Palma

In 2002, the artist Joanna Rajkowska planted a life-sized artificial palm tree in the middle of a busy roundabout in the centre of Warsaw. It was supposed to stay there for a year. The art world was suspicious, and the general public was furious that the work took the spot of the traditional Christmas tree. The difficult Polish-Jewish past, evoked by its title, was a polarising issue as well. Some people argued that it is a ‘breach of decorum’ to locate such a piece on the landmark historic axis of the Royal Route and Jerusalem Avenue. Without a doubt, it was a complete stranger – both to the traditionalist majority and the critically driven artistic milieu at the turn of the millennia. 

 

Yet, Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue has become the most iconic project in a public space in Poland after 1989. The work proved to have a life of its own, constantly changing its shape, renewing and shuffling its meanings and triggering actions of many different human and non-human actors. When we analyse two decades of the palm’s history by looking at how it acts and not the way it appears, we start to see that it is a piece with a deeply performative nature. Its material presence frames the city as a stage – it is continuously used as both a prop and scenography for happenings, but it also performs in different roles as a commonly anthropomorphised persona.

It was the experience of Rajkowska’s visit to Israel during the turbulent time of the Second Intifada that inspired the concept. Her stay in Israel made the artist realise the void left by the absence of the Jewish community in Poland. For the first time, she noticed that one of the main streets in Warsaw, Jerusalem Avenue, refers directly to the former Jewish inhabitants. The alien, surreal element of the Middle Eastern landscape was supposed to highlight and challenge the invisibility of the street’s name but also refer to the migrant communities that make up the contemporary vibrant metropolis. At the same time, she emphasized that the work is a Dadaist joke that is supposed to baffle the viewer: ‘The palm tree relates to the expression that (in the Polish language) we use to describe something unthinkable, something outside our way of comprehension, something – to put it simply – absurd’.

 

The performing arts have a very long history of ‘activities without the end product’ (Jackson 2020) (like theatrical performances), and the tacky artificial tree is not an end product of Rajkowska’s initial idea. The palm’s poor and provisional execution derives from the fact that it has the ‘materiality of a prop or scenography, which people don’t even look at, while they impose their own idea of a palm on it’ (Rajkowska 2021). The work is thus not an object (a sculpture or installation) but an ongoing spectacle on the urban stage, for which it serves as a scenography, prop and the lead actress.

 

Its location at the traffic island in the middle of a roundabout gives the impression of an exposed stage that can be viewed from 360 degrees. This impression is even more intense when the work is seen from the distant perspective of two crossing streets. Its urban surroundings create an effect of theatrical wings, with multiple compositional planes overlapping each other. Thus, it unveils the whole city as a scene of an ongoing urban spectacle. 

 

When one enters the central stage (illegally, apart from the time of registered manifestations when the traffic is blocked), they automatically become involved in a situation dictated by the scenography of the palm. For some, it’s freeing, for others, uncomfortable. A participant in a ultra-nationalist march who was passing by the palm, felt the need to ‘incense’ it with the flag of Christ the King of Poland, imitating a gesture of sanctification performed by the priest in the Catholic Church with a censer. The stage is more eagerly taken over by protesters from the liberal and left-wing side of the political spectrum, who make use of the ‘otherness’ and humour of this scenography. Good examples are the Lesbos Island-themed happening during the Pride Parade in 2018 and the choreographic piece performed during the Women’s Strike in 2020. Most common though, is an apolitical, spontaneous, creative use of the work – the palm is probably one of the most iconic spots for posed photographs in Warsaw, and the ideas range from weddings to Miami Vice-inspired photo sessions. 

 

The palm proved to be an open signifier that can bear very different meanings, given by numerous performers who use it as a prop in their own actions. The first notable action of this kind was when the gigantic nurse cap was attached to the top of scaffolding as a sign of solidarity with striking female healthcare workers. Other notable examples are the hanging of the keffiyeh during a pro-Palestinian support action (in 2011) and an anarchist protest ‘Bread Not Games’ during the 2012 European Football Championship. The palm served as a pole for the Ukrainian flag during the Euromaidan in 2014 and in 2022 after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

 

Quite early on, the palm started to be anthropomorphised in discourse, which helps to show that its specific agency is intuitively perceived by the public. During its ‘18th Birthday’ celebrations, its life cycle was described as follows: the first decade was childhood, when the tree inspired cheerful, celebratory happenings and became a symbol of a contemporary diverse metropolis. Around 2010, when the political situation got tense, the palm tree became a ‘palmitsan’ (a term coined by Sebastian Cichocki) – a left-wing activist. In 2019, the most important happening on the palm tree so far took place. For the Death of the Palm Tree its green fake leaves were replaced with real dry leaves of a palm, which died due to climate anomalies in the south of France. The Brechtian ‘distancing effect’ (inherent to the concept of the palm) was reversed – suddenly the fake tree died for real. Its gruesome appearance was widely covered by the media, including the New York Times. It was a moment when an entirely new understanding of this exotic plant started to dominate the narrative – one of warning against a global catastrophe. The two recent delegated poetic performances - Letters from the Palm Tree (2020 and 2021, co-authored by the artist and Sebastian Cichocki) - mark the period of the tree’s ‘maturity’. The first-person poetic manifestos are reminders for the public of the values of solidarity and responsibility for the other, phrased from the imagined perspective of a tree-sage. The first one referred to the climate crisis and the latter to the refugee crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border, which started in 2021.

 

Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue is an excellent example of a post-medium work of art, which crosses boundaries between the disciplines. It is a strictly time-based work, that can only be understood by following the action on the scene, both short term (during a single performance) and long term (with two decades of its constant evolution). The three main ways in which the palm tree functions – as a scenography, prop and actress – can be captured with the overarching term of a ‘spectacle’, which seems to come closest to capturing the active, complex and spectacular character of this work. 

 

Zofia Płoska-Czartoryska