Women’s Performances, Rituals and Mysteries in Contemporary Polish Art. Analysis of Selected Examples (original) (raw)
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Art & Documentation, 2020
My research method connects my theoretical background on art history studies and my practical experience as a female artist in Polish social, political and artistic realities. I focus on the position of women artists and their artistic activity in the contexts of the changing political situation. I intend to introduce Polish women artists who were active on the art scene from the seventies until today in the field of performance art and to answer the question what the women artists of my generation have in common with their 'artistic grandmothers.' The aim of this article is also to familiarize foreign readers with the specific status of women in the process of the changing of the political situation in Poland that took place before and after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989. I begin from recollection of my video-installation Fading Traces. Women in Polish Art of the Seventies (2010). In my project I have interviewed seven women artists dealing with feminist topics. For all of them, the period of the 1970s was an early stage of their careers. It was also the decade when I was born, and this personal link that created a sort of time loop was significant for me. As it turned out, most of them created performance art pieces, so their testimonies are important for the topic of this article. In my project, the following female artists took part: Natalia LL, Ewa PARTUM, Anna KUTERA, Izabella GUSTOWSKA, Krystyna PIOTROWSKA, Teresa MURAK and Teresa TYSZKIEWICZ. In the period of the new democracy, especially during last two decades, performance art pieces by Polish women artists became more rebellious. Since 2016, the course of Polish politics has become more populistic, conservative and democracy is in danger again, and this also badly affects women’s rights and their position in the society. But at the same time, thanks to democracy and the financial support of the European Union, the grass-root women’s initiatives have appeared and are getting stronger. The collaboration of women from different branches of public life seems to be organised well enough to defend women’s rights and make the country more friendly to women and all discriminated people in the future.
AGAINST THEORY: SELECTED "GIRLHOOD" FEMINIST ARTISTIC PRACTICES IN POLAND
Przegląd Kulturoznawczy, 2019
The mass public protests against introduction of further limitations on women's reproductive rights in 2016 become important moment for the Polish feminist movement. Yet, the movement's structure and semiotic reservoir of justifi cations has visibly changed in the recent years. The young Polish feminism has become more "girlish" than "womanly". In our paper, we analyze how the "girlhood" artistic practices fi t into the renewal of contemporary refl ection on the gender roles of women and the Polish feminist movement. We analyzed practices of young Polish artivists, involved in girlhood-feminist collectives, and compared their cultural tactics with those of selfi e feminism. The paper focuses on girlhood practices as activities which take place across the individual and collective divide and redefi ne the public sphere. Demonstrating how these initiatives negotiate the normative cultural system, we present expressions of the girlhood experience and describe its social and structural conditions. We analyze feminist artistic practices as expressible and language-based feminine emancipatory practices, using tools typical of analysis of discourse and, predominantly, linguistic performance.
Contemporary Polish Performance Art - Between Old Masters and Young Activists
FUGAS E INTERFERENCIAS. III International Performance Art Conference, 2018
The article presents a brief history of Polish performance art – from its birth in 1978 to the present. The first part focuses on its roots and those aspects which shaped its present state. Artists during the communist regime separated themselves from politics keeping in mind how art was used in social-realism. The second part focuses on the period 1989-2000, when artists started to move different topics, but the form in which they were expressing their stance remained “classic”. After 2000, some artists became art activists and use performance art strategies in fighting for social change. Another new issue is the emergence of contemporary performance artists – choreographers. These shifts cause a conflict between artists in a discussion about the definition of performance art and the role of art and artists in society, especially in the context of art education which tends to preserve the “traditional performance art” model.
