In 1918, a group of avant-garde artists active in Moscow and Saint Petersburg joined forces to create an experimental format for a process of musealisation, almost completely self-organised, which culminated in creation of the museums of pictorial culture in 1919. The New Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow organised a research-based exhibition to celebrate the centenary of this event, reformulating for a wider audience a story that had previously been little known beyond a small circle of specialists, focusing particularly on the Moscow input to the experience – Moscow Museum of Pictorial Culture. If the importance of this historical reconstruction per se is undeniable, it also enabled a more complex and deeper understanding of the avant-garde movement by presenting the best-known section of the New Tretyakov collection in a brand new light. This revision challenged the status of the museum as a ‘dead’ institution, bound by established canons, and applied different critical principles to its historical collection in a process that I would like to call ‘institutional self-critique’. This formulation refers to the tendency that some institutions are developing, as an attempt to reflect on their own collections and practices with the aim of de-colonising, de-constructing, and self-criticising their own approach and history. This stage can be intended as the development of the ‘institutional critique’, which has been consciously enacted by artists since the 1960s, and that has already been absorbed by the narration and methods of current art history as a pivotal moment in the art system.
Reconstruction of the history and context of the museums of pictorial culture has the potential to open up awareness of formats of self-organisation in more recent decades, some of them made in conjunction with established institutions. For the retrospective look that is applied in the present text (which will be too concise to tackle such a demanding and complex topic in detail) it is moreover interesting that the history of the Moscow Museum of Pictorial Culture can be interpreted as an early attempt at self-organisation and self-institutionalisation in the history of Russia and the USSR, where there would be further use of this strategy in the development of contemporary art history in the following decades. It is further possible to see the inclusion of administrative tasks in the artists’ practice as a preliminary influence on the art world of the bureaucratisation process, which was typical of the 20th century. This view has already been formulated for some unofficial Soviet artists who, active since the 1960s, organised their own events and exhibitions in private spaces, and implemented self-archiving and self-historicising practices. Consequently, in order to properly shed a light on the self-organisation practices enacted by avant-garde artists, it is fundamental to contextualise this experience in the whole history of Russian contemporary art. However, several problematics arise: how the concept of self-institutionalisation, with all its current meanings and readings, can be applied to a previous era without falling into the error of wrong attribution. Can our contemporary understanding of self-organisation, through a retro-imposed filter, help us to bring out nuances in the story of the museums of pictorial culture?
Self or non self-organisation?
In the aftermath of the October revolution, the entire social structure in Russia, including the domain of art and culture, was mobilised by the State for the cause of Sovietisation. Many artists responded to this new deal with enthusiasm and played an active role in it at the same time as they were conceiving and creating artworks that are today recognised as some of the most important masterpieces of Russian art. In the multitude of artistic researches that shaped the polyphony of the Russian avant-garde the recurrent theme and concept was: ‘new’. Appearing in countless written records of the era, used in reference to many different proposals and in diverse contexts, the category of the new was intended to be something that would be used to construct, piece by piece, a not-so-distant future society.
As conceived in 1918, the museums of pictorial culture were to have one central site in Moscow and 13 other venues in various Russian cities including Voronezh, Vitebsk, Samara, and Penza. [1] At the beginning, the name was slightly different: and museums of artistic culture was transformed into museums of pictorial culture in order to accord pride of place to painting. The project arose from a series of events that took place in the ‘revolutionary’ transition period, when the approach to art and culture applied by Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Soviet People’s Commissar for Education (acronym, Narkompros), and particularly by the IZO (acronym of the Department of Fine Arts of the Narkompros), was implemented as part of a broader organisation and systematisation of the cultural scene based on the new principles of the post-revolutionary era. In a moment characterised by the abolition of private property and the nationalisation of goods, a huge amount of artworks was put at state disposal. Many of them were taken from outstanding private collections, such as that of the brothers Sergei and Pyotr Shchukin, and of Ivan Morozov, while others came from Lunacharsky’s initiative to purchase the most interesting pieces of avant-garde art from the artists themselves. The requisitioning of artworks was organised through legal but nevertheless compulsory purchases, and was often driven by the artists themselves. It is therefore possible to assume that the museums of pictorial culture constituted an experience of shared responsibility between official institutions and artists, who often also assumed administrative tasks (particularly in the period from 1919 to 1922).
The involvement of artists officially began in 1918, when a commission was set up to oversee first organisational steps and there were several meetings of artists to discuss collectively the methods and the purposes of the project. Outcomes of the discussions were set down in texts signed by artists, including the Report on a Museum of Contemporary Art by Vladimir Tatlin and Sofia Dymshits-Tolstaia. [2] It was drawn up following a discussion on 28 July 1918 by the Narkompros Artistic Collegium and Moscow Artistic Collegium, and proposed a list of theoretical and practical principles to be followed. Much attention was given to criteria for the selection of artworks to constitute the collection, a process that was to be detached from any issues of ‘personal taste’. This concept was judged to be a category of the past, i.e. a method that concealed a traditional and conservative approach. Instead, a committee named Artistic Collegium resolved to use its knowledge to help make the selection more appropriate.
The new art
In a context characterised by heterogeneity of artistic researches, the topic of ‘the new’ had the role to reunite such diversity: thus the creation of a new institution, that could host and display the new kind of art that new artists were creating, was the solution. The Tatlin-Tolstaia text clearly stated commitment to pursue a selection process that would single out the most interesting coeval production, regarding which no established art critics or museological figures could give better advice. Moreover, the selection was to be of artists’ names, while the final choice of artworks would be carried out by the nominated artists. Finally, it was decided to keep a record of the names of collectors, from whom works or entire collections had been requisitioned, in order to trace provenance, a decision which shows commitment to keeping historical vestiges and sensibility towards the historicisation process around the artworks.
Since the art was new, the methods used to decide what was innovative and what was not also had to be new. The need for self-organisation was part and parcel of the attack on established institutional methods and the ending of reliance on museum professionals and art critics, who were blamed for not understanding the latest artistic researches in Russia. In several writings, such as those by Olga Rozanova, and Kazimir Malevich, artists accused ‘czarist’ curators of cowardice and of insulting revolutionary art. In particular, Malevich put into words a vision composed of two opposed sides – conservative and innovative – that could not be reconciled: ‘Due to conditions generated by refined connoisseurs, the creations of the innovators were shoved back into cold garrets and miserable studios where they awaited their fate, being abandoned to destiny’. [3]
Malevich poured scorn on the different scale of value attributed to institutionalised artists, such as Vrubel, or foreign artists such as Cézanne, Van Gogh and Picasso, highlighting the centrality of the concept of time in the evaluation process used by professionals: ‘They have established time as a barometer of understanding. When a work wallows in the monstrous and inept brain of public opinion for an impressive number of years, then this work that has not been eaten but soiled by the saliva of society is accepted in the museum. It is recognized. This is the fate of innovators.’ [4]
The dichotomy between ‘old’ and ‘new’ grew gradually in the eyes of the artists. On one side, the museum professional was deemed to be an archaeologist only able to deal with the past, and found guilty of Russia’s conservatism. On the other hand, the pioneering ideas of the revolutionary artists extended also to a new conception of the display of artworks. Even if the works were still predominantly hung on walls (in a pure gesture that demonstrated respect for the canonical perception of the pictorial dimension), they were to be organised in rooms that did not follow a chronological order. As reproduced in the exhibition at the New Tretyakov Gallery, the display was conceived as a tour through rooms dedicated to different artistic groups, but giving special attention to the contrast of shapes and rules of construction. This approach is clearly seen in the article ‘The museum of painting culture at Rozhdestvenka street, 11’ published in the guide Museums and Places of Interest in Moscow in 1926 (after the Museum had already closed). The text describes how each room was organised to show representative pieces of the most recent and experimental researches of the period. The distinction of periods and the fundamental role of time in the dissection of the true was thus negated, breaking with tradition and asserting a new rationale behind the preservation and display of these works, which had not been welcome before in established institutions. The materiality of the artwork and of art work would overcome the concept of linear time.
The challenge to the traditional role of time in the presentation of works of art was matched by a new approach to space, as manifest in the decision to create a network of museums of pictorial culture across Russia, covering different geographies and territories. The centripetal force that for many years had been characteristic of coeval contemporary art, as it was increasingly drawn to the biggest European cities, was thus negated. A more horizontal approach was put in opposition to the vertical model of art history (still predominant nowadays), aiming to spread knowledge in remote regions of the country, contributing to the creation of a less peripheral landscape. This aspect deserves more attention as a preliminary and authentic turn towards the local sphere, addressing a currently existent dualism between the two domains of the global and the local, although today’s critical discourse plays out this dichotomy in a quite different scenario and between different subjects, through questions of nationality in a reality that tends towards the fading of geographical borders while erecting new theoretical ones. In the vast spaces of Soviet Russia, shortly after the revolution and in line with the goal of constructing an egalitarian society, museums had to be spread far and wide so that everybody who worked outside the city centre, or in smaller cities, and also the ‘peasants and workers’, could have access to culture, as clearly stated in the preparatory documents for the museums of pictorial culture.
As David Shterenberg, the IZO director, wrote: ‘The concept of artistic culture contains, in accordance with the very meaning of the word “culture” as a dynamic activity, a creative element; creative work presupposes creation of the new, invention: artistic culture is nothing other than the culture of artistic invention.’ [5]
This concept of dynamism naturally implied the opening of more venues and the plan for a network of institutions across the country, around which art collections would travel. This was the same motivation that gave rise to the agit-train and Okna ROSTA posters, which used the media of transport and of communication, respectively, as tools of Soviet propaganda. More museums in more cities would facilitate the circulation of artworks and the diffusion of knowledge about the new art.
For the democratisation of art
As director of the Moscow Museum of Pictorial Culture, a position he held from 1919 to 1920, Wassily Kandinsky stated the need for unconventional methods as well as new principles for the selection of artworks. These should be ‘new contributions of a purely artistic nature, i.e., the invention of new artistic methods’, and ‘the development of purely artistic forms, independent of their content, i.e., the element, as it were of craft in art.’ [6] In his opinion, attention to problems connected with shapes, as well as a more generic approach to the tangible elements of artistic practice would reveal the ‘need to struggle painstakingly with the purely material aspect of his work, with technique – all this has placed the artist, as it were, above and beyond the conditions that determine the life of the working man.’ It was thus fundamental to spread proper understanding of the profession of the artist who ‘creates works of real value and demonstrates his definitive right to take, at the very least, equal place among the ranks of the working population.’ This egalitarian aspiration was summed up in Kandinsky’s term ‘democratisation of art’, a locution that he used in the belief that such a goal could be fully attained through the active involvement of artists in all the processes of art management. [7]
Speaking against the old anachronism that marked the choice of previous cultural operators, Aleksandr Rodchenko, who assumed the directorship of the Museums of Pictorial Culture from 1921 to 1922, said that artists are ‘the only people with a grasp of the problems of contemporary art and as the creators of artistic values, are the only ones capable of directing the acquisition of modern works of art and of establishing how a country should be educated in artistic matters.’ [8] The polysemic vision translated into multidisciplinary and helped to determine a reflection on the practice of research, too. In fact a fundamental part of the project was collecting an interesting number of publications, organised in a library, whose importance was also shown in the exhibition at the New Tretyakov Gallery, with a display that exhibited several books and art catalogues, both from Russia and from elsewhere. A rich selection of original books, now part of the museum’s library, was hosted in the vitrines and shelves, attesting the interest and connection of Russian artists to the international scenario of avant-garde researches that had developed abroad.
The experience of the museums of pictorial culture can be retrospectively interpreted as a utopian dream that came true in a certain place and a certain era, and that permitted the development of an experimental platform over a number of years. However the utopian project ended up being institutionalised. Closed in 1922 due to lack of financial support in a harsh socio-political and historical environment, the Muscovite section was acquired in its totality by the Tretyakov Gallery, which, in 2019, finally brushed away the dust to allow a second look at this fascinating episode in art history.
Arseny Zhilyaev: There have been more and more reports in recent years, even in non-specialised media, of museum staff standing up for their rights through trade unions, and doing so in spite of the specifics of the work they do and the mores that are customary in “temples of art”. We hear of actions to protest against a museum’s sponsorship policy or aspects of its display, its exhibition policies. We might see this as a drive towards social recognition of the museum as a special kind of factory with its own special kind of production – the idea is not novel in critical theory. With that there comes a drive to make this production more fair and ethical in respect of its employees and the people who depend on it, not through artistic action, but through action in “real life”, without reference to art. This seems to me to be an important difference between contemporary museum activism and the forms of resistance that were customary in the professional contemporary art community in the last century.
