Janusz Bogucki, the Polish Szeemann?
Dorota Jarecka

Dorota Jarecka: Janusz Bogucki, the Polish Szeemann?[1]

The aim of the present text is to propose a critical view of the phenomenon of the exhibitions/undertakings organized by Janusz Bogucki and Nina Smolarz, beginning with the Sign of the Cross [Znak Krzyża] in 1983, and ending with the Epitaph and the Seven Spaces [Epitafium i siedem przestrzeni] in 1991. These projects are interesting for a number of reasons. First of all, they have been poorly described – the last publication on the curatorial work of Janusz Bogucki and his associate from 1982, Nina Smolarz, appeared in 1991 and was written by Bogucki himself[2]. Another reason is the increasing significance of the work of a curator.

I want to stipulate that if I choose to use the word ‘curator’ here, I am doing so fully aware that it is outdated. ‘Curator’ is a term absent in the Polish reality of the 1980’s; the word used then was ‘commissioner’ which, however, Bogucki never used in reference to himself at the time. He actually never used any self-definitions apart from ‘project author’, ‘script author’ or ‘general director’. Any sign of authorship appeared only some time after the exhibitions, which was a routine practice in case of any underground activities. In a folder for “Encounters with art The Apocalypse – a Light in the Darkness”, which was organized in 1984 in the lower Church of the Holy Cross in Warsaw, Janusz Bogucki is mentioned only as the author of the short introduction. Avoiding any official positions and roles was also a way of making a political statement. Such a strategy could also be connected with the place where these projects took place, namely the church, which required Christian humbleness.

In the Bogucki-Smolarz curatorial team, Janusz Bogucki played the role of the promoter of ideas and the visionary. Though he shared his field of creativity with his partner, it was his personality, utopias, visions, desires, and experience that had a profound impact on the shape of his activities. His projects were of the curatorial type, even if the term ‘curator’ was unknown at the time. Roman Woźniak, artist, performer, and participant in Bogucki’s projects in the 1980’s, suggests the notion of a ‘pre-curator’[3]. It is a feasible terminological option.

Similar is the situation with the term ‘exhibition’. Whilst the word obviously appears in interviews and texts, Janusz Bogacki was more inclined to use alternative categories in reference to his activities, calling them ‘undertakings’, ‘encounters with art’, ‘space arrangements’. He also talked about creating an ‘iconosphere’ or constructing a ‘mental space’. Such abandonment of popular terminology is meaningful. The decision was a clear statement, shifting the focus from the presentation of a series of artistic personalities and the concept of a ‘salon’ onto a social and spiritual space of interpersonal and informal contacts and exchange. This decision also meant a partial breaking away from the ‘artistic system of connections’ of the 1970’s.

It is a paradox, but I have no other choice but to place the interdisciplinary undertakings of Janusz Bogucki and Nina Smolarz within the history of exhibiting in Poland, despite having made the caveat that their authors consciously differentiated their projects from exhibitions per se. They are, however, the missing link and the moment of transition between the thematic presentations engaging the national iconosphere (such as The Self-portrait of Poles [Polaków portret własny] or Romantism and Romanticism [Romantyzm i romantyczność] by Marek Rostworowski from the 1970’s), and the collective exhibitions of the 1990’s based on the independent concepts of their organizers. These include Paradise Lost [Raj utracony] by Ryszard Ziarkiewicz, as well as Sorcerers and Mystics [Magowie i wróżbici] by Grzegorz Kowalski and Waldemar Baraniewski, organized at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw in 1991, or Where is Abel, Thy Brother? by Anda Rottenberg in 1995 at Zachęta. All were based on a specific curatorial idea, be it esthetic, political or historiosophical. Apart from being valuable in terms of the works of art presented, these projects offered one new quality – that of the exhibition itself.

The above trend should be looked at from a global perspective. The event which is seen as the breaking point in this process of the evolution of the exhibiting practice towards exhibitions becoming autonomous works of art was Harald Szeemann’s Dokuemnta 5 in Kassel in 1972, when contemporary art entered the ‘era of the spectacle’[4].

Questions and the New Community

In the 1980’s, the one serious alternative to the official artistic life were the so called ‘church exhibitions’, organized outside of the system of state galleries, financing or censorship. They were held in churches, parish buildings, or museums collaborating with the Church[5]. The trend grew to such a great scale that the ‘church exhibitions’ have become almost synonymous with the art of the decade. Their current assessment is still close to the harsh words of Piotr Piotrowski, who in 1991 said that their artistic quality was “close to the intellectual babble of the pseudo-avant garde”. The exhibitions that Piotrowksi saw as nothing more than a mirror reflection of the regime-sponsored events of the 1970’s which, this time, were sponsored by the Church, included two undertakings by Bogucki and Smolarz: Sign of the Cross (1983) and The Apocalypse – A Light in the Darkness [Apokalipsa – światło w ciemności] (1984). How does the artistic quality of those events look today? Were they built on nothing but conformism? In other words, could the access of artists and critics to the sponsor of the time, namely the Church, be seen as genuine emancipation? We could return to the question asked by Piotr Piotrowski twenty years ago: "To what extent was this process profound, and to what degree were the changes initiated actually about revaluating the mechanisms of culture?"[6].

