Resurrection of The Body in Eastern Europe
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in December 1980 (22nd December 1980). Three persons took part in it,
Krzysztof Jung and two of his friends, Dorota Krawczyk-Janisch and
Wojciech Piotrowski. Krzysztof and Wojciech sat facing each
other in a dark room, surrounded by the audience. The two men Krzysztof
and Wojciech stitched the black clothes that they were wearing together,
getting united in this way. Finally, they undressed and left, leaving
the stitched clothes behind. Dorota says that she was separated from
them by a black curtain, which she was cutting into stripes. In this way
she was getting out of hiding and revealing her naked body. She writes,
though, that she did not wish to unite with the boys, although they
threw a reel of thread to her. November 1980 witnessed two other
performances during which Krzysztof Jung and Wojciech Piotrowski
stitched their clothes together and undressed in front of each other and
the audience. In 1980, Krzysztof Jung and Wojciech Piotrowski performed
in Grzegorz Kowalski’s triptych Trzy watki z zycia, kazdy z osia
symetrii (Three Threads from Life, Each with an Axis of Symmetry). From
Grzegorz Kowalski’s account we learn that Wojciech and Krzysztof,
wearing identical black trousers and white shirts, sat down at a small
table on which there was a mirror so that they could see each other’s
reflection. Next, they took off their shirts, and their hair was cut by
the other one. They piled the hair on the mirror. After that, they put
on the shirts and stitched their sleeves together, passing the needle to
each other. Then they set fire to the hair and to the threads that
connected them, and sat looking each other in the eyes for a long while.
In 1980, Krzysztof Jung and Wojciech Piotrowski posed for Grzegorz
Kowalski’s unfinished work W lustrze (In the Mirror). Highly aesthetic,
black-and-white photographs show two naked men contemplating their own
reflections and the reflection of the other one in the mirror that was
lying on the floor. A play of glances, poses and revealed parts of body
lends these portraits of two friends an erotic aura. The photographic
record of Krzysztof Jung and Wojciech Piotrowski reveals the eroticism
of confronted male bodies. This is unique because of the distinct
psychological and physical connection as well as closeness between the
two naked, attractive men.
It would be most difficult to find an equally homoerotic work in the
visual culture of the Polish People’s Republic (PRL). I do not mean, of
course, all the homophobic and humiliating references to homosexuality,
produced to stigmatize homosexual identity as pathologic or grotesque,
especially in Polish comedies of this period. In this context, Jung’s
actions strike one by deep psychical and analytic reflection on
relationships between men and masculinity. The beauty of the body, to
contemplative and the ritual character saved those performances from
ridicule or disgust, which was typical in reference to homoerotic issues
in Poland at that time. The artist’s personal engagement made them
unique and courageous. Grzegorz Kowalski writes that in Jung’s “artistic
theatre” the things that were impossible in real life became real. I
would like to add that what was impossible in the visual culture of the
1970s, i.e. nonhomophobic reflection on a relationship of two men,
allowed the survival of the Repassage circle and in performance art.
Since his first actions in 1967, Jung’s performances featured naked men
that tore nets of threads that the artist had woven around them. He
himself got caught in his own net, too, and getting free was painful.
Przemiana (Wojtkowi Karpinskiemu) Change (for Wojtek Karpinski) 1978,
Slad (dedykowane Konstantemu Jelenskiemu) Trace (dedicated to Konstanty
Jelenski) 1989, Stwarzanie poprzez innych i horyzont wolnosci (Creation
through Others and Horizon of Freedom) 1980, in all these actions
weaving a net, being entangled, and tearing it was crucial. Being tied
up and liberation could be metaphors expressing the pressure and
consequences of different sexuality.
Men liberating themselves from ties in Jung’s performances acquire a new
meaning in such context. They may be a projection, an enactment of his
own overwhelming desire for the truth about himself, a ritual of coming
out from hiding, which the artist acted with his own body. Jung’s
performance in general deals with tearing fetters. This is a diverse
process of destroying the net of masculinity, liberating it from the
closed communist, patriarchal and heterocentric gender system and its
ambushes. This is performance that can be interpreted in political as
well as sexual terms.