What were those forms? Refusal to interact with the museum (as an institution that was corrupt by default), to participate in the entertainment industry, to commercialise works of art, and all sorts of “rupture” – from torn canvases to posters demanding various changes. All this might be described as a kind of artists’ strike, one that has been going on for more than a century. All well and good, you may say – this negativity is the fuel of art. But what we are actually looking at here is a workaday routine – for a contemporary artist artistic protest, evasion, self-critical reflection, baring the device, etc., is like dropping by the filling station and choosing a fuel. I am reminded of Daniel Buren’s response to Goran Djordjevic’s letter of 1979 asking him and other leading artists to take part in an artists’ strike.[1] The Frenchman, like most of the other addressees, declined the invitation, but his justification expresses the essence of the dilemma very accurately. Buren said he had already been on strike for nearly 15 years, because he hadn’t produced any new forms in that time. So for a real strike you need something like a strike within a strike.
Awareness of this paradox of art production was a stumbling block for many. Djordjevic later proposed his own solution to the problem. Radical criticism of the art project as progeny of the capitalist system, anonymity, going outside the territory of art while at the same time appropriating its infrastructure, building institutionality. Factually, Djordjevic adopted the position of an anonymous researcher, like an anthropologist, studying the artefacts of art merely as evidence of a certain historical period. It is interesting that, for the unprepared viewer, such research can be hard to distinguish visually from what he/she sees on a visit to a regular museum exhibition. But, then, the icons in textbooks of art history do not differ from the icons you see in a church. Djordjevic has worked for several decades as a “doorman” or “technical assistant” of the Museum of American Art (Berlin), only occasionally returning to the traditional role of an artist.
This is just one example of a general and increasingly noticeable trend. There has been a shift of the agenda from the level of the individual artistic utterance to the level of the exhibition, the level of reflection of institutional organisation. Whereas, before, it was mainly artists who engaged in institutional criticism or trade union work within art, today, in campaigns led by museum unions, artists often seem to be on the other side of the barricades. Or, at least, their interventions do not have consequences that are as serious as those of an institutional protest. They remain on the ground of what is “art-ificial” and can therefore, for the most part, be ignored. Faith in artistic activism has been undermined, as have the promises of art in general. There is a sense, let’s say, of exhaustion of the resource of purely artistic innovation through criticism. As if everything that could be said in the framework of the “work of art” has already been said. The ball is in the court of more complex formations, where this utterance is included as one of several structural elements.
I hasten to qualify – what we are talking about here is primarily the USA and, in part, Europe. Russia and the post-Soviet space as a whole have to be bracketed. There, at this stage, people seem ready to forgive any injustice in labour relations or exhibition policy so long as they can have a normally functioning museum, they can work there, etc. Generally though, do you agree with my assessment and, if so, how do you explain the current institutional politicisation?
Maria Silina: I would say that the museum unions you are talking about, such as those at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and in Los Angeles, are part of a global and diverse network of actors who are destabilising the supra-class status of the museum. Local activists and academic workers, together with museum workers and artists, are showing us that the museums themselves are only a part of a big social system that is developing towards ever greater regulation. It seems to me that this is the most problematic aspect of the trend: tight regulation of the aspiration towards greater flexibility and adaptability of the system.
I follow what has been happening as regards tariffs and copyright. There is a harking back to the experience of the 1970s, when the question of the material value of the non-material labour of the artist was raised in legal terms for the first time. The first contract where that material value figured was the Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement, published in the catalogue of Documenta 5 in 1972. The idea was that the artist receives a percentage from the resale of his/her works (by a dealer, gallery or museum). There are more and more independent initiatives of this kind nowadays, including some that come from artists, like Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.), which was set up in New York in 2008.
The other actors in museum infrastructure who are now in the spotlight are sponsors, especially those who have made money in an ethically unacceptable way. Here, museum workers are tied by a loyalty policy, and the activism comes from artists and social groups. For example, we have actions by the Decolonize this Place movement demanding the removal of businessmen who provide sponsorship money to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) that comes from the sale of weapons, from the operation of prisons for immigrants, etc. This is an attack on the supposedly apolitical and supra-class infrastructure of artistic reproduction. I have followed actions by public associations like the Boyle Heights group in Los Angeles, against so-called “art washing”, protesting against the routine multiplication of exhibition spaces. They are not against art and museums as such, but against their asocial role, which is judged to be antisocial.
In Europe too it is not museum workers, but academic scholars who have shown up the structural problem of the museum in its fusion with aggressive state policy, the policy of colonialism. This has been facilitated by “Provenienzforschung”, the study of provenance, which is traditional work for scholars. What they have shown is that museums benefit directly from colonial goods and should reflect on this heritage. The positive activist programme of scholars is for legal regulation of relationships with former colonies. This is the logic of activism in the legal sphere. So the classic channels of expertise (archives, museums) are used by scholars not to strengthen these institutions, but to destabilise them and encourage them to play a more active public role.
In Russia, as you say, the museum doesn’t assume any functions other than the storage and exhibition of objects. I connect this with the Soviet tradition of museumification of the national heritage. The Bolsheviks in 1917 were quick to declare themselves protectors of heritage and they encouraged the opening of museums wherever possible. But by the mid-1920s. these museumified estates and mansions, which had been opened as small collections of nationalised treasures, began to be closed down, often in a barbaric manner. A lot was sold, a lot was lost. The dispersion of the collection of the Museum of Pictorial Culture in Moscow is one example (it was recently the subject of an exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery). In general, from the 1930s onwards it was as much as museums could do to cling onto their functions of preservation and collection, functions that state power constantly put in question. So, historically, even the function of exhibiting has been difficult for Russian museums to maintain. Remember the scandals at the Tretyakov Gallery, when the Gallery forbade independent tours. The museum restricts its visitors, even its most loyal visitors – lovers of art. It’s not just that Russian museums don’t assume social functions – they zealously reject them.
AZ: Speaking of the Tretyakov Gallery, there is something positive we could mention. I think you will agree that Aleksey Fedorov-Davydov was a precursor of contemporary critical museum institutionalism – a sort of “avant-gardist 2.0” – with his Experimental Complex Marxist Exhibition at the Tretyakov in the early 1930s. It didn’t nourish illusions about destroying the museum and returning to the pre-industrial, guild mode of production (a characteristic theme of modernism), but there was a clear understanding of the need to transform art production, the need for demonstration and distribution. Here, art is analysed as a part of the real relationships of production, and only subsequently as a form of existence of ideological content. And this analysis is not labelled as an artistic utterance. In a sense, we are again presented with a rupture, a black square; not on canvas, however, but in the form of an exhibition. The works of the avant-garde, which had declared themselves to be zero, are themselves zeroed, subjected to criticism and de-aestheticised . And, importantly, the institution itself acts as a trigger for this situation. The museum turns out to be more radical than the art radicals. Methodologically, this is a process of defamiliarisation of the history of art and of the museum as specific products of a political and economic development that has to be transformed in the conditions of the proletarian state.
I think that when most contemporary art activists, both in the domestic context and beyond, refer to the historical avant-garde and production art, they lose sight of the role of the institution. In his museum experiments Fedorov-Davydov is the successor of Boris Arvatov and Sergey Tretyakov, with their ideals, while the anarchist dreamer Malevich is better suited as a hero for the art activists. But then, Malevich was at the origins of the Museum of Pictorial Culture, so his anti-institutional impulse was not without pragmatic exceptions. You are currently working on a book about the museum experiments of Soviet avant-garde artists. Do you think that Fedorov-Davydov’s experience is relevant to the current situation?
MS: Experiments with Marxist art criticism attract growing attention today. I am writing a book about exhibitions in art museums in the 1920s and 1930s and I see this interest. It was the time when the modernist museum was being constructed on the principle of a white cube, which became the “standard” for museum spaces by the end of the 1930s. Attempts to find a non-easel and non-formalistic museum exhibition stand out on the background of this modernist tendency, are they are what I am analysing.
But first I’ll say something about the enhanced, intensified institutionality, which you described so well. It is true that analysis of the legacy of art institutions such as GINKhUK [the State Institute of Artistic Culture] or even the Museum of Artistic Culture in a recent exhibition at the Tretyakov observed a strict separation between the intellectual agenda and infrastructure, the morphology of cultural production. Or, as in the case of the Museum of Pictorial Culture or the Museum Office, which distributed the work of avant-garde artists across the country, the material history of these initiatives is ignored. The very concepts of the laboratory and of experimentation are dematerialised, and that represents a departure from the more complex conditions of an analysis of the avant-garde heritage. The case of Fedorov-Davydov confronts us directly with this new, reinforced institutionality. I want to emphasise that Fedorov-Davydov burst into the museum world as an antagonist and started work to construct the museum as an art-history laboratory. He was not a museum worker, he was an art critic who came to the museum, and he came as a bureaucrat and a Communist. He came as an employee of the Main Section for Literature and Art of the People’s Commissariat for Education, which was set up to enforce greater control over the arts, and he came as a committed Marxist and Party member.
Fedorov-Davydov worked under the banner of formal sociological art criticism. He analysed both the formal (visual) and also the material properties of the picture. He showed paintings functionally, indirectly, through their role on the art market, as components of the exhibition machine, as products of the philosophy of patronage and of the art market.
this conception of the progress of art through an overcoming of the easel, superimposed on the idea of a transition period from capitalism to socialism, created a time loop: constant relapses of easel art, a recursive movement.
The logic of his concept of art criticism came from the work of Boris Arvatov. Under Arvatov’s influence, Fedorov-Davydov treated the history of Western and Russian art as the development of easel painting, which had arrived at a state of self-denial by the time of the First World War and the 1917 Revolution. Here, for example, we have the famous photograph of the Tretyakov Gallery in 1931 with Malevich’s Black Square, which, according to Fedorov-Davydov, symbolised art “in the impasse of self-denial”. This experimental exhibition gets read as the forerunner of the Nazis’ Degenerate Art exhibition of 1937, where paintings were shown in order to be reviled. There is a great deal of misunderstanding …
AZ: … Yes, it is extremely annoying. When I was only starting to work with the legacy of Fedorov-Davydov, I also quickly discovered that he is perceived in the English-language context as an equivalent of Nazi aggressivity. The one and a half publications that were available on the English-language Internet in the early 2010s were precisely about that. I was once at a conference in New York dedicated to artist-curators, where I tried to present Fedorov-Davydov’s practice in context. I don’t think I succeeded in convincing the audience, but perhaps my Russian English was to blame. Claire Bishop said that it really is impossible to find anything in English, but there was one French publication that tried to theorise on the topic. I never found the publication. And there weren’t many Russian-speaking authors I knew who were interested in the topic – just a couple of people. First, I communicated in New York with Masha Chlenova, who wrote a dissertation on Fedorov-Davydov, but she hadn’t come back to the theme until very recently and she interpreted the Marxist exhibition very tendentiously, in accordance with the “degenerate” line. The other person was Andrey Kovalev, one of our distinguished Moscow critics, who also wrote a thesis on Fedorov-Davydov. His judgments were free of international clichés, but were more of a historiographic nature.
The interpretation closest to me was that of Goran Djordjevic. He suggested that the inclusion of Malevich and other avant-garde artists in the Marxist exhibition, albeit as a target for criticism, paradoxically made it possible to keep them in the museum.
My version has always been that Fedorov-Davydov acted according to the logic of “criticism of criticism”. He criticised the avant-garde for a kind of fetishisation of the device, albeit of the critical device and albeit of a device that brought dividends and made an important contribution to the development of art. The new situation of the post-revolutionary proletarian state called for a new working method, which was born in debates about realism. I believe that the version proposed by Fedorov-Davydov can be interpreted as “conceptual realism”. The term itself was proposed by Ekaterina Degot’ to refer to the practices of Solomon Nikritin, particularly his famous pedagogical exhibition at the laboratory of the Museum of Pictorial Culture, and the experiments of painters who rejected any clear stylistic attachment, so that they could be ready for life’s changes. But it seems to me that the idea of “conceptual realism” as a kind of umbrella term was most fully realised in the practices of Fedorov-Davydov. He presented a panorama of aesthetic approaches, critically contextualising them in installation complexes and documentary information about the economy of their production. In other words, Fedorov-Davydov wanted to be more radical than the historical avant-garde that we know.