Boris Groys defines the global condition of the two decades which followed the fall of the Berlin wall as ‘post-communist’[7], as hiding in the shadow and still feeling the impact of the failure of the political project of Soviet communism. He thus sees the entire art of the 1990’s – both ‘eastern’ and ‘western’ art – as post-communist. Groys believes that if it were not for this historical experience, the phenomenon of participative art could never have happened.

I would be interested to analyze the exhibitions of Janusz Bogucki and Nina Smolarz from the above perspective. Did they have any influence on the shaping of such post-communist condition? Looking at them now, they seem to have been an effort to reconstruct a community - an effort which was one of many. One could ask whether, for example, the concept of community activities carried out as part of the actions and exhibitions organized by the two curators in the 1980’s does not curiously coincide with the idea of Common Area, Own Area [Obszar Wspólny, Obszar Własny], which was the name of the set of tasks and exercises assigned to students of Gregorz Kowalski at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts[8]. Should the undertakings of Bogucki and Smolarz not be included in the model of other experiences of the 1980’s which broke away from the typical model of an artistic career of the 1970’s, such as the exhibition Construction in Process from October 1981 in Łódź[9] or the independent space of Granary Island [Wyspa Spichrzów], active in the second half of the 1980’s, with the focal role played by Grzegorz Klaman? The common denominator of all these projects would be the desire to create a community which would be an alternative to both the official state structures, as well the Church – as was the case with Janusz Bogucki and Nina Smolarz.

In the “Report on the State of Criticism” [Raport o stanie krytyki] from 1980, three authors, including Janusz Bogucki, defined the cultural policy of the Polish state under the leadership of First Secretary Edward Gierek as a ‘policy of breaking social ties’[10]. In this context, the project of the Sign of the Cross and the meetings which preceded and accompanied the undertaking can be seen as an attempt at mending these ties. It was not about overcoming neo-avant-garde strategies, but about releasing an emancipating potential of which they had been stripped in the 1970’s, when neoavant garde had its affair with the state.

If we were to use the terms proposed by Victor Turner in his research on rituals and rites of passage, these undertakings, including the ‘church exhibitions’ of Bogucki and Smolarz, would have the common aim of building a communitas, contrasted with what Turner calls a ‘social structure’[11]. Working on the exhibition would already be an attempt at creating communitas in opposition to the ‘social structures’, such as the structure of the Church which, at the time, was unconditionally open to such activities. The ‘interdisciplinary artistic undertaking’ under the title Sign of the Cross took place in the Church of Divine Mercy, destroyed during the war and later rebuilt by its parishioners, at Żytnia Street in Warsaw on June 14 – 30, 1983. The project was preceded by many weeks of preparatory work with the participation of the artists, volunteers from the parish, as well as the local priest, father Wojciech Czarnowski, who also used the church for charitable purposes. The church building was under construction, or rather reconstruction. Many people volunteered to work alongside the professional construction workers. The daily rituals included joint meals and prayers. The project of Bogucki and Smolarz included everyday lectures and discussions, film screenings, theater shows, concerts and performances. Janusz Bogucki defined the endeavor not as an exhibition but as "meetings and joint actions of artists interested in the revival of the internal relations between the experience of art and faith"[12].

Naturally, any communitas, or a spontaneous and anti-systemic community, is in danger of becoming petrified into a ‘social structure’. The exhibition and undertakings under the joint title Sign of the Cross set out a certain model of how art functioned in the church. The next exhibition organized in the same space, A New Heaven, A New Earth? [Niebo nowe i ziemia nowa] scripted by Marek Rostworowski in 1985, was very much in line with the rules defined by Bogucki and Smolarz, even in such minute details as the inclusion of current press photos. In terms of the content and general plan, however, the event was a step backward. The subject was not the personal experience of faith and art but anxiety about the ‘dissolution of the image of the human being in the art of our times’, as Marek Rostworowski explained, as well as a longing for the reconstruction of a utopian and holistic image of a human because “in the eras when heaven was inhabited, the paths of art were also clear”[13]. The space of the exhibition remained similar, the participating artists also seemed to be the same (Jerzy Bereś, Jerzy Kalina, Jerzy Tchórzewski, Stefan Gierowski, Jacek Sempoliński). What was different, however, was the ideological vector, which can be called nothing but conservative.

The Political Stances

The undertakings organized by Janusz Bogucki and Nina Smolarz, which often were accompanied by a spectacular scenography and impressive spatial arrangements, were the result of Bogucki’s long term evolution, both artistically and politically. A painter by education (Bogucki studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in the studio of painter Felicjan Szczęsny Kowarski), as well as an art historian (he never graduated due to the outbreak of the war), Bogucki was born in 1916 in Warsaw and from the 1940’s continued to be an active author of exhibitions. From the very beginning, he combined in his work the ideas of a social activism with Catholicism[14].

An element which, no doubt, had an impact on the formation of his outlook was the center of progressive Catholicism in Laski near Warsaw, with which he had family connections. During the war, the young Bogucki dreamed of setting up an artists’ cooperative which would give up on authorship and profits and work on improving the quality of artistic knowledge and awareness of the society[15]. When the war ended, he first worked at the Ministry of Culture and later, in the years 1948 – 1953, in the National Museum in Krakow, where he managed the department of ‘roadshow exhibitions’. He later began working for Warsaw’s CPARA – the Advice Centre of the Art Movement [Centralna Poradnia Ruchu Artystycznego], where he organized series of lectures and talks about art, and where he also managed, together with his first wife, Maria Bogucka, Galeria Widza i Artysty w Świątyni Diany in Łazienki. From 1965, they also jointly managed the gallery at MPiK club in Warsaw, affiliated with the “Ruch” company, in the building of the Great Theatre. They named it Galeria Współczesna.