Moreover, for Jung, the beauty of the male body, including the body of
the artist himself, became a medium for performance art. The aesthetics
of male body, which he used, was in opposition to the tendencies in male
nudes in the PRL that favored expressionist deformation of the bodies.
Male body was a rigid taboo, it amounted to a nest of ugliness in visual
images, censors deleted all presentation of male genitals considered as
obscene. Naked male body was where deformation and pornography dwelled.
In the official culture, beauty and masculinity were two strictly
opposing ideas. Krzysztof Jung’s homoeroticism saved the attractive male
body in the PRL, affirmed its shape, its sensations and eroticism.
Without Jung’s bodily and erotic beauty, it would be the anti-aesthetic
male body, tormented and martyred in Jerzy Beres and Zbigniew
Warpechowski’s heterosexual performances alone that would be considered
typical of that time.
Two contrastive ways can be noticed in early Polish male performance:
the homosexual of Krzysztof Jung, and the heterosexual by Beres and
Warpechowski – the heroes and pioniers of Polish performance art, each
bearing different meanings. In Jung’s works, attributing sexuality to
masculinity by a man artist was a rebellion of sexual norms. A rebellion
that could only happen in an alternative artistic space as visual
culture lacked presentations of subversion of that kind. The artist’s
homoerotic attitude caused a breach in the system of gender
articulation, it liberated and revealed desire, of which few traces
remain since it was well hidden in inaccessible private spaces. The
Repassage gallery occupied a place at the borderline between private and
public, and in this way it might offer a chance of valuable insight. The
rumor has it that Jung’s flat in Warsaw was a meeting point for the
homosexual artistic community at the turn of the 1970s and 1980s.
Couples and Communities
Jung’s performances began in 1976, and it was in the mid-1970s that
Lukasz Korolkiewicz started creating his hyper-realistic pictures
suggesting homosexual relationships, situations and identities.26 The
artist painted from photographs, adding tints of romance and melancholy
to realism. The paintings mainly featured young men at homes or against
cityscapes, first photographed and then painted. They were clearly
portraits of individual persons, presented in ambiguous, disquieting
situations that were homoerotic to a surprising extent. In the paintings
U kresu nocy (At the End of the Night), Hamak (Hammock), Milosc (Love),
two men are shown in intimate scenes of desire.
In Hammock, one of the men is naked, the viewer can see the shining
muscles on his back, he is lighting a cigarette for his partner, who is
lying in the hammock. In Love, the men are ostentatiously embracing each
other. The couple is sitting at a laid table, surrounded by plants, a
candle is burning, the older man, wearing a suit, is holding his younger
partner who looks and is dressed like a woman. The bearded man in the
suit, who is probably also the one in the hammock, seems to be holding a
shutter release, so it is him who has taken the picture which we now see
as a painting. The portrayed man controls the picture, it is him who
decided on the way of presenting the theme that was so difficult and
believed to be pathologic at that time. Elements of self-presentation
are probably in this picture, too.
In several paintings, e.g. Melancholic Afternoon, the feeling of
closeness or desire is built up by a play of glances and mirror
reflections, suggesting the presence of another man in the picture. This
presence, like in Ceremony, is evoked by an ancient sculpture of male
nude in the background, which is an element of the code in homosexual
art. In other pictures, it might be the fact that the portrayed person
is concentrating on a phallic object, e.g. the mysterious object held by
the man in Obssession. Portraits of potential lovers and the same
peoples appearing in a number of pictures are intriguing. It seems that
the artist used hyperrealism to record the life of men who were pushed
to the margin of reality. He emphasized the human aspect of existence,
hidden and repressed in the reality of socialism, rather than the
glittery, nonhuman, superficial reality of consumerism and
industrialism, typical of American hyperrealism.
For this reason, that period in Korolkiewicz’s artistic life is
exceptional and unique, especially against the background of social
attitudes towards homosexuality at that time. The paintings were created
in the mid-1970s, that is when the so-called “unmentioned problems,”
such as alcoholism, drug addiction, or homosexuality, began to appear in
the media on a fairly big scale. Although homosexuality was
decriminalized in Poland in 1932, it was still related to questions of
penology, crime and deviation.
