Ewa Partum's Artistic Practice: An Atlas of Continuity in Different Locations 9783839455241

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Karolina Majewska-Güde Ewa Partum's Artistic Practice

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Karolina Majewska-Güde is a researcher, art critic, and curator. She works as an assistant professor at the Institute of History and Theory of Art at Katholische Privat-Universität Linz. Her research focuses on the Central and Eastern European neo-avant-gardes, feminist art history, contemporary issues of circulation, translation, and production of knowledges through art-based research.

Karolina Majewska-Güde

Ewa Partum's Artistic Practice An Atlas of Continuity in Different Locations

This publication is based on a dissertation handed in at the Kultur-, Sozial- und Bildungswissenschaftliche Fakultät of Humboldt-Universität in 2019. Examiners: Prof. Dr. em. Susanne von Falkenhausen, Dr. Katja Bernhard.

Funding: Günter Rombold Privatstiftung Raiffeisen Landesbank Oberösterreich

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http:// dnb.d-nb.de © 2021 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Maria Arndt, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Ewa Partum, photo: Birgit Kleber, Berlin 1988 Copy-editing: Erin Troseth Proofread: Ben Atkins and Peter Moorby Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-5524-7 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-5524-1 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839455241 Printed on permanent acid-free text paper.

Contents

Acknowledgments........................................................................ 7 Introduction: An Atlas of Ewa Partum’s Artistic Practice ................................. 9 Opening the Archive....................................................................... 10 Horizontal Monograph ..................................................................... 11 Framing Ewa Partum’s Artistic Practice ................................................... 23 Chapter 1 Existing Cartographies .................................................................. 33 The Trajectory of the Redistribution of Ewa Partum’s Practice ............................ 33 The Genealogy of Ewa Partum’s Artistic Practice: Text, Image, Body......................... 41 Ewa Partum and Conceptual Orthodoxy ................................................... 43 Negotiating Conceptual and Feminist Perspectives in Ewa Partum’s Artistic Practice ................................................................................. 45 Chapter 2 Ewa Partum’s Critical Engagement with Art Infrastructures .............................. 51 Troubling Terminology: Art Infrastructures and the Socialist Art Institution ................. 51 Entering the Professional Art World ....................................................... 56 Creating Art Infrastructures: the Galeria Adres (1972–77) .................................. 78 Re-entering the Professional Art World: Engaging with the Curatorial in the Context of Redistribution after 1989 ................................................ 101 Conclusion .............................................................................. 116 Chapter 3 Ewa Partum’s Conceptual Art ............................................................ 119 Conceptualism as a Circulating Idea ...................................................... 119 Practicing Conceptualism ............................................................... 135 Conclusion .............................................................................. 154

Chapter 4 Feminist Identifications in Ewa Partum’s Artistic Practice...............................157 Feminist Self-Identification (1980) ........................................................157 Ewa Partum’s Situated Feminism ........................................................ 165 Indicating Victims and Oppressors: Feminist Pedagogy in Performances in Socialist Poland (1974–82) ................................................................175 The Active Body: Rhetoric of Disinterestedness .......................................... 187 The Feminist Emigrant Body: Performances in West Berlin (1982–89) ...................... 196 The Contemporary Gendered Economic Subject: The Delegated Performance Pearls (2006) ............................................................................ 209 Translating Ewa Partum’s Feminist Art Globally ............................................ 211 Conclusion .............................................................................. 224 Chapter 5 The Spaces of the Political: Ewa Partum’s Works in the Public Space................... 227 Public and Private Spheres in Partum’s Work ............................................ 227 The Public Space – East and West ....................................................... 228 Art in the Public Space in Socialist Europe ............................................... 228 The Production of the Public Space in West Berlin........................................ 233 The Legality of Space (1971).............................................................. 238 Private Performance (1985) .............................................................. 252 Conclusion .............................................................................. 258 Instead of Conclusion: Distribution Map ................................................ 259 The Musealization of the East ........................................................... 261 Operating from a Global Position......................................................... 265 Illustrations ............................................................................ 271 Bibliography ........................................................................... 273

Acknowledgments

This book is based on a dissertation written at the Art and Visual History Department at Humboldt University. I would first like to thank my supervisor, Professor Susanne von Falkenhausen, for guiding my research and providing abiding inspiration. Her passionate and bold critical stance was important in pushing my work forward. I would like to express my appreciation to the chair of my doctoral committee, Dr. Katja Bernhardt for her valuable feedback and advice as well as her support with the various aspects of the dissertation process. My special thanks go to Berenika Partum, program director of the Artum Foundation ewa partum museum. As an art historian herself she knew exactly what I needed in the process of my research and as a friend she knew how to support me. I would not have been able to accomplish my work without her help. I would also like to thank Professor Agata Jakubowska, who read an earlier version of chapter 4 and provided essential feedback. Her generous advice and interest in my research meant a lot to me. My sincere thanks also go to Marek Żychski, Ewa Partum’s long term collaborator, for sharing with me his memories, stories and insightful analyses, and to Detel Aurand for sharing with me her perspective on Ewa Partum’s early months in West Berlin. I would like to thank Professor Monika Leisch-Kiesl for her encouragement to finalize the book, my copy-editor Erin Troseth, who helped to shape this book, and Beáta Hock for helping me to find the right editor. Thank you to my family – Florian, Hania, Iwo, Iwona, Andrzej, Gertrud and Georg – for taking care of me and providing the conditions and time for my research and writing; and thank you to Kasia, who always showed me what it really means to be feminist. And of course, my biggest thanks go to Ewa Partum for generously sharing her time and work with me. For answering my many questions over the course of several years, and for all the fun we had together. Dziekuje! I started this project under the supervision of Professor Piotr Piotrowski, who died in 2015. In his absence his writings became my dialogue partners. With this book I would like to pay homage to his memory.

Introduction: An Atlas of Ewa Partum’s Artistic Practice “Nothing in the etymology of the word history, deriving from the Greek verb ἱστορέω (to know through research), suggests that the past should be the exclusive focus of what constitutes, in essence, an enquiry-driven record and truth-orientated narrativisation of events, relations and processes in human society.” – Angela Dimitrakaki1

“History is a question not just of the reception and the transmission of a work, but also of the history that was the condition for this continued reception.” – Howard Caygill2

“History cannot be reduced to a manageable block of information; it has to be grasped itself as a complex of processes and relationships.” – Griselda Pollock3

“The researcher, male or female, is never outside the cultural, political and economic conditions that allow for only certain questions to be formulated.” – Elspeth Probyn4 1

Dimitrakaki, Angela: Gender, ArtWork and the Global Imperative: A Materialist Feminist Critique, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013, p. 41.

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Opening the Archive Polish-born artist Ewa Partum is considered a pioneer of Eastern European feminist art produced within the idiom of conceptualism. Her work belongs to two discursive formations: the historical neo-avant-garde that emerged during the 1960s, and contemporary art as accompanied by its own temporal and semantic transition after 1989. Partum’s work can also be spatially and chronologically divided into Polish (1965–82), West Berlin (from 1982–89) and contemporary/global (1989 onward) periods. Partum herself established a double continuity in her work, identifying her practice as conceptual (from 1965) and feminist (from 1974). Her work follows a trajectory from a deconstruction of the protocols of medium specificity to a later reconstruction of the same by introducing an active body as a visual component, agent and constitutive element of her feminist performances. Partum’s retrospective exhibition in Karlsruhe in 2001, a double solo exhibition in Gdańsk and Warsaw in 2006, and a more recent presentation in Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź in 2015/16, with their accompanying catalogues, constituted particular moments of the reopening and transformation of the artist’s archive. Unlike the many meticulously preserved archives of Eastern European neo-avant-garde artists concerned with the problem of self-historicization,5 Partum’s archive – containing primary and secondary sources such as photographic documentation of artworks and ephemeral projects, correspondence, books, artworks, reviews, critical texts, original manuscripts and photocopies, covering the period of time from 1965 to the present – is fragmentary and fluid. It incorporates the Galeria Adres archive run by Partum between 1972 and 1977 as well as material related to her artistic practice; however, the boundaries between both sets of materials are flexible. Although there are many traces of Partum’s activities aiming at the organization and systematization of the material, the state of Partum’s archive is determined by the 2

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Caygill, Howard: “Walter Benjamin’s Concept of Cultural History” in Ferris, David S. (ed.): The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp.73–95, p. 92. In his text Caygill refers to Walter Benjamin’s essay “Edward Fuchs: Collector and Historian” (1937). Pollock, Griselda: Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art, London: Routledge, 1988, p. 30. Probyn, Elspeth: “Travels in the Postmodern: Making Sense of the Local” in Nicholson, Linda J. (ed.): Feminism/Postmodernism, New York: Routledge, 1990, pp. 176–189, p. 183. I refer to the concept of self-historicization as proposed by Zdenka Badovinac, who writes that self-historicization involves “contextualizing one’s own work in one’s own local tradition” and that it is “an informal system of historicization practiced by artists who, due to the absence of any suitable collective history, are themselves compelled to search for their own historical/interpretative context.” See Badovinac, Zdenka: “Neues Slowenisches Museum: An Essay on Institutional Critique and the Production of Institution” in Kunsttexte.de E-Journal für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte, no. 3, 2014, p. 5, https://doi.org/10.18452/7563.

Introduction: An Atlas of Ewa Partum’s Artistic Practice

artist’s attitude as articulated in one of her works that “the act of thinking is an act of art”6 rather than an act of making. This means that, for Partum, the photographic works, mail art poems, documentation of her actions, letterset and cardboard cut-out letters used in her performances, and even the performative events themselves, merely constitute forms of art notations. The material gathered in the archive was collected by the artist as both an accumulation of traces of her artistic practice and as a source for the practice itself. For that reason, every return to the archive performed by the artist or by curators or researchers is an intervention that restructures it. This process parallels the very procedure of historicization of Partum’s practice. A curator of Partum’s first Polish retrospective exhibition, Aneta Szyłak, pointed to this condition of the practice of historicization: “we want and must return to the artists’ archives and, by striving to possess, we perform rearrangements between the work and its notation.”7 Therefore, the task of the historicization of Partum’s practice, to which this book aspires, also means the transformation of it. From the correspondence preserved in Ewa Partum’s archive, we can reconstruct the process of the opening of the archive as one that is, to a certain extent, controlled by the artist who selects materials, makes them available, translates them, and also proposes certain conceptual connections. The researchers who have accessed the archive on various occasions have been driven by the need to learn about Partum’s practice. My own approach to the material gathered by Partum has been governed by two objectives: not only to find the history in the archive, but also to find the history of the archive.8

Horizontal Monograph The political changes of 1989 resulted in a methodological shift in the art history of former-socialist Europe. Post-1989 scholarship challenged not only pre-determined historical hierarchies and canons but also narrative strategies of national and “universal” art histories. It also opened the possibility of retrospectively narrating

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The Act of Thinking Is an Act of Art is the title of Ewa Partum’s work realized in 1989 at the Abstract Book event organized in West Berlin by the artist collective Der Kongreß. Szyłak, Aneta: “The Non-Transmittability of the Message: In the Context of the Exhibition and Monograph Ewa Partum: The Legality of Space” in Szyłak, Aneta/ Partum, Berenika/ Tatar, Ewa Małgorzata (eds.): Ewa Partum, Gdańsk: Wyspa Institute of Art, 2012/13, pp. 10–24, p. 14. I paraphrase Piotr Juszkiewicz, who writes about his reading of historical critical texts as a search for the history of a critical discourse and the search for the history within this discourse. See Juszkiewicz, Piotr: Od rozkoszy historiozofii do ‘gry w nic’. Polska krytyka artystyczna czasu odwilży, Poznań 2006, p. 49.

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East-Central European or, respectively, Eastern European art history. In recent years historical investigations have moved away from questions about the “voice”9 of Eastern European art history, which can be always performed as authentic, towards language (terminology) and narrative strategies of art histories and their political grammars.10 How to speak, to whom one speaks and under what conditions one speaks: these are the core questions of recent East-Central European art history, which this book also strives to pursue as it concentrates on Ewa Partum’s artistic practice. Historicizing Ewa Partum’s work means working across many different locations – places and spaces understood as differently constructed and experienced social and political realms. Thus my inquiry focuses not only on the semantic shift within Ewa Partum’s practice from autonomous conceptual art to socially engaged feminist art but also on the relocation of this practice and its redistribution from the socialist East to the capitalist West (Berlin) and, subsequently, to/in the contemporary global art world. I propose to articulate these trajectories within a nonlinear narrative focusing not on the reconstruction of an uninterrupted chronology but rather on the circulation of certain ideas, objects, strategies and knowledges and their local reconfigurations in altered geopolitical contexts. I propose analysing Partum’s artistic practice within a framework inspired by a heterogeneous concept of horizontal art history. This choice is determined by the imperative to follow a method that is not imposed on but arises from the object of study.11 Insofar as the work of Ewa Partum has been produced, distributed and interpreted in three distinctive semantical, ideological and institutional spaces, the perspective of horizontal art history – with its central notions of the parallax effect (localization of meanings) and framing – remains particularly valuable.12 Moreover, it promises to “overcome a commitment to

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Two voices of European art history were discussed by Hans Belting in his publication Art History After Modernism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003, p. 61. Current concerns of East-Central European art history include: projects that reconsider cultural production from the Cold War period beyond the dichotomy of official and non-official culture, focused instead on interrelations of art fields beyond the paradigm of two circles of culture; projects focused on recovering local traditions of internationalism, decolonisation and alternative conceptions of globality; and research on postnational art histories in the context of nascent nationalism. This concept of history relates to Walter Benjamin’s experiential concept of historical knowledge where history is understood not as an experience of but rather with the past. See Caygill 2004, pp. 89–95. Piotrowski, Piotr: “Framing of Central Europe” in Badovinac, Zdenka/ Weibel, Peter (eds.): 2000+ ArtEast Collection: The Art of Eastern Europe; A Selection of Works for the International and National Collection of Moderna Galerija Ljubljana, Vienna: Folio, 2001, pp. 15–22.

Introduction: An Atlas of Ewa Partum’s Artistic Practice

vertical relations and enables the pursuit of a (feminist) art history that prioritizes the horizontal axis.”13 Horizontal art history is understood here neither as a methodology to be applied nor as a rigid program to follow. Rather, it can be conceptualized as an operating system that must constantly be updated and further developed by the user: a conceptual tool that enables us to detect and expose silences and aporias within art-historical narratives. The constitutive notions of horizontal art history as proposed by Polish scholar Piotr Piotrowski are indebted to the vocabulary of postcolonial studies14 and diachronic analysis of cultural transfers within culture zones that deploy the notions of culture margins, circulation, and transnational and critical geography,15 as well as to feminist retroactive art history16 understood not as a strategy of inserting marginalized names into the hegemonic narrative but as an attempt to change an existing paradigm.17 Within the horizontal paradigm, a static spatial dualism of periphery and centre is replaced by a dynamic model focused on the set of relations between centres and plural margins, as well as margin-to-margin relations. This perspective enables the mapping of a set of dynamic relations between Ewa

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Dimitrakaki 2013, p. 41. See, for instance, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s seminal book Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. For a genealogy of the concept of cultural transfer see, for instance, Middell, Matthias: “Von der Wechselseitigkeit der Kulturen im Austausch. Das Konzept des Kulturtransfers in verschiedenen Forschungskontexten” in Langer, Andrea (ed.): Metropolen und Kulturtransfer im 15./16. Jahrhundert. Prag – Krakau – Danzig – Wien, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2001, pp. 15–51. See, for instance, Pollock 1988. Piotr Piotrowski elaborated his concept of horizontal art history around 2005 in a series of articles and books published in Polish and English; see especially “Geografia i historia. Sztuka w Europie Środkowo-Wschodniej” in Piotrowski, Piotr: Awangarda w cieniu Jałty. Sztuka w Europie Środkowo-Wschodniej w latach 1945–1989, Poznań, 2005, pp. 13–36; English edition: In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-garde in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989, London: Reaktion Books, 2009; “On the Spatial Turn, or Horizontal Art History” in Umeni/Art, no. 5, 2008, pp. 378–383; “Towards Horizontal Art History” in Anderson, Jaynie (ed.): Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration, and Convergence, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2009, pp. 82–85; “Towards a Horizontal History of the European Avant-Garde” in Bru, Sascha/ Nicholls, Peter (eds.): Europa! Europa? The Avant-Garde, Modernism and the Fate of a Continent, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009, pp. 49–58. Full Polish version: “O horyzontalnej historii sztuki” in Artium Quaestiones, vol. 20, 2009, pp. 59–73. Shorter version: “On the Spatial Turn” in Macel, Christine/ Mytkowska, Joanna (eds.): Promises of the Past: A Discontinuous History of Art in Former Eastern Europe, exh. cat., Paris, Centre Pompidou, 14 April–19 July 2010, Paris 2010, pp. 212–215. When possible, I refer to English editions of Piotrowski’s books and essays.

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Partum’s work and the times and places from which she has operated and from which her art is being redistributed and interpreted.18 This book attempts to respond to two paradigms of horizontal art history: the postulate to revisit and rewrite a set of art-historical concepts (such as institutional critique) that, according to Piotrowski, would lead to provincializing Western art history; and secondly, to create a narrative that focuses on performative locality and transnational connections, especially those that omit overrepresented centres. The task of such an art history is to reconstruct the topography of the local and translocal circulations of concepts and knowledges. While Piotrowski applied and exercised his method within a transnational comparative study of East-Central European neo-avant-garde and contemporary art,19 here I am working towards adapting his narrative model to the format of a monographic study. From the outset of art history, a monographic focus on the sovereign (male) artist was one of the main tasks of the discipline.20 Within the horizontal paradigm, a monograph is decentralized as a genre and assumes the form of an atlas: a set of articulations connected to each other in a non-linear but problem-centred way.21 As a multi-perspectival whole, the atlas constitutes an enfolding multiplicity; it is conceived as an interrogation that undermines the notion of completed history and also stays away from the notion of art perceived as an individual mythology. An atlas of Partum’s practice represents a revelatory rather than celebratory art history: it does not aim to reveal the place of Partum’s art in art history, but it points to the mechanisms that guarantee that place in particular circumstances of the post-1989 period. The main heroine of this non-linear, problematic mapping is thus not the

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According to Piotrowski, horizontal art history should articulate “a triangle of problems: the strategies of the local cultural policies of the authorities; the local artistic traditions and varieties of the mythologization of culture; and the universalist ambitions of the local cultures attempting to find compensation for the traumatic reality experience.” See Piotrowski 2001, p. 22. Piotrowski 2005 (English edition 2009) and Piotrowski, Piotr: Agorafilia. Sztuka i demokracja w postkomunistycznej Europie, Poznań, 2010, English edition: Art and Democracy in PostCommunist Europe, London: Reaktion Books, 2012. For a historical overview of a monograph as an art historical genre, see Guercio, Gabriele: Art as Existence: The Artist’s Monograph and Its Projects, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. Guercio describes the areas defined by monograph legacy as: “The life-and-work dialectic; the view of the artist as a ‘who’ reflected and engendered within the artworks; the focus on the singular existence; the surmise of a continuum among the objects of creation, the sphere of living, and reality at large.” Guercio p. 284. The metaphor of an atlas does not relate to the project Atlas of World Art History by John Onians (2004), broadly criticised for its reductionist approach to global comparative art history. See, for instance, Bryl, Mariusz: “Translate/Transcend” in Elkins, James (ed.): Is Art History Global? New York: Routledge, 2007, pp. 356–371, p. 369.

Introduction: An Atlas of Ewa Partum’s Artistic Practice

artist and her intentionality but the artistic practice in constant movement between its historical alterity and its interpretative presences. The notion of an atlas emphasizes the performativity of framing and a contingency of interpretation: meanings are produced by asking particular questions. Thus, each chapter can be understood as a different question posed from a contemporary perspective towards Partum’s practice. If the act of interpretation is always an act of violence, the fragmentation achieved by the atlas structure is an act of curating: taking care of the object of study by approaching it carefully from different directions but not subsuming it. Therefore, the chronological narrative is disturbed due to its verticality and canon-making orientation as well as its centre–periphery dynamic, which is based on the concepts of diffusion and influence. At the same time, a preposterous interpretation,22 i.e. the procedure of situating works of art in ahistorical discursive contexts, is avoided for its tendency to exploit and exhaust an artwork by stabilizing it in a context that is not historically grounded. Avoiding a sequential historical narrative enables us not only to focus on ruptures and gaps but also to develop multiple narratives that expose both a certain disposition within Partum’s practice and its reception. Paradoxically, it also allows for disclosure of the continuity of this artistic practice in different spatial and material conditions beyond the fossilized “progress, loss, and return” narrative models identified by Clare Hemmings in the context of Western feminist storytelling as dominant – and which do not account for the complexities of the past.23 The notion of an atlas refers to the material grounding of art history: it is a format of “historical-geographical materialism understood as an open-ended and dialectical mode of inquiry.”24 It follows the “spatial turn” in art history, a paradigm fuelled by the desire to write an inclusive non-hierarchical art history that incorporates marginalized locations and focuses on the circulation of materials, people and ideas rather than on a limited number of canonized objects and actors. This approach also emphasizes “questions of cultural encounters and exchanges as circulations.”25 Spatial art history draws on theories of critical relational geography understood as “a mode of rethinking the relations between subjects and places away from the 22 23 24 25

For the notion of “preposterous” art history, see Bal, Mieke: Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Hemmings, Clare: Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Kaufmann, Thomas DaCosta: Toward a Geography of Art, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, p. 2. Kaufmann, Thomas DaCosta/ Dossin, Catharine/ Joyeux-Prunel, Béatrice: “Reintroducing Circulations: Historiography and the Project of Global Art History”, introduction in: Kaufmann, Thomas DaCosta/ Dossin, Catharine/ Joyeux-Prunel, Béatrice (eds.): Circulations in the Global History of Art, Farnham UK: Ashgate, 2015, pp. 1–22, p. 2.