Though never a party member, Janusz Bogucki was known to be someone who knew how to ‘play with the authorities’. Interesting was the moment when he came to the conclusion that he was no longer able to play that game with the authorities and that all possibilities of a compromise had come to an end. It happened in the first half of the 1970’s. In 1974 Bogucki caused a crisis by leaving Galeria Współczesna and deciding to function outside of the system[16].

When with the gallery, he had to constantly negotiate the admissible areas of freedom within the existing system, where gestures of resistance, be it personal[17] or institutional, were really important. The latter included, for example, such exhibitions as The New Art of the Times of the October Revolution [Nowa sztuka czasów Rewolucji Październikowej][18] which opened on November 8, 1967, or the exhibition organized in 1968 on the occasion of the celebrations of the International Year of Human Rights, in which case the political context was set by the arrest of the protesters participating in the March events in Poland[19]. The above gestures, though critical, were made within the system in force – their form had to be painfully negotiated with the party apparatus and the censors.

The crisis took place upon Janusz Bogucki’s return from Kassel in the summer of 1972, where he saw Documenta 5, arranged by the Swiss curator of leftist and anarchist beliefs – Harald Szeemann. Bogucki experienced an esthetic shock, which he wrote about extensively. But he was also shocked politically – and this fact is less known. When he came back, he proposed to reformulate the concept of Galeria Współczesna, turning it from a regular gallery into a program of social and educational activities[20]. It was to be a ‘new type of gallery’ which was a place of action and interaction with the public, based on the model the critic saw at Documenta 5 in Kassel. It was at that very exhibition that Joseph Beuys founded the “Bureau for Direct Democracy”. Was it a coincidence that in 1962 the gallery space was reduced by a hall in the basement, which was taken away because it was apparently needed by the “Ruch” company to expand its warehouse space? In any case, 1973-1974 was a period of grappling with the management of the gallery[21]. On July 10, 1974, Bogucki submitted his resignation. His leaving Galeria Współczesna was an event widely commented in the press. It may even be that the famous article by Wiesław Borowski, “Pseudoavant garde” [Pseudoawangarda], which was directed against the shallowness of neoavant-garde poetics, including those practiced at Galeria Współczesna under new management, was indirectly referring to that very fact[22].

The meetings which Bogucki organized in the years 1979-1981 with a group of artists and critics in the convent in Laski were intended to seek an alternative. It was at these meetings that the idea of the Sign of the Cross exhibition was forged. It all happened a long time before the imposition of martial law, however in a place which was very important for the opposition and the foundation of the Committee for the Defense of Workers - KOR. At one of the meetings in 1979, Andrzej Kostołowski delivered a speech on ‘ethical art’; other meetings were attended by Jerzy Ludwiński. Both men, just as Janusz Bogucki, were active participants of the neoavante-garde plain-air workshops in the 1960’s and 1970’s. The convent in Laski, however, was also frequented by intellectuals associated with the Catholic Church. These included the Dominican friar Jan Andrzej Kłoczowski, or the art historian and lecturer at the Lublin Catholic University, Jacek Woźniakowski. The choice of venue and guest speakers was not a sign of any conformism toward the Church. It was more a search for possible ways out in light of the situation in which all channels of communication were closed by the communist state. It was also a response to a policy of ‘breaking social ties’. It was not a subservience to the Church but more of an effort to also try to influence the Church via the Church itself. In his notes to the Sign of the Cross exhibition from September 1982, next to the entry ‘RESACRALISATION’ (of culture) Bogucki wrote ‘DECLARICALIZATION’ (of the Church), and a postulate, "to educate the institutional Church in the construction of culture"[23].

It should also be added that up to 1983, the position of the Church towards the opposition was not entirely straightforward, and the idea to enter the sacral space with contemporary art could not have been seen at that time as simple opportunism[24].

While in the 1960’s, the place of the unsuccessful encounter of artists with society was the factory – in the late 1970’s it was the Church. Another utopia of the new world, but realized only in part.

Utopia of the New World

This utopia is heralded by the texts of Janusz Bogucki from the 1970’s. It is an anti-systemic idea born in the circles of the Neoavant-garde and inspired by conceptualism. In her book on Polish conceptualism, Luiza Nader brought out the political, critical sense of the statement made by Jerzy Ludwiński, such as “Art in the Post-artistic Epoch” [Sztuka w epoce postartystycznej](1970), where he had outlined a vision of art without authors and the possibility of art existing “outside of the system which we learned to associate with art”[25].

