Religious Symbols in Polish Underground Art and Poetry of the 1980s, in: Behrends J.C. and Lindenberger T. (eds.) (2014) Underground Publishing and the Public Sphere (original) (raw)
Related papers
Religious Motifs in Polish Contemporary Art Using the Crucifixion: An Outline of the Problem
Perspektywy Kultury 28(1), 2020
Sacred motifs have a long tradition in art and ample figurative representation. They have been present in the visual arts for numerous reasons, from the need to identify faith to artistic expression based on commonly-known truths and stories saturated with meaning. In the art of the twentieth century, Christian motifs were often an excuse to speak about the world, its threats and fears, and the human condition. Polish artists frequently availed themselves of religious symbols and systems in the post-war era, and during the political transformation of the 1980s, they became a way to articulate uncertainty, expectation, and hope for change. Today, the religious trope is a pretext for artistic commentary on religion, social problems, and internal issues of the creators themselves. The article explores the causes and the nature of artistic practice rooted in Christian iconography in Polish contemporary art, with a particular emphasis on the motif of the crucifixion.
Polish contemporary art to the anti-semitism of Poles and its political significance
Review of Nationalities
This article presents artistic creativity which worked through the problem of Polish anti-Semitism. Almost all discussed works, performances, films, projects appeared after 2000, when Jan Tomasz Gross published his book Neighbors, in which he described the massacre in the village of Jedwabne (1941) launching a public debate about the responsibility of Poles in the Holocaust of the Jews. In the text, I showed as art, which is conventionally called “post-Jedwabne” was part of this debate. Its political status on possibly general level was associated primarily with the revision of conventionalized historical memory and national identity formed on romantic patterns.The text shows that the debate with the participation of artists formed part of the rules of socalled ritual chaos, so the highly polarized positions, in which anti-Semitism was considered as an obvious and determining such events as the ones in Jedwabne (the opinion was adopted by artists), or it was denied. Even those works...
On the Genealogy of the Symbol of the Cross in the Polish Political Imagination
East European Politics and Societies and Cultures, 2019
This article traces the genealogy of the cross as a key Polish national symbol back to the independence struggles of the nineteenth century and the post-1918 attempts to map the new Polish nation-state over its multiethnic territory. Discussing the shifting meaning ascribed to the symbol in the changing political conditions in the 1860s and during the Second Republic, the article relates the semantic content of the symbol to the cycle of solidification and defiance (corresponding with Victor Turner’s “structure” and “anti-structure”). While, in conditions of defiance, during the January Uprising (1863–1864), the cross connoted progressive and egalitarian ideas of emancipation and solidarity with other nations who were also deemed as deserving their freedom, this changed once Poland regained its independence. After the First World War, the cross came to be employed as a marker of Poland’s territorial ambitions and an emblem that redefined ingroup boundaries by excluding from the national community the threatening Others: whether Bolsheviks, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Lithuanians, or Jews.
Lit Verlag, 2020
In a series of richly illustrated short essays, Hidden Galleries presents the ways in which the secret police of the communist-era and before collected and curated material religion in their archives. Based on painstaking documentation by a team of eight historians, anthropologists and scholars of religion in archives in Hungary, Romania, Ukraine and Moldova, this volume offers a rare window on underground religious life and its ideological representation as well as exploring the significance for religious communities and wider society today of this legacy of repression and surveillance. Highlighting the dual character of the visual and material aspects of religion in the secret police archives, the authors present the creative practices and lost cultural patrimony of repressed religious communities as well as the secret police’s visual means of knowledge construction about their targets. Beyond the archives, Hidden Galleries engages the voices and memories of descendant communities in an encounter with the secrets of the state weaving them into a fascinating story that both enriches scholarly debate whilst also accessible to a general audience.
Acta Universitatis Lodziensis. Folia Litteraria Polonica, 2017
The ritual as a series of actions specified by traditions or a given political system, defined in detail and repeatable, was also fulfilled in the communist system. There it was aimed at introducing and amalgamating the order imposed on Poland by the Soviets after WWII. It could only be achieved by strictly observing the rules of Socialist rites. And that did not only apply to, however important, the celebrations of holidays according to the communist calendar, but also to the master principles which the enforcers of the new order used towards society. The indicated research material, extracted from censorship archives, shows that regardless of the changing media policy in the first decade after WWII, from the very beginning there existed invariable rules which constituted a compass for specific choices: the ban on criticising or disturbing the good name of the authorities, starting with Generalissimo Stalin, through the leaders of the states subordinate to him, higher-ranking offic...
IKON. Journal of Iconographic Studies, 2018
The present text addresses the tactical, cynical or transgressive uses of Christian iconography in contemporary art from Romania in comparison with critical art from Poland. In these countries that may now be characterized as post-secular societies, religion is considered to have played an important emancipatory role during communism. Starting from the assumption that iconoclastic gestures are not only destructive, but also inherently productive, I suggest that contemporary art in post-socialist countries employs conflicting and contrasting symbols in order to produce a new discursive field which aims to release existing cultural tensions, to expose the imbrication between religion and politics, and thus, to play a critical social function. Borrowing a concept coined by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, such a critical visual practice may be called "iconoclash". On the one hand, the artworks that may fall into this category resemble postmodernist strategies of appropriation and pastiche, but, as I will argue, they are rather immersed in a media ecology. On the other hand, on a social level, they reveal existing social tensions and defy new forms of authoritarianism in countries whose recent public spheres are divided by the confrontation between conservative Christian religiosity and secularized socialist ideals in an expanding capitalist economy of images.