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organizing principles of the law of the state that controls privileged inclusions and exclusions.”26 David Harvey argues that in the current global condition, in a world of diminishing spatial barriers to exchange, movement and communication, place-bound identities have become more important rather than less.27 Piotrowski’s concept of horizontal art history is grounded precisely in such a recognition that “the place as an identity label has not disappeared but has acquired a new meaning.”28 Thus one of the main categories of horizontal art history remains the notion of “local” and “location”. Piotrowski approached the notion of “local” as not essentialized but conceptualized in performative terms – as constituted in the process of communication. Considering the spatio-temporal significance of the local, Elspeth Probyn defined “local” as “directly issuing from or related to a particular time.”29 The author also distinguishes between “locale” and “location”, defining “locale” as a place that is the setting for a particular event: “A place understood as both a discursive and nondiscursive arrangement that holds a [gendered] event.”30 The non-discursive “locales” into which Partum’s practice expands include the art academy, an artist’s home, galleries, museums, and the public space; discursive locales include transnational concepts of “conceptual art”, “feminist art” and “global contemporary art” as well as “the West” and “the East”. Finally, Probyn defines a “location” as fixing statements in relation to other already sanctioned statements. Thus, location delineates “what we might hold as knowable and, following Foucault, renders certain experiences true and scientific while excluding others.”31 Within this framework, the West and the East can be defined as specific geographical, economic and political discursive locales of connections and separate locations of knowledge production. Probyn argues that to bring these metaphors down to earth it is necessary to consider both “the construction of sites and the methods of researching sites”32 – in other words: “Instead of imploding the historical and the situational into a simulated issue, we have to look at the construction of locale”.33

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Rogoff, Irit: “Engendering Terror” in Biemann, Ursula (ed.): Geography and the Politics of Mobility, Vienna: Generali Foundation, 2003, pp. 48–64, p. 53. Harvey, David: “From Space to Place and Back Again: Reflections on the Conditions of Postmodernity” in Bird, Jon et al. (eds.): Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, London: Routledge, 1993, pp. 3–29, p. 4. Piotrowski 2010, p. 214. Probyn, Elspeth: “Travels in the Postmodern: Making Sense of the Local” in Nicholson, Linda J. (ed.): Feminism/Postmodernism, New York: Routledge, 1990, pp. 176–189, p. 178. Ibid. Probyn 1990, p. 178. Ibid., p. 177. Ibid., p. 186.

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Discursive locales such as Eastern Europe, East-Central Europe/Central and Eastern Europe, and the West are “historically determined constructs that cannot be absolutized”,34 as they are “produced in the interpretation processes”35 in ever-changing historical circumstances.36 In the critical discourse on contemporary transnational cosmopolitan artistic practices, these terms are often irrelevant and replaced by the categories of the global South and North. They are nevertheless still relevant and effective in the case of artistic practices in socialist Europe. Some of the approaches and concepts I will be discussing in the following chapters certainly ossify the notion of Eastern Europe. This tendency among regional art and cultural historians is an integral part of a particular historical moment related to the changes initiated in 1989. According to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, this position can be described as “strategic essentialism” – a certain necessary step on the way to something more complex. On the other hand, it can also be related 34

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In this context, Amy Bryzgel emphasizes that binaries such as East and West “are easily exploded when we realize the dependence of the dominant of the pair for its existence.” See Bryzgel, Amy:Performing the East: Performance Art in Russia, Latvia and Poland since 1980, London: I. B. Tauris, 2013, p. 14. Marina Gržinić in a panel discussion published in: Gržinić, Marina / Heeg, Günther / Darian, Veronika (eds.):Mind the Map! History Is Not Given: A Critical Anthology Based on the Symposium, Frankfurt am Main: Revolver, 2006, p. 72. The roots of “Eastern Europe” as a concept relate to the eighteenth-century emergence of the concept of “civilization” and invention of a “civilized” superior Western Europe. As Larry Wolf demonstrated in his book, Eastern Europe was “invented” by Western European travellers and intellectuals as a land of barbarism and backwardness. See Wolff, Larry: Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994. The designation of “East-Central Europe” appeared after the Second World War and was also introduced from the outside, by the new authors of political geography to refer to the countries under Soviet hegemony plus Yugoslavia. As Zdenka Badovinac put it in one of her essays, they are terms “used by an external narrator”. See Badovinac, Zdenka: “Histories and Their Different Narrators” in Höller Christian (ed.), L’Internationale: Post-War Avant-Gardes Between 1957 and 1986, Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2012, pp. 52–62, p. 54. “Central Europe”, on the contrary, is a concept developed internally – by Central European intellectuals who in the 1980s therapeutically referred to the idea of Central Europe as an antidote to Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe. This nostalgic concept of Central Europe differs from political and ethnic concepts of Mitteleuropa related to Prussian and Habsburg expansion in the nineteenth century. Piotr Piotrowski employs a notion of “Central-Eastern Europe” and not “Eastern Europe.” Piotrowski argues that “Central-Eastern Europe” is a political construct of the Yalta Agreement (1945) whereas Central Europe refers to a certain cultural, economic and historical spatiality. See: Piotrowski, Piotr: “Between History and Geography: In Search for the Identity of Central Europe” in Brendel, János (ed.): Culture of the Time of Transformation: II International Congress: The Cultural Identity of the Central-Eastern Europe [sic], Poznań: Association of Historians of Art, 1999, pp. 39–45; Piotrowski, Piotr: “The Geography of Central/East European Art” in Murawska-Muthesius, Katarzyna (ed.): Borders in Art: Revisiting Kunstgeographie, Warsaw: Institute of Art, 2000, pp. 43–50.

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to the persistence of the condition described by Beáta Hock and Anu Allas as “intimately linked to the region’s location at the margins of the European core and the concomitant exposure to ‘epistemic violence’.”37 Such a radical insistence on a divide between Western and Eastern Europe that exceeds sociopolitical differences towards the current condition of knowledge production was advocated by Piotrowski, who argued that “the terms of the language of interpretation and institutional discourse are still Western”38 and “to analyse the world (so also Central and Eastern European art and its historiography), we still must rely on Western tradition of academic or intellectual discourse.”39 But, according to him, “to realize this is the beginning of the questioning and critique.”40 Similarly, Boris Buden, writing from the perspective of critique of the “culturalization of historical reality” of “post-communist transition” argues that “now the East, after having been defeated politically and appropriated economically, can also be conquered epistemically and colonized culturally. The first task is assumed by the Western academy, particularly disciplines like the so-called area studies.”41 In their essay on the postnational turn and postnational solidarity in Eastern European art, Maja and Reuben Fowkes reflect upon the notion of Eastern Europe from the contemporary post-transitional perspective and provide a way to use this term productively. They argue that “[l]ike the art created under its name, Eastern Europe has itself migrated over the last two decades, losing political relevance as the original geopolitical designation of the Eastern Bloc fades into history. The transformations brought by the accession of even ex-Soviet republics into the European Union and NATO has emptied the old term Eastern Europe of its contested political significance, but perhaps made it a more open and productive category in other ways. […] An Eastern Europe which is no longer defined by Soviet control, but only by differentiated historical experience of socialism.”42 The authors call this a liberated concept of Eastern Europe. 37 38

39 40 41

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See: Hock, Beáta/ Allas, Anu (eds.): Globalizing East European Art Histories: Past and Present, New York: Routledge, 2018. p. 7. See Piotr Piotrowski’s comments in: “Remarks and Comments: Discussion after the Papers by Charles Esche and Kathrin Rhomberg” in Bishop, Claire/ Dziewańska, Marta (eds.): 1968–1989: Political Upheaval and Artistic Change/Momenty zwrotne w polityce i sztuce, Warsaw: Museum of Modern Art, 2009, pp. 205–208, p. 208. Ibid. Ibid. Buden, Boris: “Recycling the R-waste (R is for Revolution)” in Höller Christian (ed.), L’Internationale: Post-War Avant-Gardes Between 1957 and 1986, Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2012, pp. 134–144, p. 134. Fowkes, Maja/ Fowkes, Reuben: “The Post-National in East European Art: From Socialist Internationalism to Transnational Communities” in Janevski, Ana/ Marcoci, Roxana/ Nouril, Ksenia (eds.): Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe: A Critical Anthology, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2018, pp. 366–371, p. 371.

Introduction: An Atlas of Ewa Partum’s Artistic Practice

In this book I use the historical notions of Eastern Europe/East-Central Europe in combination with the binary of East and West. If maintained, this binary delineates a set of specific geographical, historical, economic and sociopolitical differences “encompassing the economic and social boundaries between European countries that experienced single-party state socialism [that] the rest of Europe and North America did not.”43 However, it must be emphasized that the East–West distinction is constructed as asymmetrical. Rastko Močnik defines this asymmetry in terms of the hierarchical order between the West – which is a non-space – and all local spaces that are to be measured against the West conceptualized as a norm.44 Also Andrea Dimitrakaki, who proposes that the West and the East are “materially grounded and ideologically express divisions”, emphasizes certain incompatibility between both categories. She refers to the “process of manufacturing Eastern Europe as an ideological tale of otherness in ongoing, hegemonic global political narratives.”45 The East is historicized as exceptional and particular, “always intensely local and always having its own story to tell.”46 As Dimitrakaki argues, this “allegeable authentic identity” marketed within the post-socialist condition inscribes itself into the neoliberal logic of competition. This logic of exception “serves to return Eastern Europe to its point of origin, as either a heroic or denigrated otherness – as exotic yet tamed.”47 Apart from functioning as a political or ideological concept reinscribed within the current condition of neoliberal global capitalism, the otherness of the socialist part of Europe has also been experienced historically; it can therefore be studied as a lived experience that has determined artistic practices. One of the operating concepts used within recent East-Central European art history to define the conditions of this experience is the notion of the “close Other” introduced into regional art history by Bojana Pejić. Whereas the identity of the “real Other” is determined by the colonization strategy of the metropolis and developed in a state of tension between its own local tradition and the metropolis, Pejić argues that the identity of the “close Other” is created by an act of marginalization by the metropolis.48 This concept was rephrased within the framework of recent studies that focus on semi43

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Marina Gržinić in a panel discussion published in: Gržinić, Marina/ Heeg, Günther/ Darian, Veronika (eds.): Mind the Map! History Is Not Given: A Critical Anthology Based on the Symposium, Frankfurt am Main: Revolver, 2006, p. 72. Močnik, Rastko: “EAST” in IRWIN (eds.):East Art Map: Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006, pp. 343–348, p. 343. Dimitrakaki 2013, p. 71. Ibid., p. 72. Ibid. The term “close Other” was introduced by Bojana Pejić in her essay “The Dialectics of Normality” in Pejić, Bojana/ Elliott, David (eds.): After the Wall: Art and Culture in Post-Communist

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peripheral colonization, i.e. the relationship of East-Central European countries to the processes of decolonization from the position of being an “internal Other”.49 This historical situatedness of the former Eastern Bloc countries and their relationship with “the West” are also often explained through the metaphor of selfcolonization and the notion of “hegemony without domination”.50 Alexander Kiossev states that it was merely “social imagination” that played a key role throughout the process of self-colonization that “took place beyond colonial realities – military occupation, political dominance, administrative rule, and economic exploitation.”51 Social imagination also played an important role in the process of artists in the Eastern Bloc establishing a relationship with art created in the West. Piotr Piotrowski has insisted that “perceiving art as European was a psychological remedy for artists under communism – for the attempts of the Soviet Union to impose its cultural model.”52 He argues that although the meanings of Eastern European artworks differ from those made in the West, Eastern European art was developing within the orbit of Western culture. Even if the East became an object of the modernist universalism of the West during the Cold War – the universalism that was a tool of the expansion of the West and a manifestation of its imperialism – the East itself perceived the West as universal. Piotrowski concludes that Western art has been perceived as a universal art “that merely demanded a politics of assimilation, an incorporation or a resistance.”53 Effectively, the minor, i.e. Eastern European, art “appears always mediated by the major” (i.e. Western) art.54

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Europe, exh. cat., Stockholm, Moderna Museet, 16 October 1999–16 January 2000, Stockholm 1999, pp. 116–28, p. 120. Ginelli, Zoltán: “Hungarian Experts in Nkrumah’s Ghana: Decolonization and Semiperipheral Postcoloniality in Socialist Hungary”, in Mezosfera, May 2018, http://mezosfera.org/hungarian -experts-in-nkrumahs-ghana/. Alexander Kiossev defines self-colonization as: “A situation, which is apparently the reverse to the one described by Ranajit Guha [in] Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India, Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1998”, http://monumenttotransformati on.org/atlas-of-transformation/html/s/self-colonization/the-self-colonizing-metaphor-alexa nder-kiossev.html. Ibid. Kiossev continues: “Supported and reproduced by everyone, such commonly shared notions encourage individuals in imagining participations in communities and processes beyond the limited horizon of their immediate experience whereas primary groups are stimulated to perceive themselves as being a part of larger and sometimes unfathomable societies – nations, races, classes, historic periods, and even ‘humankind’ acting upon ‘the world stage’ and producing ‘world history’.” Piotrowski 2010, p. 213. Piotrowski 2012, p. 22. Lionnet, Françoise/ Shih, Shu-mei: “Thinking through the Minor: Transnationality”, introduction in: Lionnet Françoise/ Shih, Shu-mei (eds.): Minor Transnationalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005, p. 2.

Introduction: An Atlas of Ewa Partum’s Artistic Practice

Consequently, if for the contemporary decolonial thinkers the West becomes a dead interlocutor and their task is to overcome Europe and engage with “border thinking”55 instead of sharp dichotomies such as East and West, historians concerned with the art and culture developed during the Cold War period in what was then socialist Europe still have to keep open the problem of the historical relation between former Eastern and Western Blocs – not only to maintain or rearticulate the difference between the colonized and colonial Europe but also to reconstruct the unique historical episteme: a condition of the production of culture in socialist Europe that could be described as the East looking at the West not look at the East. In his proposal to approach this condition of “close Otherness” historically within the paradigm of horizontal art history – the art history which is “polyphonic, multidimensional and free of geographical hierarchies”56 – Piotrowski emphasizes the necessity of a global perspective.57 In this book I will advocate a perspective inspired by the critical vocabulary developed within “minor transnational” discourse developed as an answer to a reductive rendering of transnationality and as a reaction to “the compulsory mediation by the mainstream for all forms of cultural production and interrelations among different minority communities.”58 Why is the concept of a global perspective not sufficient in this context? 59 If we look at the collapse of the West–East divide as “another chapter in the general narrative of the restructuring of global industrialism that occurred in response to the economic crisis of the 1970s”,60 1989 can be defined as “a crucial and concluding step in a global passage from one phase of capitalism to another, that is from state capitalism to the intercontinental economies of global capital.”61 This dystopian vision

55 56 57

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See, for instance Mignolo, Walter: Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Piotrowski 2010, p. 215. In 2014 Piotr Piotrowski organized the conference East European Art Seen from Global Perspectives: Past and Present at the Galeria Labirynt in Lublin, Poland (24–27 October 2014); in June 2018 a volume based on this conference was published. See: Hock, Beáta/ Allas, Anu (eds.): Globalizing East European Art Histories: Past and Present, New York: Routledge, 2018. In his more recent writings concerned with post-1989 trans-cosmopolitan artistic production, Piotrowski advocated a de-regionalized topographic approach and finally an alter-globalist perspective. See Piotrowski, Piotr: “From Global to Alter-Globalist Art History” in Teksty Drugie, 2015, Special Issue – English Edition, pp. 112-134. Lionnet et al. 2013., p. 2. In Peter Osborne’s words, “the global is merely suspicious because of its deep entanglement with capital.” See Osborne, Peter: Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art, London: Verso, 2013, p. 26. Buck-Morss, Susan: Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000, p. 264. Buck-Morss 2000, p. 101.

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of a globalization that refers to “an untrammelled financialization of the globe”62 points towards the penetration of cultures by capital that causes their reification and commodification rather than creates plural and non-hierarchical spatialities of exchange and communication. Thus, while referring to “the global art world” in the context of a redistribution of Partum’s practice, I point indeed to the Western centres of capital accumulation. The process of the global redistribution of Partum’s art does not indicate that it is recognizable internationally but rather that it is present in major Western collections such as London’s Tate Modern or the Museum of Modern Art in New York. If “global” here is defined as the current condition of the globalization of capital experienced as culture, then “transnational” merely designates “the spaces and practices acted upon by border-crossing agents, be they dominant or marginal.”63 Nevertheless, the notion of transnationality can also be interpreted as the privileged perspective of the mobile transnational elite – and, as such, as advocating the enculturation of capital and human flows. Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih’s counter-hegemonic concept of “minor transnationalism” attempts to counter the paradoxes of the transnational perspective and is conceived as “a space of exchange and participation wherever processes of hybridization occur and where it is still possible for cultures to be produced and performed without necessary mediation by the center.”64 The minor transnational perspective is a privileged position for the art historical narrative that involves an analysis of the process of transnational transitions, transfers across national boundaries and the redistribution of artistic practice within the current global condition. If “global” is defined merely in relation to “local”, a minor transnational perspective aims to reveal all the traceable and potential connections between the work of art and its space and place without privileging “local” dimension. Within art history, the minor transnational approach provides a framework for translating an art practice in terms of regional and broader networks and not focusing on the frame of national art history but also “acknowledging the national as a particular location.”65 Piotrowski’s project of non-national art history, proceeding from his global perspective, is based upon the predicament that art history has to remain concerned with national difference “only when written in the micro perspective that cannot ignore the national subject.”66 Analogically, minor transnationalism conceptualizes

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Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty: “Diasporas Old and New: Women in the Transnational World” in Textual Practice, vol. 10, no. 2, 1996, pp. 245–269, p. 262. Lionnet et al. 2013, p. 5. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

Introduction: An Atlas of Ewa Partum’s Artistic Practice

the subject that differs from the postcolonial, nomadic and flexible forms of citizenship and still considers the nation-state as a major and active mechanism that regulates people’s lives and therefore influences their artistic practices.67 Thus, this perspective enables the articulation of “a bigger picture” without refraining from problematizing the relations of the subjects (artists) and practices (art) with the infrastructures of nation-states.

Framing Ewa Partum’s Artistic Practice “Charting multiple cartographies should not be confused with ahistorical or essentialist strategies – many maps do not simply equate with any maps. – Marsha Meskimmon”68 This book inscribes Ewa Partum’s practice onto multiple axes across a set of constructed binaries such as East/West; local (distribution)/global (redistribution); national/transnational; and historical alterity/interpretative presence. The subsequent chapters problematize and historicize Partum’s practice across the space delineated by those binaries while examining the tension between intensely local contexts (non-discursive locales) such as Poland in the 1970s and West Berlin in the 1980s and several transnational frameworks (discursive locales) such as the neo-avant-garde, conceptual and feminist art movements. The chapters have been conceptualized as frames that not only enable the articulation of local meanings of Partum’s artworks but also allow the mapping of the dynamic process of local and transnational movement of these meanings. The frames re-actualize Ewa Partum’s works within particular contexts understood not as given or objective facts but rather as actively constructed through the act of asking questions. The concept of framing allows us to create a critical distance between the presentist perspective on Ewa Partum’s art (the “now” in which a question is asked) and the historical alterity of this artistic practice (the “then” of art production) and, in this process, to rethink the political dimension of Partum’s practice. To focus

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Lionnet et al. 2013, p. 8. Meskimmon, Marsha: “Chronology through Cartography: Mapping 1970s Feminist Art Globally” in Mark, Lisa Gabrielle (ed.): WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, exh. cat., Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art MOCA, 04 March 2007–16 July 2007; Washington, National Museum of Women in the Arts, September–December 2007; New York, MoMA PS1 Contemporary Art Center, February–May 2008; Vancouver Art Gallery, October 2008–January 2009; Los Angeles 2007, pp. 322–335, p. 327.