Bogucki and Ludwiński, two critics and art theoreticians, who were also friends, seem to have had much in common, both in terms of the notions and metaphors used[26], as well as the ‘phase-based’ thinking about art which, they believed, was in the state of constant development or progressing change, eventually leading to the final phase of delight or even salvation of mankind[27]. To both Ludwiński and Bogucki, the last phase would mean leaving behind the system of exhibitions, galleries and museums, which they thought was enslaving to both the artist and the viewer. Ludwiński referred to an encounter of art and reality, which had brought the two so close that only the awareness of art processes would make the art processes different from the others. Bogucki assigned a stronger social accent to this moment of releasing oneself from the confines. He believed that art in this phase would be related to the existence of small “communities of friends, where living for others and living internally could also be expressed by means of actions, signs, concepts or spatial situations”[28].

It was obviously a vision of the future. There was no place for such independent activity and artistic creation in whatever confines of the ‘contemporary artistic system’, be it the western one, which is market-oriented, or the socialist one – centrally planned.

In the works of both critics, it is not difficult to find a source of inspiration in the form of the thought of the Frankfurt school, propagated in Poland by Stefan Morawski[29]. Morawski, who was also an active participant in the plain-air workshops mentioned, analyzed in his excellent texts from the 1970’s the crisis of western culture, with all its aporias, contradictions, and entanglements, including the incapacity for actual emancipation in a situation in which any resistance is absorbed. Incidentally, one cannot sometimes escape the impression that it was actually a cover-up for the criticism of socialist realism, which does not diminish its value as criticism of contemporary western culture. It is striking how powerfully the thought of the three authors was dominated by the Marxist model of the consecutive phases in the development of mankind. Once they are accomplished, one can finally free oneself from alienation, which can, of course, be overcome with the help of art.

What makes Bogucki different from the above theoreticians is the application of the category of the sacrum. In his most important text, “Three Magnetisms or a Small Prognostic Treaty” [Trzy magnetyzmy, czyli mały traktat prognostyczny], delivered for the first time at the plain-air workshop in Miastko in 1978, Bogucki proposed three perspectives of attitudes which are appropriate to artists: pop, ezo, and sacrum. He promised emancipation only in the sphere which he termed as sacrum, where the division between the ‘sacrum of art’ and the sacrum in the original religious sense – as it was perceived by Mircea Eliade – would blur. Bogucki anticipated that emancipation would take place as the result of a deep ‘internal experience’, as a result of the individual becoming independent from ‘any welfare systems’. Artists would finally free themselves from the ‘civilization of rush and success’, and the ‘contemporary artistic system of connections’. It should also be stressed that Janusz Bogucki had already formulated in advance the rules of the artists: collaboration with the Church, though they would function in an area where the sanctity of art would be the same as religious sanctity, they would maintain their independence from the existing Churches[30].

These declarations from the 1970’s cannot be ignored. At the time, Bogucki was not the only one to seek categories and a language which would be related to intuition and spirituality (if only to compare telepathy to a means of communicating art in the final, ‘zero’ phase of the development of art, according to Ludwiński[31]).

It would actually be interesting to take a closer look at the current in Polish art which appeared in the late 1970’s, mainly at plain-air meetings, which focused on mysticism, sensuality, nature, and communication with the recipient. I am thinking here about the performances of Jerzy Bereś or Zbigniew Warpechowski at Miastko 78[32], for example, or the actions by Teresa Murak[33] and other endeavours of those associated with the Warsaw galleries of Repassage and Re-repassage[34]. These were interesting community projects, focused on communicating with the recipient and on a dialogue. Eventually, they were lost in the pathos of communities created in the name of the homeland, faith and the people.

Sign of the Cross does actually have certain things in common with a plain-air. At least this is how it was treated by Teresa Murak, who decided with Danuta Zakrzewska to first sow cress on the cross and later make a performance by carrying the cross to its place in the presbytery.

“Has the community come?” we could repeat after Agamben, who also served as a reference of the recent exhibition at Muzeum Sztuki w Łodzi dedicated to Construction in Process. A community is very difficult to gauge and measure. It is also difficult to determine the level of emancipation. From the testimonies of that time, we hear that there was a climate of community which was built with the significant selfless contribution of artists and their helpers, volunteer parishioners, or curators who gave their time working as guards at the exhibition. The collaboration of artists and curators with the local people during the Sign of the Cross project was also extraordinarily close. The church building was a war ruin and under permanent reconstruction. The so called ‘wheelbarrow path’ ran across the exhibition as the organizers had to leave a path for the workers taking out the rubble. The authors of the exhibition and the participating artists were allowed to enter the church as a result of previous negotiations with the citizens who at the time, in line with the spirit of the place and time, were called ‘parishioners’.

In passing, it is interesting to see Bogucki’s approach to the question of the authorship of exhibitions. From 1982, he worked together with Nina Smolarz[35], thus creating a small two-person community (an architect by education and photojournalist by practice, Smolarz worked as a photo-editor in the Razem magazine, among other places).

Could Bogucki have known Szeemann’s concept of creating exhibitions by co-operatives of curators? The criticism of the modernist ethos of the artist had to be logically linked to the criticism of the authorhips of exhibitions. Hence Szeemann’s concept to create an anonymous collective when in 1969, after leaving Kunsthalle in Bern, he founded Agentur für Geistige Gastarbeit (the concept, by the way, never left the paper). The only exhibition that was signed by the Agency was Jungesellenmachinen in 1975[36], though it was actually Harald Szeemann himself hiding behind this sign. He said he had been ‘delegated’ by the Agency to make the exhibition.