MS: In my opinion, Fedorov-Davydov’s achievement was to articulate the panorama of aesthetic approaches through Arvatov’s idea of easel art. He did not have time to do more. The devices he used in exhibiting contemporary art show Malevich as the pinnacle of painting mastery, as the conceptual limit of the development of easel art, where it reaches the point of self-denial. From that point onwards, Fedorov-Davydov says, a new class – the proletariat, the worker-artist, the self-taught artist – will adopt Malevich’s formal methods in the new economic conditions. In 1929, Fedorov-Davydov showed two exhibitions side by side at the Tretyakov Gallery: works by Malevich and works from Leningrad’s Izoram [Young Workers’ Art Studios]. His curatorial idea was to show clearly how formal devices in Malevich’s works could be used in new, non-easel art forms by new agents – self-taught proletarians. For him, however, neither Malevich nor Izoram are yet proletarian art, because the socialist base of art production has not yet been established. Their work still only represents approaches to the new. This is what is particularly subtle in Fedorov-Davydov’s thought: contemporary art of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s is a relapse to easel art, and all that is new in it is the search for socialist themes and a few stylistic elements. In this Fedorov-Davydov follows the ideas of Alexander Bogdanov, who believed as a matter of principle that new art can only be developed by a new class, the proletariat, and he is also close to the positions of Leo Trotsky and Nikolai Bukharin on the possibility or impossibility of creating proletarian art in the conditions of transition from capitalism to a classless society. Fedorov-Davydov postulated that he was, in fact, working in a suspension of time: his contemporary history hovered between capitalism and socialism. This conception of the progress of art through an overcoming of the easel, superimposed on the idea of a transition period from capitalism to socialism, created a time loop: constant relapses of easel art, a recursive movement. An inability to have done with capitalism. This timelessness is the key and the main difficulty of such a prognostic model of the history of art.
AZ: People often forget how productive this period was. Even at the level of the use of words. My colleagues have often corrected me when I discarded the word “opytnaya”, which basically means “experimental” [“eksperimental’naya”] from the title of Fedorov-Davydov’s “complex Marxist exhibition”. Tell me in more detail how Fedorov-Davydov’s methodology worked in practice, what was “experimental” about his approach?
MS: In 1930, Fedorov-Davydov organises an exhibition of works with revolutionary and Soviet themes. The criterion for inclusion of works in the exhibition was that they should contain elements of the movement towards socialist, non-easel art, i.e., new genres and themes, new types of art – the “components of everyday life”. He actually said, regarding this exhibition, that he wanted an image of the future and that the choice of works was almost random. Of course, the works were not random, but he had no formalistic visual obsession with only showing things that were excellently made. On the contrary, the near-randomness of unfinished sketches, children’s drawings, architectural projects were meant to hint that something was going to happen, something was ripening. The exhibition was visually and museographically chaotic, by all accounts, but it is important that it was presented as experimental. And yet, by inertia, it still gets interpreted as an exhibition of triumph, an exhibition of the progress of Soviet art. This is the fundamental difference between the ideas of Fedorov-Davydov and the subsequent paradigm of both socialist realism and “pogrom exhibitions” like Degenerate Art. Fedorov-Davydov predicts genres, themes and iconography – all of this was his material. He defines particular “slots” of art production – this was his work as an expert. He does not focus on specific artists: the museum is not for specific artists, but for identifying the class struggle and… methods of art criticism. This “Soviet-themed” exhibition ended, for example, with a stand displaying new Marxist literature, and not naturalistically, with bags of coal. Osip Brik said at a museum conference in 1919 that real artistic life takes place at exhibitions, but museums are research institutes, and Fedorov-Davydov embodied this. So, for him, the museum is a showcase of art history. He did not define what good museum art was. Instead, he used formal sociological tools to mark the boundaries of his competence, predicting genres and types of artistic production. He was normative in respect of the future proletarian art, but absolutely flexible in respect of current art processes, partly because they could never reach as far as the fundamentally new future.
The special value of Fedorov-Davydov’s method is that he tried to move away from formalism in the hanging of exhibitions, from an approach that only compares illusionistic techniques on the canvas. He opposed Darwinism in art criticism, which was very clearly present in the exhibitions of museums of art and painting, where works were displayed based on their authorship and the way objects were transformed on the canvas – from volume to objectlessness. That applies to Alfred Barr in New York and his idea of the development of art from realism to abstraction. None of that went beyond the illusionistic surface of the canvas.
AZ: We started by saying that we are now seeing a transformation of the role of the institution and a critique of the institution as such. But let’s talk about how feasible it would be to re-enact Fedorov-Davydov’s experiments in today’s reality. It always seemed to me that it is only possible to enact such experiments in full after a revolution. It is impossible to imagine a biennale or a large museum exposition today that would nullify art through its contextualisation in the specifics of the class struggle. If you believe that an exhibition is always a hybrid, that it always contains different levels of control and is not determined solely by a charter of the artist’s sovereign freedom, but also by the institutional freedom of the curator (limited by social consensus), you quickly grasp what the boundaries are. Although I would love to attend such an event. The only way forward, barring a change of the social order, is, paradoxically, a return to the level of the artist and his/her work, but represented by the figure of a researcher, somebody who sets up experiments in a laboratory in the hope that sooner or later they will go beyond its walls.
MS: If we take the strategies of art museums, where exhibitions are based on formal- genetic and stylistic derivations, there is nothing to suggest that such a systematic review is possible. For example, a new MoMA exhibition opened in New York in the autumn of 2019. The curators play with visual aspects of the collection as part of a diversification of gender and cultural variety. They have successful formal exchanges between types of art, they make full use of material and the juxtaposition of genres, but their slogan and general idea are conservative: “An extraordinary collection, remixed”. This visual remix, these stylistic juxtapositions reveal at once the conceptual weakness of art museum exhibitions: Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) is put alongside a work by Faith Ringgold, American People Series # 20: Die (1967), which deals with race conflict and murder. It’s amusing to note that the curators have changed the source: Ringgold was inspired by Guernica, which was exhibited in the Museum from 1943 to 1981, but they are showing a direct juxtaposition of Picasso and his sex workers in Demoiselles d’Avignon and Ringgold’s interracial slaughter. Clearly there is a need here for the additional materials and expositions that Fedorov-Davydov used in art museums. They could do with a holistic critical framework like Fedorov-Davydov’s class struggle and his formal-sociological understanding of creative activity and artistic production. Additional exhibitions of that kind are feasible for small museums that build a narrative around a well-prepared critical canvas, for example, the history of American slavery, the history of Nazism. So the Worcester Art Museum transcoded its portrait gallery to reveal those subjects who made money from slavery in the United States, whereby the gallery inscribed itself in a wider social context. German art historians and museologists make exhibitions drawing on huge amounts of additional material (archives, texts, art reviews) and discuss the strategies by which modernist artists such as Emil Nolde and the Die Brücke group were adapted to the Nazi cultural bureaucracy. I think that Fedorov-Davydov would have been interested in these experiments.
Fedorov-Davydov had this freedom in experiments with contemporary art because of a strong belief in the possibility of socialist production in the context of the crisis of capitalism. This belief was reinforced by that elusive and, in his case, academic position of an interval of timelessness between capitalism and socialism, in which he lived and where modernity was a “relapse”. It seems to me that this crisis-relapse mode of expectation is still with us, but we don’t have the political base that potentially promises change, as it existed in Fedorov-Davydov’s time. In principle, though, museums themselves are now ready to experiment further with their own institutional sustainability. For example, a couple of years ago the Victoria and Albert Museum in London faced criticism of its acquisitions as a typical case of art washing. The museum had acquired a fragment of a demolished block of flats (Robin Hood Gardens), built in the 1970s in brutalist style. The point was that the Robin Hood Gardens development was another failed modernist experiment in the design of social housing. It’s a typical sad story: the social purpose of a project fails, and prestigious museums thrive on a topical agenda. But for the museum, this critical reaction was intellectual fuel for its exhibition: it made the acquisition of the fragment socially significant, and it was written into the exhibition programme. Yes, the museum will not directly affect social inequality, but some museums are now ready to articulate the problems of which they are historically a part, including by their very function of preserving and exhibiting these fragments of social failures.
“If a government has, and had, an agenda of changing everything, always, and as a long-term plan, to erase everything, then you need to archive. Urgently,” claims one of the voices in the mediation text of Far Too Many Stories to Fit into so Small a Box, designed as a visitors’ companion in a mobile speaker. The exhibition is not the first to show the CCA’s collection, but is arguably the only one to date that looks at the collection from different angles and provokes questions about its status, revealing the context of the institution’s early years and what it took to start a collection that is far from formalised. The show brings together not only the CCA’s collection and archival pieces, but also stories gathered in the course of preparations for the show. It uncovers selected pieces to show the multiplicity of solo and group shows by mid-career or lesser-known artists who have passed through the institution’s doors in the last three decades, leaving their traces and understatements. Indeed, the informal stories behind the objects and their often vague status play a key role in the exhibition narrative, which can be read as a fragmented, unfinished history of the institution as told by these objects and their voices. “We were interested in gossip and half-truths from our interlocutors, who speak of the same exhibitions, but whose memories of them are different,” curator Joanna Zielińska explains. [1] She had the idea of inviting the Rotterdam-based Dutch artist duo Bik Van der Pol back in 2015 and the CCA’s history and its collection was a crucial reference point, but it took much longer to pinpoint the most telling features of the collection. The methodology of the duo, Liesbeth Bik and Jos van der Pol, who spent three months as the CCA’s residents from March to May 2019, is to create, as they put it, “site-sensitive works”. What they have done, as we read in the press release, is to “critically examine the history of the CCA from the vantage point of outsiders”. The artists have previously worked in a similar vein with the collections of other art centres. They were behind Were It As If (2016) at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, marking the 25th anniversary of the Center’s operation, as well as Fly Me to The Moon (2006) at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, where the artists worked on the museum’s oldest object, a moon rock, and they also organised Married by Powers (2002), an exhibition encompassing works from FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais in Dunkerque that was presented at Tent, Rotterdam. According to Zielińska, their method of the Dutch duo, called “dynamic script”, is based on interviews, with subsequent modification of the gathered narratives. The final script is composed from more than 20 interviews transcribed 1:1.
Karol Radziszewski. The Power of Secrets. Installation view at Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art. Photo: Bartosz Górka
Far Too Many Stories… speaks subjectively of the institution, to some extent constituted by a white square on the floor — a stage — in the central part of the exhibition, referring directly to Akademia Ruchu (Academy of Movement), an experimental theatre company set up in 1973 and run by Wojciech Krukowski, [2] the second director of the CCA. Artists were always present at the CCA, some working there and others temporarily residing. “Yes, of course, I was living in the Castle. Once on a Sunday morning, very early, I heard strange voices. I went to the window, and there was the Dalai Lama, standing in the yard”, Zbigniew Libera recalls. The time when Krukowski took up his post at the Ujazdowski Castle at the beginning of the 1990s coincided with the period of political transformation in Poland. One part of the show exposes the original red brick wall — a more authentic backdrop to events that occurred in the early years of the CCA, now hidden under the white wall of more recent times. Next to the red brick, windows have been covered with blue translucent foil as a reminder of David Hammons’ show Real Time from almost two decades ago — an empty space with a thin film of water on the floor, addressing references that include Derek Jarman’s 1993 film, Blue. “Everything was under construction, always in between. Always in movement, never stopping,” the first speaker’s voice continues.
The exhibition is being held at a special time, as a new director, appointed without a contest by the Polish Minister of Culture, takes up his duties at the CCA in early 2020. So the show captures the moment of another transition, attempting to document and speak of the institution’s fragile history, its missing parts, while what is yet to come is even more vague. One of the performers leading a performative guided tour quotes from Jenny Holzer’s Truisms (some of her best-known works, presented here in 1993): “The future is stupid,” “Men don’t protect you anymore”.
The central element in Radziszewski’s queer-archival exhibition, The Power of Secrets, is an open-space installation standing for the Queer Archives Institute, an autonomous nomadic para-institution, a show within a show that reflects Radziszewski’s distinctive methodology and a long-term project that collects objects and knowledge on queer narratives of Central and Eastern Europe.