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on Partum’s artistic agency carries a risk of becoming a rigorous exegesis of Partum’s narrative. The aim here, however, is not to reconstruct the artist’s intentions behind certain works in order to recover her authority, but to emphasize and critically use the language with which the artist conceptually constructed her works. This excavated language is being used alongside contemporary theoretical models for an analysis of Partum’s intellectual and political pursuits. By drawing attention to Partum’s artistic agency, I am not trying to compensate for potential contradictions within this practice in order to present it as a coherent development of certain ideas. On the contrary, I give priority to the contradictions that are at the heart of this (and any other) artistic practice and propose a fragmented narrative that focuses on individual artworks. Chapter 1, Existing Cartographies, maps major agents, locations, themes and geographical trajectories of the redistribution of Ewa Partum’s artistic practice. Interpretative and historicizing texts about Partum’s art practice are connected to the process of the institutional distribution and redistribution of her art. Most often, these texts under examination take the form of a catalogue essay or a review; on occasion, the narratives are constructed exclusively within a single article69 or exhibition. Considering the correlation between historicization and the institutional re/distribution of Partum’s art – namely the fact that the historicizing essays cannot be perceived as separate from the research exhibition projects – I recount the most significant moments in the recent history of the redistribution of Partum’s practice. In the second part of the chapter, I look closely at the main lines of argument and the problems related to interpreting Partum’s work. Chapter 2, titled Ewa Partum’s Critical Engagement with Art Infrastructures, responds to the postulates formulated within the debate on art history produced in/from an East-Central European perspective – i.e. the need for terminological inventiveness and a rethinking of the vocabulary of East-Central European art history.70 69

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In this context, the texts of a feminist philosopher Ewa Majewska stand out. Ewa Majewska interprets Ewa Partum’s art in the light of contemporary philosophical discourses and queer theory, referring to the writings of Jacques Rancière, Gerald Raunig, Jack Halberstam, Renate Lorenz and others. See, for instance, Majewska, Ewa: “Feminist Art of Failure, Ewa Partum and the Avant-garde of the Weak” in Widok. Teorie i Praktyki Kultury Wizualnej, no. 16, 2017. Other types of texts which not related to the exhibitions are comparative analyses that position Partum’s work among the artistic production of the 1970s, often with a reference to a particular medium; see, for instance, Rode, Dagmara: “Women’s Experimental Filmmaking in Poland in the 1970s and Early 1980s” in Baltic Screen Media Review, vol. 3, no. 1, 2015, pp. 31–43. This postulate was formulated by Éva Forgács in her lecture “Art History’s One Blind Spot in East-Central Europe: Terminology”, delivered during the conference Rewriting Art History in Eastern Europe: Art History on the Disciplinary Map in East-Central Europe, at Moravian Gallery, Brno, 18–19 November 2010. See also a review by Ghiu, Daria: “Rewriting Art History

Introduction: An Atlas of Ewa Partum’s Artistic Practice

In it, I discuss Ewa Partum’s involvement in art infrastructures set within different spatial and temporal frameworks: socialist Poland in the mid-1960s and 1970s and in the decade that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall, tracing her activities both in Germany and in Poland. I point to the particular events in Partum’s artistic biography of entering and re-entering local art scenes, and I analyse Partum’s practices and works that engaged directly with the protocols of the distribution and redistribution of her art. A substantial part of chapter 2 is devoted to new research on and interpretation of the Galeria Adres (1972–77). I delineate the history of the Galeria Adres, focusing on its specificity to particular locales and contexts while considering (1) its structure and artistic profile, (2) its transnational aspirations and strategies, and (3) Partum’s strategy of appropriating infrastructure as a part of her artistic practice. The exhibitions and publications organized at and by the Galeria Adres are also discussed. The archive of the Galeria Adres has not been preserved in its entirety.71 My analysis has therefore been based on a close examination of the fragmentary remaining material, which includes correspondence, mail art works, books, catalogues, brochures, posters, scenarios and notes. I also refer to art historical texts and especially to Dorota Monkiewicz’s essay published in 2015 that constituted the first attempt at the historicization of the Galeria Adres activities.72 My knowledge about the gallery’s activities was also enriched through working on the exhibition ewa partum. my gallery is an idea. galeria adres archive, held in 2019 in Warsaw.73 In the last section of chapter 2, I read Partum’s practice in the context of the reconfigured post-1989 art world and its new formulas of art infrastructures, focusing on the phenomenon of the “curatorial” and its languages. The curatorial is not problematized here as a critical practice with its own set of cultural, educational and research strategies and theories, but rather as a set of protocols within the net of art infrastructures related to hegemonic position in the field of art. I examine the events in which Partum employed her practice as a critical tool that enabled

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in Eastern Europe” in Kunsttexte.de E-Journal für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte, no. 1, 2011, p. 3, http s://doi.org/10.18452/7514. At the beginning of the 1980s, Partum’s family sold the flat in Warsaw where she had left a considerable part of the Galeria Adres archive. All documents stored there were lost. Monkiewicz, Dorota: “On the International Artistic Exchange Network in Poland as Illustrated by the Example of Łódź’s Adres Gallery” in Morzuch, Maria (ed.): Nothing Stops the Idea of Art, exh. cat., Łódź, Muzeum Sztuki, 24 November 2014–15 February 2015, Łódź 2015, pp. 56–67. The exhibition ewa partum. my gallery is an idea. galeria adres archive was organized together with Berenika Partum at Galeria Studio in Warsaw and took place from 08 March to 02 June 2019. For more about the exhibition, see https://teatrstudio.pl/en/galeria/aktualnosci/ewa-pa rtum-moja-galeria-jest-idea.

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her to interfere with the process of its redistribution74 and with artworks that actively engaged with the procedure of rendering curatorial agency and its languages visible. By framing fragments of Partum’s artistic practice within the discourse on art infrastructures, I intend to disclose the dialectical relation between Partum’s artistic production and its material, cultural and personal frameworks. I investigate the contexts and conditions of Partum’s art production and distribution and look closely at how this cultural practice has modified existing conditions. Therefore, I am concerned with the interpretation of works and events that informed rather than reflected upon the rituals and protocols of the existing art infrastructures. In chapter 3, Ewa Partum’s Conceptual Art, I consider Partum’s works realized during the period identified by the artist as “conceptual.” I characterize various scenarios employed by Partum to identify her artistic practice with the conceptual label. My subject is therefore the historicization of the relationship between the unstable notion of “conceptual art/conceptualism” and Partum’s artistic strategies of identification with conceptualism. In the first part of the chapter I consider the problem of the historicization of Ewa Partum’s self-identification as a conceptual artist and the changing paradigms of historicization of conceptual art within national and global frameworks. I also investigate the geopolitical context of the reception of Western artistic models in Central and Eastern Europe and the crucial problem related to the concept of circulation, namely, “the limits of the reception of circulating ideas”.75 In my reading of the conceptual/conceptualism label both within Partum’s practice and in its historicization, I propose to look at this notion from a perspective of circulation understood as the “condensation of temporal moments that allows one to move from the general and abstract (‘conceptual’) – ultimately the universal – towards the local, the contingent, the contextual.”76 I approach the notion of conceptual art within the imperatives “of a thicket of localities, complex relationalities and precise language,” as postulated by Monica Juneja in her deliberation on the notion of circulation in contemporary global art history.77 To that end, I consider 74

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I focus here exclusively on artworks and I am not analysing Partum’s polemical correspondence or public statements, which often remain critical of contemporary exhibition strategies. The question of these limits of reception was posed by Piotr Piotrowski in his essay “The Global NETwork: An Approach to Comparative Art History” in Kaufmann et al. (eds.) 2015, pp. 149–165, p. 164. Juneja, Monica: “Circulation and Beyond: The Trajectories of Vision in Early Modern Eurasia” in Kaufman et al. (eds.) 2015, pp. 59–77, p. 61. Ibid., p. 61. Juneja also writes about the inflammatory use of metaphors such as “hybridity” and “creolisation” which, due to the latent assumption of the existence of pure cultures, have limited explanatory potential. Circulation, on the contrary, “is an important entry point that

Introduction: An Atlas of Ewa Partum’s Artistic Practice

the circulation of the “conceptual label” within Polish historiography and, at the same time, appropriate the language used by Partum in her conceptual works. As Tomáš Pospiszyl has argued, “conceptual art is one of the most fluid of the current international movements: it flows easily across borders, in all directions.”78 I am concerned here with the reconstruction of such flows and their vectors on the map of Partum’s practice. I consider how Partum’s practice was framed within local discourses on conceptual art but also how this practice was positioned towards transnational knowledges of conceptual art. My argument is twofold: to consider the “conceptual” in the process of the historicization and self-historicization of Partum’s practice, and to interpret the strategies employed by the artist, such as tautology and repetition, in relation to this label in the context of what was available and aesthetically achievable in Partum’s location at the time. From there, I consider transgressive and conformist aspects of conceptualism understood as a phantasm of pure autonomous art. Finally, I define selected strategies of Partum as an internal critique of the hegemonic definition of conceptualism. In Feminist Identifications in Ewa Partum’s Practice, chapter 4, Partum’s feminist art is recognized as a reverse of “latent feminism” and exposed as an unambiguous practice deriving from a critical analysis of the local social conditions and the personal experience of operating within the predominantly male art scene in Poland in the 1970s. In my analysis, I propose interpreting Partum’s feminist aesthetics as a series of context-based and situated feminist identifications. I demonstrate that Partum’s feminist art was grounded in the context of state-organized socialism and was not merely the reception of second-wave feminism by an artist from the periphery. I analyse the evolution of Partum’s feminist strategies in performances realized in pre- and post-1989 Berlin, and I trace the dynamics of the redistribution of Partum’s feminist practice. Partum’s emancipatory feminist attitude has not manifested itself exclusively within her art. We can find traces of this attitude in Partum’s activities as an exhibition organizer and gallery owner (1972–77), which enabled her to participate in transnational art networks as well as to control the means of the presentation and distribution of her art. There are also subtle yet important traces of Partum’s feminist attitude in her archive: written evidence from male artists documenting her positive influence on their professional careers, such as a statement by Wolf Vostell

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challenges us to take our enquiry to another register so as to find a precise language to theorize the morphology of the many possible relationalities that are engendered by mobility and encounter.” Pospiszyl, Tomáš: “An Introduction: Conceptual Art and Times of Transition” in Hoptman, Laura/ Pospiszyl, Tomáš (eds.): Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art Since the 1950s, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002, p. 123.

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confirming that it was Partum who introduced him to a prominent gallerist; or a dedication in Andrzej Partum’s book of poetry,79 not only attesting to the artist’s affection but also to the fact that it was Ewa Partum who educated him as an artist. It is not merely the existence of these statements that makes them documents of Partum’s feminist consciousness, but rather the fact that Partum placed them in her archive among photographic documentation of her projects, works of other artists and international artistic correspondence. In chapter 4, however, I am concerned exclusively with analysing Partum’s feminist aesthetics. I focus on the works in which feminist content plays a structural role, i.e. determines their meaning. I seek to define the conditions of Partum’s situated feminism and reconstruct the genealogy of her feminist aesthetics beyond a diffusional paradigm that emphasizes the Western roots of second-wave feminism. Thus, I concentrate on articulating “the many interspaces that make any piece of art a unique item of knowledge” which “disappears behind the common notion of influence.”80 In the first section of the chapter, I reconstruct the vocabulary of Partum’s feminism, referring to the notion of Self-Identification the artist introduced into her practice in 1980, and I analyse the function of Partum’s naked body in her actions, photo collages and photographs. In order to determine the local meanings of Partum’s feminist aesthetic, I take into account specifics of Polish visual culture in the 1970s as well as the characteristics of the semi-public artistic sphere, structured by tension between autonomy and engagement. In the following section, I analyse the changes of Partum’s artistic strategies in her self-reflective performances in West Berlin, where Partum’s body was used as a surface for drawing and writing. In these actions, Partum’s focus moved away from social issues towards conceptualizations of subject/object relations as found in performance art. Subsequently, I point to the shift within Partum’s feminist practice after 1989 and I analyse her delegated performance Pearls (2006) as the moment of identification with contemporary global feminism. In the final section of chapter 4, I consider the process of the contemporary global redistribution of Partum’s art within the framework of blockbuster feminist exhibitions. If, for Partum, feminism constituted both a basis for her artistic practice (from 1978 onwards) and a means to explore a particular artistic subjectivity (feminist artist), for the secondary audience, feminism became a major interpretative framework of her work. However, feminism is a contested and pluralistic

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Partum, Andrzej: Powodzenie nieurodzaju (Zwałka papki), self-published in 1965. Bazin, Jérôme/ Glatigny, Pascal Dubourg/ Piotrowski, Piotr (eds.):Art beyond Borders: Artistic Exchange in Communist Europe (1945–1989), Budapest: Central European University Press, 2016, p. 3.

Introduction: An Atlas of Ewa Partum’s Artistic Practice

terrain, and I therefore investigate how Partum’s situated feminism inscribed in her works differs from the feminisms of her contemporary interpreters. In chapter 5, The Spaces of the Political, I present the “agoraphilic” disposition of Partum’s artistic practice and analyse her works realized in municipal public spaces in two non-discursive locales: in socialist Poland (repeated in post-socialist Poland) and in West Berlin. The chapter is structured as a case study juxtaposing two works, The Legality of Space and Private Performance; in it, I argue that Partum’s experience of working under the conditions of the centralized spectacle of real socialism in Poland sensitized the artist to the complex constellation between private and public and led her to explore the possibilities of situating her works in the actual public space in a subversive way. One question I address is how Partum utilized geographically located physical space, such as a city square or municipal office, as the means to position her art within the public sphere. I aim to demonstrate how the space in Partum’s practice became the means – aside from her body – for situating her works of art politically. In my analysis, I refer to theories of the oppositional public sphere and to contemporary deliberations on art in the public space to demonstrate that in her works in the public space, Partum worked towards establishing an experience-based oppositional public sphere.81 I focus on The Legality of Space (Poland, 1971) and Private Performance (West Berlin, 1985), two paradigmatic works realized in the public space, in order to define a set of tactics employed by the artist in both locations. This juxtaposition enables me to capture Partum’s transition from operating in a physical, urban space (or its simulation, as we also see in another work, Self-Identification) towards acting within the space of municipal offices and municipal rituals, both being actual locations of state power, which operates through bureaucratic procedures. The questions I try to answer in this book include: In Partum’s practice, what was the function of art institutions? What did it mean to represent, use and perform the naked female body under state socialism in a country with a limited consumer culture, characterized by an absence of a feminist movement and a very limited presence of feminist art discourse? What did in mean to postulate the recognition of women, or to criticize the cultural lack of representation of women, in socialist Poland of the 1970s and early 1980s? What (and where) were the intellectual sources of Partum’s feminist performances and how did she formulate the feminist postulates in her statements? Among these concerns, I also want to address the transfer of Partum’s artistic practice from socialist Poland to West Berlin, which must be seen as a process of re81

More recent social theories that deliberate on social space tend to avoid categorical divisions between private and public spheres, instead employing alternative notions of community or multitude. I will, however, maintain this division as an operative category.

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signification and rearticulation of the meaning of her acting body in a new political, social and artistic context. How did Partum and her performances in West Berlin navigate these changes? How did she confront the realities of change and location? How does Partum’s art function/perform transnationally? Does her work challenge and influence the prerequisites of the “received canon”? Or is it discursively reduced to a representation of already existing narratives? Do (Western) cultural discourses on global feminisms speak Partum’s art, or does Partum’s art “speak itself” through the exhibitions? How is “Partum” integrated into the art system via the curatorial discourse and how does she integrate herself as a “contemporary artist” via her recent works? To conclude this introduction, I would like to mention the problem of my own situatedness in relation to the object of my research, as well as the language of my writings. The subject of the situated author often appears in recent historical writings. The reason for this is the recognition that the art historian cannot avoid a transferential relation with the subject of study, especially when she writes about the recent past.82 During my research, I have become Ewa Partum’s assistant, a translator, often mediating in contacts with curators and exhibition organizers, travelling with the artist and being Partum’s companion. I worked with the artist in the capacity of a curator. This partial position enabled me to have unlimited access to the artist’s archive, which I had the pleasure not only of constantly revisiting during the course of the last years but also of rearranging and organizing. I have documented a selection of Ewa Partum’s recent works and translated her emails and correspondence. I have conducted many informal conversations and several structured interviews with the artist. Therefore, the artist’s intentionality and memory have also become a part of the research material. However, I approached the subject of memory as a symptom rather than a transparent source of knowledge about the past, conceptualizing it within the framework offered by Dominick La Capra, who argues that memory – because of its lapses and tricks – is informative in that it represents the past object inaccurately.83 This view of memory prompted me to withhold from interviewing other actors in this reconstructed history: the agents of the redistribution of Partum’s practice, namely, curators. Another reason for omitting oral histories was related to a delineation of the field of my research. I was not interested in the

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For more about transference in art history, see Nixon, Mignon: “Oral Histories, Silvia Kolbowski and the Dynamic of Transference” in Rike, Frank (ed.):Silvia Kolbowski: Inadequate…Like…Power, exh. cat., Vienna, Secession, 17 September–11 November 2004, Vienna 2004, pp. 93–102, p. 96. LaCapra, Dominick: History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003.

Introduction: An Atlas of Ewa Partum’s Artistic Practice

motivations of curators and researchers, or in their experiences, but merely in the effects of their work – the transfer of Partum’s practice from the margin towards the centre. To that end, I carefully read their texts, as well as their professional correspondence with the artists, and I searched for traces of their work in Partum’s archive and reconstructed their working methods. My own procedure with respect to accessing the archive was based on comparing discursive material (documents, texts) and visual material with secondary sources such as historical essays and reviews of Partum’s art and the artist’s own commentary. In Partum’s narrative, I did not search merely for a confirmation of the facts; rather, I focused on reoccurring themes (such as marginalization, the male avant-garde and feminist identification), words (tautology, idea, feminism), artworks (Self-Identification, 1980) and cracks in the linear narrative (relations with other female artists in Poland, reception in feminist circles in West Berlin). To arrive at my engaged or partial position, i.e. to work for and with Ewa Partum, was not something that happened by accident. Instead, it was a consequence of my way of working, fuelled by the belief in the effectiveness of participatory research and a partial perspective. It was also a consequence of the affective dimension of art history as a discipline – ultimately, no art historian will devote many years of work to write about an artist or art uninteresting to them. However, my ultimate aim was not only to produce a monograph of Ewa Partum’s art; I wanted to use Ewa Partum’s practice and the knowledge already existing about her work as the lens through which I could observe and understand certain historical and current tendencies and mechanisms that operate within art history itself. In recent years, Partum’s art has become an object of retroactive art history – the history that incorporates people from the margins into the mainstream. I wanted to investigate this process and narratives of (re)incorporation or retrieval to expose the criteria and frameworks that led to the rejection and then to the inclusion of Partum’s practice into art history. I am aware that Ewa Partum belongs among a small group of artists that entered – or are entering – the canon of art history as non-Western and non-male – thus to reveal this mechanism was to reveal the mechanism of art history itself. The second problem to consider with regards to my own situatedness is the language of my writings. Angela Dimitrakaki argues that to create a framework that allows “maximum legibility” is to choose English and at the same time to acknowledge “the hegemony of writing in English.”84 I do not understand, however, my task to be one of “cultural translation”. This book does not follow the premise of identity politics, of an “embedded” local art historian’s identity and the transference of authentic expertise. Just as I do not have firsthand experience of Berlin in the 1980s, I do not have direct experience of Poland in the 1970s. I do, however, 84

Dimitrakaki 2013, p. 97.

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have certain language competences necessary to access the source material and a personal experience of transnationality understood as moving and working across borders, as well as the experience of communicating in global English both professionally and with my friends and family. Therefore, this book is an exercise in transnational art history: an art history that acknowledges national, regional and global frameworks and contexts, understanding them as correlated and historically determined.

Chapter 1 Existing Cartographies

The Trajectory of the Redistribution of Ewa Partum’s Practice The heterogeneous practice of Ewa Partum, which includes many differentiated formats, such as conceptual poetry, installation, photomontage, film, intervention, statement, performance and action, was and is interpreted and historicized from many perspectives and locations. The distribution (in the 1970s and 1980s) and re/distribution (after 1989) of Ewa Partum’s art and knowledge about Partum’s practice can be categorized into four consecutive but sometimes overlapping stages. The first stage consists of synchronized criticism and presentations for the primary audience; subsequent stages involve the historical work of preserving, preparing and delivering this practice to the secondary local and then international audiences.1 Before referring to the history of the redistribution of Partum’s practice, it is worth briefly considering a dynamic of Polish art history after 1989 in conjunction with Partum’s absence from Poland during the transformation period – i.e. at the time when the new institutional order of the Polish art world was established. Partum, who has lived in Berlin since 1982, was temporarily excluded from Polish art history and did not assume a visible position within the Polish art scene in the 1990s.2 The subsequent inclusion of Partum’s art into the Polish history of conceptualism and feminist art was determined by two factors: a generational change, which saw the ascension of art historians who had not participated in the neoavant-garde milieu and who operated within the framework of poststructuralist 1

2

The expression “historical work” was used by Luiza Nader, who followed the approach of Mignon Nixon (Nixon 2004, p. 96) in defining exhibitions, critical interpretations and publications. See Nader, Luiza: Konceptualizm w PRL, Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2009, p. 14. Aneta Szyłak identified the reasons for the concealment of Ewa Partum’s art from visibility in Poland as a consequence of both the artist’s anti-establishment attitude and her relocation to Berlin, which resulted in the fact that Partum “did not participate in the transformation and rearrangement of the Polish institutional art scene after 1989 […and] she was written out of Polish art history until the beginning of 2000.” See Szyłak et al. (eds.) 2012/13, p. 10.

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methodology; and the introduction of feminist discourse into Polish art history in the 1990s.3 The dynamic behind both of these was related to the broader geopolitical context, namely, the political change of 1989. The post-1989 “rearrangement in the field of visibility”4 within the art world was also an effect of the West’s increased interest in Eastern European art, as well as the growing mobility of Polish curators who were determined to introduce Polish neo-avant-garde art, produced in the shadow of Yalta, to the West.5 The first stage of Ewa Partum’s art distribution relates to Partum’s participation in the Polish neo-avant-garde art scene, from 1965 until she moved to West Berlin in 1982. There are two types of critical writings on Partum’s practice in the 1970s: texts concerned with positioning Partum’s art in the context of local hierarchies, always outside the core conceptual circle,6 and analytical texts that refer to particular aspects of Partum’s practice, such as Marek Ławrynowicz’s analysis focusing exclusively on Partum’s Active Poetry and Metapoetry series.7 What characterizes the few texts written about Partum’s practice at that time is the fact that they were conceived before the introduction of the feminist discourse into the mainstream of the Polish art world and academy.8 Moreover, Partum’s practice was not incorporated into the hegemonic narratives on Polish conceptualism written in the 1970s by leading art critics and theorists of conceptual art, such as Andrzej Kostołowski (who would finally examine Partum’s practice on the occasion of her first retrospective 3

4 5

6

7 8

The exhibition Artystki Polskie (Polish Female Artists) curated by Agnieszka Morawińska at the National Museum in Warsaw in 1991 is considered a symbolic beginning of Polish feminist art history. In 2011, a joint publication with the same title presented profiles of Polish female artists excluded from that exhibition, including Ewa Partum. See Jakubowska, Agata (ed.): Artystki polskie, Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Szkolne PWN, 2011. It is also worth mentioning that the same scholar initiated an online project, Exhibitions of Women Artists, documenting the exhibitions of women artists that have taken place in Poland since 1870. See http://wystawy kobiet.amu.edu.pl/wystawa/artystki-polskie,60.html (English version in preparation). Szyłak et al. (eds.) 2012/13, p. 12. Curators and art historians who initially popularised Ewa Partum’s art include: Dorota Monkiewicz (group exhibition at the Charim Galerie in Vienna in 2002 and a lecture at the Royal College of Art in London in 2011), Łukasz Ronduda (group presentation at Tate Modern in 2006), Adam Budak (Manifesta 7 in Trentino in 2008), and Joanna Mytkowska (group exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in 2010). A good example of such a marginalization is demonstrated by Alicja Kępińska’s book Nowa sztuka polska w latach 1945–1978. Kępińska mentions Partum’s art but situates it outside of the conceptualist circle, in which she includes only male artists such as Jarosław Kozłowski, Jerzy Rosołowicz, Zdzisław Jurkiewicz, Zbigniew Gostomski, and Zbigniew Makarewicz, among others. See Kępińska, Alicja: Nowa sztuka polska w latach 1945–1978, Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Artystyczne i Filmowe, 1981. Ławrynowicz, Marek: Galeria Krytyków, Warsaw 1974. The problem of a circulation of feminist ideas in Poland in the 1970s and 1980s will be discussed further in chapter 4.