The Bogucki-Smolarz tandem worked more democratically – it was a team first and foremost. Janusz Bogucki had the role of the visionary and creator of the ideological construct of the exhibition, while Nina Smolarz vested incredible amounts of energy in organizational issues, though she was also active in the artistic part. Her achievements, such as introducing contemporary journalistic photography to the area of contemporary art, would be hard to dismiss. In Sign of the Cross, she was mainly responsible for organizing the photography part. With time, however, her influence on the form and shape of the undertakings became continuously greater.

Sign of the Cross, The Apocalypse and The Labyrinth – From Events to Structure

Bogucki thought that Documenta 5 in Kassel was the ideal model of exhibiting. It is something he also had in mind, from Sign of the Cross[37] to the Epitaph and the Seven Spaces shown in 1991 at Zachęta.

Let us take a look at Sign of the Cross The inspiration seems to have come from Harald Szeemann’s Documenta 5, which was turned into an ‘event of a 100 days’. It is seen in the inclusion of journalistic photography, or photography in general (Zofia Rydet’s Sociological Record [Zapis socjologiczny] being given a separate space), site specific works, such as the Pieta of Wola [Pieta Woli] (photographs by Eugeniusz Lokajski presented in the part of the church related to the events of the Warsaw uprising) or the installation by Jerzy Kalina The Last Supper [Ostatnia wieczerza], set in the nave, which was full of rubble. The presentation also included folk and amateur art, and the whole ‘exhibition’ was turned into an event – just as in the project by Harald Szeemann.

In his later exhibitions, Bogucki comes closer to Szeemann also in terms of the concept of the ‘individual zones’. The way to show in a single exhibition a number of different artistic personalities who cannot be made to follow a single superior thematic message is to simply give them separate spaces, capsules in which they can each realize their own autonomies. Hence the concept of mini-exhibitions (Church of Divine Mercy, Warsaw 1987) or Labyrinth – The Underground Space [Labirynt – przestrzeń podziemna] (Church of Divine Ascension, Warsaw 1989).

In case of Epitaph and the Seven Spaces (1991), the curators chose a similar model and gave the artists tents designed by Magdalena Abakanowicz. I see this solution as being inspired by Szeemann’s Individual Mythologies from Documenta 5. One of the works, Paul Thek’s The Pyramid, made a strong imprint in the memory of Janusz Bogucki. Whenever he was asked what he thought could be the sacrum in art, he often talked about this very installation in which the artist “takes us through a thin crack into the interior of the Pyramid”. It was the pyramid he must have been thinking of when he invited Grzegorz Klaman to build the Holy Mountain [Święta Góra] at Zachęta in 1991.

Perhaps it had existed as a model when, in 1989, Bogucki and Nina Smolarz were working on the structure of the Labyrinth for the underground Church of the Divine Ascension in the district of Ursynów in Warsaw. The structure, just as Thek’s installation, was based on the concept of a journey, which included a moment of falling into the reality created by the artist, and the moment of enlightenment, of passage.

The Labyrinth project requires a broader analysis. Whilst in the case of the Sign of the Cross the curator asked the artists to "show the presence of the cross in art and in life", in the Labyrinth the authors themselves impose the idea of the structure which is to define the space and geography of the exhibition. It was to be a narrative (which would also include documentary photographs) about the human fate on two planes: the individual and the universal. On the one hand, it was to be a story about the life of every man, on the other – about the history of the species, from its appearance on earth to salvation. Two dimensions intertwined throughout the entire structure of the exhibition – the universal and the individual.

The story was to be put in order by a superstructure, which was to be made by sculptor Grzegorz Klaman. A structure of wood and steel, occupying several hundred square metres, was placed in the underground church. Black and white documentary photographs were hung on its walls.

The above is one of the elements which made the project different from the previous ones (such as Sign of the Cross or The Apocalypse – Light in the Darkness), which were subservient to the structure of the church, including the altar and the chapels. In the case of this particular exhibition, the labyrinth was arbitrarily inserted in the vaults of the church by means of an external artistic gesture. The labyrinth became a part of the broader narrative structure of the entire exhibition, which referred to the questions of sin and redemption. Over 30 artists were included, who had contributed their paintings, sculptures or installations to the project. When entering the Labyrinth, one had to pass by Marek Kijewski’s sculpture, The Tree of News [Drzewo Wiadomości]. Alojzy Gryt’s The Pyramid of Light [Piramida światła] was placed by the exit.

In Klaman’s interpretation, however, the labyrinth completely dominated and overwhelmed this consoling Christian narrative. It was a part of it but, at the same time, it broke away from it. In the eyes of the artist, it was more a ‘Gnostic labyrinth’ which showed the world as a fallen place, as a dead end. The gloomy and dilapidated matter constructed of coarse wooden boards and aluminum sheets evoked a pessimistic interpretation.

The burnt The Tower of Babel [Wieża Babel] by Jerzy Kalina – located in the very center of the labyrinth and stuck in the ceiling of the lower church – can also be interpreted twofold: as a path leading upwards, but also as a huge underground gutter, a machine which sucks out what is at the top.