Karol Radziszewski: This is a case study of the method. For example, this work, which is called Invisible [3] is of key importance for me, it is the quintessence of how I work. There is the oral history, the basis of the entire exhibition, the works, my interviews. It is an attempt to talk with the oldest people, who remember something, and at the same time a chance to find something that cannot be found in any other way, because it is not in books, it is not in any other materials. […]
Zofia Reznik: When did you consciously become an archivist?
KR: I think, fully consciously in 2009.
ZR: What happened then?
KR: Before, I was mainly interested in contemporaneity and facing up to what had been happening. I had been archiving everything, but I didn’t think about it in a systematic way. And in 2009 I started working on the “Before ’89” [4]http://redmuseum.church/demidenko-reznik-performing-archives#rec165323650 issue of DIK [DIK Fagazine], where I said that I would be collecting all these stories from the past of Eastern and Central Europe and somehow I started doing it, and I also went to talk with [Ryszard] Kisiel, [5] whose archive I saw for the first time. It was my first interview and the first view of his archive — it all gives the feeling that it just started then. The work on that issue of DIK lasted for more than two years, there was a lot of travelling. And in 2011, when it came out, I started working on Kisieland — a film about Kisiel, where we reenacted this [archivistic] part of his actions. [6] In the last decade the archive was always there in the background — closer or further, but always a basis for work. And this exhibition is built so that it is not a retrospective, but a selection of works. The archives are the main axis of it all. [7]
The exhibition includes a vast compilation of different artifacts, photographs and oral histories such as those focused on and collected around Ryszard Kisiel, a pioneer of gay culture based in Tricity (the three coastal cities of Gdansk, Gdynia and Sopot), active from the late 1980s who created Filo, one of the first communist-era gay zines. [8]
KR: …this art and those objects, the visual aspect of it, is not insignificant — reading a book about it is not the same as seeing the scale of it, the physicality of those objects.
ZR: And in this sense, this materiality is an amazing carrier of the physical stimuli, that also effect the release of something from our bodies.
KR: You know … I know that people are aware that these clothes that lie here under the glass are theatrical costumes or museum objects, but when Ryszard [Kisiel] brought them to me from Gdańsk in a plastic bag… and they had never been washed, and you smell the smell, and touch those laces, and we laugh, and he crams it in that plastic bag… You know, it is very physical, also the smell, some of these people are dead or it was a model… I have never thought before that the smell of the 80s is preserved in it. It is strange, the sweat, but it is just so physical.
ZR: It’s a shame one can’t feel it here…
KR: You know, there are the bras that Kisiel’s boyfriend was wearing and they just, well, they stink… but this is just the magic of the body.
ZR: And you took it away from the viewers! And you could have given [laughs].
KR: Well, but I let them peep under the glass…
Karol Radziszewski. The Power of Secrets. Installation view at Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art. Photo: Pat Mic
Next to Kisiel’s showcases with playful lingerie and accessories used in his photoshoots, there is a red cubicle with a micro exhibition Hommage à WS dedicated to Wojciech Skrodzki (1935−2016), art critic, writer and queer activist, co-curated with Wojciech Szymański, an art historian and curator who Radziszewski works with. [9] The environment-like section (and in fact reenactment of a show from the past) brings together works by artists who were part of an undocumented show that Skrodzki put together and that included autobiographical and erotic threads.
KR: … the idea is to show it as part of the method of work with archives, so you can only enter through the Queer Archive Institute. [10] The idea is also to show how you can queer the past without necessarily saying: he was a fagot, she was a dyke, but instead by looking at the existing things in a queer way. That applies to Wojtek Skrodzki, a well-known critic from the times of the Polish People’s Republic, a zealous Catholic who outed himself at the age of 80 and became an activist of sorts. We met at that time, but he died when I was in Brazil, so didn’t have enough time to develop it. But he left me the typescript of his biography, a childhood photo and various premises, that… I treat it as a sort of a fulfilment of his will [sighs embarrassedly] — in 1978 he made an exhibition that was supposed to be his coming out, which he called an erotic exhibition. [11] And from those texts and letters to friends, from his biographical notes, it is clear that he wanted to make an exhibition that in a way would reveal that he was gay, but at the same time would hide it, so that one wouldn’t guess. That’s why he openly writes… that’s why the undressed Natalia [LL], so that there was this feminine sexuality… [12] But there were also some minor clues that he planned on showing, photos documenting The Dead Class of Tadeusz Kantor. [13] So I was reading it and thinking “Fuck, Kantor. What is this about?”. But then I started to look for photos and it turned out that there was this one photo that was removed by the censorship — there in the catalogue, where there is an empty place. So we got to the photographer who made it and he gave us those photos for the exhibition. And suddenly it turns out that you can even show Kantor in such a way… that when you are gay in the 70s and trying to queer your reality, you can sample it from anywhere…
ZR: Even Kantor…
KR: …even Kantor.
The carmine room with a few circular holes in its temporary walls is designed as a reference to intimate club rooms that provide safe anonymity for sexual intercourse, but it might as well resemble a womb or a photographic darkroom used by professional and amateur photographers in the 70s and 80s. The room was an extension of the exhibition site, a reaching-out architectural hub, enabling the two shows (Far Too Many Stories… and The Power of Secrets) to symbolically meet via the glory holes carved out from the institution’s walls, as one of Radziszewski’s friends brilliantly pointed out during an informal guided tour. [14]
KR: There is a focus here on appropriation art, also as a method of producing, expanding the materiality of art history and history in general. So this picture is called Hyacinth and it is apparently the first-ever visual representation of Operation Hyacinth. [15] And it is my typical method… let me decode it: I wonder about the most easy-going, best artist of the time, who might try to portray it […]. So, it’s Operation Hyacinth and it’s 1985 and what are the hottest aesthetics of the time? The new expressionism, Neue Wilde — the expression of German painters. [16] So from those painters I choose A. R. Penck, who is a bit less known than [Georg] Baselitz and [Jörg] Immendorf, [17] but his style is more brutal, it evokes cave drawings, very primitivistic — it reminds me of Keith Haring. [18] But he is American, so we need to postpone that tradition, because I’m looking more locally. And it turns out that there are drawings of Ryszard Kisiel from the Filo zine, that are simply about HIV and AIDS, showing various safe and dangerous sexual positions, and that these drawing schemes are totally part of this aesthetics. So I take West — the first painting that A. R. Penck made after escaping from East to West Berlin, which is in the Tate collection, so it is well-known and can be referred to. [19] The characters on the left and right are partly copied […] So this is where “AIDS” appears, he also codes letters — “A. R. Penck”, and here I put “UB” [Urząd Bezpieczeństwa — Department of Security], [20] at two characters holding each other’s hands, I create a policeman wearing a hat, I insert the drawings of Kisiel and I imitate the whole in scale. […] The result has to be such that, when an art historian enters, they say: “Oh, this is A. R. Penck!'”. I had some French curators here three days ago and they said: “Oh, A. R. Penck!”. […]
And this Operation Hyacinth, that everyone speaks about so mythologically, no one really knows what… but then — OK, now we have the images that show how it was. So now we can start the conversation: if it was like that or not, or some other way. But it is a starting point for an average person who might have heard of Operation Hyacinth for the first time in their life — they will see this picture and will wonder: here’s a policeman, there is sex — what was going on? — pink folders, something here…
ZR: So again, materiality as a place of entry.
KR: Yes, because it is crucial for this exhibition to create a kind of material culture based on stories and archives, so the archives are performed by giving them a body or the bodies of those who speak, or bodies in the form of works of art that are physical and material. They are sculptures, images that one is not only projecting or inducing, but you face them. You have to go around this sculpture [Mushroom], for example, and you already know the scale of this toilet [21] and it starts working, stimulating your imagination.
Bik Van der Pol. Far Too Many Stories to Fit into so Small a Box. Installation view at Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art. Photo: Pat Mic
“Archives must be reenacted, especially as QAI always works on different terms, depending on where it is being shown,” Michał Grzegorzek, the curator of Karol Radziszewski’s show, explains. In that sense, the artist brings back and reenacts different, and very often personal narratives, to build up the image of a collective queer body. Its history — rather like the history of an institution — is fragmented and hard to describe or show, and always subjective. One of the show’s protagonists is Ryszard Kisiel, who is the protagonist of an ongoing project started by the artist in 2009, with the 2012 documentary Kisieland — overlooked in the collective memory.
KR: This, for example, is a sculpture that pretends to be a work by Monika Sosnowska. But it is about the Mushroom, that picket [slang for a gay meeting place], and poses common questions about what is possible. What queer form of commemoration can function and what is worthy of being a sculpture — could the most famous gay toilet be worthy?
The queer body is under threat from resurgent homophobia in today’s Poland (one of the biggest countries in the EU). To mention one emblematic manifestation of homophobia, in July 2019 participants of the first rainbow march in the city of Białystok (Radziszewski’s hometown) were met with rage and violence (the words of The New York Times) as homophobic insults were hurled at them by right-wing advocates. [22]
Both exhibitions continue the archival line practiced by different art institutions reflecting on their past recent years, such as Working Title: Archive at Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź presented in 2009, which revived the memory of the museum’s most remarkable shows and marked the launch of its second site. As the written guide to the Łódź show stated: “Today’s culture is constantly in archive mode — documenting and attempting to preserve every aspect of the reality that surrounds us”. [23] On a wall at Too Many Stories… we see a poster of the exhibition by Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska, Enthusiasts (2004), the first iteration of their long-run “extensive research amongst the remnants of amateur film clubs in Poland under socialism”, recently acquired and featured online by Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. [24] In that sense, art institutions become libraries, gathering and preserving various traces of the past, and activating them whenever needed. Missing links in the CCA’s timeline can serve as fertile ground for its future programming — disseminating knowledge and using mediation tools to highlight what has been overlooked and sometimes to repeat what is already known. In the final room we see eight TV screens collecting documentations from the backstage of exhibitions, revealing how quickly they were assembled. “The Centre is a field of action, it attracts attention” the subtitles read. The opening of Marina Abramović’s show is blended with a press conference with Annie Leibovitz, interviews or artist talks, excerpts from workshops, documentations of performances and the Animal Pyramid by Katarzyna Kozyra from 1993, which is one of the most emblematic works of Polish critical art. Publications by CCA are laid out on tables with posters from shows above them: Tony Oursler (1999), Jenny Holzer’s Street Art (1993), Nedko Solakov (2000), Devil’s Playground by Nan Goldin (2003). Curators reveal that Devil’s Playground “is a show that Karol Radziszewski mentions as having helped him to come out”.
queer archives in “the power of secrets” and the cca’s collection, with its backroom micro histories, complement each other, in the sense that informal narratives often push the boundaries of what is called official.
ZR: I would like to ask more about the archival impulse. What’s behind this need to deal with archives, what motivated you to start doing it?
KR: I have said it many times — it is important for me that it is about identity, or at least the first impulse was about identity. When I did the first openly homosexual exhibition in Polish history it was 2005 [25] and I had seen things by Paweł Leszkowicz’s, [26] some faint traces of the past. And when I officially came out and saw people’s reaction — that of my mother and of my environment — I realised that there are zero reference points. And there’s nothing in history or in Polish art to lean on as an artist, to refer to, even to see yourself in. So then I understood that the lack of voices and the absence of these themes in the public sphere is a form of repression. […] And this exhibition is the quintessence of it — it is a political work intended to build the visibility of this history that existed, but that had to be discovered and conveyed in a form that made it readable for people. Because all these things existed, functioned somewhere — these historical figures, figures from Poczet [27] or archival figures, — so what I’ve started to do is meant to enable others to find out, like I have found out.