Women’s art in Irland and Poland 1970-2010: Experiencing and Experimenting on the Female Body
Études irlandaises, 2012
Though the Polish minority is the most numerous one in Ireland, and although the Ireland Poland Cultural Foundation has been in existence for five years, comparative studies centered on the two cultures remain sparse. However, confronting trends in Irish culture with evolutions in countries which offer similar characteristics may strengthen our understanding of the interactions between art and society. The gender-related works produced by Irish and Polish female artists between 1970 and 2010 reflect a growing tension between traditional values, secularisation and Europeanisation. They reverberate the heated debates over abortion, contraception and divorce which have put womanhood in the limelight in these two deeply Catholic nations. 2 These lens-based works derive from the tradition of self-portraiture and are related to body art. They starkly highlight the corporeality of the body, thus challenging the patriarchal social structures and discourses that, according to many radical feminists 1 , compound masculine power. Crucial to the understanding of these works is Foucault's argument that "there are no relations of power without resistances; the latter are all the more real and effective because they are formed right at the point where relations of power are exercised 2 ". Since the body is the main target of power, art works using the female body as their prime material are likely to shake the audience's perceptions of femininity, whether it is perceived as womanhood, femalehood, or motherhood. The performative body, serving a re-empowerment strategy, then becomes a locus of resistance. Irish artist Helena Walsh observes that the recent development of live art in Ireland has been "hugely significant to countering the negative impact of strict cultural mores and giving voice to those bodies silenced by the nation state 3 ". Live art is Women's art in Ireland and Poland 1970-2010: Experiencing and Experimenting o... Études irlandaises, 37-2 | 2012 10 In Poland and Ireland alike, the Catholic Church took part in the debates over abortion. In Ireland, where abortion has been a criminal offense since 1861, back-street abortions
Artium Quaestiones, 2022
This article is an analysis of one area of Piotr Piotrowski’s (1952–2015) activity in the 1990s – his writings on the art of Zofia Kulik and, more specifically, on its feminist dimension. I argue that although Piotrowski was never interested in women’s art in particular, not only did he practise feminist criticism during this period, but he was also a catalyst for the development of a specific form of feminist reflection that was then new in Polish art history. It focused on power relations and did not accept distancing oneself from social and political problems. I analyse it from the perspective of contemporary revisions of the development of feminist discourse after 1989 in Eastern Europe, which critically examines its embeddedness in Western ideas.
Positing the division of space into geometric and performative, and pointing to the three strategies of its intensification proposed by Erika Fischer-Lichte in reference to the theater, the author of the article attempts to find their counterparts in visual arts. The article focuses on some Polish examples of public art, environment and installation. The first strategy of intensification distinguished by Fischer-Lichte concerned the use of empty or nearly empty stage space, whose arrangement could change, allowing for different patterns of movement of the actors or the spectators. The article discusses whether it is possible to determine the relationship of a work of art with an empty gallery space through its active management. The objects used by artists are meant to intensify the sense of lack, emptiness and absence, to stimulate imagination and sensitivity, or to refer to spiritual values. Effects of this type are discussed on the example of the works of Jan Berdyszak and Mirosław Bałka. According to the second strategy of the performative approach to space in theater, happening and performance art, the chosen place of action allows or rejects certain modes of behavior. Thus, there is no freedom of assigning meaning. This kind of situation occurs in the case of Wojciech Fangor's environment and of Składaki by Maciej Szańkowski. The artists create a new space with their works, at the same time determining, through its characteristics, the situation of their reception, a specific energy that varies depending on the number of recipients, their age and other factors. The third strategy of the intensification of performativity defined by Fisher-Lichte is the use of pre-existing and reclaimed spaces, whose features are modified in the course of the action. In the case of theater, these are performances arranged in town squares, in industrial interiors, in rural areas, on beaches, etc. In the visual arts, an analogous procedure was used in Mikołaj Smoczyński's installation Labirynt, realized at the Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw and even more explicitly in Joanna Rajkowska's Dotleniacz. The works by Polish artists described here do not posit the concept of a work as an artifact meant for timeless and universal contemplation. They take into account what is current, unstable, fleeting, dependent on the will and decision of not only the artist but also the spectator. They demonstrate the ability to assign a performative sense to space without having to refer to the actors' actions, as in the case of theater performances.