Homosexuality appeared in social reflection only to be connected with
those extremely negative and degrading connotations, while these
pictures were huge, beautiful, official proof of relationships and
desire between men. Was it the artist’s joke, his iconographic
originality, was he inspired by his friends’ lives, was it contrariness
towards the official heterosexist ideology, or, perhaps, curiosity about
a subculture, an element of his own biography? (In photographs from that
period the painter poses hugging his naked models).
The answers to these questions will remain secret. However, these
portraits of a group of friends give us a unique artistic and
anthropological insight into the atmosphere, clothes, and male types of
the artistic homosexual community in Poland in the 1970s. The
melancholic, and secret, character of those paintings shows a sense of
social alienation but also a sense of magic that must have surrounded
those people and their officially degraded subculture. Apart from Jung’s
absolute extraordinariness and courage, Korolkiewicz went surprisingly
far in a time when all metaphors of homoeroticism were conveyed with an
almost undecipherable code.
Code of Painting
A combination of religious and sexual themes in male nudes is
characteristic of the code of homoerotic art, especially in its masked
version, hidden under a pure male nude. It is a code of iconographic
accessories that reveals the erotic rhetoric of martyrdom. Male
carnality is represented in ecstasy and hiding. It is an almost abstract
language of painting, the most consistent representative of which was
Jacek Sempolinski in the 1970s. This kind of presentation allows the
artist to speak and be silent simultaneously, experience something and
deny this experience.
Sempolinski turned this code into his own style, creating a series of
abstract crucifixions or male busts referring to crucifixions. A
deformed, exhausted body of Christ, the body of a man, is both
articulated and negated, covered by a pastel crayon. A spiral of lines
shapes, hides and attacks the nude, often changing into a whirl where
the genitals are. The mediums of painting express the suffering on the
cross, but also the suffering of the artist, both spiritual and erotic.
Expression and suppression are in conflict, the negation of pleasure in
the name of religious metaphysics, the metaphysics of painting, is
dominant.
All those paintings look like hiding variations on male nude; it is the
title that suggests iconographic essence. This kind of homoerotic coding
is concealed in many male nudes created by men in the history of Polish
painting, and it will remain enigmatic for ever. Other Polish painters
who worked in the genre of coded or veiled male homoerotic nude are
Krzysztof Cwiertniewicz and Tadeusz Boruta. The secretive painterly
erotic is in significant contrast to spectacular expressions of
heterosexual men’s desire in countless female nudes, totally unmasked
and dictating the history of Polish art. This is exactly the way in
which heteronormative domination and the irony of artistic freedom get
uncovered in art.
Sexuality in Independent Cinema
It was in the output of the Amateur Film Clubs, which has recently been
rediscovered in an exhibition by Marysia Lewandowska and Neil Cummings’
Enuzjasci [Enthusiasts] (Zamek Ujazdowski, 2004), that the most
interesting explosion of sexuality in the PRL (socialist Poland)
occurred. The years 1952-1981 witnessed the most intensive creativity of
the filmmakers – members of the Amateur Film Clubs. Films relating to
eroticism were presented in the section entitled Love, where pieces
questioning the routines of heterosexual marriages and traditional
gender roles, presenting orgiastic liberation of group sex, homosexual
themes and saturating the medium with carnality were screened.
This stuff seems to be authentic evidence of everyday life, of the
hidden sexual revolution pushed to the margin in the PRL, a humble
equivalent to sexually countercultural avant-garde cinema in the West.27
Among those unique materials there are also poetical films dealing with
dilemmas, desires and fantasies of young homosexual men against a
background of the reality the 1970s. Piotr Majdrowicz and Jan Bujak are
two experimental filmmakers who should go down to the history of
independent homoeroticism in the cinema. Both artists also visually
presented the tragedy of homosexual men in the system that was
oppressive not only in political but, first of all, in heterocentric
terms.
In the film Ton (Depths), 1978, Jan Bujak presents the constraint of
heterosexual sex, to which a young men is forced, via surreal images.