Karol Radziszewski. The Power of Secrets. Installation view at Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art. Photo: Bartosz Górka
Considering the two exhibitions only through the archivalist point of view would not do full justice to the curators’ interest and the dimension of the exhibitions. “The CCA’s tradition of exhibition-making in an almost spontaneous manner derives from theatre rather than from the visual arts”. Bik Van der Pol’s curator and writer Joanna Zielińska is known for her cutting-edge curatorial proposals, often connected with time-based arts, such as her recent projects at the CCA: Performance TV co-curated with Michał Grzegorzek and Agnieszka Sosnowska (2017−2020), Objects Do Things (2016) or Nothing Twice at Cricoteka in Kraków (2014), and The Book Lovers, exploring written work by visual artists alongside David Maroto (ongoing from 2011). [28] Zielińska previously worked as artistic director at Znaki Czasu Centre of Contemporary Art (CoCA) in Toruń, Poland, where she curated the inaugural exhibition and the institution’s programme (2008−2010). Reenactments as part of Far Too Many Stories… are by a group of artists and amateurs from different backgrounds and origins, including storyteller Agnieszka Ayen Kaim, singer Mamadou Góo Bâ and choreographer Ania Nowak helped by Jagoda Szymkiewicz. All of them were given the final script to interpret so that they could choose parts of it and select objects to focus on. Billy Morgan leads an intriguing tour around selected works in the exhibition, asking the audience to repeat gestures or sentences after him while confessing personal stories: “Yesterday I presented my performance in the sculpture park at Królikarnia and a man I don’t know yelled ‘pedał’ [eng. faggot]. It was a reminder that public space is not a utopian free-for-all, it is a deeply insecure, heterosexist topography governed by its own set of norms”. The touching works tackling body issues are particularly noteworthy and resonate with performances complementing the exhibition such as Family of the Future by Oleg Kulik (1999), “a visualisation of all living creatures living happily together”, as the wall-text tells us, Barbara Kruger’s Your Body Is a Battleground (1989) originally created for the 1989 women’s rights demonstrations in Washington DC and shown in Warsaw in 1995 (resonating with passage in the Polish Parliament of legislation allowing abortion in certain instances), or Nan One Month after Being Battered by Nan Goldin (1984), “I took that picture so that I would never go back to him,” says Goldin about the man who attacked her. In this way the exhibition documents the bodies of the artist and not only institutional archives. Far Too Many Stories… shows objects and artifacts, activates stories through performances and includes a selection of videos documenting such works as Other Dances (one of the most emblematic spectacles of Akademia Ruchu), performances by Antoni Mikołajczyk, a film on Andrzej Dłużniewski blended with a public talk by Barbara Kruger, an interview with Nan Goldin or excerpts of an exhibition by Yoko Ono. In the next room there is a collection of posters and publications that accompanied the shows. Far Too Many Stories… also offers another significant mediation tool: the Other Lessons programme, focused on Akademia Ruchu, aims “to merge the past with the present”, Zielińska says. It includes workshops with artists such as Alex Baczyński, who uses some of AR’s performances as references, and with Jolanta Krukowska, a performer, who worked in the collective for nearly three decades with her life partner Wojciech Krukowski. A range of guided tours sheds light on the complex nature of CCA’s collection, including tours led by curators who have worked here for many years and a conservator who discusses works that were hard to deal with due to the unusual materials from which they were made. Marek Kijewski’s black-red bust on a plinth, Fred Flintstone of Knossos (1997), covered with a specific type of Haribo jelly beans is a case in point: disintegrating parts of the work were hard to replace with new ones due to declining popularity of the confectionery. Works with collective authorship such as a painterly installation by Winter Holiday Camp also pose difficulties: how can a work that was created by a people now in different locations be maintained? The problem is also relevant for collections and archives in a broader sense: how do we make sure we care for them properly? And what happens to objects with non-obvious status?
Bik Van der Pol. Far Too Many Stories to Fit into so Small a Box. Installation view at Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art. Photo: Pat Mic
KR: I have very unique things that people donate to me privately, for example the costumes that Ryszard Kisiel used for photo sessions and photos that I developed myself (the originals are slides, 300 of them) in one suitcase. Ryszard thought that they had burned in my studio, [29] but they were squeezed in between the clothes. […] This is a queer strategy of moving it [the archive], not having your own headquarters, and on the other hand, using the institution as much as possible to digitise, scan, correct, do conservation, insure it. […] I think I have to set up a foundation, because people don’t realise how much money is needed to digitise a large amount of materials, to keep them in good condition and to work with it at all. […] For example, one could say of my film Afterimages, [30] which is exclusively about one of Kisiel’s photographic films: “He just scanned it and recorded sound”. But scanning this one film, without touching it, so that it didn’t disintegrate, cost 900 zloty (each frame can be enlarged to the size of a billboard). And Ryszard has three hundred of these negatives.
ZR: And somewhere, at some point you have to choose something more valuable and sacrifice something else, right?
KR: Yes, but I also work in batches. We are also coming back to what is, maybe, an interesting topic… a bit of selfishness: you get something special and the question is how quickly you share it. Because everyone expects it immediately. If you make a discovery — you have knowledge, you take a journey, pay for the trip, convince someone, have a conversation, understand what it is, scan it, — people think that you immediately put it on the Internet and it is going to be everyone’s property, preferably in high resolution. Most people have this attitude — activists, scholars. And I think that ultimately such a democratisation of access is great — I would, of course, want a huge website with everything. But if something is part of the work, one of the stages, then I have to decide what I will take care of now, and what to hold back until I know what it is all about.
ZR: But I also sensed — correct me, if I’m wrong — a moment of suspension in this process, finding pleasure in having something just for yourself.
KR: It’s just exciting. But we’re now also talking about sources, from which I create works. When I work on residences and show the effects — like in Belarus or in Romania — that’s usually one work. (…) This exhibition shows a lot of such effects, fruits, transformations. I sometimes need to hold something for myself, enjoy it, or have exclusive use of it, so that I can then create a work that will be able to act as something more, something new.
What is perhaps more remarkable in the context of both exhibitions is the collaborative dimension of the project and the blurred borders between the exhibition format and the accompanying programme. Quite different for both: Bik Van der Pol’s presentation of their research project encompasses works conceived for the institution by many artists or left on site almost involuntarily. “Works were made for the space. And artists donated works (…) No contract, so a lot is unclear,” as the second speaker’s voice puts it. For Karol Radziszewski it flows from his practice of mapping queer microhistories almost from the beginning, restoring the memory of overlooked bodies and quotes from stories, “for the very first time with full awareness”, as he puts it, looking back at his queer childhood.
KR: Take this Donald Duck — quite late, just before the exhibition, I found a drawing that I had done, and it is from exactly the same year as the collage by Ryszard Kisiel with the AIDS Donalds that inspired me to make this wallpaper. So when I recalled this sticker, which I put on a pencil case or backpack as a child, it suddenly turned out that this Donald Duck was also present in this form [points to his mural] — there is a sailor, a tattoo with a heart… And of course it was not conscious, but now, as I look at it through everything that I know about queer things, it can be decoded in many ways. The basic interpretation would be that my imagination, that of a 9-year-old boy in Białystok, and the imagination of Ryszard Kisiel in Gdansk, who was sticking it in the first gay zine, met somewhere. For me it is also a matter of queer time, queer memory — cross-generational, connecting memory.
Karol Radziszewski. The Power of Secrets. Installation view at Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art. Photo: Bartosz Górka
Shortly after the opening of the two exhibitions, CCA announced Michał Borczuch’s performative installation Untitled (Together Again), activated live on three different occasions, which looks back at “the past intertwinement of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and political changes, especially the political transformation in Poland”, framed alongside two shows as Performing Archives.
Queer archives in The Power of Secrets and the CCA’s collection, with its backroom micro histories, complement each other, in the sense that informal narratives often push the boundaries of what is called official, bringing a new understanding of how the institutional context can serve both for its own sake and for art practice, both as a consequence of an artist’s own endeavours and a vivisection initiated through someone else’s objective or a shared objective.
Both of the exhibitions and the current context in which they appear — a change in the management of the CCA — send us back to the 1990s, the “heroic years” of an institution in the making and the pre-teen years of Radziszewski, whose protagonists such as Ryszard Kisiel were active at the time and would appear afterwards in his Queer Archives Institute. A large part of Ryszard Kisiel’s archival matter appears — accessories from photo sessions displayed in the showcases or copies of spreads from his magazine Filo, alongside covers of other magazines such as Inaczej (Polish for “Differently”) or Okay.
A crucial part of Radziszewski’s practice is the enlivening of under-represented and significant figures and concepts of queer identity. Looking at the current practices of institutions that include a queer retro-perspective in their programme (Van Abbe Museum’s long-term project Queering the Collection with reading groups, guided tours and other activities addressed to overlooked queer communities, or the major recent Keith Haring retrospective at BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels), we could imagine that the CCA is considering a similar direction. And blockbuster institutional shows in recent years representing women artists show how contemporary art institutions are working to restore forgotten protagonists and rediscover important culture-forming characters that have been pushed to the margins in the past. It is clear that works by Karol Radziszewki and Bik Van der Pol’s proposal work very well in the institutional context. DIK Fagazine, a quarterly founded in 2005 which used to be Radziszewski’s trademark, with an uncanny logo by Monika Zawadzki of two penises facing each, has been showcased at the CCA several times, and Radziszewski already had a solo show there, I Always Wanted, back in 2007. This year’s event gives full rein to his almost obsessive way of working through the archives. It is the first such complete archival presentation in Poland, and has already been shown at Videobrasil (São Paulo, Brazil), Ў Gallery of Contemporary Art (Minsk, Belarus), Fundación Gilberto Alzate Avendaño (Bogota, Colombia) and Schwules Museum (Berlin, Germany), to name but a few venues.
Do the exhibitions tell us something about unknown archives or is it rather that the archives tell us about protagonists from the margins of the art world’s interest? In the opening part of Bik Van der Pol’s show we see a pile of stones which were a component of the installation Stone Circle by Richard Long (1977). The installation remained in the Castle’s deposit, but lost its certificate of authenticity and reverted to a material artifact. “This piece… it is such a shame it is covered with paint,” as we read in a line of a “dynamic script” describing Lawrence Weiner’s Far Too Many Things to Fit Into So Small a Box. The artist and the curator agreed in 1996 that the work would remain during the renovation works planned for the following year. The renovation did not happen, and the work became an informal CCA trademark until its removal a few years ago. The work now serves as the title of the show and its leitmotif of the show. Bik Van der Pol explains: “We live in very strange and radical times. If we think about climate change, maybe it would be best to get as high up as possible, to save yourself from the worst. The coastlines of Great Britain and the Netherlands will collapse, rivers will dry up, forests will be on fire, people will migrate to northern parts of the planet and the global economy will fall apart. You may say: I would like to be on a mountain in Switzerland, but actually it doesn’t matter where you will be. The best and the worst in people will come out in a situation where their lives are at stake. Lawrence Weiner’s Far Too Many Things to Fit Into So Small a Box could be seen as speaking to this as well”.
It would be easy to slip into a simplistic listing of similarities and differences between these two distinct exhibitions at the CCA. But both of them deserve a more detailed description.
The monographic exhibition of Karol Radziszewski’s works is to some extent a retrospective, as it seems to look chronologically at different stages of his practice, but it is primarily an installation, in which the artist creates an assemblage composed of his earliest and more recent works. The “childhood drawings which covered the pages of his school notebooks” (1989, 2017—ongoing, painting, acrylic on canvas; murals) depict figures of extremely femininity, at once Barbie and drag queen, together with other doodles in coloured felt-tip pen, through which Radziszewski dialogues with his preteen past. The innocent secret of a coming-of-age boy’s dream of being a princess becomes a radical statement, reenacted in a blown-up version on the walls of an institution. This entry backdrop becomes significant as it bridges past and present, a gesture that is also apparent in a series of paintings (O Snob, 2019, painting, acrylic on canvas) inspired by the front covers of an underground Brazilian queer magazine published in Rio in the 1960s, edited mostly by trans people using cosplay as a way of discovering identity.
Karol Radziszewski. Afterimages (film still). 2018. Courtesy: Artist and BWA Warszawa
ZR: You spoke of establishing historical continuity, that you were building a bridge for yourself and you were looking for identity, iconographic sources, some actions that would allow you to put yourself in context. But I also understand that at some point the mission began: you said that people seized on it and that it is also important for them. So from being a researcher for yourself, you became a researcher for others as well.
KR:There’s another important element here: this princess wearing glasses or the crucified princess… these are like my self-portraits. And it was also a surprise to me, something that I didn’t do too much in my art — and I don’t even mean drag, but entering this other sex, which suddenly appeared here as a child. It was surprise to me too. That’s why this princess is so huge. I have an awesome picture of my parents standing beside her and they are about half her size. So they stand alongside the great Karolina. I was supposed to be called Karolina.