What is interesting is that for reason of the context of historical events, The Labyrinth became a specific political metaphor: during the time of the exhibition, from the beginning of its installation at the end of March 1989, until the closing of the presentation itself, the external structure of the communist state was broken[38]. While this was happening, a vessel was built, which – like Noah’s ark - was to leave the old world towards the new one[39]. The walls of the raw construction carried approximately 800 photographs which came from the Polish archives and were placed in the order from birth till death. They displayed the recent 150 years of the country’s history and, at the same time, 150 years of the history of photography (1989 was the anniversary year). The Labyrinth presented spotlighted paintings which seemed to be pulsating like images excerpted from the collective memory or amnesia. The dilapidated used steel sheet walls did not exactly evoke associations with a ‘treasure vault’ containing the national memory but more of a junk yard, or perhaps... a warehouse.

The vision of the great brain, an egg, of something concentric and unifying the memories and images evokes natural associations with a different structure which had dominated the social imagination at the time, namely the gigantic round piece of furniture placed in the Office of the Council of Ministers in Warsaw. It was at this piece of furniture that the new order was negotiated: the Round Table[40].

In no previous exhibition by Bogucki and Smolarz had photographs played such an important role. Whilst it would be possible to imagine the Sign of the Cross without photographs, it would be absolutely unimaginable in case of The Labyrinth. The exhibition was an archive which was ‘live’ and constantly on the move[41].

The selection of photographs was extremely interesting. The co-author of the exhibition, Nina Smolarz, asked the members of her team to dive into the archives[42] and pick the images intuitively – if anything caught their attention then that was „it”. It was the idea of Barthes’s punctum. When entering the labyrinth, the first pictures were of infants. The images at the exit displayed old age and death. All the photographs were grouped in constellations. If any comparisons were to be drawn, perhaps the arrangements could bring to mind Pierre Nora’s ‘sites of memory’ – in other words, a history which is non-linear and refers not only to the exceptional but also to the anonymous individual. It is thus a history understood as a collection of symbols, or perhaps even images. Let me mention a few such constellations: the revolutionaries, the exiled, Feliks Dzierżyński, the sportsmen in the photographs by Leszek Fidusiewicz, the dead insurgents of 1963, the Polish Jews, children, tsarist police photographs, World War II and the Holocaust.

The question is: how is this arrangement to be interpreted? It was as ambiguous as an archive could possibly be. It could be understood as an attempt to reconstruct a community in light of its possible dissolution. Such universalizing narrative would soon be impossible – the memory of the left would be different from that of the right, or from that of the feminists, Jews, Silesians, or all the remaining Others. In that sense, it was an archive of the borderland of transformation. The two key moments here seem to be that of forgetting and that of remembering. If the archive is the relict of history[43], thus letting us relive history as the past, then the exhibition was a means of departure from the events, however recent they were, and a way to contain them in some kind of a framework. The labyrinth also contained photographs of the Round Table talks, general Jaruzelski taking the presidential oath, or the appointment of the government of Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki.

On the other hand, such an intuitively constructed broad stream of images, which was not subject to rigid orderly thought, could be a risk. But the decision was a symptom of the feeling of freeing history from hiding, from the shackles of censorship and self-censorship. It therefore comes as no surprise that the Institute of National Remembrance was established soon afterwards. A guard was needed to tame this spontaneous river of memory.

The installation was also very important as far as the art of Grzegorz Klaman was concerned. First of all, it was the biggest one in his career to date. The artist created a structure resembling the ganglia in a human brain and introduced it into the space of the church. Was his Emblems series in 1993, when Klaman inserted a real physical human brain in a vessel in the shape of a cross, a repetition of this original gesture? In this case, it would be difficult to speak of any criticism of the Church or Catholicism – it was more about the restitution of the spiritual dimension, lost in contemporary culture, to the body or its remains[44].

Klaman’s Emblems are not that far off from the next dramatic encounter of the body and the cross in Polish art, namely Dorota Nieznalska’s installation Pasja from 2001. Though the language use is different – no longer pompous but grotesque, if not satirical – the intention seems to be similar, namely to criticize reification and to protest against a culture which is focused on the worldliness and cult of the body stripped of the spiritual dimension. I would be inclined to even venture a thesis that the exhibitions of Bogucki and Smolarz, as well as the participation of Grzegorz Klaman in them, should serve as a new vantage point from which to again cast a look at the genesis and messages of the Polish ‘critical art’.

As difficult as it may have been, I believe that the encounter with the space of the church was also significant to Teresa Murak. I have already mentioned her cross of cress from 1983 from the Sign of the Cross exhibition. The artist made a soft belt of fabric with grass sown on it, which she planned to attach to the foot of the cross so that it would hang a few metres below for ‘people to touch it’. She recalls she had to take it down as the author of the exhibition claimed that it did not fit its original concept. The artist also sowed seeds on a dress she wore, and she bathed in water with seeds, which sprouted on her body. Her attempt at caressing or humanizing the cross could have been perceived as erotic, as if Murak dressing the body of Christ in her robe.

But was not Jacek Murkiewicz’s adoration of the cross close to such a gesture? In his ‘iconoclastic’ performance from 1993, the naked artist fondled a crucifix lying on the floor. Was such art still within the domain of the sacrum or was it a criticism of the sacrum? After all, ritual orgiastic activities are also part of the sacrum. Interestingly, the mystical espousal of Teresa Murak with the body of Jesus has not yet been dealt with by feminist criticism. In The Labyrinth, the gesture of Teresa Murak was subversive also against Klaman’s superstructure. Paradoxically, it was a reminder of the sacred nature of the space. She limited her presence to the vestibule, spreading mud from the local river on the wall before the entrance. The episode is omitted in current interpretations of Murak’s work, as if even the valuable and the brave could be an object as long, however, as it remained inside the church building.