The portrayed men escapes into imaginative, homosexual fantasies that
show his real nature – that is why landscape plays an important role in
this film. Piotr Majdrowicz’s film Nieporozumienie (Misunderstanding,
1978) is a real masterpiece. The camera is the homosexual eye looking at
the body of another man with desire. The viewer is participating in it,
and the official visual heteromatrix is completely discarded. It is a
story of a young photographer in love with an athlete, whose pictures he
takes. The traumatic story is connected with the theme of erotic
presentation of the male body. We see the athlete’s body when he is
training or taking a shower. The photographer and his model watch
classical and Renaissance male nudes together, which they use as a model
for the photographs. It seems as though both young men entered the
alternative homosexual matrix and its visual aspect. But the hopes of
the artist fail to come true, the end of the film shows the athlete and
his girlfriend, and the tragically lonely hero / photographer looking at
them from a distance.
Both in Bujak’s and in Majdrowicz’s films, forced heterosexuality is a
barrier stopping homosexual fulfillment and as such becomes a sign of
the repressive and alienating system. The originality of those films
lies in the fact that, through erotic images as well as through the
trauma of being rejected and the internal conflict, the artists manage
to convey all their frustration to the viewer. The reflection on the
nonhuman character of the totalitarian sexual system is obvious. Also
women are trapped – the sad heroines of those films, unaware tools in
the hands of the heteronormative order of masculinity in the communist
civilization of the Cold War period. First of all, though, both the
filmmakers, members of the Amateur Film Clubs, avoiding censorship,
without the help of the metaphors of painting or performance, told their
alternative stories and showed images of gay desire, look and trauma.
Just like Jung’s performance and its subversive aesthetics and eroticism
is in opposition to Beres and Warpechowski’s mainstream performance art,
who somatically yielded to the deformation of the body and the
desexualization of masculinity typical of the PRL, so the films by
homosexual artists from the Amateur Film Clubs can be contrasted with
the creative output of the official macho of the socialist cinema
avant-garde concentrated around the Film Forms Workshop in Lodz, which
flourished exactly in the same decade of the 1970s. It is surprising to
see that the so-called oppositional artists, who experimented in the
medium of film and television to subvert and analyze the official
ideological video-sphere of communism, entirely remained visual tools of
the communist patriarchic and heterocentric order as well as the
humiliating gender and sexual norms and stereotypes.
In old productions of the avant-garde “gay jokes” can be found, which
would probably be warmly welcomed today by the homophobic guys from the
far right parties League of Polish Families / Law and Justice /
All-Polish Youth. The cult film Widok z mojego okna (View from My
Window) by Józef Robakowski will not let the good old joke about the dog
that must be homosexual since he is molesting another dog be forgotten
in the Polish art history. This is a superb linguistic material for
studying the language of homophobia, but also a testimony of how the
nonhuman language of a system goes deep into the psychosexual level even
in those who allegedly are in opposition.
The Life Of An Outsider Gender Performer
I would like to finish the reminiscences of the men of those years with
the figure “larger than Polish life”: Rysia, i.e. Ryszard Czubak, who
walked (and still does today) the gray streets of the cities, including
the capital city, of the PRL in his drag incarnation. This is an ideal
fulfillment of the countercultural postulate of life that becomes art
and art that becomes life, with all the risks that such existence may
bring about. Ryszard / Rysia, participating in various artistic
activities, such as theater or performance, though always on the margin,
is a testimony of the liquidity of gender and the mystery of its
dualism.
This is not the contemporary drag queens entertaining a heterosexual
audience, but permanent, existential, transgender performance in
everyday life, which he prefers to playing female roles in the theatre.
Ryszard / Rysia has always been on stage, first of all at the time when
there was no stage for such total performers of ambivalent gender, all
there was a social and political stigmatization. Continually confronting
his surroundings with the horror of female masculinity, the breaking of
the boundary between womanhood and manhood, Rysia / Ryszard is still as
radical and unique in the time of pilgrimages as he was in the time of
1st May parades.
Many artists could learn the freedom of speech, the courage and
transgression from him. But, first of all, he is an allegory of the
liberation of all those people who are not happy in narrow cages and the
fiction of one gender, controlled by fundamentalist masculinity. Rysia
has recently been discovered by the newest art-queer magazine DIK
(2005),28 which raises hopes that this extraordinary figure will not
disappear, and will become significant for the new generation of the
21st century.