The greater part of the exhibition is a non-linear collage of footnotes, artist’s findings and focus showcases, including the Queer Archive Institute in the central part of the exhibition with 22 Picasso-esque paintings (Poczet, 2017, paintings, acrylic on canvas) of non-heteronormative people from Polish history, looking out boldly at the viewer as if asserting their role as heroes (heroines?) of the QAI. Here, Radziszewski, in a way that is very significant for his practice as archivist or curator, shows other people’s work: a red (“carmine”) room dedicated to art historian and researcher Wojciech Skrodzki (Hommage à WS, 2019), which is an exhibition re-enactment co-curated with Szymański himself, or the archives of Ryszard Kisiel with extracts from Filo zine and props from his photo sessions, as well as a series of stills from a carnival party at the T-Club in Prague by Czech photographer Libuše Jarcovjáková (T-Club, 1983−1986, inkjet prints). “Gay and lesbian clubs in post-Soviet countries — hidden in cellars, behind unmarked doors, promoted by word of mouth were — the perhaps still are — the most formative centers of the queer community,” we read in the work’s description. Radziszewski also evokes the recent past of Europe’s margins: Belarusian (Invisible (Belarusian) Queer History, 2016, analogue photographs) and Ukrainian (Was Taras Shevchenko Gay?, 2017, installation), resonating well with Wolfgang Tillmans’ series of portraits from Saint-Petersburg (Saint Petersburg LGBT Community, 2014, chromogenic prints). The exhibition also shows an ever growing collection of videos by Karol Radziszewski, including a series of interviews focused on queer and trans protagonists, conceived during QAI residencies, and others created though invitations such as Interview with Laerte (2016, video, 39′) featuring Laerte Coutinho, a Brazilian artist and activist, and an interview with Ewa Hołuszko, a major and until recently overlooked figure in Poland’s Solidarity movement who had to confront attempts at exclusion due to her transition process (Interview with Ewa Hołuszko (fragments), 2019, video, 30′). Radziszewski is also the author of a number of other film productions, some of which are shown in the CCA’s cinema (Sebastian, 2010, 4’30”; MS 101, 2012, 50′; Backstage, 2011, 38′; The Prince, 2014, 71′), together with videos and films by other artists (Przemek Branas, Agne Jokse, Dawid Nickel and Liliana Piskorska).
ZR: Where do you keep your archive?
KR: In my bedroom, because one studio burnt down and the other was partly flooded. So there are only relics of the second category, like doubled magazines or VHS cassettes. But I keep negatives in boxes in the wardrobe with clothes.
ZR: I am sorry to hear that. Did you lose much that was valuable in these disasters?
KR: Well, five years ago I lost all my work up to the age of 29, everything I had done. Other than childhood notebooks, which were at my parents’ home, all of the work I did up to the end of my studies was burnt with the studio. Over a hundred paintings, polaroids, most of DIK’s archives, sketches, gifts from artists.
ZR: Oh no… and how do you feel as an artist-archivist who lost such a large part of his private archive?
KR: Well, apart from the trauma and the fact that I lost a lot of work, I also lost a lot of money — there were whole photo exhibitions that I had produced, 70 photos, large, hand-made prints in wooden frames that I had been working on for half a year. I can’t afford to do the whole series again. Then I moved to a small, clean studio, which was meant to be an office, and repainted three works that had been burnt. But I went away for a week and when I came back the ceiling had leaked (someone upstairs had a clogged bathtub) and the works that I had repainted after the fire were flooded. So, then I realized that it is… Having lived through this trauma, I felt that I didn’t want to be an archivist, I didn’t want to deal with this materiality, to be responsible for all this. There was a period when I wanted to get rid of it all, sell it to some institution, so that someone else would take responsibility for it. But it wasn’t possible, the years went by … And then I made movies. I had a clean white studio, I made films, I didn’t paint, I didn’t want to produce any material things at all, and I only had two small boxes with these archives. The exhibition dedicated to DIK Fagazine and the archive of my magazine had been packed into a box after the exhibition and was in the middle of the studio that burnt down, so it was also burnt, the box containing all that.
ZR:So you self-archived your works, and they got lost anyway…
KR: Yes, and I thought long and hard at that point about what to do, because I didn’t want to have it on my mind. But the months and years went by […] and the archives began to accumulate again.
[…]
ZR: And what about Polish lesbian artists who might want to look for some kind of continuity for themselves?
KR: The biggest success is the cooperation with Liliana Piskorska, which is not just history — it is something we are building into the future. We have [shown and — K.R.] produced her works twice as part of the Pomada festivals. They became part of the narrative and I believe that this has also given her more mainstream visibility. […] The Queer Archives collection is also intended to create contemporary queer art, following the tradition of an exchange gallery. So I exchange works with other artists. And everyone is usually younger than me, because it is all such a fresh topic. People are happy to exchange, and I create a private collection — but also as part of the Queer Archives — of the queer art of the region, and that is a source of strength. These are not historical works or strictly an artistic cooperation, but my works resonate with them, and I choose them, so that I already have the beginnings of a pretty cool collection. I have drawings by Tolik [Anatoly] Belov, [31] a Ukrainian, from the period when he started working openly as the first gay [artist — K.R.], so I can put this together [with mine]. I have drawings of his daughter, whom he adopted, which also interest me — the issue of queer children. I also have Polish artists — I exchange work with Liliana. I will also create a collection of contemporary Eastern European queer art that will travel and also various curators could arrange their own travelling exhibitions. So there are a lot of plans for the future.
Karol Radziszewski. The Power of Secrets. Installation view at Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art. Photo: Bartosz Górka
These two solo presentations accentuating archives as their method are widely inclusive and open-format shows where different bodies tell their own stories. The Power of Secrets begins with the queer childhood of the artist and each feature becomes a QAI artefact extending through the exhibition rooms. The creativity of Natalia LL, whose solo exhibition Secretum et Tremor was presented exactly three years ago at the CCA, works very well in this context. Her work Dulce-Post Mortem, 2019 (photographs of three neon lights tracing abstract characters) seems to conclude the exhibition.
Stressing the status of Far Too Many Stories… as an exhibition in motion, curator Joanna Zielińska says that “Even the work by Alina Szapocznikow, considered to be the beginning of the collection, was loaned from 2002 and will soon be taken back to its owner”. The show works both as a solo and collaborative proposal with countless voices gathered for its making, the objects selected according to the interlocutors’ visions, voices by Ania Nowak and Billy Morgan coming from speakers in an audioscape designed by Wojciech Blecharz, and with posters designed by the Warsaw duo Fontarte. Bik Van der Pol’s exhibition is a site-specific installation looking at the CCA’s past and its traditions and can serve to locate the current position of the Centre and its future programme. Far Too Many Stories and Power of Secrets testify to the Centre’s resilience, its ability to present different types of archival matter and artistic research. “The archives are useful. This is activism. It is the core business of the Centre”, as one of the voices suggests.
ZR: In socially-engaged research, anthropological or ethnographic, there is the concept of “action research” — you meet, act with a community, because you want to acquire some knowledge, create something, but also to improve their situation. Is it something you can relate to? Are you interested in such research, in a change-making activity?
KR: You know, I certainly care about change-making, but I’m not always able to use these methods because they take time. So, depending on the country and situation, I unfortunately have to step into the role of someone who kindles something, continues, tosses it and often people just continue in some other way. This happened in Minsk, where as well as meeting with historians, I met with activists and we just talked for an hour and they said that they were also starting archives, they took out my DIKs, my magazines, which they had somehow got on the Internet, which they already had at home, and they asked me where to begin. It was a kind of workshop, a very specific one.
Those two exhibitions, as critical inquiries into the past and possible futures of Polish institutions mark a turning point and a new chapter in the history of the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art. A major shift in the CCA’s programme is expected after the conservative Piotr Bernatowicz [32] was appointed director of the institution at the start of 2020. The nomination has evoked substantial concern both at the liberal end of the Polish art scene and internationally. [33] The CCA is a pioneering contemporary art centre in Poland, its history collates with the history of democratic transformation in Poland after 1989 and it has always been perceived a cutting-edge site for bold and critical exhibitions and presentations, a flag bearer since the 1990s for freedom of speech and the polyphonic blooming of intersecting narratives and perspectives, as Bik Van der Pol has clearly showed in the latest exhibition. For three decades (notably under Wojciech Krukowski, from 1990 till 2010) CCA was not just an institutional role model for other galleries in Poland (though, of course, with its own issues and flaws), but also a place where artistic dialogue with the audience and open cultural and political debate were shaped – a genuine agora. One might ask: will the latest exploratory exhibition be enough for this narrative to be sustained or will it be altered? Will it preserve collective memory? Will the CAA transform into an even more spacious shelter for cultural micronarratives, including overlooked conservative voices, as Bernatowicz declares, but without banishing liberal voices? Ujazdowski Castle remains one of the leading art institutions in Poland, with huge impact on the Polish contemporary art scene, and these two exhibitions raise the more general question how the historical narrative of contemporary art and its future will be reshaped. Hopefully, the narrative will become not only polyphonic, but even more heterogeneous and less centre-oriented.
Acknowledgements: Michał Grzegorzek, Billy Morgan, Karol Radziszewski, Joanna Zielińska, Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art
Museums are places that produce and expose values.
Values necessary lead to conflicts.
Museums are places of multiple conflicts.
Indeed, as James Clifford famously put it, museums are contact zones of negotiations between communities and stakeholders [1]. At least, ideally.
As this short essay seeks to show, for decades and even centuries museums have, in fact, been contact zones of failed negotiations. For all that time they have, in essence, avoided their true role. This approach, which views the museum as a place of crisis, lets us conceptualize the museum as a key institution in contemporary society and a source of ongoing class, national, and cultural conflict. The Louvre has, since its creation, always been the model for a modern public museum. Its collection and its function as an art museum of national glory was consolidated after Napoleon’s march through Europe in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. French authorities and troops diligently and systematically expropriated museum treasures from neighboring countries, particularly Italy and Germany, and the looted art was accumulated in the Louvre. Several European museums then followed the Louvre’s example in building their own collections. This is how the modern history of museums began: national triumph and cultural accomplishments were synergetic to tyranny and robbery and generated a tension between nations and museums that lasted for decades [2].
Horse Theft from Berlin (Pferdedieb von Berlin). Caricature depicting Napoleon stealing the Quadriga from the Brandenbirg Gate. C. 1813. Courtesy: Maria Silina
The sequence of events, initiated by Napoleon’s act of plunder, continues to our day. Several lesser-known episodes occurred at the time of the First World War. When war broke out, a number of German cultural activists set to work identifying and locating works of art that had been looted by Napoleon. In case of victory, they intended to press for the repatriation of these works. Wilhelm von Bode, a founding father of modern museology, was especially enthusiastic and active in this act of historical justice [3]. Another museum worker, Ernst Steinmann, Director of the Bibliotheca Hertziana carried out comprehensive research into Napoleon’s looted art. For diplomatic reasons it was only published nearly a century later, in 2007 [4].
Steinmann’s archive research was the first step towards the creation of a Europe-wide map of plundered museum treasures. Demands for restitution extended even to the Russian Empire, or the country that by late 1917 had become Soviet Russia. In 1815, the Russian Emperor Alexander I purchased several paintings from the Malmaison Palace of the Empress Joséphine near Paris, which had been removed from the collection of Wilhelm VIII of Hesse-Kassel. Steinmann’s survey listed 21 paintings, originally held in Germany, which had reached St. Petersburg in this way. Rembrandt’s Descent from the Cross (1634), now a core work in the Hermitage collection, is among them.
One obvious role of museums is to “normalize” societal conflicts. Museums serve as repositories of treasures that are endangered by wars, revolutions, and other natural disasters and human conflicts [5]. The Russian revolution of 1917 is an excellent example of such a process of normalization through an epic crisis.
Soviet historians claimed that the Russian revolution represented a major success in restoration and heritage practice, as thousands of previously inaccessible ecclesiastical treasures, icons, decorative objects, paintings, and the magnificent interiors of former Imperial palaces and homes of the wealthy aristocracy became public property. In 1914, Russia counted 180 museums, by 1920 it had 381, and by 1928 there were 805 (the second largest number of any country in the world) [6]. This was made possible by “nationalization” – a euphemism for the forced expropriation of private and corporate property [7]. Armed with revolutionary mandates, museum workers took charge of previously closed private collections and large repositories of treasures, particularly those of the Russian Orthodox Church. In a review of Western museological practice, Viktor Lazarev, a Soviet art historian of Byzantine and Medieval Russian art, called restoration the sole advanced domain in Soviet museology, thanks to the unprecedented influx of antiquities to museums after the 1917 revolution [8]. So museum workers in Russia were, on the one hand, agents in safeguarding cultural items and, on the other hand, intruders and expropriators, armed with state decrees and mandates [9].
finally, museums are ideal places to practice the althusserian symptomatic reading centered on the absence of problems or any other kind of institutional critique. museums are places that hide societal and class conflicts.