Existing Cartographies

in 20019 ) and Jerzy Ludwiński, whose texts and lectures informed about, defined and consecrated conceptualism in Poland in the 1970s.10 The recent process of the re/distribution and historicization of Partum’s practice, related to revisiting and transforming the artist’s archive, however fragmentary and non-linear, was not arbitrary and has a traceable chronology that also establishes a certain relational geography. This can be described as a movement from the margins (socialist Poland, West Berlin) towards the centres (exhibitions in Tate Modern in 2009, the Centre Pompidou in 2010, and MoMA in 2015/16) or in terms of actual geography – from local Polish and German art scenes towards London, Paris and New York, the capitals of the Western (art) world. The first stage of the historicization of Partum’s art relates to the retrospective exhibition in 2001 organized and curated by Angelika Stepken at the Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe. Ewa Partum: Gedankenakt ist ein Kunstakt, Retrospektive 1965–2001 (Ewa Partum: The Act of Thinking Is an Act of Art, Retrospective 1965–2001), which ran from 17 February to 16 April 2001, not only presented the full spectrum of Ewa Partum’s practice to the local public for the first time but also constituted an act of curating in its etymological sense – understood in terms of preservation and conservation.11 Many photographs and poems by ewa were framed and protected from further deterioration, and 8 mm films from the series Tautological Cinema (1973–74) were recorded onto DVDs. Some early works were also exhibited and interpreted for the first time, such as Presence/Absence (1965).12 However, this exhibition initiated a narrative, perpetuated throughout the redistribution of Partum’s art, based on the nostalgic concepts of “loss” and “return” of this artistic practice.13 The accompanying catalogue, produced in two versions – German/English and Polish14 – published in cooperation with the National Museum in Warsaw, included a comprehensive interpretative essay by Gislind Nabakowski on the genealogy

9

10 11 12 13 14

See Kostołowski, Andrzej: “A Complex of Analyses: Ewa Partum’s Early Works” in Stepken, Angelika (ed.):Gedankenakt ist ein Kunstakt. Ewa Partum 1965–2000, exh. cat., Karlsruhe, Badischer Kunstverein, 17 February–16 April 2001, Karlsruhe 2001, pp. 150–153; and Kostołowski, Andrzej: “Ewy Partum krytyka kryteriów” in Arteon, vol. 10, no. 18, 2001, pp. 30–33. See Nader 2009, especially the chapter “Sztuka konceptualna w Galerii pod Mona Lisą”, pp. 38–140. This aspect of curating is discussed by Boris Groys in his essay on “On Curatorship”. See Groys, Boris:Art Power, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008, pp. 43–53. Partum describes this work as her “first conscious artistic project” in a recorded but unpublished interview conducted by Marek Ławrynowicz in 1987. On the topic of return narratives, see Hemmings 2011. Citations here are from the German-based edition: Stepken, Angelika (ed.): Gedankenakt ist ein Kunstakt: Ewa Partum, Retrospektive 1965–2001, exh. cat., Badischer Kunstverein, 17 February–16 April 2001, Karlsruhe 2001.

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of Partum’s artistic practice and a chronology of Partum’s art prepared by Angelika Stepken, as well as a series of commissioned texts and reprinted critical essays and fragments of essays from the 1970s and 1980s that proved the past visibility of this invisible heritage. From the correspondence preserved in the artist’s archive, it is clear that Partum was very much involved in all stages of production of this exhibition catalogue, including working on its layout and selecting images for reproduction. Stepken’s chronology, entitled “Monograph”, was the result of intensive work with the artist’s archive and consisted of juxtaposing documents (often written in Polish) and items from the archive with Partum’s authorial commentary.15 Stepken started her research on Partum in the mid-1990s with the intention of completing and publishing a work résumé of Ewa Partum’s practice.16 The project was developed further into a retrospective exhibition when Stepken became the director of the Badischer Kunstverein in 1998. The material collected and arranged by Stepken became a foundation on which subsequent art historians and researchers of Partum’s practice based their work, and it was also important inspiration for my research. This “Monograph” and texts published within the German/English version of the catalogue were first steps in preparing Partum’s art for the secondary audience; it was the procedure of inscribing Partum’s art into a narrative of the European precursors of feminist, conceptual and performance art realized within the framework of Western art history.17 The conceptual connection of the artistic material as presented in Stepken’s “Monograph” consisted of a linear narrative capturing the transition from conceptual art to feminist practice. This narration paralleled an 15 16 17

Research was also conducted in the following private collections in Berlin: Michael Wewerka, Peter Thielen and Galerie Rafael Vostell. The earliest letter that mentions Angelika Stepken’s work on Ewa Partum’s oeuvre preserved in the Ewa Partum archive is dated 1997. Gislind Nabakowski opens her comprehensive historicizing essay on Ewa Partum’s practice with a quotation from VALIE EXPORT’s essay “The Real and Its Double: The Body” (1988) and argues that Ewa Partum addressed feminist issues that were relevant internationally. Nabakowski writes, “Ewa Partum thus addresses issues that are relevant within an international feminist context. In 1978, the social topic of female nudity – which at that time was being articulated from a feminist point of view by innumerable artists in Europe and the US – was also a central preoccupation in Partum’s work. In this connection, Partum’s performances of the 1970s function as revealing deconstructions of feminine myths and stereotypes as defined by the general view of women in art and mass culture.” See Nabakowski, Gislind: “Apprehension and Masquerade: ‘Letter Millionaire’ – Ewa Partum’s Path to Conceptual Poetry and Feminist Gender Theory” in Stepken, Angelika (ed.) 2001, pp. 129–139, p. 133. The English translation of Nabakowski’s text is a shortened version of her essay published in the catalogue. See “Das Unbehagen an der Maskarade. Ewa Partums Weg als ‘Buchstabenmillionärin’ zur konzeptuellen Poesie und zur feministichen Gender-thematic” in Stepken, Angelika (ed.) 2001, pp. 110–129.

Existing Cartographies

interpretation of the developments within art practices in Poland in the 1970s, namely, the process of the gradual reopening of Polish neo-avant-garde art to social and political reality, a transformation which was described by Łukasz Ronduda as a move away from post-essentialism towards a pragmatic understanding of art.18 Another stage of the historicization and intensification of interest in Partum’s art relates to the double retrospective exhibition in 2006 organized and curated by Aneta Szyłak in the Wyspa Institute of Art in Gdańsk (Ewa Partum: Legality of Space, 17 June–31 August 2006) and Dorota Monkiewicz in the National Museum in Warsaw (Self-Identification, 11 October–05 November 2006). These important exhibitions were preceded by a project realized by Monkiewicz outside Poland: in Semiotic Landscape (Charim Galerie in Vienna, 28 June–27 July 2002, and the National Museum, Królikarnia in Warsaw, 18 October–18 November 2002), Dorota Monkiewicz placed Partum’s art into a broader international context, juxtaposing her work with those of VALIE EXPORT. For the first time since 198319 the politically engaged work The Legality of Space (1971), which played a crucial role in redefining Partum’s early art as a critical practice and not merely a “laboratory of concepts”20 was presented to an audience. By means of this exhibition, Partum’s art re-entered Polish art history, which was at that time searching for the genealogy of the critical and socially engaged art practices (sztuka krytyczna) that dominated the Polish art scene in the 1990s. The following double retrospective in 2006 problematized Ewa Partum’s practice by approaching it as an example of the return of historical conceptual and feminist practices. The exhibitions focused on questions of the historicization, reification and musealization of conceptualism and the problem of the preposterous reading of Partum’s feminism. The curators created two separate yet parallel sitespecific readings of Partum’s art that followed their respective research interests. Aneta Szyłak wrote that the purpose of the Gdańsk retrospective was “to disrupt the historical and fragmentary rhythm of the reception of Ewa Partum’s art and to reconstruct the most important, original and innovative strands of her practice.”21 The exhibition was accompanied by a workshop Reproducing the Past conceptualized and curated by Berenika Partum, in which several contemporary artists (Ania Kowalak, Agata Ludwiczak, Franciszek Orłowski, Agnieszka Sural, Magda Szczepaniak, Kamil Wnuk, Natalia Fiedorczuk, Piotr Łużynski, Małgorzata Wysocka, Maciek Lorenc, Alina Źemojdzin, Magda Dłoniak, Kordian Lewandowski, Patrycja Orzechow-

18 19 20 21

Ronduda, Łukasz: Sztuka polska lat 70. Awangarda, Warsaw: Centrum Sztuki Współczesnej Zamek Ujazdowski, 2009, p. 8. I refer to Partum’s solo exhibition at Galerie Wewerka in West Berlin which will be discussed in chapter 2. Szyłak et al. (eds.) 2012/13, p. 18. Ibid.

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ska, Angelika Fojtuch, Elissa Andesser, Kuba Bielawski) were invited to reinterpret and re-enact Ewa Partum’s feminist performances. Dorota Monkiewicz’s exhibition was mostly concerned with the feminist aspect and possible interpretations of Partum’s early linguistic works, as well as Partum’s feminist performances understood as a form of “feminine writing.”22 In her review, Dorota Jarecka wrote that within the exhibition we are “discovering a new and uncovered land – more precisely an island”23 and she described Partum’s practice as feminist conceptualism. Jarecka interpreted the curatorial agenda as revealing Partum’s path towards rebellion against art and the patriarchy.24 The double retrospective worked as an acceleration of art history performed in the face of its previous inertia; it opened Partum’s art for multiple readings. The exhibitions were designed as a “multiloge of synchronic fragments” and were accompanied by a publication organized by the same principle.25 The book includes an extended and revised version of Stepken’s “Monograph” text providing a chronology of Partum’s practice and a series of commissioned critical essays, and it remains the most conclusive attempt to historicize and interpret Ewa Partum’s work. Although both exhibitions included more recent and new commissioned works by Partum, texts in the publication focused on Partum’s activities in socialist Poland in the 1970s and early 1980s, marginalizing – with a few exceptions – works realized in West Berlin and those made after 1989.26 The authors operated from distinct fields of interest and expertise and independently discussed various aspects of Ewa Partum’s work from compatible methodological perspectives indebted to poststructuralist theory. The book can be described as an articulation of multiple voices or a constellation of readings of Partum’s art and its legacy without seeking to achieve a comprehensive interpretation.27 22 23 24 25 26

27

Monkiewicz, Dorota: “(Her) Body and Text: Fragments” in Szyłak et al. (eds.) 2012/13, pp. 74–91. My translation. Unless otherwise noted, all translations of quotations are my own. Jarecka, Dorota: “Partum trzaska drzwiami”, Gazeta Wyborcza, 11 October 2006, pp. 14–15, p. 15. Szyłak et al. (eds.) 2012/13, p. 18. In the conclusion of her essay, Ewa Małgorzata Tatar refers to Private Performance (1985), whereas Dorota Monkiewicz analyses two linguistic performances from the late 1980s. See Tatar, Ewa Małgorzata: “Private is Political”, pp. 106–119, and Monkiewicz, Dorota: “(Her) Body and Text: Fragments”, pp. 74–91, both in Szyłak et al. (eds.) 2012/13. The book includes an extensive bibliography, which shows that between 2001 (Partum’s first retrospective exhibition) and 2013 (the date of the publication) a considerable number of texts on Partum’s art were published in the Polish art press. The catalogue also includes a comprehensive subject bibliography on Ewa Partum’ s work that includes catalogues, brochures, books, articles, talks and correspondence, reviews, announcements, summaries, presentations, records, unpublished texts, prints of the Adres Gallery, films, TV, and audio. See Szyłak et al. (eds.) 2012/13, pp. 175–183.

Existing Cartographies

The black cover of the book, with the name “ewa partum” followed by a large dot, unintentionally represents Ewa Partum as an artist who was and, at the same time, opens her practice to a multiplicity of meanings. However, all its texts register a certain tension, related to Partum’s resistance to interpretation of her works within the framework of Luce Irigaray’s, Hélène Cixous’s or Jacques Derrida’s theories. The artist’s (latent) voice can be aligned with James Elkins’s call to see what would happen to art history if we were to resign from the contemporary interpreting agendas, such as semiotics, deconstruction or anthropology, in order to de-Westernize art-historical discourse.28 My own conversation with Partum about the book constituted an initial stage of this research.29 The subsequent retrospective in Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, Nothing Stops the Idea of Art, curated by Maria Morzuch (24 November 2014–15 February 2015), realized after Partum had achieved a degree of international recognition, was conceptualized as the gesture of returning Partum’s heritage to Łódź, the city of the Polish avant-garde, where Partum was active between 1971 and 1982. Partum ran the Galeria Adres (1972–77) in Łódź, where she realized her most important public work, The Legality of Space, in 1971. Some aspects of Partum’s professional relationship with Łódź were also considered in commissioned essays published in the exhibition catalogue, which discussed, among other things, the history of the Galeria Adres as well as Partum’s actions realized in the city.30 The exhibition was preceded by two other moments marking the return of Partum’s legacy to Łódź, performed in the public space within the framework of a collaboration with local cultural organizations. In 2009, Partum was invited to realize the action Conceptual Museum of Ewa Partum, which consisted of tracing and marking places in the cityscape related to her artistic activities in the 1970s.31 In 2010, in the central square in Łódź, a re-enactment of The Legality of Space was realized in the format of a delegated performance.32 28

29 30

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See, for instance, Elkins, James:Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction, New York: Routledge, 2003, where the author deliberates on the Westerness of art-historical methodologies, institutions and concepts. Majewska, Karolina: “On Historicizing Conceptualism and the Interpretation of Feminism: A Conversation with Ewa Partum” in Obieg, 08 April 2014. Morzuch, Maria (ed.): Ewa Partum: Nothing Stops the Idea of Art, exh. cat., Łódź, Muzeum Sztuki, 24 November 2014–15 February 2015, Łódź 2015, and especially the following essays: Monkiewicz, Dorota: “On the International Artistic Exchange Network in Poland as Illustrated by the Example of Łódź’s Adres Gallery,” pp. 56–67; Majewska, Karolina: “The Legality of Space versus Legalising Space”, pp. 70–76. The project Conceptual Museum was initiated by the Łódź-based Manhattan Gallery, run by Krystyna Potocka-Suwalska. See Leśniak, Anka: “Conceptual Museum of Ewa Partum”, 13 March 2011, http://www.livinggallery.info/text/ewa_partum. The Legalization of Space, an action organized by the local branch of the political think tank Krytyka Polityczna, took place on 18 June 2012 and will be analysed in chapter 5.

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This list of publications must be complemented with reviews of the exhibitions and the polemical texts that appeared on the occasion of subsequent presentations of Partum’s work in Poland. Analyses of Partum’s art were frequently accompanied by questions about the reception of second-wave feminism in socialist Poland and the problem of the historicization of Polish feminist art of the 1970s. The exhibition Three Women, curated by Ewa Toniak in the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in 2011, engendered the most prolific response. Partum’s works were shown together with works by Natalia LL and Maria Pinińska-Bereś. According to Anna Markowska, this show, presented as three mini-retrospectives, was based on the idea of the articulation of “artistic greatness” by transforming ephemeral works and DIY aesthetics into effective, spectacular and professionally made works.33 Markowska interprets Toniak’s curatorial strategy as a response to the belated reception of these artistic practices, emphasizing that while in the West feminist artists of the 1970s achieved high status and were celebrated as great heroines, in Poland they still await proper recognition.34 The articles devoted specifically to Partum’s work or its contemporary redistribution often refer to the artist’s statements made during an extensive interview conducted by Dorota Jarecka in 2006, in which Partum refused to be labelled exclusively as a gender/feminist artist and attempted to negotiate her role as a firstgeneration conceptualist.35 The transnational stage of the redistribution of Partum’s art relates to Partum’s participation in group exhibitions curated within the paradigm of pluralizing the Western canon and decentring art history, which will be discussed in the following chapters. For now, it suffices to say that the Western reception of Partum’s art mirrored to a certain extent the patterns of reading the neo-avant-garde art produced in the countries of state socialism. Thus Partum’s art has been incorporated into Western art history either via the framework of exhibitions that referred to the particular Eastern European experience or the framework of the “feminaissance exhibitions” that aimed to demonstrate the parallel development of geographical-

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Markowska, Anna: “Trzy kobiety i inne wystawy duetu Toniak/Szcześniak / Three Women and other exhibitions of the duo Toniak/Szcześniak” in Sztuka i Dokumentacja, no. 15, 2016, pp. 79–96, p. 83. Also available at http://www.journal.doc.art.pl/pdf15/wystawy_sztuki_kobiet_m arkowska_art_and_documentation15.pdf. Markowska also writes that the formal interpretation and the transformation of previously ephemeral or conceptual works was aimed to satisfy the taste of the new Polish middle class. See Markowska 2016, p. 84. Jarecka, Dorota: “Na wszystkim szminki ślad. Ewa Partum: artystka performerka” in Wysokie Obcasy, a weekly supplement to Gazeta Wyborcza, 12 August 2006, http://www.wysokieobcas y.pl/wysokie-obcasy/1,96856,3539283.html.

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ly spread feminisms.36 Angelika Stepken’s text published in the retrospective catalogue (2001) and the accompanying essay by Gislind Nabakowski functioned as primary sources of information about Partum’s practice and were quoted in the catalogues that accompanied these exhibitions. The most recurrent themes in the interpretive texts written during this process of redistribution relate to the problem of the genealogy of Partum’s practice understood, as per Foucault, not as a source of the practice but rather as a fragmented and discontinued process of the constitution of this practice; Partum’s inclusion/exclusion as a conceptual artist; and, as already indicated, the synchronization of the conceptual and feminist perspectives within Partum’s practice.

The Genealogy of Ewa Partum’s Artistic Practice: Text, Image, Body Ewa Partum’s art incorporates many formats and occupies the space between the linguistic and visual: between text and body. An interesting visual utterance about the genealogy of Partum’s artistic practice is provided by the drawing made by Wolf Vostell for the cover of the catalogue of Partum’s 1983 retrospective exhibition at Galerie Wewerka in Berlin (fig. 1). It illustrates Partum’s “constructivist side” rooted in her naked female body revealing the heterogeneous provenance of her artistic practice. Researchers who have attempted to determine the genealogy of Partum’s art also problematize its duality, pointing to the simultaneousness of Partum’s strategies of the deconstruction of linguistic order and “depicturalization”.37 Considerable attention has been paid to Partum’s performative deconstruction of linear language, its grammar and syntax, and her attempt to undermine the medium (language) for the values of the patriarchal world. At the same time, art his-

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The expression “feminaissance exhibitions” originated in articles about blockbuster exhibitions in the first decade of the 2000s exploring second-wave feminism. Mirjam Westen in her introductory essay in the Rebelle catalogue writes: “The exhibition Rebelle is part of a development that, in reviews of the recent American travelling exhibitions WACK! and Global Feminisms (2007), has playfully been called ‘the feminaissance’ – a term signifying the current resurgence of interest in art with feminist themes. In Europe, this surge of interest has inspired exhibitions such as It’s Time for Action (There is No Option) About Feminism (2006), Cooling Out – On the Paradox of Feminism (2006–2007), the CGACs Gender Battle (2007), Perspective (2008), Female Trouble (2008), Gender Check (2009) and Re.act feminism (2009–2010).” See Westen, Mirjam: “Rebelle: Introduction” in Westen, Mirjam (ed.): Rebelle: Art and Feminism, 1969–2009, exh. cat., Arnhem, Museum voor Moderne Kunst Arnhem (MMKA), 30 May–23 August 2009, Arnhem 2009/2010, pp. 5–20, p. 13. “Depicturalization” is a term introduced by Andrzej Turowski. See, for instance, Turowski, Andrzej: “The Greatness of Desire: On the Feminist Conceptualism of Ewa Partum” in Szyłak et al. (eds.) 2012/13, pp. 40–57, p. 42.

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torians pointed towards Partum’s deconstructive gestures in the fields of visuality and artistic conventions. Gislind Nabakowski emphasizes the heterogeneous genealogy of Partum’s art, defining its source as text and image. She interprets Partum’s early practice as a realization of the urge to deconstruct both the traditional notion of image and the notion of poetry.38 Andrzej Turowski rephrases this observation, arguing that Partum introduced text in the place of painting and therefore performed a “depicturalization” of art that was followed by a strategy of the deiconization of the image.39 Nabakowski also noticed an anarchistic impulse in Partum’s practice and her fascination with both the unexpected and probable – as in aleatoric operations performed in public spaces and museums (the Active Poetry series). Nabakowski develops her narrative in the essay “Apprehension and Masquerade: Ewa Partum’s Path to Conceptual Poetry and Feminist Gender Theory” by tracing a gradual radicalization of Partum’s artistic attitude: a transition from conceptual poetry to gender art. The author points towards the intertextuality of Partum’s practice – the fact that the meanings of Partum’s early works such as poems by ewa or Active Poetry went through fluid transition after the gradual introduction of feminist discourse and new artistic strategies into her practice in the mid 1970s. Nabakowski concludes that Partum, within her art, makes statements about the production of meanings and the movement of these meanings while simultaneously referring to social reality as the sphere in which the production of meaning is being determined.40 Luiza Nader also emphasizes the social level of Partum’s linguistic operations, arguing that the artist is “reaching […] not for the semantic level but above all for the semiotic level of language.”41 There are also several texts on the multiplicity of Partum’s artistic practice that articulate the relation between linguistic inspirations and body practices. The most detailed analysis of this constellation is offered in Dorota Monkiewicz’s text (Her) Body and Text: Fragments. Monkiewicz emphasizes that Partum entered conceptual art from the territory of literature and that her first theoretical elaborations derived from linguistic disciplines, which was also typical for most of the conceptualists’ theories at that time.42 Monkiewicz pays attention to the pre-eminence of literary inspirations dispersed between the poles of surrealism and the constructivist linguistics of the Kraków avant-garde. She recalls Roland Barthes’s The Pleasure of the

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Nabakowski 2001, p. 130. Szyłak et al. (eds.) 2012/13, p. 50. Nabakowski 2001, p. 134. Nader, Luiza: “Conceptual Art and Ewa Partum” in Szyłak et al. (eds.) 2012/13, pp. 24–37, p. 32. Monkiewicz refers to Partum’s Master of Fine Arts dissertation. See Frejdlich Partum, Ewa: Nowe źródła intelektualnych wzruszeń (New Sources of Intellectual Affections), supervisor: Prof. Dr. hab. Mieczysław Porębski, Painting Department ASP, Warsaw 1970, typescript.