Summary

The exhibition of Bogucki and Smolarz cannot be considered without a broader international context. In 1983, it was no longer Szeemann’s Documenta 5 that should have been their point of reference but the hotly discussed projects such as New Spirit in Painting by Norman Rosenthal, Nicholas Serota and Christos Joachimides at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1981, Documenta 7 by Rudi Fuchs in Kassel in 1982 or Zeitgeist by Rosenthal and Joachimides at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin in 1982. These exhibitions marked the beginning of the great popularity of the Neue Wilde painting (Neoexpressionism), though they were criticized by the left for withdrawing the discussion about art back to the modernist attitudes, to the area of the unquestionable autonomy of art. The ‘great exhibitions’ of the 1980’s, which focused mainly on painting, predominantly by men, and which treated art as an object – most often a big object – were in contradiction to the need expressed by the avant garde of the 1970’s to participate in politics. They reversed the anti-market vector of dematerializing art. The connections between these exhibitions and the market was immediately recognized[45].

I am far from suggesting that the exhibitions by Bogucki and Smolarz were in a dialog with such criticism. It must have been due to the ‘spirit of the times’, and also to the unmistakable intuition of Bogucki, who had always been sensitive to the gradually intensifying shortcomings of the ‘civilization of rush and success’, that their exhibitions were slowly but surely departing from painting seen as an autonomous artistic expression. That wasn’t necessarily an anti-commercialism gesture. It could have been mistrust of a fad. In any case, these exhibitions were probably the least painterly in the whole of the 1980’s.

The Sign of the Cross from 1983 was the last to be seen in the eyes of the participants and the viewers as an exhibition of painting. And as such, it was criticized – many saw it as a failed attempt at the sacralization of art. “One had the strong impression that many authors identified the sign of the cross with the crossing of straight lines. Others treated it as merely a theme of an art competition, or decided to use it as an identification sign”[46], - as Nawojka Cieślińska wrote about the exhibition.

Indeed, the Sign of the Cross was still to a large extent a presentation of traditional media – painting (Henryk Stażewski, Stefan Gierowski, Janusz Tarabuła, Henryk Błachnio), sculpture (the large metal crosses by Edward Krasiński), smaller compositions such as a chair with the soft rag cross by Andrzej Matuszewksi, or the wall composition by Paweł Kwiek with his self-portrait photograph and quotes from Maria Dąbrowska. In the following exhibitions, such works were treated as individual artistic expressions and thus hidden in the ‘individual zones’. A structural and holistic spatial concept stands out in the foreground.

The curatorial evolution of Janusz Bogucki and Nina Smolarz is not entirely about abandoning painting, but more about the blurring of the autonomy of art objects. Barely a year later, at the exhibition of Apocalypse – The Light in the Darnkess, the works of art, large-scale installations, were interconnected such that any attempt at dividing the presentation into separate parts could have deprived them of sense.

To reach the sculpture-installations by Włodzimierz Borowski and Jerzy Kalina, one had to cross a long corridor made of a steel net by Grzegorz Kowalski, which had screens mounted on the inside. The installation by Roman Woźniak – a cloud painted on fabric stretched under the roof of the church – was actually a prop for a performance presented on the last day of the exhibition, in which the curtain of heaven was torn. Anda Rottenberg called The Apocalypse “the highest artistic achievement”, underlining the fact that it was the different works that created a new quality[47].

In neither The Labyrinth (1989) nor in Epitaph and the Seven Spaces (1991), which was the last big exhibition by Bogucki and Smolarz, did painting or sculpture regain its autonomy. In The Labyrinth the construction by Klaman dominates and makes the works of other artists dependent on it. The manner of presenting the paintings by Jacek Sempoliński, on the other hand, evokes controversy – the curator made a separate creation of these images, turned them into a curtain, or an element of interior design, showing them in a way completely different from the customary way of displaying in galleries. The painters, such as Marek Sobczyk, show installations and not paintings. In Epitaph and the Seven Spaces, the Luxus collective led by Paweł Jarodzki, decided to build an apocalyptic landscape – a model of a capitalist consumerist city.

It is merely an example of an artwork which is perishable, it falls apart once the exhibition is over. To me, it is an ideological declaration. Perhaps in the Poland of the 1980’s it was difficult to choose a reality which would be different than a non-commercial one. At the end of the decade, however, the choice was perhaps a bit more feasible.

The same applied to the space. What was seen as a contestation of the modernist gallery space in the West seemed just a touch imposed in Poland. Those who wanted independence in the 1980’s were pretty much limited to a church or a factory. The two places were, obviously, "outside of the white cube"- as Brian O’Doherty would say. At the end of the decade, however, the galleries and museums hosted exhibitions of the newest art, and the state policy in the domain of culture was also subject to gradual liberalization. But Janusz Bogucki and Nina Solarz decided to choose the church even in 1989. It was an esthetic, as well as a political declaration.