One inevitable outcome of this “heritage protection” and creation of the Soviet museum network was the separation of objects from their original settings. The treasures of a few former Imperial and aristocratic palaces were kept where they were found (some of the palaces at Petergof and Detskoe Selo near St. Petersburg), but others, like those at Gatchina, the Paley Palace in Detskoe Selo, the Winter, Anichkov, and Shuvalov Palaces in St. Petersburg, were dispersed to museums, governmental, educational and cultural institutions, or even sold abroad [10]. The icons from the Trinity Monastery of St. Sergius in Moscow region were taken from the Orthodox Church and became the core of the icon exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery (Russia’s national gallery) [11]. The vagaries of war and revolution, as well as diplomatic initiatives led to major migrations of cultural objects at this time. The collection and library of the University Museum of Tartu (now Estonia) was evacuated eastward in 1915 in Nizhny Novgorod then in 1918 to Voronezh. After Estonia declared its independence, the country’s museum workers sought the return of the University collection and set to work on creation of a united museum catalogue (the work remains incomplete today) [12]. Ukraine and Poland also initiated a process of restitution of museum and cultural items under the Riga Peace Treaty of 1921, signed at the end of Soviet-Polish War. Ukraine was unsuccessful in obtaining restitution of its museum collections [13], while Poland pursued negotiations at the highest level until the eve of the Second World War (from 1921 until 1937) [14]. The displacement of cultural treasures creates a special ambiguity in the functioning of museums, calling into question their role as untouchable containers of authenticity.
Konstantin Korygin. Vacation retreat of the The Red Army Air Force in Marfino. 1937. Courtesy: Maria Silina
The most striking and far-reaching action of isolating objects from their national and cultural settings is undoubtedly the colonial expropriation of cultural goods in the 19th and 20th centuries. The issue was recently highlighted by Emmanuel Macron, the President of France, who in autumn 2017 called for a process of restitution of Africa’s looted heritage. A year later, in November 2018, a state-commissioned report, entitled “Toward a New Relational Ethics” was published by Bénédicte Savoy, the leading European museologist and Felwine Sarr, a Senegalese scholar and cultural activist. Restitution requests, led by Ethiopia and Nigeria, date from the 1960s, but have drawn little attention until today. According to the Savoy-Sarr report, the British Museum holds 69,000 objects from Africa, the Weltmuseum in Vienna has 37,000, the soon-to-open Humboldt Forum in Berlin lists 75,000 and the Musée du quai Branly in Paris has 70,000. Meanwhile, as of 2007, all the museums on the African continent have no more than 3000 objects [15]. The report is radical in its assumptions. It calls for a restitution process based on the assumption that all kinds of displacement of objects from the African continent during the colonial era (particularly from 1885 to 1960), including military trophies, objects brought back from scientific missions and expeditions of all kinds, as well as special gifts should be treated in the context of colonial mobilization and exploitation of the economy, politics, and culture of African countries [16].
View of interior of the Museum of quai Branly. Paris. Courtesy: Maria Silina
The state and museum authorities today generally acknowledge that many museum collections were accumulated in dubious ways. When the legality of ownership is put in question or contested, they often respond in an idealist perspective, citing moral and cultural considerations. Anti-restitution strategies vary from assertions of the “universality” of Africa’s heritage to the alleged incapacity of African countries to collect and safeguard their heritage [17], A popular counter strategy is to champion the creation of new “universal” museums. One of the most ambitious initiatives of this kind is led by Berlin museums, which plan to open the Humboldt Forum in Berlin — a hyper-universal museum, which will amalgamate collections from the city’s state museums, including the Ethnologisches Museum and the Museum für Asiatische Kunst. The concept was put forward in 2002 in the well-known Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums, signed by the heads of major state museums in North American and Europe. The second part of the Declaration is worth citing in full (with some minor omissions): “The universal admiration for ancient civilizations would not be so deeply established today were it not for the influence exercised by the artifacts of these cultures, widely available to an international public in major museums. Indeed, the sculpture of classical Greece, to take but one example, is an excellent illustration of this point and of the importance of public collecting.
<…> Calls to repatriate objects that have belonged to museum collections for many years have become an important issue for museums. Although each case has to be judged individually, we should acknowledge that museums serve not just the citizens of one nation but the people of every nation. Museums are agents in the development of culture, whose mission is to foster knowledge by a continuous process of reinterpretation. Each object contributes to that process. To narrow the focus of museums whose collections are diverse and multifaceted would therefore be a disservice to all visitors” [18].
Humboldt Forum. Berlin. Cover of the review. March 2018. Courtesy: Maria Silina
The Humboldt Forum in Berlin, due to open in 2019, promotes itself as just such a “place for all”, likening its concept to that of the old Kunstkammer — a collection of art and marvels (usually the privilege of royal or wealthy personages) where “objects from local and foreign cultures were divided into the categories of nature (naturalia), science (scientifica), and art (artificialia)” [19]. In this perspective educational goals and the spectacular diversity of objects overshadow the problematic of any restitution claims.
Alongside assertion of the universalist and normalizing objectives of museums, some institutions are attempting more nuanced strategies to deflect restitution claims. One initiative by the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (a participant in the Humboldt project) is particularly intriguing. In 2017, the Staatliche Museen launched a funding program addressed to recent immigrants from Syria and Iran, who would be trained as volunteer museum guides for the Near East collection. This project promotes socially meaningful actions like mapping local immigrant culture and legacy in a metropole, engaging local immigrants and inviting 20−25 people to work with their national art while gently avoiding any questions of restitution [20]. The British Museum, another fervent defender of universal values of art [21], which has been under a barrage of restitution claims from Greece in recent decades, has followed the Berlin initiative [22].
Finally, museums are ideal places to practice the Althusserian symptomatic reading centered on the absence of problems or any other kind of institutional critique [23]. Museums are places that hide societal and class conflicts.
Tellingly, today, it is mostly artists themselves and small museums which have been willing to subject underrepresentation in museums to critical scrutiny. The Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts has added labels to works in the classical interior of the portrait gallery of respected citizens of the United States [24], telling visitors “which early American subjects benefited from slavery”, while the Baltimore Museum has sold works by established, mostly male artists in order to acquire works by underrepresented artists [25]. Canadian museums have taken some steps to readdress normativity of the colonial gaze by renaming paintings. So, for example, Emily Carr’s work, Indian Church (1929), is now exhibited under the title Church at Yuquot Village [26].
The #Metoo movement, which burst into the mass media and cultural world in early 2017, has encouraged redefinition and reframing of the persistently patriarchal and “grands hommes” strategies of museum, as well as addressing neglect of human rights violations by artists. Michelle Hartney recently intervened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York with a series of labels that tell a neglected story behind famous paintings by such artists as Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, and Balthus. The text placed by Hartney next to Paul Gauguin’s Two Tahitian Women (1899) cites a comment by the feminist author, Roxanne Gay: “We can no longer worship at the altar of creative genius while ignoring the price all too often paid for that genius. In truth, we should have learned this lesson long ago, but we have a cultural fascination with creative and powerful men who are also ‘mercurial’ or ‘volatile,’ with men who behave badly” [27]. The labels were quickly removed from the museum.
Another case — that of the video by Beyoncé and Jay-Z shot in the Louvre, which went viral in 2018 — is especially important for grasping the twofold image of the modern museum as an open-to-all institution promoting cultural accomplishments and a successful enterprise based on capitalist productivity. It provoked heated debates about the acceptability of filming a pop-music video in a major museum and the message behind the oeuvre of American celebrities. The artists wanted to critically reframe the absence of black history and culture in museums, an action to be read in the context of the Decolonize this Place initiative. But what the debate set off by the video showed most clearly was the scale and depth of belief in the museum as a place of art and culture, which must not be “endangered” by pop culture. Interestingly, the video has also revealed much about the managerial strategies of the Louvre, a museum that, according to hundreds of social network commentaries and posts, is still perceived as an untouchable and elitist sanctuary for white, eurocentric culture. In reality, the Louvre has recently taken unprecedented steps to market and rent out its “sacred spaces” to all sorts of commercial activity, attracting wealthy corporations and Hollywood giants to make use of its halls [28].
Screenshot from Apeshit video by Beyoncé and Jay-Z. The Consecration of the Emperor Napoleon by Jacques-Louis David at the background. 2018. Courtesy: Maria Silina
This synergy of museums and the marketing industry is increasingly prevalent. Urban museums have become highly visible and controversial agents of the hyper-and overproduction of cultural goods and commercialized public spaces. “Artwashing” and “gentrification” are important keywords that describe museums as agents of crisis in a context of societal disparities (museums are also tellingly described as “brandscape spots” and “mass tourist attractions”). The Boyle Heights Alliance Against Artwashing and Displacement — a coalition of affinity groups in Los Angeles [29] — is leading an anti-gentrification war in the US city: “What the neighborhood needs”, the groups insist, “is more affordable housing, and residential services such as grocery stores and laundromats” and not museums and art galleries for a privileged few [30]. Numerous studies have shown at museums tend to be integrated into exclusive cultural districts and “museum islands”, conglomerates of pure (consumerist) culture segregated from social facilities [31].
Recent exposés of the role of museums in urban social erasure as well as other controversial aspects of museum life (the irregular or unlawful way in which national collections were amassed, museums that were created thanks to war and revolution, as well as hidden social and cultural conflicts behind museum displays) make the crisis angle of museum functionality highly thought-provoking. They demonstrate the embeddedness of museums in the state ideological apparatus and the successful institutional enterprise of modern national regimes. Museums as creations of nationalism, idealism, and the class-agenda of Western culture will always be containers or vehicles of conflict. This elusive and paradoxical situation is well described by Donald Preziosi, who wrote that “the seeming luxury, marginality, or even disposability of the museum may be read in fact as the very mark of its totalizing achievement” [32].
The concept of a hybrid (as well as its derivatives: hybridity, hybrid, hybridization) is used so widely today that it becomes synonymous with everything contemporary. Hybrid wars, hybrid regimes, hybrid cars. The word also takes on an evaluative meaning when hybridization is viewed as an effective weapon of progressive politics, disrupting endogamy, breaking down fixed identities and producing an infinite number of differences. Conservative critics, on the other hand, describe hybridization as a homogenizing practice that erases local traditions and conventions. So on one hand there is the ideology of fundamentalism, essentialism, purism and awesome invariants: purity, solidity, ineluctability. On the other, there are the processes of pidginization, creolization, glocalization and various transitional states (liminality, volatility, plasticity, fluidity). Toxic masculinity, white supremacism and identity politics are taking a beating from assemblages, prostheses and cyborgs.
In contemporary art, art hybridization is understood as something innovative or high-tech and is associated primarily with science art. Hybrid arts are a subculture that includes formalist practices of interactive design using high technologies with the prefixes “info”, “bio”, “nano”, “cogno”. Today, though, in the postmedium condition, any art is hybrid, because there is no longer a division into specific mediums (painting, sculpture, etc.), and the fundamentally interdisciplinary nature of art implies the inclusion of any research themes, openness to other areas knowledge and an invitation to experts from other fields to join in.
Perhaps the hybrid nature of art should be understood in a completely different way, putting the emphasis on its “non-artificial” character – a continuum between the natural and the cultural. By linking the concept of hybridity with its original biological meaning, we can reassess the very “artificiality”, “artistry” and “technicality” of art. Our start point will be a half-forgotten, almost curious exhibition project.
In 1936, MoMA presented some extraordinary “works” by Edward Steichen, one of the foremost modernist photographers. The exhibition, organized in two stages, displayed to the public varieties of delphiniums, which were the result of 26 years of work selecting and cross-breeding flowers on ten acres of land in Connecticut. In the first stage the public were shown “true blue or pure blue colors, and the fog and mist shades”, followed in the second stage by huge spike-shaped plants from one to two metres tall. The exhibition press release clarified: “To avoid confusion, it should be noted that the actual delphiniums will be shown in the Museum – not paintings or photographs of them. It will be a ‘personal appearance’ of the flowers themselves.”