Subjective Archeology
The discovery of each of the artists that I wrote about in the last part
of my essay is a step in the alternative archeology of masculinity and
sexuality in the Polish art. An archeology that, through homoeroticism
or homosexual identity, provokes an explosion and confrontation for the
heteronormative gender and the repressive system that is connected to
it, which is still so strongly experienced by women and men in Poland.
This is why a reflection on masculinity is always potentially dangerous.
The visual and performance aspect of these artists shows a hidden
collaboration of sexual and artistic politics, which surfaced in the art
of the 1990s, first of all in women’s art.29
Krzysztof Jung’s performances show the role of the aesthetic of the live
male body and the psychodrama of the relationships between men. Ryszard
Czubak’s existential transgender attitude opens manhood to womanhood and
womanhood to manhood in a revolutionary way. Lukasz Korolkiewicz’s
paintings are portraits of a subculture, and they introduce the viewers
to spaces of privacy and desire that are invisible and prohibited in the
official public life and media, which, however, turn out to be spaces of
freedom in a totalitarian country. Jacek Sempolinski’s painting
abstractions demonstrate how a homophobic system determines expression
and what masks artists must use to communicate with their audience; it
is also a lesson in a secret visual code and repressed desire. In the
opposition, the independent films by Jan Bujak and Piotr Majdrowicz are
an open testimony of homosexual experience; they are also a record of
heterosexual pressure.
From Love and Democracy of the new millennium, through the 1970s, 80s
and 90s of sexual/artistic interventions and democratic progress in
culture, the archeology of the nonheteronormative art, conducted by me,
is subjective and speculative, and might be a starting point for
alternative histories, counter-histories that will complicate our sense
of tradition and perception of contemporaneity, which will reach deeper
into history or to other figures.
In criticism, where emphasis is on identity and the visual aspect, the
individual position of the interpreter is especially important, he
cannot hide behind a mask of the objective style. My own subjective
archeology could not probably come to life without my homosexuality and
living in and out of Poland, and the resulting viewpoint, desire,
emotions and knowledge. The fact that it is the creative output of the
mentioned artists that means something to me is psychologically rooted
in my romantic and sexual identity, as well as in my current private and
political situation.
It is this open subjectivity that is itself an intervention in the
tradition of the “objective” heteronormative history and the pressure to
write about it in neutral terms.
Notes
1Tomek Kitlinski, Pawel Leszkowicz, Love and Democracy. Reflections on
the Homosexual Question in Poland, Aureus, Krakow, 2005, s. 290-291.
2The term “heteronormativity” was coined by Michael Warner (1993), but
its roots extend back to Adrienne Rich’s (1980) famous argument about
“compulsory heterosexuality”. Some define heteronormativity as a
practice of organising patterns of thought, awareness and beliefs around
the presumption of universal heterosexual desire, behaviour and
identity, while other definitions emphasize either the rule that force
us to conform to hegemonic heterosexual standards or the system of
binary gender. Heteronormativity means, quite simply, that
heterosexuality is the norm, in culture, in society, in politics. It
means that everyone and everything is judged from the perspective of
straight. Samuel Chambers, “Telepistemology of the Closet; Or, the Queer
Politics of Six Feet Under", Journal of American Culture, 26.1.2003.
3Pawel Leszkowicz, Love and Democracy, in: Art Fair Poznan 2005,
exhibition catalogue, The Fine Art Academy, Poznan 2005.
4In 2000, in CSW Laznia Aneta Szylak organised an important
international exhibition called All You Need Is Love which was still
situated in the dominating hetero-normative model. See the All You Need
Is Love exhibition catalogue, CSW Laznia, Gdansk 2000.
5This relates to the history and psychology of love expressed in the
plural in the philosophy of Julia Kristeva. My curatorial concept of the
exhibition was deepened due to Julia Kristeva’s book Tales of Love.
Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, translated by Leon S.Roudiez, Columbia
University Press, New York, 1987. The French original Histories d’amour
was published in1983.