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Text (1973) to explain the relation between text and the body in Partum’s art, arguing that Partum’s work does not involve a corporal, physical body deprived of the symbolic function, as seen in Vito Acconci’s performances. Instead, Partum employs a certain phantasm of the female body, first represented by traces of lips (from 1971) and then, after 1979, as the naked body of the artist in her performative works. Monkiewicz locates Ewa Partum’s early works within the tradition of the linguistic theory of poetry, emphasizing that Partum’s linguistic works transgressed the structuralist orthodoxy.43

Ewa Partum and Conceptual Orthodoxy Reasons for the concealment of Partum’s art from the history of Polish conceptualism, until the 1990s, have already been indicated and will be discussed further in the chapter devoted to conceptual art. Here I would like to recall contemporary debate related to historicization of Polish conceptualism and neo-avant-garde art in general. Art history on the Polish neo-avant-garde has recently been involved in a reconstruction undertaken by art historians and critics who did not participate in the events of the late 1960s and the 1970s. These authors critically approach already constructed historical narratives using methodologies indebted to poststructuralist and feminist theories. The new histories of Polish conceptualism/neo-avant-garde art do not repeat the definitional disputes and lines of divisions established in earlier decades; rather, they work through the existing histories of art. Among recently published books, there are two complementary publications concerned with a different range of neo-avant-garde art practices that formulate methodological propositions relevant for studying Ewa Partum’s art practice: Conceptualism in the Polish People’s Republic by Luiza Nader (2009) and Polish Art of the 70s by Łukasz Ronduda (2009). In her book, Nader criticizes the normative, androcentric definition of conceptual art and proposes to view conceptualism as a discursive formation that simultaneously constitutes its object and generates knowledge concerning it. Nader focuses on the conceptualist treatment of subjectivity, discontinuity, disparity and alienation, delineating a set of discourses relevant for creating conceptual art as a discursive formation: discourses about truth and signification, power and know-

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Monkiewicz recalls the essay “On the Theory of Poetic Language” by Janusz Sławiński, published in 1971. In his text, the author argues that linguistic signs of a poetic text may not possess an external signifier and might not refer to an external world, but to the very linguistic form of the agreement between signs and meanings. See Monkiewicz in Szyłak et al. (eds.) 2012/13, p. 80.

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ledge, and the construction of the subject through language.44 Ronduda, in turn, attempts to create an overview of Polish art of the 1970s, focusing on practices related to post-essentialist and pragmatic aesthetic attitudes.45 Unlike Nader, he does not follow the map of institutional and social connections but creates a theoretical map of artistic practices that allows him to redefine artistic strategies and attitudes. Ronduda attempts to summarize/restate the process of the Polish neoavant-garde’s opening towards reality and analyses the tension between the postessentialist and pragmatic understandings of art held by practitioners in the 1970s. Both processes are in parallel with the trajectories of Ewa Partum’s practice and are recounted as the gradual introduction of feminist discourse into her conceptual work. The relevance of Nader’s and Ronduda’s publications for studying Ewa Partum’s practice lies in the fact that both texts open – in different ways – a space for integrating a narration about her work into the major narratives on conceptual art in Poland. Łukasz Ronduda situates Partum’s early works, alongside the activities of the Foksal Gallery, into the Adornian paradigm of autonomous art understood as a field of resistance and critique of the culture industry. He describes this form of practice as “post-essential conceptualism” and defines its broad goal as a search for the essence of the work of art through a negative method: by the deconstruction of all possible contaminations, institutional entanglements, relations to politics, sociology and consumption – a constant drive towards uncovering the essence of art as well as a consciousness of the impossibility of such an essence.46 Also, in mapping the moment of change from the conceptual to the feminist idiom, Ronduda writes Partum’s feminist turn into a broader tendency of deconstructing existing aesthetic concepts and artistic traditions.47 Consequently, he associates the evolution in Partum’s art with a general art-historical development from conceptualism to nominalism.48 Nader, on the other hand, complicates the relationship between the conceptual and feminist art idioms, emphasizing the lack of essential qualities that would allow a stable definition of conceptual art as such. She argues that its essence consisted rather of a heterogeneity which took the form of definitional antagonism.49 Moreover, Nader diagnoses both a tendency to place Partum’s art rather “next to”

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Nader 2009, p. 13. Ronduda 2009. Ibid., p. 11. Ronduda, Łukasz: “Between Conceptualism and Nominalism: About Ewa Partum’s Tautological Cinema” in Szyłak et al. (eds.) 2012/13, pp. 60–69, p. 60. Jakubowska, Agata: “Niemożność porozumienia. Feminizm indywidualny Ewy Partum” in Obieg, 02 November 2006. Nader 2009, p. 12.

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or “close to” conceptualism as well as a repression of the conceptual aspects of Partum’s work, contending that it was a tendency towards definitional unambiguity that resulted in the exclusion of subjectivity, sexuality and desire from the history of conceptual art and the subsequent marginalisation of artists such as Martha Rosler, Mary Kelly, Louise Lawler, Yvonne Rainer and Ewa Partum. Nader argues that “Partum after all introduces into the experience of conceptualism the notion of Difference, which, subjected to repression, enabled the foundation of definitional homogeneity and, together with this, a conceptual identity that is based on Reason.”50 Andrzej Turowski remains close to this perspective when he writes that Partum’s work restructured the field of conceptualism. The author recognizes Partum’s early works as a critical analysis of a representation of the female body in contemporary patriarchal culture and interprets her strategy as the political and artistic repossession of both the body and gender for conceptual art. Turowski concludes that Partum reorganized the artistic field, connecting conceptualism with surrealism.51

Negotiating Conceptual and Feminist Perspectives in Ewa Partum’s Artistic Practice A tension between conceptual and feminist perspectives, or the phallocentric/conceptual and the feminist engaged perspectives, has been identified by some researchers as the source of the ambiguity in Ewa Partum’s practice. Aneta Szyłak distinguishes these perspectives as the two main driving forces behind Partum’s art; one is related to overcoming already existing forms of art and the other related to the new problematization of femininity.52 Analysing Partum’s linguistic works from the early 1970s, Dorota Monkiewicz argues that even at this early stage of her artistic career, Partum simultaneously operated within two different artistic narratives – the feminist and the conceptual – but their dissimilarity and relation remained unnoticed until more explicit feminist statements were realized, such as the Change action from 1974. Paraphrasing the title of Partum’s work My Problem Is a Problem of a Woman (1978), Monkiewicz argues that Partum’s problem was, at the outset of her career, a problem of language, whereas after the 1974 introduction of feminist issues into her art along with autobiography, subjectivity and emotionalism, Partum started to speak with the language of the body. Monkiewicz refers to the qualities of tautological hard

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Szyłak et al. (eds.) 2012/13, p. 32. Szyłak et al. (eds.) 2012/13, p. 54. Szyłak et al. (eds.) 2012/13, p. 10.

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conceptualism and points out Partum’s feminist reinterpretation of the strategies of serialism and repetition.53 Ewa Tatar resolves the problem of the ambiguity of Partum’s universalist/feminist attitude by referring to John Berger’s notion of the split female “I”, a double position of being observer and observed, and defines this inner division as a main subject of Ewa Partum’s early works. Tracing personal accents and first-person narratives, Tatar concludes that the common denominator of Partum’s linguistic and explicitly feminist actions was an attempt to define her own identity through the body, which has been discredited in culture. Tatar also notices that in her early linguistic works, Partum attempted to formulate écriture feminine and argues that the imprint of Partum’s lips in poems by ewa was used as a personal touch and therefore belongs to social reality rather than to the realm of language.54 In her early texts, Agata Jakubowska also frames Partum’s art within the discourse of French literary feminism and argued that the imprint of Partum’s lips in poems by ewa becomes a feminine pen, a writing tool in an artistic attempt to constitute écriture feminine.55 Jakubowska, however, suggests that by emphasizing the universality of the category of “woman”, the speaking subject in Partum’s works situates itself within the field of dominant culture. According to Jakubowska, Partum is concerned with how the fact of being a woman conditions the possibilities of speaking.56 Andrzej Turowski, referring to poststructuralist feminist theory, reads Partum’s art through Hélène Cixous’s text Le Rire de la Méduse.57 This interpretation has been further elaborated by Małgorzata Dawidek Gryglicka in her analysis “Nakedness of Text: Conceptual Poetry of Ewa Partum”, in which the author reads Partum’s art together with Cixous’s texts, emphasizing the simultaneity of both practices.58

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Szyłak et al. (eds.) 2012/13, p. 80. Szyłak et al. (eds.) 2012/13, p. 113. Jakubowska, Agata: “Niemożliwość porozumienia. Feminizm indywidualny Ewy Partum” in Obieg, 02 November 2006, see also Jakubowska, Agata: Na marginesach lustra. Ciało kobiece w pracach polskich artystek, Kraków: Wydawnictwo Universitas, 2005. In her earlier articles, Jakubowska emphasizes the analytical and linguistic genealogy of Partum’s feminism; in her more recent texts, Jakubowska focuses on Partum’s engagement in “women problems” in her feminist performances. See, for instance, Jakubowska, Agata: “Divided Body: Ewa Partum’s Hommage a Solidarność (Łódź 1982, West Berlin 1983)” in Arnoux, Mathilde (ed.): OwnReality (23.), online publication of the Research Project To Each his Own Reality: The Notion of the Real in the Fine Arts in France, West Germany, East Germany and Poland, Paris: Deutschen Forum für Kunstgeschichte 2016, http://www.perspectivia.net/publikatione n/ownreality/23/jakubowska-en. Szyłak et al. (eds.) 2012/13. This analysis is a book chapter in: Dawidek Gryglicka, Małgorzata: Historia tekstu wizualnego w Polsce po 1967 roku, Kraków 2012, pp. 471–499.

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The problem of the recuperation of the female voice is also articulated by Gislind Nabakowski, who writes that Partum’s works reveal that language comes from the body and the female body is speaking through her poems.59 Luiza Nader observes that Partum’s linguistic works exposed language as a space of phallocentric order and positions Partum’s practice on the crossroads between the death of the author and the birth of a sovereign subject: “in logocentric discourse, the artist undertook the challenge of accepting the position of a speaking subject, whose speech and writing are defined both by the horizon of the body and by radical otherness.”60 The reading of Partum’s early works as an attempt to articulate écriture feminine reoccurs in the writings of various critics; however, it is in Grzegorz Dziamski’s essay “Speaking as a Woman: Why Have There Been So Few Female Artists in Conceptual Art?” where this strand of interpretation is combined with an analysis of Partum’s phallocentric perspective. Dziamski argues that Partum, in her early works, dialectically incorporated a duality of perspectives: feminist and universal. He writes that “[t]he works indicate that there is another perspective in which they can be interpreted – from which their meaning can be interpreted. The early works disturbed the phallocentric perspective but did not define it.”61 Moreover, Dziamski traces the subordinated characteristic of the feminist voice in these works, stating, “The specific nature of feminine writing depends on the fact that it goes beyond the discourse regulated by the phallocratic order and appears in areas not subordinated by philosophical-theoretical domination and is, therefore, ungraspable for this discourse.”62 In his reading, “the male perspective” was gradually overturned and overtaken by an explicitly feminist but still ambivalent perspective. Dziamski locates the significance of Partum’s explicitly feminist works within the artist’s ability to articulate the fact that the body is always entangled within cultural discourses, always suspended between the public and private spheres – in other words, the body is never fully private.63 Gislind Nabakowski proposes that “although it is not clear when exactly Ewa Partum discovered for herself a meaning of feminism, we can now treat her whole oeuvre as feminist.”64 This interpretive strategy, which does not follow historically located instructions inscribed in Partum’s works, can be described as preposterous reading.65 As already mentioned, the authors who do not pay attention to Partum’s 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

Nabakowski 2001, p. 131. Szyłak et al. (eds.) 2012/13, p. 32. Dziamski, Grzegorz: “Speaking as a Woman: Why Have There Been So Few Female Artists in Conceptual Art?” in Szyłak et al. (eds.) 2012/13, pp. 94–103, p. 98. Ibid. Ibid., p. 100. Nabakowski 2001, p. 131. I refer to Mieke Bal’s concept of preposterous art history articulated in her monograph on the relation between contemporary artworks and Caravaggio’s art. See Bal 1999.

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conceptual identification (1965–74) propose reading her practice within the framework of French literary feminism, employing the notions of the speaking body (lippen), revealing Partum’s art as a critique of logocentric order. Other authors conceptualize the initial stage of Partum’s practice in proximity with the notion of “latent feminism”,66 defining Partum’s practice as “feminist intuitions” (Ewa Tatar) or “feminist interventions” and “feminist motifs” (Izabela Kowalczyk), classifying Partum’s works as “proto-feminism” (Ewa Toniak) or “individual feminism” (Agata Jakubowska).67 Another aspect of Partum’s turn to the feminist poetic, namely the impact of Partum’s actual experience of operating in a patriarchal culture, has also been articulated by researchers. In her analysis of Partum’s practice, despite defining it as by and large feminist, Nabakowski remains close to Partum’s authorial narration and argues it was the circumstances of restrictions imposed by the patriarchal male avant-garde that gave Partum a direct impetus to search for a stable position for the female subject within spoken and written language. Therefore, Nabakowski emphasizes Partum’s engagement with the actual social conditions in Poland and her reworking of the limitations imposed onto a female artist.68

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The concept of “latent feminism” was introduced by Zora Rusinová in her essay “The Totalitarian Period and Latent Feminism” (2003), republished in: Pejić, Bojana (ed.): Gender Check: A Reader; Art and Theory in Eastern Europe, Cologne: Walther König, 2010, pp. 145–149. Tatar, Ewa Małgorzata: “The Modes of Surfaces: Ewa Partum’s and Teresa Tyszkiewicz’s Feminist Projects” in Le Journal de la Trienniale, no. 2, 2012, pp. 30–39, https://www.cnap.fr/sit es/default/files/import_destination/document/124586_le-journal-de-la-triennale--2--4heads andanear--emilierenardreng.pdf; Kowalczyk, Izabela: “Prekursorki wciąż w izolacji” in Obieg, 06 May 2011; Kowalczyk, Izabela: “Wątki feministyczne w sztuce polskiej/Feminist Motifs in Polish Art” in Artium Quaestiones, vol. 8, 1997, pp. 135–152; Toniak, Ewa: “Niemożliwa?” in Toniak, Ewa (ed.): Trzy kobiety. Maria Pinińska-Bereś, Natalia Lach-Lachowicz, Ewa Partum, exh. cat., Warsaw, Zachęta National Gallery of Art, 01 March–08 May 2011, Warsaw 2011, pp. 4–10, p. 9; and Jakubowska 2005. Nabakowski 2001, p. 130. Nabakowski writes: “Perhaps the pressure of a particular, existential isolation – ultimately subjecting Ewa Partum to repeated censorship relations in Poland dominated by a primarily male neo-avant-garde – may explain why her position became increasingly radicalised.”

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Negotiating feminist and conceptual (phallocentric) perspectives in Partum’s early works is in fact a problem between presentist and historical approaches to her practice. Indeed, some of Partum’s early works can be productively read together with texts written by French literary feminists. However, Partum did not have access to this discursive material. Thus, the feminist content of these works can show itself merely “thanks to the poststructuralist methodologies of the researcher.”69 The poststructuralist experience has also taught us that there is no purely descriptive level of history – that history is merely yet another form of representation that constructs rather than reveals the object of study. Acknowledging the failure of representative adequacy of historical narration,70 I consider the historicity of the objects of study – i.e. Partum’s artistic practice – as partially accessible and suggest working towards accessing Partum’s practice through the act of framing.71

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Szyłak et al. (eds.) 2012/13, p. 88. See, for instance, Deutsche, Rosalyn: “Inadequacy…” in Rike (ed.) 2004, pp. 67–70. Luiza Nader refers to Jaqueline Rose’s notion of “ethics of failure” as elaborated in Rose’s book Why War? Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Return to Melanie Klein, Oxford: Blackwell, 1993, in the context of historicization of conceptual art. See Nader 2009, p. 16. In their discussion on Jonathan Culler’s concept of “framing”, Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson argue that “[t]his proposal does not mean to abandon the examination of ‘context’ altogether, but to do justice to the interpretive status of the insights thus gained. Not only is this more truthful; it also advances the search for social history itself.” See: Bal, Mieke/ Bryson, Norman: “Semiotics and Art History: A Discussion of Context and Senders” in Art Bulletin, vol. 73, no. 2, June 1991, pp. 174–298, p. 244.

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Chapter 2 Ewa Partum’s Critical Engagement with Art Infrastructures

Troubling Terminology: Art Infrastructures and the Socialist Art Institution In an undated typescript most likely written by Ewa Partum in 1978 as a preparatory note for a public lecture, there is a passage that critically challenges the art system and its institutions. It appears in a description of Partum’s work Metapoetry, realized in Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź in 1972 at the occasion of that year’s International Council of Museums (ICOM) symposium (18–23 September), during the event “From Łódź Atteliers” (Z łódzkich pracowni).1 Significantly, Metapoetry was the only work realized by Partum in a public art museum during state socialism in Poland, or within the context of an international museum conference. In the note, entitled reflection on a museum, Partum writes: “Every object/anything exhibited in the museum is a work of art. Every work of art exhibited in the museum is art.” In 1972 in Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, the following work was realized: A couple of thousand cardboard letters, a scattering of never-existing text, were exhibited on the floor; it did not have a stable location, a stable form or a time of exposition. It was aimed at being destroyed by visitors, who spread the letters out, carried them around the museum on their shoe soles until they were completely used up. The work transgressed the museum and blended into the surroundings […]. As a work of art, it existed only in the consciousness, in an unlimited way, constantly suspended between a presence and an absence.2 1

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Other works presented during the event included: Audycja by Andrzej Łobodziński and Krystyn Zieliński, Hotel Sztuki by Ireneusz Pierzgalski and Environment by Jerzy Treliński. In a description preserved in Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź archives, Ewa Partum’s work is entitled Ulisses. Undated typescript from the Ewa Partum archive. This fragment was reused in the lecture “Made by Me – The Non-Transmissibility of the Message”, translated by Partum’s collaborator Marek Żychski in 1978 as: “Made by Me – The Impossibility of Transmitting the Message”

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Another relevant fragment of the local discourse on art institutions can be found in Andrzej Kostołowski’s Theses on Art 1–17 published by the Galeria Adres in 1972. In “Thesis 9, On an Institution”, Kostołowski argues that an intuition can limit artistic freedom, though at the same time, completely bypassing artistic institutions can result in becoming an outsider artist. He then prescribes a program of a partial or strategic appropriation of art institutions: An artist has a possibility to avail the structural value of social anonymity and objectivity, which are characteristic of institutions, when he brackets the institutions for artistic purposes and when institutional methods of activity are included in his actions.3 In the case of Partum and her collaborators, anti-institutional impetus was merely a consequence of the redefinition of art as a mental or intellectual activity that takes place in the field of the imagination and consciousness.4 Institutions were considered a possible danger to artistic freedom and to art itself, but at the same time, they were conceptualized as a necessary part of artistic practice. Both texts discussed possible strategies for a critical examination of art institutions, though their advice was rather general, without specifying a productive tension with the state socialist art institution. This unspoken or not explicitly articulated aspect of anti-institutional strategies engendered forms of non-institutional artistic activities, self-instituting practices as well as general “resourcefulness in finding solutions and spaces for the realisation of ideas”.5 For the purpose of creating a historical parallel, this kind of artistic reflection that challenges existing art institutions could be defined as a local form of the “institutional critique” contemporary to the artistic developments in the West. In the West, institutional critique has been preceded by the processes of deconstruction and demystification, or “the act of unmasking universality and exposing it as historically contingent.”6 The emergence of institutional critique was genealogically connected with certain artistic and theoretical formations: from Situatio-

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(typescript in the Ewa Partum archive). In the catalogue edited by Aneta Szyłak, Partum’s text is translated as “Made by Me – The Non-Transmittability of the Message”. See Szyłak et al. (eds.) 2012/13, p. 10. Kostołowski, Andrzej: Tezy o sztuce/Theses on Art 1–17, 1970–72, Łódź: Galeria Adres, 1972, not paginated. This statement echoes the founding manifesto of the Galeria Adres (spring 1972) which will be discussed later in this chapter. The other part of Partum’s text refers to the notion of imagination: “The existence of art depends on an activity in the sphere of non-reality.” Fowkes, Maja/ Fowkes, Reuben: Central and Eastern European Art since 1950, London: Thames and Hudson, 2020, p. 7. Foster, Hal/ Krauss, Rosalind/ Bois, Yve-Alain/ Buchloh, Benjamin H. D./ Joselit, David: Art Since 1900, 2nd ed., London: Thames and Hudson, 2011, p. 543.