The following research paper explicates a four year Practice as Research enquiry into the potential of puppetry and visual performance in the representation of a Feminine Semiotics for the 21st century. This enquiry manifests in a series of creative and research outputs that form the research body of the project entitled Plot 99. The Feminine Semiotic is, I believe, key to the developing methodology of a creative thesis and its imminent issue: the extent to which the governing principles of theorization, documentation, research production and output, guide and constrict the vortical confluences of hunches, knowings, bodies, presences, performances, live experiences, media, distillation and creativity that is at the heart of visual performance. In this light, process becomes the most important guiding outcome to the myriad theoretical and practical distillations that characterise the Practice as Research in performance project. Through the paper, the Feminine Semiotic, expressed in the performance of sexual and spiritual emergence(y) is investigated as a representational strategy for innovative performance. It theorizes representation of the sacred, the liminoid and the inappropriate other as complex approaches to performing the feminine, specifically around the experience of women’s spiritual and sexual crises. Using the metaphor of alchemy as a starting point for the consideration of multidisciplinary research in Plot 99, it interrogates the role of binary in crises of identity and representation. It also examines the potential of the surface and threshold as a conduit for meaning and cultural identity in the 21st century. Binaries are re-explored through combination and reconfiguration in the complex production of the alchemical third in performative representation. The paper investigates the potential for binaric categories of performance and gender, through ritual, intersection, integration, transmutation, slippage, dislocation and deconstruction, to express the liminal and inappropriate other that provides representation for narratives of complex women’s experience.
Communities of Practice - Performing Women in the Second Public Sphere
', in K. Cseh, A. Czirak (eds.), Performing Arts in the Second Public Sphere . Routledge, 2018
Performance Art in the Second Public Sphere is the first interdisciplinary analysis of performance art in East, Central and Southeast Europe under socialist rule. By investigating the specifics of event-based art forms in these regions, each chapter explores the particular critical roles that this work assumed under conditions of censorship. The artistic networks of Yugoslavia,
Politics of Performance Art in Poland Before and After 1989
Politics of Performance Art in Poland Before and After 1989, 2017
Looking back at the history of performance art in Poland, the moment of the fall of the Iron Curtain seems to be crucial for many reasons – both artistic and institutional. The manifestation-like form of presentation of performance art encourages artists to take a stance on various topics. Yet, Polish artists in the reality of a communist regime separated themselves from politics keeping in mind the usage of art in social-realism. Their work (with the only exception of Jerzy Beres who openly declared his art to be political) was political in a sense of Jacques Ranciere rather than directly engaged in political discourse. The fact itself that it was anti-institutional made it political. Democracy that was brought back in 1989 meant that Polish performance artists started to be able to travel freely around the world which is extremely important in case of the art which requires physical presence of an artist. The date also marks the beginnings of institutional critique and becoming a part of an international circuit. Political engagement of the new generation of artists who now often become art activists is relatively new in Poland, even though performance art has been always connected with social activism since its birth in the 70s. This shift causes a conflict between artists in a discussion about the role of art and artists in society, especially in the context of art education. In my paper I will focus on the “politics” of Polish performance art before and after 1989, with a special focus on its today’s condition – when democracy is again seriously challenged.
TDR/The Drama Review
Barnum as the sensational 161-year-old nursemaid of the young George Washington. What if, Uri McMillan asks in Embodied Avatars, we were to reclaim Heth as a "performance artist"? McMillan's gambit initiates a provocative new genealogy of performance art. Though the category of performance art was inaugurated in the 1970s, largely by and for white men, and later expanded by feminist scholarship, largely to accommodate white women, McMillan stretches its contours to reveal fresh lines of inquiry. Rather than throwing out this contested designation, he retains it "precisely to apply pressure on the assumed meanings of the term. How do we know what we know about performance art, particularly in who makes it and what counts as such?" (4). The four chapters of Embodied Avatars are divided between the 19th and 20th centuries in America: the first and second take up antebellum forms (and exigencies) of "artful embodiment" (51) through case studies of Heth and Ellen Craft (also a slave, who escaped to freedom in 1848 by impersonating an aged white man); the third and fourth focus on performances by the artists Adrian Piper and Howardena Pindell in the 1970s and '80s. The genealogical arc of the book is informed by Coco Fusco's "The Other History of Intercultural Performance," which appeared in TDR in 1994. Critiquing the primitivism intrinsic to the European avantgarde, Fusco compellingly argues that performance art did not originate with Futurist and Dadaist antics-as RoseLee Goldberg (1979) influentially argued at the close of the 1970s, when "performance art" was effectively codified-but with 19th-century exhibitions of non-Western people in aesthetic, scientific, and entertainment contexts. Fusco's attention to the way in which performance art, thus conceived, is inseparable from power structures even as it has always promiscuously traversed disciplinary boundaries undergirds McMillan's study of black feminist art and performance, which begins with one such historical platform: the freak show spectacle of Heth.