One could, therefore, ask (applying the categories known from American criticism and referring to the alternative outlined by Hal Foster): did these exhibitions belong to the postmodernism of resistance or a reactive, conservative postmodernism[48]?

It was definitely a subversive gesture against the Church. Even the concept of ecumenism proposed in 1987 by Bogucki and Smolarz was already explosive to the church then and would most probably be unacceptable today. (As part of a project titled The Path of Lights – Ecumenical Meetings, the space of the Catholic Church of Divine Mercy on Żytnia street in Warsaw was turned into a Jewish chamber and Protestant, Orthodox, Moslem and Buddhist chapels.) No doubt, if we were to look at it all from the perspective of the alternative attitudes and circles such as Strych from Łódź, kultura Zrzuty, Luxus, etc., then we would see no revolutionary or subversive concept lying at the foundation of the exhibitions by Bogucki and Smolarz, but rather a utopia of the return to faith and a dream of reconstructing the humanistic, integral vision of a human being and culture.

However, one must not lose sight of the broader political situation, about blocking the development of culture by censorship and other forms of repression, and about that specific freezing of the entire artistic life which took place during martial law and throughout the entire decade of the 1980’s. In this context, these projects carried a huge emancipating power. Grzegorz Kowalski recalls that in 1984 he was talked into taking part in The Apocalypse – The Lights in the Darnknes in the Church of the Holy Cross in Warsaw, though he thought of himself as a ‘libertine’. He was convinced, however, that Bogucki "was not a man of the Church but someone interested in spirituality"[49].

For that reason I would see the projects by Bogucki and Smolarz closer to the ethos of resistance, especially that the works of such artists as Klaman, Kozyra, Althamer or, for that matter, Nieznalska, which make references to the body and are against its reification, seem to owe quite a lot to the attitudes expressed in that past milieu.

The last joint event in the form of an exhibition was Epitaph and the Seven Spaces in 1991 at Zachęta. The later projects organized by Bogucki and Smolarz were meetings, fleeting events[50], subjective to the performative structure developing in time. They were contemplating finding a permanent seat for the ‘monastery’ of art” they had founded. It is as if the language of a huge multi-disciplinary exhibition was the one to use when arguing against a specific political system. Once the system was gone, so was the language of resistance.

Dorota Jarecka, an art historian and critic, writes reviews, longer texts and interviews for Gazeta Wyborcza. In 2011 she co-curated the exhibition Erna Rosenstein. I can repeat only unconsciously at the Foksal Gallery Foundation in Warsaw. A laureate of the Jerzy Stajuda Art Criticism Award (2012).

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Notes

1. The author would like to thank Nina Smolarz for providing access to the archive, Teresa Bogucka, Michał Bogucki, Wiesław Borowski, Małgorzata Iwanowska-Ludwińska, Grzegorz Klaman, Grzegorz Kowalski, Teresa Murak, Marek Sobczyk, Roman Woźniak for the interviews, Leszek Fidusiewicz, Anna Beata Bohdziewicz, Tadeuszow Rolke and Erazm Ciołek for the photographs. ↑

2. J. Bogucki, “Od rozmów ekumenicznych do Labiryntu”, Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, 1991. ↑

3. The author's interview with RomanWoźniak, Warsaw, 2010.↑

4. See H. Kim, “Conclusion”, in: “Harald Szeemann. Individual Methodology”, ed. Florence Derieux, JRP/Ringier, Zurich, 2007, p. 147. ↑

5. The undertakings were mainly financed from the Independent Culture Fund (Fundusz Kultury Niezależnej). For his participation in the exhibition „Apocalypse – Light in the Darkness”, Grzegorz Kowalski received 50 litres of olive oil from foreign assistance to Poland. A new element appeared in 1989: apart from the underground fund, one of the sponsors of the exhibition „The Labyrinth - Underground Space” was a manufacturer of washing powder (information from Nina Smolarz). ↑

6. P. Piotrowski, “Dekada. O syndromie lat siedemdziesiątych, kulturze artystycznej, krytyce, sztuce - wybiórczo i subiektywnie”, Obserwator, Poznań, 1991, p. 76. ↑

7. “Boris Groys interviewed by Judy Ditner”, in: “Ostalgia”, exh. cat., New Museum, New York, 2011, p. 58. ↑

8. From 1980 to 1985, Grzegorz Kowalski was head of a studio at the Department of Industrial Design, and from 1985 at the Department of Sculpture at Warsaw’s Academy of Fine Arts. See: Obszar Wspólny, Obszar Własny, ed. K. Sienkiewicz, Instytut Teatralny im. Zbigniewa Raszewskiego, Warsaw, 2011. ↑

9. Current interpretations of that exhibition underline the community moment. See: “Konstrukcja w Procesie 1981 – wspólnota, która nadeszła?”, exhibition newsletter, ed. A. Saciuk-Gąsowska, A. Jach, 15 IV–29 V 2011, Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, 2011. ↑

10. J. Bogucki, W. Borowski, A. Turowski, “Raport o stanie krytyki”, Odra no. 1/1981, p. 42. ↑

11. See: V. Turner, “Passages, Margins and Poverty: Religious Symbols of Communitas”, Polish translation in: idem, “Gry społeczne, pola i metafory. Symboliczne działanie w społeczeństwie”, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, Krakow, 2005. ↑