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nist interventions, the events of the student protests in 1968, and poststructuralist theorization (Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida).7 It established itself against the economic and social background of late capitalism, thus in a different sociopolitical context than in socialist Europe. Since the process of the deconstruction of universalism had a different historical dynamic in socialist Europe, neither of the two dominant narratives of institutional critique – critique of the museum8 and critique of the commodity status of art – exhaust the meanings of works produced in East-Central Europe outside of or as an alternative to art institutions.9 The specificity of the critical antiinstitutional artistic gestures performed in this part of the world has been defined by Alenka Gregorič and Suzana Milevska as issuing from the fact that “their authors [were] not keeping up with the discourse of institutional critique in art, though nevertheless [were] acting out its urgency.” Gregorič and Milevska also argue that “[i]n comparison with their Western counterparts, these artists addressed different problems and used distinct methods to question the existing institutional framework determined by their specific sociopolitical and economic contexts.” The authors point to the undeclared political urgency of anti-institutional practices in socialist Europe, emphasizing that “[t]o scrutinize art institutions meant to scrutinize the institutions of power, which led to using this as an opportunity to confront the political structure of the State by artistic means.”10 On the other hand, as Klara Kemp-Welch has observed, “the embrace of an expanded field went far beyond a critique of art-world systems”,11 as it was issuing from the lack of the actually existing art institutions and functioning art system. In other words, seemingly anti-institutional gestures could have been conceived

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Ibid. “In modern times,” writes Hans Belting, “art was usually defined by an institutional framework. Art was what you saw in art museums. It is for these reasons that museums often become the target of an institutional critique, as artists called for a different kind of museum.” See Belting, Hans: “Contemporary Art as Global Art: A Critical Estimate” in Belting, Hans/ Buddensieg, Andrea (eds.): The Global Art World: Audiences, Markets and Museums, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2009, pp. 38–73, p. 54. An institutionalized institutional critique in the 1970s was represented by the Foksal Gallery’s artistic profile. Gregorič, Alenka/ Milevska, Suzana: “Inside Out: Critical Art Practices That Challenge the Art System and Its Institutions” in Gregorič, Alenka/ Milevska Suzana (eds.): Inside Out: Critical Discourses Concerning Institutions, Ljubljana: Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana, 2017, pp. 8–24, p. 9. Kemp-Welch, Klara: “Species of Spaces in Eastern European and Latin American Experimental Art”, Museum of Modern Art, MoMA online, December 2015, p. 1, file available at https://cou rtauld.pure.elsevier.com/files/8222263/mp019063_kkw_final_2.pdf.

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as autotelic and autonomous artistic actions realized outside of official art venues merely for logistical or practical reasons.12 However, as Partum’s and Kostołowski’s texts demonstrate, this does not mean that concepts of anti-institutional practice did not appear in the discourse on art at the beginning of the 1970s in Poland, and in East-Central Europe more broadly. Having said that, since “the terms, concepts and theories of Institutional Critique are historically loaded,”13 as Isabelle Graw points out, I would like to argue that the notion of institutional critique becomes obscured once it is transferred into the territory of East-Central European neo-avant-garde art history. In his deliberation on the Westernness of art-historical terms “moored in the deep waters of the recent Western past”,14 James Elkins writes about two possibilities of “de-Westernisation” of the discipline: either to return to the local languages and avoid Western concepts when possible, or to rethink them – as, for instance, David Summers does in his book Real Spaces.15 To address this issue, I suggest a third option to stand alongside those offered by Elkins: to appropriate contemporary theoretical concepts that have no history in art history, regardless of where they originated from. To approach Partum’s critical engagement with art institutions, i.e. the aspect of her artistic practice that could be associated with the institutional critique discourse, I appropriate the concept of art infrastructures that follows the proposition formulated by Irit Rogoff within the framework of the freethought collective.16 Rogoff proposes thinking about infrastructure beyond the limits of material and administrative constraints and to conceptualize it as productive rather than restrictive.17 This concept expands on the historical notion of the “institution of art” that – as Andrea Fraser writes – began to emerge in 1969 and included all the sites of the production, distribution and reception of art: “the entire field of art as a social

12

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Partum’s works realized in the public space will not be analysed within the framework of antiinstitutional discourse but in chapter 5 they will be evaluated as a form of political engagement. Graw, Isabelle: “Beyond Institutional Critique” in Welchman, John C (ed.): Institutional Critique and After, Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2006, pp. 137–151, p. 137. Elkins, James: “Why Art History is Global” (2011) in: Newall, Diana (ed.): Art and Its Global Histories: A Reader, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017, pp. 38–42, p. 42. Ibid., p. 41. Other members of the freethought collective include Stefano Harney, Adrian Heathfield, Massimiliano Mollona, Louis Moreno and Nora Sternfeld. This notion refers to the discourse developed within the framework of urban studies by scholars such as Keller Easterling and Saskia Sassen, who focus on the present conditions of globalization.

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universe.”18 Rogoff characterizes art infrastructures as a set of art institutions and places for the production and presentation of art, as well as the dynamic of human and technical relations: “functioning institutions, systems of classification and categorization, archives and traditions and professional training for these, funding and educational pathways, excellence criteria, impartial juries, and properly airconditioned auditoria with good acoustics, etc.”19 The notion of “art infrastructure”, according to Rogoff, does not indicate a sum of art facilities but rather refers to everything that shapes the process of art production, distribution and consumption. Infrastructure is not only something that facilitates delivery, something that enables us to do things, but also “a set of protocols that bind and confine us.”20 Keller Easterling describes infrastructure as something that has a capacity and currency not of text but of software: “an operating system that makes certain things possible and other things impossible.”21 Within this framework, art infrastructures can be defined as a rhizomatic multi-connected operating system that incorporate technical and institutional forms but also personal relations and gestures. Irit Rogoff’s and freethought’s investigations into the potentiality of thinking through political, cultural and technocratic infrastructures focuses on its promises for the current condition. In the context of art history, applying the notion of infrastructure holds the promise of narrating horizontal art history that relates to a presupposed transparency of the notion of infrastructure. Unlike the concept of institutional critique, a neutral and active concept of infrastructure does not indicate certain traditions or conventions and does not refer to events already narrated within mainstream art history. It does not recall its canons; instead, it enables us to think critical approaches concerned with art institutions on different terms, incorporating artworks and artistic projects alongside other activities, gestures and rituals that take place within the art field and beyond. Within this conceptual framework, institutional critique can be defined as a specific Western historical manifestation of artistic critical engagement with art infrastructures. In this chapter, I do not discuss all aspects of Partum’s strategies that could be associated with a critical undermining of the art system. Thus I omit, for instance, 18

19

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Fraser, Andrea: “From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique” in Welchman (ed.) 2006, pp. 123–137, p. 128. This is a revised version of an essay published in Artforum in September 2005. This is a quotation from a lecture delivered by Irit Rogoff during the Former West project’s research congress Documents, Constellations, Prospects, which took place 18–24 March 2013, at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. A recording of the lecture is available at: http://www.f ormerwest.org/DocumentsConstellationsProspects/Contributions/Infrastructure. Ibid. Easterling, Keller: Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space, London: Verso, 2014, pp. 12–14.

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her strategy of self-identification with the feminist agenda, which will be discussed later in another context. I also do not examine art projects that aim to change the broader social, economic and political conditions. Here, I look closely at the events that can be defined, following Deleuze and Guattari, as “asignifying ruptures”: moments of disruption that cause reconfigurations of parts of the infrastructure; moments when assigned roles are being de-assigned.22 I recall particular fragments of art infrastructures connected with Ewa Partum’s practice as productive contexts for entering and re-entering the art world, namely the art academy with its examination rituals, the hegemonic positions and “oedipal narrations”23 of the Polish neo-avant-garde art field, the independent gallery, the mail art network, and the field of curatorial practice after 1989.

Entering the Professional Art World Art Academies Born in 1945, Ewa Partum started her artistic education in 1963 at the State Higher School of Visual Arts in Łódź (PWSSP Łódź),24 where she was confronted with the effects of a narrowly understood politicization of art – a deterioration and crisis of the avant-garde tradition not caused by the institutionalization of the avant-garde, but the contrary: by the institutional suppression of this tradition. The school was established in 1945 and had initially implemented a didactic program focused on experimental research into visual perception directly influenced by the Bauhaus and following the artistic leadership of the constructivist artist and theoretician Władysław Strzemiński. At the beginning of the 1950s, the avant-garde experiment based on an idea of combining art and industry was replaced by a reductive socialist doctrine. The school became merely a backstage for the textile industry and implemented a programme based on a reduced concept

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In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari list characteristics of the rhizome as the principles of connection and heterogeneity, multiplicity, “asignifying rupture”, cartography and decalcomania. The principle of asignifying rupture means that “a rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but will start up again, on one of its old lines, or on new lines.” See Deleuze, Gilles/ Guattari, Félix: A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 2nd ed., Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p. 303. Thus, asignifying rupture is a process by which the rhizome resists territorialization and breaks out of its boundaries (deterritorializes) and then reassembles itself in a new place/time. Foster, Hal: The Return of The Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996, p. xiii. In 1988, the school was renamed the Strzemiński Academy of Art, Łódź. For the history of the school, see http://culture.pl/en/place/wladyslaw-strzeminski-academy-of-fine-arts-in-lodz.

Ewa Partum’s Critical Engagement with Art Infrastructures

of pragmatism and functionality. Students were educated within two departments – textiles and clothing – and the quality of the education was compromised by the imposition of a highly ideologized aesthetic.25 The avant-garde tradition and Strzemiński’s teachings were preserved merely in a non-institutional way. Strzemiński’s writings, including his Theory of Vision, circulated as manuscripts among the school’s art students throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Theory of Vision, originally a series of lectures conducted at the PWSSP in the 1950s, discussed the historical development of art forms from prehistoric times to the twentieth century and represented “a model example of a formalist/modernist interpretation of art history.”26 The first publication of these manuscripts, with an introduction by Julian Przyboś, was in 1958. Julian Przyboś, since the mid-1950s, was highly committed and determined to restore and preserve the history of Strzemiński’s and Katarzyna Kobro’s art, perceiving Strzemiński’s artistic, educational and theoretical practice as a coherent unity, focused on both the epistemological values and social mission of art.27 Przyboś, a constructivist poet and art critic, as well as a collaborator and friend of Strzemiński, was a visitor to Partum’s family home in the 1960s and it was Przyboś who familiarized Ewa Partum with Strzemiński’s works and theory.28 Partum’s early encounter with Strzemiński’s artistic heritage meant that in her formative years, she was exposed to the concept of art as an analytical and speculative activity rather than a personal expression. Having an extra-institutional connection with Strzemiński’s work can be seen as a generational experience for the broad group of neo-avant-garde artists entering the Polish art world at the end of the 1960s, rather than an individual artistic path. As Paweł Polit has argued, Polish conceptualism as such was developed in a polemical dialogue with Strzemiński’s tradition, neutralizing or emphasizing particular elements of his theory of art, working towards “undermining his retinal notion of art and realizing a model of reflection in which the work of art opens itself up to the surrounding reality and assumes the form of a process.”29 This influence – and, more broadly, the tradition of the Łódź-based interwar avant-garde

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In 1950, Władysław Strzemiński was dismissed from the academy by a decree of Culture Minister Włodzimierz Sokorski. The same year, the Neoplastic Room designed by the artist in 1948 in Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź was painted over (it was then reconstructed in 1960). Piotrowski, Piotr: Znaczenia modernizmu. W stronę historii sztuki po 1945 roku, 2nd ed., Poznań, 2011, p. 122. Juszkiewicz 2006, p. 155. Ewa Partum’s knowledge about Strzemiński’s theory is reflected in her master’s dissertation, written in 1970, in which she directly refers to Strzemiński’s concepts. Polit, Paweł: “Odpowiedź Strzemińskiemu. Idea jednolitości w twórczości polskich artystów konceptualnych” in Artium Quaestiones, no. 16, 2005, pp. 215–231, p. 216.

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– becomes critical for Partum’s inaugural artistic statements aimed at a professional audience: her Master of Fine Arts diploma work – which was accompanied by her first artistic manifesto – and the project that followed, Field Organized by Imagination, (both 1970) which will be discussed later in this chapter. Another generational experience related to contesting and overcoming specific formats and strategies of artistic activity is related to Ewa Partum’s relationship to the art academy in Warsaw, where she moved after two years of study in Łódź. As the monographer of Polish conceptualism Grzegorz Dziamski has argued, conceptual art was a kind of artistic initiation addressed against the academy and its model of artistic education.30 Also Luiza Nader emphasizes that the critical potential of conceptualism manifested itself only in its negative attitude towards academic authorities and institutions.31 At the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Ewa Partum became a student in the painting department, initially in the studio of Tadeusz Dominik then, in the following year, of Stefan Gierowski, where she was engaged in “painting large, black lines.”32 At that time the Warsaw academy represented a complex landscape of internal tensions that constituted the context for Ewa Partum’s critical artistic works. The academy was undergoing a significant generational change with respect to its teaching staff. For many years it remained a stronghold of Polish “post-thaw modernity.”33 The school was dominated by modernist painters who developed their didactic program based on modernistic ideas of universalism and the autonomy of art, prioritising painting as the ultimate form of fine arts.34 They insisted on the non-discursive nature of art, focusing on the formal qualities of the medium. In 1968 the most important Colourists, or Kapists, Jan Cybis and Artur NachtSamborski, retired from the academy. The next generation of professors (including Stefan Gierowski, Tadeusz Dominik, Rajmund Ziemski, Bronisław Kierzkowski and Jan Tarasin) reinvented the didactic program of the painting department to a certain extent and supported the idea of a more rationalized process of art

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Dziamski, Grzegorz: Przełom konceptualny i jego wpływ na praktykę i teorię sztuki/Conceptual Breakthrough and Its Impact on the Theory and Practice of Art, Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2010. Nader 2009, p. 396. Interview with Ewa Partum, 14.02.2016 (Berlin). Post-thaw modernity refers to the Polish modernism that developed after 1956 and was characterised by an emphasis on the autonomy of art, freedom of formal expression, and elitism – in fact, contrary values to those postulated within socialist realism. It involved abstraction, metaphorical and surrealist works, as well as informalism. The Kapists introduced to the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts ideas from the first half of the twentieth century, including certain avant-garde traditions and modernism. At the end of the 1960s new conceptions arrived: the ideas of socially engaged art, the social mission of art, and mass culture.

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production and education, though they never completely rejected the modernistic paradigm that characterised “post-thaw modernity”. As Wojciech Włodarczyk argues, Stefan Gierowski (Ewa Partum’s supervisor) continued the Colourists’ tendencies by promoting ideas of the universality of art and both the mystery and absolute primacy of painting, with nature as an inspiration, but at the same time he also introduced some new concepts, such as the freedom of painterly means and heterogeneity of artistic language.35 Jakub Banasiak describes Gierowski’s method as a continuation of Colourism: as the artistic doctrine practised “in a different costume”.36 On the other hand, from the mid-1960s, painting as an ultimate bourgeois discipline was reclassified by authorities as a sub-discipline of planning and design. In 1969, the Ministry of Culture established official ratios between pure arts and applied arts as 30 percent to 70 percent, respectively, by which art academies were to abide. The program postulated by the authorities, which culminated in the socalled great reform of higher education (1970), promoted a narrow definition of modernity, pragmatism and social mission.37 In that context, defence of the autonomy of painting as a discipline was related to the politically imposed structural changes within art education, where the “concept of the autonomy of disciplines was going down in history and painting was losing its special status.”38 The third factor that influenced the situation at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw was related to pressure from the students themselves. Włodarczyk has emphasized that students from the painting department responded to the generational change and theoretical and personal vacuum created by the departure of the Colourists by reinventing painting as a discipline related to reality and by approaching it with a more intellectual attitude.39 The students also reacted to developments in the art world outside the academy – in a growing network of independent art laboratories, events, art galleries and student clubs that promoted conceptual art, happenings and actions.40 To sum up the situation in the academy, Włodarczyk

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Włodarczyk, Wojciech: Akademia Sztuk Pięknych w Warszawie, Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Szkolne i Pedagogiczne Społka Akcyjna, 2005, p. 341. Banasiak, Jakub: Oduczyć sztuki. Metoda pedagogiczna Leona Tarasewicza na tle tradycji dydaktycznej Wydziału Malarstwa Akademii Sztuk Pięknych w Warszawie, Warsaw: Fundacja Kultury Miejsca, 2016, p. 77. Ibid., p. 75. Ibid., p. 82. Włodarczyk 2005, p. 344. In an interview with the artist conducted by the author on 14.02.2016, Ewa Partum mentions that at the time (1969) she was considering a change from painting to the graphics department. The latter was launched as an independent department in 1968; the professors in the graphics department, such as Henryk Tomaszewski and Jerzy Tchórzewski, were far more progressive. They encouraged experimenting with new media and developed programs focused

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writes: “The painting department at this time had to struggle to settle the problem of the heritage of the Colourists. […] It was related to the position of painting in general, the place of painting in art of the 1970s.”41

Ewa Partum’s Diploma Work (1970) Ewa Partum’s diploma work (figs. 2-6) constituted a contextual response to this situation – it revealed the actual place of painting within Warsaw’s Academy of Fine Arts, criticising the master-student model and the notion of the “autonomy of painting” protected by the academy while at the same time responding to the broader cultural framework of the “depicturalization of art”,42 i.e. the ongoing development of new art formats outside of art academies. Partum’s diploma work indicated new directions for that development and functioned as a switch (“embrayeurs”) referring to both academic and neo-avant-garde fields (“locuteurs”).43 In other words, Partum incorporated an educational institution into her diploma work’s content and simultaneously referred to art infrastructures existing outside of the academy. She created a temporary platform where both institutional discourses collided, performing an asignifying rupture within the existing infrastructures. Ewa Partum’s diploma assessment for her Master of Fine Arts degree took place in May 1970 and consisted of practical and theoretical elements. The obligation to produce a theoretical essay, i.e. a master’s dissertation, was relatively new, introduced in 1962 by the Ministry of Culture as a part of the educational reform. According to the academic tradition, it was the practical component, the diploma work – demonstrating the student’s painterly skills – that was considered crucial.44 It was necessary to paint and present a painting to pass the assessment. Partum rejected this hierarchy, approaching the “field” of the master’s dissertation as a space of

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on design and modern systems of information. Moreover, it was the only department that owned a film camera. Włodarczyk 2005, p. 333. Andrzej Turowski defines “depicturalization” as the process of removing significance from an artistic form of painting and undermining the hegemony of painting. See, for instance, Szyłak et al. (eds.) 2012/13, p. 42. Solarska, Maria: Historia zrewoltowana. Pisarstwo historyczne Michala Foucaulta jako diagnoza teraźniejszości i projekt przyszłości (Revolted History: Historical Writings of Michael Foucault as a Diagnosis of the Presence and a Project of the Future), Poznań: Instytut Historii UAM, 2006, p. 95. Still in 1971, the Kapists (Michał Bylina) proposed that a promotion should be based exclusively on an evaluation of ten paintings made by the candidate, without authorial commentary or oral examination. See Włodarczyk 2005, p. 341.

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manifestation of her artistic program and a means of art presentation and distribution.45 The practical element of Partum’s diploma work involved an appropriation of two artistic objects, an expropriation of their meaning and the revelation of a disposition of Tadeusz Kantor’s action Multipart (Multiplication and Participation), which he realized in 1970 in the Foksal Gallery.46 The first episode of Kantor’s Multipart comprised exhibiting and selling forty identical art objects: crushed umbrellas painted white, affixed to canvases, and named Parapluie – Emballages. According to the instructions included in the purchase agreement, the works were to be sold at production cost. The contract also stipulated that each purchaser was obliged to fulfil conditions regulating participation: namely, to somehow interact with (i.e. modify) the objects. After half a year, all the purchaser-participants were obliged to provide their altered emballages for an exhibition that took place on 22 February 1971, again in the Foksal Gallery. Luiza Nader writes that in this action, Kantor “ironically revealed […] the material conditions of the existence of an artwork and at the same time its way of functioning in an institutional framework.”47 Partum borrowed two of Kantor’s emballages from the fellow artist Eustachy Kossakowski and repeated Kantor’s characteristic gesture of wrapping objects. She wrapped the emballages in white and black paper, leaving the artist’s signature and the logo of the Foksal Gallery visible. She hung the wrapped paintings on the wall and arranged four wrapped cubes in front of them. On all these objects Partum placed fragments of her syntax poem, written in black and white letters. She presented the enwrapped canvases to the examination jury and answered the set of standard – and in this case completely irrelevant – questions about the pictorial composition and formal aspects of her work. After receiving a positive assessment, she unwrapped the objects and revealed them as simultaneously being visual poems and the works of Tadeusz Kantor. In earlier interpretations of this work, authors have focused on Partum’s critique of didactic methods based on a non-critical, formalist repetition of com-

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Existing interpretations of Partum’s diploma work, which I will refer to later, focus exclusively on its practical “painterly” component, emphasizing Partum’s critical attitude towards the educational methods employed at the academy. In my analysis, I depart from such a narrow understanding of the artist’s intervention and include an analysis of Partum’s master’s dissertation. The reason for researching this early discursive material was to trace the heterogenic genealogy of Partum’s artistic practice and investigate the constellation of her knowledges at the outset of her artistic career. Launched in 1966, Galeria Foksal PSP realized an ambitious international programme and implemented a progressive formula of institutionalized institutional critique, permanently reinventing its program and questioning its own status. The position of the Foksal Gallery in Partum’s artistic biography will be discussed in chapter 2. Nader 2009, p. 263.

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positional features and her critique of plagiarism.48 According to such readings, Partum’s work can be perceived merely as a manifestation of the broader anti-academic tendency characteristic of a generation of artists that entered the art scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is also important to add that the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts was widely criticized at the time, not only by its rebellious students but also by leading official art critics, for its indiscriminate educational methods. In one of his texts, an official art critique, Andrzej Osęka wrote: “The Academy does not teach artistic rebellion but the strategies of adaptation. It can be called a great school of conformism.”49 Undoubtedly, by revealing her professors’ lack of competence, Partum undermined the discourse of institutional discipline and authority. At the same time, her intervention was devised as a critique of the conventional art practice fostered by the academy. Partum wrote her work directly into the bureaucratic procedures of academia: she questioned not only the procedure of examination as such but also the competences of her professors to pronounce a judgement on art. In his essay Introduction to Meta-critique (1962), the professor of art history at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts and prominent art historian and art critic Mieczysław Porębski, wrote: I fell into melancholy when I learnt that we would be awarding diplomas for master’s degrees in painting, sculpture, architecture and drawing. But I knew that it would end up that way and I even got used to teaching art students in the fourth year about the history of Dadaism and Surrealism (not exclusively). It does not appear dangerous, because I am sure none of them will have the desire to realize the rules of Dadaist negation in their lives; none of them will practice automatism or the paranoid-critical method; none of them will go crazy, commit suicide or fall into conflict with their professors at the academy. All of them will receive their diplomas and to do so, they will have to pass an art history exam including lessons on Dadaism and Surrealism. Even if any of them suddenly feel some urge towards a non-professional game, there will be always somebody who will make it awful enough for them, since there is nothing more effective than spitting with a semblance of competence. Dadaists and Surrealists were

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As Angelika Stepken has noted: “With this contribution Partum alludes to the educational situation at the academy, which encourages the copying of models, and implies at the same time a critical engagement with the meaning of appearance and the demand to develop ‘thought possibilities’ via art. To the standard, obligatory questions from the examination committee, she gives the corresponding answers about work’s composition, contrast, form, etc.” Stepken, Angelika: “Monograph”, pp. 17–23, p. 17, in Stepken 2001. Osęka, Andrzej: “Loch Ness polskiej plastyki” in Kultura, 21 August 1966, p. 8.