At that time the public still viewed the activities of MoMA with much scepticism (especially after the Machine Art exhibition), and the Museum legitimized the non-traditional objects of its latest show by including various facts in the press release that testified to the status of these flowers in the history of culture. Reading the text, one might well suppose that the exhibition was the whim of an influential and museum-affiliated artist who was given the opportunity to present his hobby to the general public. Critics at the time and historians later paid little attention to the exhibition.
Today, however, in the history of art Delphiniums are regarded as the originator of the bio-art movement. The author of the bio-art anthology Signs of Life writes that Steichen “was the first modern artist to create new organisms through both traditional and artificial methods, to exhibit the organisms themselves in a museum, and to state that genetics is an art medium.” [1] It is unlikely, that Steichen – a commercial salon photographer – was seriously interested in the ontology of art at a theoretical level. For him flower selection was an occupation which, like photography, had to do with an aesthetic experience, an appeal to beauty.
The assessment by art historians of Steichen’s work as a dotted line linking Cubism with George Gessert’s later bio-art practices seems stretched and teleological. It is much more interesting to look at what such a project, implemented without design and little reflected in its time, can tell us about today’s understanding of art and its growing interest in the natural world. In this sense, we cannot treat the flowers simply as a “personal appearance”, as a modification of the readymade brought into the gallery-museum context. We need to pay attention to the actual process of their formation and materialization, of which Steichen himself said: “The science of heredity when applied to plant breeding, which has as its ultimate purpose the aesthetic appeal of beauty, is a creative art.” [2] Cleary this “creative art” is at the same time a “creative act” and what interests me is not so much a new medium, genre, species, technique or movement in art, but the fundamentally different approach, which Steichen proposes, to the creative act. It, as we will see, concerns three basic levels: art production (artistic method), the way of being of art (ontological status of the work) and its consumption (reception).
First of all, the application of hybridization to art production forces us to reconsider the concept of authorship. Poststructuralism demythologized the romantic figure of the author by asserting the unoriginal and self-citing nature of any work (the author, according to Roland Barters, is always just a “tissue of quotations”). [3] The new materialism, in the optics of which it is logical to describe Steichen, understands the artistic process as “co-collaboration”, that is, the joint action of artist and material. Modernist art was based on the principle of hylomorphism, i.e. the idea that passive material is shaped by an active form, that form being the discourse itself (art criticism, philosophy, history of art), which, through the artist as an abstract function, determines the distribution of the material (paint on canvas, metal in space, etc.).
Steichen offers another model, where the form is not just superimposed on material, forming their synthesis in a complete object, but, in the words of neo-materialists, “matter is as much responsible for the emergence of art as man.” [4] In other words, the substrate, the substance of art, is not simply used to achieve some or other artistic or conceptual goals. Matter is endowed with its own agency, its own will or goal-setting capacity. For example, for contemporary artists, the molecular forces of paint become important – the stratification of substances in themselves and as they are. So the artist is reduced to the role of partner or assistant of self-developing, pulsating matter, which has its own “interests” and “intentions” and is thus not reduced to an effect of discourse. [5] Such matter is emergent, self-organizing and generative. Steichen’s example is especially interesting, because the plant breeder works, not with inorganic, but with organic substance, penetrating into its very essence. [6] The artist is the helmsman of evolution.
Following these crude historical parallels with the modernists leads to the following conclusions about the avant-garde. The artist of the historical avant-garde tried to combine art and life, where life is understood as social reality (bios), because his or her work was intended to create a new utopian world. Steichen, however, tries to break down the boundaries between art and zoé – life itself. Posthumanists understand zoé as the dynamic, self-organizing structure of life itself – generative vitality. [7] It is interesting that Rosie Braidotti, who recognizes the intrinsic value of life (zoé) as such, calls this approach a “colossal hybridization of the species”, [8] where there is no significant difference between man and his natural “others”. The artist does not stand opposed to the flower. They are both part of the same creative act. Not only does Steichen hybridize delphiniums, but delphiniums hybridize him, their breeder.
Steichen’s interest in the bare factuality of the material lends him an affinity with contemporary artists. Steichen was not only fascinated by the technical and representative possibilities of photography; he was also interested in the chemical process of image production itself. Just as he produced huge numbers of negatives, most of which were never converted to positives, so he grew thousands of delphiniums in order to select the best examples. The production process here was like a struggle for survival, natural selection (or curatorial selective practice), and not a concentrated honing of the original. The artist was driven by a passion for selection – the practical side of theoretical genetics, which was at the peak of its development at that time. Selection had been a human capacity for millennia, but it was first carried out by scientific methods (and not blindly) in Steichen’s time. At that time (before Lysenkoism or before the complete discrediting of eugenics by fascism) it was perceived as a science of the future, comparable with the utopian pathos of the avant-garde, which swallowed not only bios, but also zoé.
Selection is based on the process of hybridization, whereby genotypes are chosen for their nutritious or aesthetic qualities, the preferred individuals are crossed with one another and those of their descendants which inherit all of the required features are in turn selected. So, generation by generation, the breeder brings the plant to the required state as expressed in its phenotype (i.e., the externally manifest features of the individual). Selection, therefore, in contrast with species isolation, is a matter of breaking down the boundaries of species – that “great bastion of stability,” as the biologist Ernst Mayr called it. Mayr gave a biological definition of species as “groups of actually or potentially interbreeding natural populations which are reproductively isolated from other such groups.” [9] Today, in the light of new discoveries or the spread of hybrids and chimeras in biotechnological experiments, biologists and philosophers increasingly emphasize the limitations of this definition, although Mayr deserves credit for not absolutizing the nature of species boundaries.
Perhaps such a parallel will seem factitious, but if traditional contemporary art is based on the production of a certain type of art (the medium) or a specific individual (the work), in Steichen’s case, we find it hard to draw the boundary. Are his works only those delphiniums that were shown at MoMA in 1936? Or their seeds, which can still be bought today? Rather, hybridization can be understood as a process that emphasizes the conventionality of species differences. So he does not address a species, population or individual organism, but liberates life itself, the constant fluidity of the vital forces of nature (and of art). Artistic hybridization is a queer practice par excellence, a practice which highlights the very process of becoming rather than fixed identities. Such art and life is a constant movement of creating and erasing boundaries through the temporary accentuation of genetic mutations.
Hybridization not only changes the role of the artist (into an assistant to the material) and the status of art (into a constant becoming), but also makes the process of perception mutually directional. The philosopher Catherine Malabou believes that the paradigm of writing, which prevailed in the days of poststructuralism, is being replaced by the paradigm of plasticity – the ability to both acquire and give form. [10] Plasticity plays an important role in biology, particularly in the framework of a new evolutionary synthesis (sometimes misleadingly called “postmodernist”), where species are not considered in isolation from ecosystems. Suffice it to recall Charles Darwin, who poetically described the co-evolution of insects and flowers, where not only does the insect adapt to the shape of the flower, but the structure of the flower also uses ruses and devices in response to the requests and desires of the insect. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari would later describe this process as that of de- and reterritorialization: “The orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing of a wasp; but the wasp reterritorializes on that image. The wasp is nevertheless deterritorialized, becoming a piece in the orchid’s reproductive apparatus. But it reterritorializes the orchid by transporting its pollen.” [11]
The relationship of flowers and insects is a ménage-à-trois (for example, pistil, stamen and bee), but together with the artist they form a love rectangle or trapezoid, where all of the participants are equally involved in the process of receiving and passing on a form. And to understand this process, we must turn to an area that is (quite understandably) neglected by art theorists, namely, evolutionary or Darwinian aesthetics. This teaching is based not on the widely known idea of the survival of the fittest, but on the idea of sexual selection, i.e. differentiated access to partners (competition and choice of a partner of the opposite sex). The theory was developed by Darwin himself, who, trying to explain apparently redundant ornamentation on the bodies of animals, believed that sensual pleasure, attractiveness and subjective experience are also agents of selection.
This question remains a matter of controversy in evolutionary biology, where representatives of the two camps continue to disagree. The “adaptationist” interpretation insists that bodily ornamentation advertises and provides information about the useful qualities of the partner, while an alternative “arbitrary” model sees no benefit in the production of aesthetic attributes other than the popularity of the partner. The latter approach was developed by Darwin’s follower, Ronald Fisher, who described sexual selection as a positive feedback mechanism. For example, the more advantageous it is for a male to have a long tail, the more advantageous it is for a female to prefer just such males, and vice versa (in biology this principle is called “Fisherian runaway”). His radical follower, our contemporary Richard Prum, has pursued this line of thought, which also correlates with plasticity: partner preferences are genetically correlated with preferred features. In other words, “variation in desire and variation in the objects of desire will become correlated or enmeshed, entrained evolutionarily,” [12] beauty and the observer co-evolve. Aesthetic attractiveness makes the body free in its sexuality: “birds are beautiful,” Prum writes, “because they are beautiful to themselves.” [13]
Feminist critiques of Darwinism, however, go much further in defending Darwin against reductionism. For example, Elizabeth Grosz questions the raison d’être of sexual selection and emphasizes its irrational character, expressed in an unbridled intensification of colours and shapes, extravagance, excessive sensuality and an appeal to sexuality rather than simple reproduction. She tries in this way to separate natural from sexual selection (the second is usually considered a subspecies of the first). In particular, she writes: “Sexual selection may be understood as the queering of natural selection, that is, the rendering of any biological norms, ideals of fitness, strange, incalculable, excessive.” [14] Moreover, sexual selection expands the world of the living into ”the nonfunctional, the redundant, the artistic.” [15] And here we are again reminded of Steichen’s Delphiniums, which only intensify the already excessive beauty of this flower. But how does this leap from nature to culture happen? Why does a person become an addressee of someone else’s sexual selection? How does he or she get drawn into this “co-evolutionary dance”?
Describing the attractiveness of flowers (including delphiniums) and their ability to come to life in our imagination, Elaine Skerry highlighted their various characteristics: the size that allows them to freely penetrate our consciousness, the bowls that correspond to the curve of our eyes, the possibility of their localization by vision, the transparency of their substance, etc. [16] However, this says little about plasticity. Without extrapolating biological principles to social ones, I would propose that an even more complex process is at work in Steichen’s love rectangle or trapezoid, where not only does the artist subordinate the flower to his aesthetic needs, but the flowers themselves determine the artist’s sensory experience. The reception and consumption of art cannot be a one-way process, but are subject to positive or negative feedback. There is no need to go far for an example: in Russia flowers of Northern European selection (the so-called “the new perennials”) – calmer, more austere and vegetative – are gradually supplanting the gaudy and bright flower varieties that were popular in Soviet times. We can easily trace how flowers steer our taste. Could it be that our taste, our aesthetic judgment, is also a hybrid?
Following in the steps of Steichen’s experiments, I have tried to retroactively comprehend what hybridization as a creative act might be today. However, despite all that has been said above, I am not sure that hybridity in itself is of indubitable value. We know from evolutionary theory that mixing does not always lead to diversity, and the endemics so dear to us are a product of the isolation of species (“Splendid Isolation” is the title of a book about the remarkable mammals of South America), [17] because “isolating mechanisms” between species preserve originality and authenticity. In a similar vein, some left-wing philosophers say that by altogether abandoning identity politics and insisting on the fluidity of categories, we make ourselves vulnerable to traditionalism. For instance, if you consider yourself fluid, what prevents you from abandoning your essence and accepting a fixed norm? Hybridity also comes in for criticism as a product that masks the policy of global imperialism, because it is based on the exclusion of “others”: old age, uncommunicativeness, pain, i.e., non-hybridity itself. [18]
Hybridity and its dark double, non-hybridity, are in equal measure social constructs. Perhaps everything around us is equally hybrid. However, the hybridization procedure is not just a progressive trope, but also a subversive procedure. Hybridization, unlike many other analogous concepts, is associated with biology, i.e., with something natural and inherent to nature itself, but at the same time is also a cultural practice of selection, and for this reason it undermines naturalness as such. Unlike concepts that naturalize, that represent human history as something natural, it naturalizes unnaturalness itself. The unnatural seems natural. As Steichen shows us, the boundaries between art and nature are highly arbitrary. Life imitates art. Art imitates life.
