-modèle)—not as an anti-model that would replace the old aesthetic norms with the new ones, but precisely a counter-model. This suggests that there is no such thing as the history of art, but there are (at least) two—existing in a continuous debate with each other, continuous fibrillation and convulsion of one in the other. One is happening in broad daylight and is written by the “rulers” and “victors,”28 whereas the other is written in shadows and penumbrae, at the fringes and between the lines.29 Such a fragmented and non-continuous vision of history suggests an alternative way of interpreting it: history is not really a prerequisite and necessary condition for an event to occur, but rather its consequence. It is not an unavoidable and untouchable monolith, but written with separate histories emerging “on the go,” with subjective attitudes toward time and with micro-revolts happening in the shade of great revolutions.

In this context an imprint is not only the essential element for considering any type of mimesis, but by activating the difference it allows us to see history in its manifestations, where a decontextualized fragment, an anonymous remnant and a quote taken out of context become the carriers and active creators of history.

The exhibition “Awkward Objects. Alina Szapocznikow and Maria Bartuszova, Pauline Boty, Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, and Paulina Ołowska” was an attempt at such a non-linear reading of history and its writing from an ahistorical (or even a “counter-historical”) perspective. In showing these artists, unconnected to each other but for incidental links, and their work, created at a moment (or perhaps moments, as each of them confronted it separately and from a different perspective) when classical artistic vocabularies were being revaluated, the exhibition was aimed at capturing the dynamic of what they have in common: a feeling of insufficiency, a conviction that the already existing is not untouchable, an intuition about the new. By confronting the works of four pioneering artists, the exhibition was a de/reconstruction of history from the view point of its own margin. It was a story of an undisciplined creation of relations between incompatible elements, about drawing impossible connections, thinking beyond categories, and finally about the possible constellations of the “dialectical image.”

Formed in different traditions, the artists presented in this exhibition worked with different materials, far from each other, most often not even knowing of each other’s existence. Despite being so far from each other, each artist “fragments,” cuts, and repeats. Such emancipation of the fragment and the despised remnant, the generalization of their meaning, and the creation of types and laws for them seem to be a means for defining (and, via repetition, even forcing), whole new areas in the immense space of existing knowledge. All of them (again, without having known each other) take on the theme of their femininity and body as the most direct, individual, and intuitive here and now, a here and now that are least entangled and open to the greatest creative experimentation. Finally, almost all of these artists remained for many years outside the main “male” stream of art (be it Nouveau Réalisme, Minimalism, or Pop Art) despite of their wishes and desperate attempts to be a part of it.

Not having succumbed to this division, the disobedience and acts of separation, negation, and refusal to be assigned to an imposed order became for the artists a principium individuationis of a sort, a way of emphasizing their otherness and individuality. It identified them then and has become their hallmark today. These pioneers of feminine art did not become who they are through the affirmation of their body or through the exaltation of their femininity or beauty. On the contrary, this was happening at a moment of the negation of these categories. They were perhaps not entirely rejecting them, as the coquetry of the forms they created is unquestionable, but attempting to go beyond any dictionary that classified them in this way.

The discord, which impels them to chop up, repaint, replace, and multiply, seems to have become a beginning of new divisions, the source of a cascade. “Awkward Objects” beheld them at a moment when spring is just pushing its way up through the ground and begins to work its bed, marking its existence but having no future. It depicted a moment when the actions of the artists had not yet been in any way designated, when they were still an experiment in the strong (often almost existential) sense of the word, in a moment just before assigning certain defined meanings to their actions.

Focused on a time when what is knowledge today was still only a belief or assumption, “Awkward Objects” tried to capture that instant when the “awkward” is only halfway to the world of art, when the emotions of the artists are just gaining legitimacy. It is an instant when the question of the beginning of history is nothing more than a desire or an intuition in an ocean of hesitations, doubts, dissatisfaction and discord.

Such multi-level “scrimmage,” in the work of each of the artists in this exhibition, became a source of the most original and unimaginable (from the point of view of the “whole” and the chronology) organic hypotheses. The margin of understatement and indeterminacy inscribed in it30 made the final form “always problematic, unexpected, unstable and open.”31 The effect of this heuristic experiment, tuchē and technē intertwined in a single gesture, became a source of “surprises, expectations exceeded, horizons suddenly opening up”32 and each time it was connected with what Benjamin referred to as the “miracle of phenomenon.”33

This is why the exhibition “Awkward Objects” was a story of bringing history to a halt and then restarting it; about the courage of taking the here and now as a starting point, about the critical point of a certain vocabulary, a certain history, a certain world. By exposing the moment from a perspective which is not historical but one of certain individual histories, the exhibition focuses on an instant of absolute tension when history changes course from the bottom up. “Awkward Objects” is placed in the middle of a collision, when both the new and the old are still in coexistence, but the old does not yet know it is already old and the new does not yet know it is the beginning of an entirely new history. It showed not a moment of spectacular fracture, but rather individual stances toward time. These stances are spectacular only to the extent that they are so perfectly separate, having occurred in such different contexts, while still having jointly given rise to a completely new history (of art).

1     “Awkward Objects. Alina Szapocznikow and Maria Bartuszova, Pauline Boty, Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, and Paulina Ołowska,” Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 14 May–26 July 2009. Inviting Paulina Ołowska to participate in the project was motivated by the idea of giving this exhibition a contemporary character and thereby amplifying its dynamic and posing yet another challenge to the classical, linear, interpretation of Szapocznikow’s art. The younger Polish artist’s multi-level commentary, appearing at several places in the exhibition, was a certain kind of stimulating observation that stressed , in her dialogue with Szapocznikow and these other pioneering women artists, how timely their stances are, how their “awkward” suggestions are today legitimized, and how today they have become an inspiration, a subject, and a task.