Ewa Partum’s Critical Engagement with Art Infrastructures

also spitting – but they spat competently – with precision and mastery. But I am afraid that these days the art of spitting has fallen very low.50 In her critical intervention, Partum demonstrated an ability to spit with Dadaist mastery, embracing the concept of artistic practice as a “non-professional game.” In terms offered by Bourdieu, we can say that Partum refused to participate in the “illusio” of the institutional field51 and invested in a riskier game that negotiated and undermined professional instructions and rituals, such as the examination ritual. First and foremost, however, the artist interfered with the protocols and routines of assigning a value to an artwork (painting) that operated in both hierarchically organized artistic fields: the academic and the neo-avant-garde art field where the Foksal Gallery and Kantor occupied hegemonic positions. Partum creatively exploited her situatedness on the double margin of both art scenes, assuming a critical position towards both centres. She incorporated into her realization the work of the leading figure of the Polish neo-avant-garde, Tadeusz Kantor, who in his practice worked towards deconstructing the mythology of an artist and an artwork, in fact establishing another variant/formula. Kantor was certainly a central figure in the Polish cultural milieu of the 1960s and 1970s. He represented the international avant-garde: an ultimate avant-garde artist who brought back the meaning of this word to its roots by performing a constant confrontation with art conventions.52 However, for Partum, Kantor was 50

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Porębski, Mieczysław: Pożegnanie z krytyką, Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1966, p. 189. The original text reads: “Odkąd dowiedziałem się, że w Akademii Sztuk Pięknych dawać będziemy dyplomy magistrów malarstw, rzeźby, architektury i grafiki, od czasu do czasu popadam w stan melancholijnej zadumy. Wiem oczywiście, że tak musiało się skończyć i przyzwyczaiłem się nawet do tego, ze studentom IV roku wykładam (miedzy innymi) dzieje dadaizmu i surrealizmu. Nie wygląda to groźnie, jestem bowiem prawie pewien, że żaden z nich nie zapragnie realizować w życiowej praktyce zasad dadaistycznej negacji czy surrealistycznej moralności, żaden nie będzie uprawiał automatyzmu czy stosował metody paranoicznokrytycznej, żaden od tego nie zwariuje, nie skończy samobójstwem, nie popadnie w konflikt z władzami uczelni, związku, z ministerstwem. Wszyscy będą mieli swoje dyplomy, które żeby je otrzymać, wymagają również zdania historii sztuki XX wieku z dadaizmem i surrealizmem włącznie. A jeżeli nawet, któryś poczuje pewne ciągoty do nieprofesjonalnej gry, znajdzie się zawsze taki, który mu ja prędko obrzydzi, nie ma, bowiem skuteczniejszej metody aniżeli plucie z pozorami kompetencji. Doleci – nie doleci – jedno jest pewne, że pod ten ogień zaporowy nikt z ochota pchać się nie będzie. Mniejsza z tym. Sadze, że dzieje się tak nie, dlatego że komuś na coś jest to potrzebne. Dadaiści i surrealiści i socrealiści też pluli, i to pluli po mistrzowsku, celnie i naprawdę kompetentnie. Dlatego boje się, że sztuka plucia upadla nisko.” Bourdieu, Pierre: Masculine Domination, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. Jarosław Suchan, director of Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź and curator of Kantor’s solo exhibition wrote about Kantor’s position in Polish art this way: “To say of Kantor that he is among Po-

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not a central figure of reference. Rather, as Partum’s diploma intervention reveals, “Kantor” was for Partum “an oedipal narration” that she wanted to recall and then transgress.53 On the one hand, incorporating Kantor’s work was a strategy of transmitting cultural capital and establishing a symbolical lineage for her own practice by using existing infrastructures in a subversive way. In the Multipart exhibition catalogue published in 1971, Ewa Partum was not mentioned as one of the authors of the intervention. In a description of her action, she appears merely as a “student” who used Kantor’s emballages in her diploma work.54 This did not stop Partum from including the Multipart exhibition in her artistic curriculum vitae, which she wrote in 1971.55 On the other hand, lacking the possibility of negotiating her ideas with her teachers at the academy, Partum initiated cross-generational dialogue with Kantor’s avant-garde legacy, “understood as criticizing and tearing away,”56 towards which she positioned her own practice. Paraphrasing Kantor’s confrontational strategy “of annexation, the incorporation of found persons, objects and social conventions into a new and potentially free situation,”57 Partum not only appropriated Kantor’s work but also reinterpreted his signature gesture of wrapping objects (emballages). The medium of emballage was specific to Kantor, as “he invented and named [it], using the French term ‘emballer’ […] which was for him a way to abandon his abstract, informalist painting and to return to real objects of lower rank – but not by representing them (and thus by creating an illusion) but by wrapping them and

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land’s most outstanding artists of the second half of the twentieth century is to say very little. Kantor is to Polish art what Joseph Beuys is to German art and what Andy Warhol is to American art. He created a unique strain of theatre and was an active participant in the revolutions of the neo-avant-garde; he was a highly original theoretician, an innovator strongly grounded in tradition, an anti-painterly painter, a happener-heretic and an ironic conceptualist. These are only a few of his many incarnations. Apart from that, Kantor was a tireless animator of artistic life in postwar Poland; one could even say he was one of its chief motivating forces. His greatness derives not so much from his oeuvre as from Kantor himself in his entirety, as a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk that consists of his art, his theory and his life.” See “Tadeusz Kantor”, Cultura.pl, https://culture.pl/en/artist/tadeusz-kantor. Foster 1996, p. xiii. Kantor, Tadeusz: Multipart, exh. cat., Warsaw, Galeria Foksal PSP, 22 February 1970 and 22 February 1971, Warsaw 1971. In the catalogue Multipart, the following description of Partum’s intervention was included: “A borrowing of two paintings with umbrellas in order to use them as graduation works. Due to the argumentation that aimed at deceiving the examination committee, two of the paintings were qualified for the graduate exhibition among other diploma works.” Szyłak et al. (eds.) 2012/13, p. 40. Kemp-Welch, Klara: “Emancipation and Daydreams – Kantor’s Happenings” in MurawskaMuthesius, Katarzyna/ Zarzecka, Natalia (eds.): Kantor Was Here: Tadeusz Kantor in Great Britain, London: Black Dog, 2011, pp. 141–147, p. 141.

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fixing them to his canvases, or by making art out of the very process of wrapping.”58 He proposed a critique of painting understood as image-making “with the material object and its poetic and critical potential to unmask a Modernist mythology of painting: the illusion of its autonomy and exceptionalism.”59 This strategy of deconstruction cannot be understood outside of its local context. The model of the critique developed in the West and articulated in the late 1950s that revealed art practice and art discourse as universalist, autonomous, Eurocentric and masculinist cannot easily be transplanted into art practices in the socialist countries. Piotr Piotrowski argues that “the idea of the autonomy of art, seen in the West as an impediment to social and political critique, was viewed in socialist countries as a manifestation of the opposition to the forced politicization of art.”60 For these reasons, the process of decentring modernism in the context of socialist Poland meant to “a lesser degree questioning the ideology of representation in contemporary culture and to a greater degree it meant the “depicturalization of art”, and thus removing meaning from painting as a dominant artistic tradition.”61 This process often consisted of the incorporation of a painted image or its fragments (frames, canvases) into an assemblage of forms and artistic formats. Partum experimented with this strategy in a series of early works Presence/Absence (1965), but in her diploma work her situated critique of painting went beyond ontological questioning of the nature of the medium, or deliberations on the mimetic image and reality, into the field of art infrastructures. She commented on the process of art education (the academy), art distribution (the Foksal Gallery) and the art field’s hierarchical structure and interconnected layers. In this context, the reference to Kantor must be understood as a reference to the particular local tradition of a critique of painting that Partum sought to extend in her practice. Her (mis)use of Kantor’s work consisted of the appropriation of his program of “depicturalization, which Partum

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Murawska-Muthesius, Katarzyna: “In conversation with Nicholas Serota: Emballages at the Whitechapel” in Murawska-Muthesius et al. (eds.) 2011, pp. 63–67, p. 65. Piotrowski 2009, p. 197. Piotrowski 2009, p. 179. In his 1999 book Znaczenia Modernizmu (The Meanings of Modernism), Piotrowski elaborated on the problem of autonomy in the context of Polish culture of the 1970s: “A tension between the avant-garde and contestation [counterculture], in other words, between modernism and critical practice, constituted a major dilemma of Polish culture of the 1970s. It was related to a search for theoretical justification of the autonomy of art in face of totalitarian appropriation of reality through the language of ideology. This defence of the autonomy of art, and specifically the autonomy of artistic language was, in fact, the means to protect the work from reality.” See Piotrowski, Piotr: Znaczenia Modernizmu. W stronę historii sztuki Polskiej po 1945, 2nd ed., Poznań: Dom Wydawniczy Rebis, 2011, pp. 133–4. Szyłak et al. (eds.) 2012/13, p. 42.

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exposed as incoherent and which she transgressed through a critical transformative repetition.62 As a part of the Multipart action, the participant-purchasers of Kantor’s emballages were contractually allowed to do anything with the objects apart from execute a painting or turn the object into a conventional painting. Partum exhibited Kantor’s works precisely as paintings, rebelling against the rules of participation as established by Kantor, therefore not only demythologizing his strategy of the constitution and preservation of particular materiality but also his artistic agency. Kantor’s critical use of objects, which aimed to reveal bureaucratic social rituals, was met by a contextual critique of painting and its institutions in Partum’s intervention, achieved by interfering with the protocols inscribed into another artwork. Partum was not referring to the critical discourse as such but to its agent, proposing an intervention that exceeded the act of constituting “absolute uselessness” or “deriding the uniqueness of a work of art.”63 She indicated that the critique should not be limited merely to the gestures of de-sublimation but rather that it should focus on mapping diverse networks in the art field that influence art value. Thus, she performed a critique that is situated and contextual, which was also symptomatic of the generational change that took place during the 1960s. Kantor belonged to the generation of artists that transgressed the borders between action and the production of objects; Partum belonged to the next generation, which asked questions about the production of value and meaning within the new status quo. Mieczysław Porębski, who was also a friend and collaborator of Kantor and a member of Kantor’s second Kraków Group, wrote in one of his essays from 1963: For many years we have been convinced that the art of painting cannot exist other than by a constant reaching beyond itself. This tendency, or rather necessity to transgress manifests itself in many ways. Art is jealous of thinking and invades its territory. […] The art of our century already wanted to be pure and constructivist, pure and unconscious and also at times, a pile of debris. Always to be something else, never itself. We can call this tension a contemporary metaphor: it does not mean transmitting non-painting into painting but transmitting painting into non-painting; into something that was never a painting.64 Porębski later continues: “A transfer from a painting to a non-painting always resulted in a new structure: meta-painting, which, when it came into existence, always

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Tomasz Załuski points to the fact that every repetition is transformative and consists of two aspects: identification and modification. See: Załuski, Tomasz: Modernizm artystyczny i powtórzenie. Próba reinterpretacji (Modernism and Repetition: An Interpretation), Kraków: Wydawnictwo Universitas, 2012. Nader 2009, p. 349. Porębski 1966, p. 207.

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positioned itself between us and some kind of rest, which has not been included. This created yet another veil.”65 During her diploma defence, Partum performed the double transition: she turned the non-painting into a painting, neutralizing the meaning-producing potential of the metaphor of “non-painting”, and redirected attention away from an ironic and absurd critique of artistic conventions and towards the disposition of “nonpainting”, pointing out Kantor’s signature, his artistic gesture (wrapping) and an institution that promoted his art practice (the Foksal Gallery) as elements that generated the value and the meaning of the work. Partum’s diploma defence was also the first of her idiosyncratic performances based on the tactic of confrontation. The Latin verb confrontare means “to stand in front of”. This “standing in front” became a structural feature of Partum’s artistic actions and her intermedia works in the 1970s and early 1980s, such as Tautological Cinema, Active Poetry (figs. 7-10), poems by ewa, and – most of all – in her feminist performances (figs. 11-12). In these works, Partum “stands in front” not to be seen, but rather to act: to mark, to speak and to defend her position just like in her diploma intervention. This configuration can also be described by the German word Vorstellung, which translates as both “performance/presentation” and “imagination” but literally means “in-front position”. It indicates the placement of an image in front of reality. And indeed, Partum’s works, unlike Kantor’s existential practice, did not aspire to be, to define or to include reality. While Kantor sought to create a “distinct, different reality, whose freedom is not curtailed by the laws of any system of life,”66 Partum developed a form of art based on both performative and visual patterns producing works that “communicate the existence of art,”67 understood as distinctive symbolic practice.68

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Ibid., p. 211. Kantor, Tadeusz: “MANIFESTO” in Teatr, no. 7/886, (1990); translated by Klara Kemp-Welch and reproduced for the first time in: Kemp-Welch, Klara: “Excursions in Communist Reality, Tadeusz Kantor’s Impossible Happenings” in Object, no. 8, 2006, pp, 45–65, p. 60. In her text “Made by Me – The Non-Transmissibility of the Message” (1978) Partum defined the purpose of art as “communicating about the existence of art”. It is interesting to note that Partum’s concept of art resembles contemporary theoretical reformulations of avant-garde practice. According to Zdenka Badovinac, the avant-gardist desire to dissolve art into life has been rewritten, in the current conditions of appropriation of culture by capital, as a postulate to separate art from life – to divide the sphere of art from the sphere of life that became an artwork, to distinguish art from creativity that has been deprived of any individual approach. In such a constellation, the only way to practice art is to use art as art: “Art hast to be used as the pure means, pure mediator in the creation of new kinds of social relations.” See Badovinac, Zdenka: “Using Art as Art” in Aikens, Nick/ Lange, Thomas/ Seijdel, Jorinde/ ten Thije, Steven (eds.): What’s the Use? Constellations of Art, History and Knowledge: A Critical Reader, Amsterdam: Valiz, 2016, 394–405, p. 405.

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The Master’s Dissertation: New Sources of Intellectual Affections Ewa Partum wrote her short master’s dissertation for her Master of Fine Arts degree under the supervision of Mieczysław Porębski, and she also participated in Porębski’s art history seminars. Porębski’s teaching has been recognized as one of the sources of the innovative approaches developed at the Warsaw Academy at the beginning of the 1960s. In his writing and lectures, Porębski introduced a multidisciplinary approach combining linguistics, semiotics and anthropological methodologies, defining a painting as a ritual of communication and identifying art as a form of visual communication.69 At the end of the 1960s, Porębski was primarily interested in structuralism, game and probability theories, and the possibilities of employing mathematics in art analysis. He familiarized art students with the theories of Georges Bataille, Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss and introduced vocabulary that resonates in Partum’s texts and manifestoes such as meta-critique, art as information, and the notion of contemporaneity.70 In her master’s dissertation, entitled New Sources of Intellectual Affections, Partum commented explicitly on the process of the critique of painting that took place within experimental art practices in the 1960s and which was analysed in Porębski’s texts. Partum’s essay is a discursive confirmation of “depicturalization” understood as the process of removing art’s conventions and boundaries between creative disciplines. This process, in Partum’s view, depended on particular infrastructures, and she points again to the Foksal Gallery as its major agent. However, the pure gesture of deconstruction, or, as Partum phrases it, “the idiom of art engaged with its own boundaries”71 , does not exhaust the possibilities of the critique. The artist postulates a new kind of art practice that is indeed anti-conventional but is not restricted to formal exercises: she juxtaposes “executed non-conventional art” (still object-based) with the new format of “ephemeral and documented actions”.72 Partum proposes to resign from the materiality of art in favour of a hybrid cognitive spatio-linguistic formula realized in a field of pure imagination. Certainly inspired by avant-garde tradition, she writes that this kind of thought-provoking practice is not merely an exercise that focuses on the development of artistic language but, on the contrary, aims to influence its audiences, changing the viewer’s/participant’s perception by imposing a new sensitivity that allows for non69 70

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Porębski 1966, p. 211. During his academic career Porębski frequently received international scholarships; scholarships from the French Government to study at the Ecole du Louvre (1949) and Ecole Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris (1960–61) resulted in two important publications: Granica współczesności (The Border of Contemporaneity) (editions:1965, 1989) and the monograph Kubizm (editions: 1966, 1968, 1980, 1986). Frejdlich Partum 1970, p. 1. Ibid.

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conventional ways of seeing which, in the context of state socialism’s rationed normality, can be interpreted as a postulate of social engagement.73 The notion of “imagination” in the centralized spectacle of the socialist state had a particular political and critical resonance, related not only to the possibility of a transgression of the material conditions of everyday life. It also related directly to the problem of freedom, which in the Polish context has been reformulated as the problem of free action performed in the autonomous field of art.74 In the world of post-totalitarian control, art has become a technology of maintaining free imagination as in the actions and happenings realized in the Foksal Gallery by Kantor himself, who “hoped to carry out within reality what he called a new sphere of the imaginary.”75 “Imagination” became a keyword for the neo-avant-garde art practices and theories around 1970. In his text written in 1970 and discussed at various art events in the 70s, the theorist of conceptual art Jerzy Ludwiński writes about four historical stages of neo-avant-garde critique of art, related to objects, space, time and – finally – imagination (which would later followed by the “zero stage” of post-art).76 Referring to this condition, Andrzej Turowski emphasizes the critical dimension of Partum’s “art of the imagination,” interpreting her works as political because they introduce the concept of a free space and therefore directly engage with the conditions of “ideoza – the ideological appropriation of the public sphere.”77 Lukasz Ronduda, in turn, describes Partum’s artistic strategy as aimed at the deconstruction of material, institutional and traditional determinants of art in an attempt to purify the idea of art while at the same time defining the artist’s desire to expand the viewer’s imagination as central for her practice.78 Thus, Partum entered a prevalent discourse on imagination with a strong statement formulated in her master’s dissertation, in which she also considered the history of modernist poetry as a possible genealogy of “art of the imagination”. She

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Originally, the manifesto Obszar zagospodarowany wyobraźnią (A Field Arranged by Imagination) constituted the conclusion of Partum’s dissertation; See Frejdlich Partum 1970, p. 8. On the problem of control of the imagination, see Piotrowski 2011, p. 216. Emphasis added. Kemp-Welch, Klara: Antipolitics in Central European Art: Reticence as Dissidence under Post-Totalitarian Rule 1956–1989, London: I. B. Tauris, 2014, p. 50. Ludwiński, Jerzy: “Sztuka w epoce postartystycznej” in Kozłowski, Jarosław (ed.): Jerzy Ludwiński: Sztuka w epoce postartystycznej i inne teksty, Wrocław: Akademia Sztuk Pięknych, 2009, pp. 57–67. Ludwiński’s text was first published in 1989. Turowski defines core qualities of Partum’s artistic practice as giving a poetic dimension to the political. He writes: “Ewa Partum was thinking about art that would not be reduced to a political slogan, would not be limited to the aesthetic convention of the white walls in a gallery, the printed pages of the book, the illusions of an image, the metaphorical logic of poetry. The artist wanted art of the imagination.” See Szyłak et al. (eds.) 2012/13, pp. 48–49. Ronduda 2009, p. 140.

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mapped sequential forms of visual-linguistic encounters, from the Dadaists’ iconoclastic interventions, through linguistic and structural poetry, to concrete poetry, which replaced an experience of poetry with a precise graphic situation. It was in this context that Partum employed in her text a selection of images: visual poems by Kurt Schwitters, Louis Aragon, Stanislaw Młodożeniec and Stanislaw Dróżdż. Partum also proposed her own work devised as a real-life scenario realized in a scale appropriate for a printed medium: a visual poem created by letter-shaped marks left on the page by the tires of a toy car. The poem read: The greatness of desire is a dash of time from the surroundings of eternity.79 It is interesting to compare this intimate work with the grand gestures of Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage. Their seven-metre-long Automobile Tire Print (1953) aimed at the deconstruction of artistic mythology by undermining the notion of an artwork as a sign of personal expression. Partum, on the other hand, proposed a minimalistic sketch – a scenario that merely replaces the process of writing by hand with a mechanical procedure that leads to new forms of materialization of poetry.80 Another interesting analogy that demonstrates the specificity of Partum’s early linguistic experiments is a comparison between Partum’s work An Area under Poetic Licence (1971) and Environment in Red by Andrzej Matuszewski (1970). In both realizations, the artists activated the participants’ bodies and used an everyday object – a doormat – to arrange a processual artwork. In the first case, Partum scattered cardboard cut-out letters around the floor of a room and visitors distributed them, via the soles of their shoes, into the public space, as the doormat into the room had been smeared with glue. In Matuszewski’s case, the doormat was covered with red paint and the participants were “painting” with their shoes on a white canvas spread on the floor in the exhibition space. Partum’s action, unlike Matuszewski’s, was not another instance of “depicturalization”, but an event in which deconstructed language materialized in the physical space as an object, in the form of cardboard letters. In the case of the visual poem designed in her master’s dissertation, Partum was preoccupied with the process of notation. The artist was exploring new ways of poetry writing, new possibilities of a material basis for poetry understood as technology of the imagination. A considerable portion of her master’s dissertation

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A fragment of a syntax poem published in the volume Tlenek zasobów (Resources’ Oxide), 1969 (self-published), that, alongside Ewa Partum’s poems, included works by Andrzej Partum and Bogdan Chorążuk. The original text reads: wielkość pragnienia jest szczyptą czasu z okolicy wieczności. Partum developed this strategy into de-semantization of language in her poems by ewa series and especially the ongoing work Active Poetry (from 1971), which is discussed in chapter 3.