6Tomek Kitlinski, Joe Lockard, Poland’s Transition from Communism to
Fundamentalist Hetero-sex,
bad.eserver.org/issues/2005/72/kitlinskileszkowiczlockard.html
7The ring is part of an installation which also includes a video film
showing the artist as she is boxing with Przemyslaw Saleta - famous
Polish boxer. Thus the ring and the video projection has a strong
feminist message as reflection on heterosexual couple dynamism. Due to
the symbolic significance of the object I decided to show the ring on
its own which gave the work additional dimension commenting on the
conflicts related to sexual identities. Zuzanna Janin has already
exhibited this work in various versions in the past and agreed to
present only one part of it – the ring without the performance.
8Bogna Burska quotes films such as: Queen Margot, Marquise, Dangerous
Liaisons, Frantic, Henry and June, Quills, Lovers on the Bridge and
Night Wind.
9The title is a reference to the famous philosophical and sexology
treaty written by Otto Weininger in 1903.
10Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J.P. Mayer, M.
Lerner, transl. G. Lawrance, New York 1966.
11J.S. Mill’s famous essay On Liberty (1859) is directed against “the
tyranny of the majority”.
12Claude Lefort, Essais sur le politique, Editions du Seuil, Paris 1986.
13Nussbaum Martha C., Cultivating Humanity. A Classical Defense of
Reform in Liberal Education, Harvard University Press, London, Cambridge
1997.
14Rosalind Deutsche, Evictions. Art and Spatial Politics, The MIT Press,
1996.
15Danuta Cwirko-Godycka, Krzysztof Malec – In the Field of Nature, in
Mystical Perseveration and a Rose, exhibition catalogue, State Gallery
of Art, Sopot, 1992, p.65.
16Artur Zmijewski, “Und morgen die ganze Welt…. About the exhibition Me
and AIDS“, Magazyn Sztuki (10 / 1996), p.262.
17Jerzy Slawomir Mac, ”Prawo do rownosci,” Polityka (15 / 2001), p.22.
18Jaroslaw Lubiak, “What Tower Would Like to Say?”, Exit. New Art in
Poland (October –December 1996), p. 34.
19Iwona Lewandowska, "Andrzej Karas”, Gazeta na Mazowszu. Dodatek Gazety
Wyborczej (14 February 1994 ) reprinted in A.r.t: Galeria a.r.t.
1992-1997, Plock, 1998, p.46.
20I am referring here to an interview with the artist: Katarzyna Kozyra,
Artur Zmijewski, “Homoartysta”, Czereja ( 6/1998), pp.5-11.
21Artur Zmijewski, A Passport into the Male Sanctum. An Interview with
Katarzyna Kozyra in catalogue of the exhibition Katarzyna Kozyra. The
Men’s Bathhouse, XLVIII International Biennale of the Visual Arts,
Venice, 1999, pp.75-78.
22Tomasz Kitlinski wrote in Art in America that Anda Rottenberg ‘shook
up the nation’s male-dominated art establishment’: Tomasz Kitlinski,
Warren Niesluchowski, Jacek Maslanka, “Polish Passions Damage Two
Works”, Art in America (March 2001), p.160.
23Jaroslaw Modzelewski, Marek Sobczyk, Szesnascie obrazow, in catalogue
of the exhibition Jaroslaw Modzelewski i Marek Sobczyk. Szesnascie
wspolnie namalowanych obrazow, Centrum Sztuki Wspolczesnej Zamek
Ujazdowski, Warszawa, 1998, p.14.
24Catalogue of the exhibition: Izabella Gustowska. Namietnosci i Inne
Przypadki, Centrum Sztuki Wspolczesnej Zamek Ujazdowski, Warszawa, 2001.
25Grzegorz Kowalski, Tropy, in: Krzysztof Jung (1951-1998), exhibition
catalogue, Muzeum im. Xawerego Dunikowskiego in Królikarni – The Branch
of The National Museum, Warsaw 2001. All information about Jung’s life
and art is taken from this catalogue published in Polish and English.
26Lukasz Korolkiewicz, exhibition catalogue, Dom Artysty Plastyka,
Warszawa 1979.
27Amelia Jones, Subversive Love. A Selection of Polish “Enthusiast”
Film, in Marysia Lewandowska, Neil Cummings, Enthusiasts from Amateur
Film Clubs, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London 2004.
29Pawel Leszkowicz, The Feminist Revolt, bad.eserver.org/issues/2005.
Dan Doran
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