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was devoted to theorizing this problem of the “distillation” of poetry from its conventional formats and mediums to build a more direct relationship with a reader who becomes a viewer. Partum writes that “arranging a space by imagination is one of the ways to make the intellectual notation more present.”81 While discussing the forms of presentation and distribution of conceptual art that were dominant around 1970, Luiza Nader writes that a page of paper (of a book, catalogue or magazine) became an alternative medium for the presentation of art. The walls of the gallery assumed the function of a notice board presenting art documentation.82 Partum, however, did not consider a piece of paper and the space of a gallery as complementary mediums of art distribution; rather, she was interested in juxtaposing both conventional standards of “intellectual notation” – linguistic and visual. For that reason, she turned to the area of poetry where the “crises” of form had been overcome by the introduction of visuality by the avantgarde poets. Her answer to the “crisis of painting” – and to “the crisis of art” in general – was analogical: she proposed to reach out to other disciplines of creativity and incorporate their protocols to enrich the art field with new possibilities. Thus, Partum brought the discourse on poetry into the field of visual arts to move beyond the pure deconstructive gestures of “depicturalization”. It was not yet a fully elaborated artistic program, but certainly the inception of a positive program that preoccupies itself with “constructing frames for games of imagination.”83

A Field Arranged by Imagination (1970) Partum realized the concept discussed and theoretically outlined in her master’s dissertation a couple of weeks after defending her diploma, as a contribution to the group exhibition Information-Imagination-Action: Anti-Biennale in Galeria Współczesna in Warsaw in June 1970 (figs. 13-15). For the young artist, this was her first opportunity to work within the format of an art exhibition and to express her ideas about an exhibition as a medium. Partum was offered a small, restricted space where she created a spatial arrangement exploring the tension between the phenomenological and discursive understandings of space. In Partum’s realization, the 81 82 83

Partum, Ewa: A Field Arranged by Imagination, 1970, typescript in the Ewa Partum archive. Nader 2009, p. 270. The notion of art as the place of free action was formulated in the opening manifesto of the Foksal Gallery: The Theory of Place, written in 1966 and announced the same year during a seminar in Puławy by Mariusz Tchorek. Luiza Nader observes that within The Theory of Place, a gallery space was defined as autonomous and isolated, “a sudden rupture in the utilitarian perception of the world.” The concept of “the place” departed from the notion of an exhibition and presentation in favour of notions of (free) action and event. See Nader 2009, pp. 234–235. Łukasz Ronduda describes the concept of “the place” as a field of disinterestedness, permanent potentiality and non-determination, i.e. freedom. See Ronduda 2009, p. 12.

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implicit model of a place in Partum’s realization was neither a map, nor an itinerary, but rather an instruction.84 Partum undertook a critical dialogue with both the concept of an exhibition as a place of “disinterested and permanent potentiality”85 and, by referring to the notion of imagination, the concept of an exhibition as a platform for distributing information about artistic facts. Partum introduced to dimmed space three spatial elements made from plasterboard: two cubes and an arch, inside of which she placed verses of her poem. The text was visible through the fissures in the objects, which were illuminated from the inside. In accompanying text, Partum described her work as follows: A surface composed of pages of white paper functions as a basis for geometrical spatial elements, which organize the space and have a particular artistic/haptic impact. A poetic situation is arranged by the exhibited texts. A perception demands intellectual participation, as well as a particular action. Through juxtaposition of the materiality of spatial figures and the affective dimension of poetry, Partum offered a new set of instructions for a mutual dependency between these two conventions of intellectual notation. Her formula corresponded with the tradition of radical functionalism where the space was conceptualized as a possibility of direct action: a regulation of individual or social rhythms. “When the object of design is not an object form or a master plan but a set of instructions for an interplay between variables, the design acquires some of the power and currency of software,” writes Keller Easterling.86 The author relates this concept of the organization of space – a spatial software – with the Deleuzian category of a diagram: “Like the engine of interplay that philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call a diagram, an active form does not represent a single arrangement. It is an ‘abstract machine’ generative of a ‘real yet to come’.”87 Similarly, Partum’s scenario was not about working within two systems of signification – textual and visual – nor about ascertaining that both languages are not transparent. Rather, it was about activating the conventional infrastructures of these systems of significations – an exhibition and a page of paper – by a common operating instruction. The space “organized by imagination” was to be put to work through the viewer’s active body, which activates the viewer’s mind. Thus, the artistic field designated as a sphere of imagination was, on the one hand, related to the physicality of the space and objects and, on the other, it was a metaphorical realm of freedom

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Kwon, Miwon: “One Place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity” in October, vol. 80, Spring, 1997, pp. 85–110. Ronduda 2009, p. 12. Easterling 2014, p. 80. Ibid.

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from any conventions. It was simultaneously a space of embodied perception and a conceptual space of intellectual affections generated by language games.88 Partum’s engagement with language must be seen in the broader perspective of the return of the neo-avant-garde to the Dadaist and Futurist tradition of “framed texts and shaped writings”.89 Interestingly, referring to her linguistic works, Partum refuses to place them within the interpretative framework of visual and concrete poetry. It is Partum’s intention to be positioned exclusively within art discourse as a creator of a “private idiolect”90 – an individualized language system that draws on poetry and inherits from natural language a “collocation and transivity of particular elements”.91 The genre of concrete poetry – with its understanding of text as an instance that does not produce but disseminates meanings, where the author is defined as somebody who does not express herself through language but employs it in a disinterested way, and finally where language is deconstructed through visual and semantic operations – is certainly in proximity with and corresponds to Partum’s conceptual investigations. However, as Dorota Monkiewicz observes, Partum’s linguistic works “were not about the visualisation (i.e. substantialising) of text, which was the crux of concrete poetry, but about notional operations.”92 The character of these operations, according to Monkiewicz, were not limited to “phonological analysis, statistical methods or sentence modules.”93 I propose to look at these operations as spatial and bodily translations, where the space and the body function simultaneously as a discursive site and as a filter.94 In A Field Arranged by Imagination, Partum was concerned not with creating object-words nor with redirecting viewers’ attention to the surface of a text. Instead, Partum was concerned with the process of reviving language through affective connection with a poem. As Piotr Piotrowski has observed, in socialist Poland, the space of everyday life was “reset” by the language of ideology – a hollow language

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Undoubtedly, Partum’s involvement in poetry was influenced by a collaboration with her partner, the avant-garde neo-Dadaist poet Andrzej Partum, who since the late 1950s had carried out his Performances of Words. Andrzej Partum was also one of the first self-publishers in Poland. Sokół, Krzysztof: “You Kissed Livid Yellow Oysters: Poezja konkretna and Fluxus” in Grupa Etc. (eds.): Narracje, Estetyki, Geografie. Fluxus w trzech aktach, Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2014, pp. 41–69, p. 43. Szyłak et al. (eds.) 2012/13, p. 84. Ibid. Szyłak et al. (eds.) 2012/13, p. 78. Ibid., p. 80. I refer to the concept articulated by Naoki Sakai in his text “Translation as a Filter” in Transeuropeennes, International Journal of Critical Thought, 25 March 2010, http://www.transeuropee nnes.org/en/articles/200/Translation_as_a_filter.html.

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that generated fixed ways of thinking and produced a particular set of social attitudes.95 Małgorzata Dawidek Gryglicka argues that in the late 1960s and early 1970s, combining the languages of art and poetry became an instrument in the struggle against the ossified language produced and distributed by the establishment. The artistic appropriation of language was a strategy for recuperation of its value.96 These observations are confirmed in the review by Magdalena Hniedziewicz of Partum’s realization A Field Arranged by Imagination, published in the magazine Kierunki in 1970. Analysing the work, Hniedziewicz writes: A word in our normal life becomes completely depreciated; it attacks our consciousness and makes us build psychological barriers that protect us from its flooding […]. In everyday situations we are immune to the content of words, especially written words, or, we do not perceive the content at all. Ewa Partum locates words inside almost completely closed structures, illuminated from the inside. To see the text, we must make a conscious effort, which makes us aware of the situation and the content of the words.97 If Partum’s engagement with language in the geopolitical context of real socialism is seen as a practice of resistance, it has to be emphasized that language and poetry also functioned in socialist Europe as the means to reconnect with the interrupted avant-garde tradition. An excellent example of such a practice is represented by, for instance, the transregional group Bosch+Bosch, which included Hungarian and Yugoslav artists working together from 1969.98 Bálint Szombathy, Slavko Matković, Katalin Ladik, László Kerekes, László Szalma and Ante Vukov were engaged in concrete poetry, spatial interventions, visual semiology and new comedy99 and centred their activities around journals such as Polja, WOW and Új Symposion. The group referred to local avant-garde practices rooted in experimental poetry and progressive contemporary discourses such as structuralism.100 Emese Kürti emphasizes 95 96 97

Piotrowski 2011, p. 216. Dawidek Gryglicka 2012, p. 96. Hniedziewicz, Magdalena: “Plakaty, Biennale i młodzi artyści” in Kierunki, vol. 25, no. 731, 1970, not paginated. 98 Kürti, Emese: “Transregional Discourses: The Bosch+Bosch Group in the Yugoslav and the Hungarian Neo-Avant-garde” in Kürti, Emese (ed.):Bosch+Bosch, Budapest: acb ResearchLab, 2016, pp. 4–31, p. 17. 99 Ibid., p. 9. 100 The specificity of these strategies relied not on the deterritorialization of language – its transfer from the field of literature to the field of visual art – since this shift was already performed by the previous generation of avant-garde artists, but on the appropriation of the existing tradition as a tool that enabled a critical engagement with art infrastructures. Accordingly, the reference in Partum’sField Arranged by Imagination to the institution of an exhibition, through the notion of organizing/arranging the space, simultaneously constituted a moment of recollection but also a rupture with the dominant system, which always relates to the possi-

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that “with each member of the group, although in different ways, the reconsideration of classical avant-garde practices (Lajos Kássak’s transdisciplinary practice; the visual poetry of the Dimensionist Károly Tamkó Sirató or Stéphane Mallarmé) was manifested in claims for establishing a new linguistic and communication system fundamentally different from the theoretical conception of language.”101 Within A Field Arranged by Imagination, Partum, too, performed a return to the local constructivist tradition of engagement between visual arts and poetry that was especially relevant in the practices of the “a.r.” group (short for artyści rewolucyjni, meaning “revolutionary artists” or “real avant-garde”; its membership included Władysław Strzemiński, Katarzyna Kobro, Henryk Stażewski, Julian Przyboś and Jan Brzękowski).102 In that context, Partum’s dialogue with the heritage of Strzemiński, as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, can be specified as her response to Strzemiński’s work realized within the transdisciplinary a.r. group (1929–36). The ideas articulated in the manifestos of the a.r. group (Komunikaty a.r.), correspond with Partum’s conceptualizations of the relationship between poetry and visual arts that she formulated in her manifesto that accompanied her work: “the word in the field of art assumes new value, it creates new imaging systems.” In their first Komunikat (1930), the a.r. group wrote: a.r. combines fine arts with poetry a.r. propagates art in which every single 2 mm and 3 mm is organized a.r. proclaims poetry, in which every single word is the most important.103 In the same text, poetry is defined as a “unity of vision, condensed into the maximum amount of imaginative allusions and the minimum amount of words.” In the second a.r. Komunikat (1932), rhythm is defined as the organizational unit of poetry. Thus, the essence of poetry was located not in the meaning of particular words or metaphors but in the relations between words: the ways they correspond with each other. a.r. postulated that poetical merit has to be distributed evenly throughout the structure of a poem.104

bility of new forms of articulation. See also Deleuze, Gilles/ Guattari, Félix: Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. 101 Kürti 2016, p. 17. 102 In May 1971, a year after realizing A Field Arranged by Imagination, Ewa Partum received a comprehensive bilingual (Polish and French) publication about the a.r. group published on the occasion of the conference at Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź. See Ojrzyński, Jacek (ed.): Grupa “a.r.” 40-lecie Międzynarodowej Kolekcji Sztuki, Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź 1971. 103 “Komunikat grupy a.r. nr 1” in Strzemiński, Władysław: B=2, Pisma, Wrocław 1975, p. 130, published in one volume with Julian Przyboś’s poetry book, Sponad from 1930 in Cieszyn. 104 “Komunikat grupy a.r. nr 2” in Zagrodzki, Janusz (ed.): Władysław Strzemiński in Memoriam, Łódź: Sztuka Polska, 1998, p. 129.

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This program found its fullest artistic articulation in Julian Przyboś’s Sponad (From Above), a book of linguistic poetry published in 1930 and designed by Strzemiński. Strzeminski’s work on graphic design and fonts inspired by Jan Tschichold’s theory of Die Neue Typographie was based on the principle of visual translation. It was not an illustration of poetry but an interpretation of it. The shape of the letters was subordinated to the “internal shape of the poems”105 and their composition followed the organizing principle of the linguistic system – the rules of “transitivity not efflorescence.”106 In his letters from 1929 to Przyboś, Strzemiński wrote about their interests in constructing poetical form and visual structure in an analogical way; he also referred to relations of quantity as being the common theme of their work.107 Similar concerns with proportions, relations between quantity and measure of space, have been explored in Partum’s manifesto A Field Arranged by Imagination, which she defines in her master’s dissertation as: “the measure of the space and its form. […] The field is a precise designation of the space”. Partum’s syntax poem utilized in the spatial installation, in which the verse as a traditional carrier of meaning was replaced by a semantic particle, also thematized relations of quantity: the swing of a day a warranty of an accord for every moment by an infallible part/for a measure of a sway   it will be only a proximity of measure when the overtaken horizon prefigures one more sky/close to the registration of a dogma   greatness of desire is a grain of time from the surroundings of eternity

105 Kwiatkowski, Jerzy: Świat Poetycki Julian Przybosia, Warsaw 1972, p. 107. Quoted in: Jaworska, Anna: “O Sponad Juliana Przybosia i Władysława Strzemińskiego” in Przestrzenie Teorii, vol. 11, 2009, pp. 97–130, p. 103. 106 Jaworska 2009, p. 127. 107 A letter to Julian Przyboś from 27 July 1929 in: Turowski, Andrzej (ed.): “Listy Władysława Strzemińskiego do Juliana Przybosia z lat 1929–33” in Roczniki Historii Sztuki, vol. 9, 1973, p. 225.

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it makes a feast raises as the sun for a woman108 Partum placed semantic particles of her erotic poem in the physical space structured by geometrical elements that introduced rhythm to the space. Their form alluded to Katarzyna Kobro’s Spatial Compositions, which aimed to compose space by grasping its temporal and spatial rhythms. Also Strzemiński, in his typographical design for particular pages of Sponad, followed the rhythm of the lyrical situations that take place in the poems, separating consecutive poetic events in a way that resulted in merging the visual and the textual – redefining a perceptual experience as a linguistic experience. It is also worth remembering that the topics of “measurable parameters” and “non-corporality” were explored explicitly by Julian Przyboś in his constructivist poetry and essays, which were a source of intellectual affections for the young Ewa Partum.109 In his essay “A Line and a Buzz” (1959), Przyboś specifies the value of poetry by introducing the notion of “inter-wordness” (międzysłowie). He writes: It is not a word that is important. The poetry depends on the currents between the words; it depends on the creative juxtaposition of words and phrases. It is this “inter-wordness” that releases poetry. It is “inter-wordness” that creates a lyrical situation and affections.110 Partum drew on this tradition in A Field Arranged by Imagination, where arranging or composing the space meant regulating relations to achieve “intellectual affection.” In this framework, the arranged field becomes a machine for intellectual sensitization. Partum therefore ascribes to art a social function, describing it in an interview from 1971 as a “non-commercial and disinterested idea that serves the human imagination.”111 In the same interview, responding to a question on the role of contemporary art in expanding the boundaries of consciousness and cognitive abilities, Partum argued that art is complementary to other discourses such 108 A fragment of the same poem was used in Partum’s artistic scenario in her master’s dissertation. See also footnote 79. 109 Considering the genealogy of Partum’s poetic works, Dorota Monkiewicz also emphasizes their correspondence with Proust’s writings, where “the image is a firmer reality” than the “factual experience of [one’s] own eyes”. Referring to Partum’s linguistic inspirations, Monkiewicz also notes that in works that draw on the strategy of repetition, such as Eiffel Tower or the performance un peu, beaucoup, passionement, pas du tout (both 1972), “the point is not the conceptual objectification of the object of art, capturing it in a network of abstract but still numerally measurable parameters, but rather in its non-corporality – in ‘the area organized by imagination’, as the installation by Ewa Partum in 1970 was called.” Szyłak et al. (eds.) 2012/13, p. 78. 110 Jaworska 2009, p. 128. 111 Ekwiński, Andrzej: “Zjazd Marzycieli” in Argumenty, no. 43/698, 1971, p. 8.

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as science and technology. She pointed out the potential of lateral thinking and the different forms of cognition offered by art realized within the imperative of an artistic experiment.112 In her diploma work and accompanying essay, as well as in the subsequent realization A Field Arranged by Imagination, Partum proposed a turn into the field of avant-garde poetry not as the ultimate answer, but as an option, one of many possibilities that allows an artistic process to occur without producing material objects. At the same time, referring to the discourse of poetry enabled the artist to infiltrate the autotelic artistic debate concerned with deconstructive gestures that have lost their radical potential and to move on into the new terrain of artistic experiments. And although Partum’s critique remained confined to art protocols and rituals, it also incorporated the idea of the social mission of art – not as a narrowly understood pragmatism imposed by the political establishment, but as a broader cultural avant-garde project of liberation from conventional ways of perception, and as grounded in the local avant-garde (Strzemiński, Kobro, Przyboś) and neoavant-garde (Kantor) tradition. In that respect, Partum’s early artistic experiments were parallel to Fluxus actions, characterized by an openness for alternative ways of perception.113 In the next section, our picture of artistic relations and Partum’s engagement with existing art infrastructures will be extended to include local and international neo-avant-garde networks, such as the local “event culture”, the network of Polish independent art galleries, mail art and Fluxus networks.

Creating Art Infrastructures: the Galeria Adres (1972–77) “An inertia of Wrocław’s infrastructure gave the impulse to popularise conceptual art in Poland.” – Piotr Piotrowski114   “Self-instituting in art history as well as in institutions is fundamental in order to overcome the paradoxes of institutional critique by offering counter-narratives and counter-structures.” – Alenka Gregorič and Suzana Milevska115

112 113

Ibid. See Higgins, Hannah:Fluxus Experience, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002, pp. 17–36.

Ewa Partum’s Critical Engagement with Art Infrastructures

Art Infrastructure-in-the-Making Two years after receiving her Master of Fine Arts diploma and after a brief experience of working together with her husband, Andrzej Partum, in his newly established Poetry Bureau (Biuro Poezji) in Warsaw,116 Ewa Partum founded her own art gallery in Łódź. The changing status and artistic autonomy of this institution closely reflects the paradoxes of cultural policy in Poland in the 1970s; concurrently, it exemplifies the productive tension that was characteristic for practices of artistic self-instituting in Poland at the time. The decade from 1970 to 1980 was a time in Polish political and cultural history characterized by a relative opening to the West, which fuelled proto-consumerist attitudes, a part of the process described by Immanuel Wallerstein as “the unstoppable process of desatellization” initiated in the Eastern Bloc already in 1956.117 After the political crises of 1968118 and the reshuffle resulting in Edward Gierek becoming the First Secretary of Poland’s ruling communist party (the Polish United Workers’ Party, PZPR),119 new authorities replaced the state’s official Marxist doctrine with a hybrid ideology of national and socialist values, simultaneously opening the Polish market to Western capital. In the broader perspective of economic history, this process can be seen as an element of global capitalism’s restructuring and gradual expansion eastwards.120 As a result of the new cultural politics, artistic culture in the 1970s functioned relatively freely within the official and alternative art infrastructures but was no-

114 115

Piotrowski 2011, p. 161. Gregorič, Alenka/ Milevska, Suzana: “AFTERWORD: A Conversation” in Gregorič et al. (eds.) 2017, pp. 153–161, p. 157. 116 The Biuro Poezji was established in 1971 by Andrzej Partum and was active until 1985; it was located in a tiny one-room flat in the loft of the Hotel Polonia, at Poznańska Street 38 in Warsaw. He collaborated with Polish and international neo-avant-garde artists such as Dick Higgins, Robert Filliou, John Cage, Stanisław Dróżdż, KwieKulik, Jerzy Bereś and many others. 117 Wallerstein, Immanuel: “Connect Whom? Connect What? Why Connect? The Word-System after 1945” in Höller 2012, pp. 120–133, p. 123. 118 The Polish political crisis in 1968, known as March 1968, was a series of protests against the communist government. Paralleling the Prague Spring, the protests were instrumentalized in orchestrating an anti-Semitic (branded anti-Zionist) campaign related to the power struggle within the Polish communist party. The anti-Jewish smear campaign, propaganda, mass mobilization and constant harassment resulted in the emigration of 13,000 citizens with Jewish ancestry. 119 Edward Gierek remained in power for almost ten years, from 20 December 1970 until 06 September 1980. The proto-consumerism of the Gierek decade will be described in more detail in chapter 5. 120 Buck-Morss 2000.

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netheless “limited, controlled and not stimulated.”121 A superficial approach to modernization, the so-called “small stabilization,” determined that “the state was not interested in enforcing any particular vision of the world but was merely concerned with the delineation of forbidden areas.”122 To a certain extent, the state instrumentalized experimental neo-avant-garde culture, using it as evidence of cultural liberalization in Poland.123 An important distinction between different registers of autonomy – social and aesthetic – allows us to conceptualize this in terms of an undeclared transaction: aesthetic autonomy was granted in exchange for social and political obedience. The state preserved an institutional monopoly over artistic life and remained the exclusive supplier of the material means for culture production; this included direct financial support, potboiler jobs, commissions and venues. For that reason Piotr Piotrowski calls it a “dispersed” form of monopoly that maintained the appearance of a plural culture system.124 Consequently, it is not accurate to describe the Polish cultural landscape in the 1970s as two separated circuits of culture: the official circle, which promoted post-thaw modernism, and the nonofficial neo-avant-garde circle, or – as more recently referred to in the context of recent Eastern European scholarship – the first and the second public spheres.125 It would instead be more accurate to map neo-avant-garde practices in the margins of the official culture’s infrastructures: connected with the mainstream through a system of “education, sponsorship and censorship”126 yet actively creating, within this stable system, their own forms of fragile and flexible branches – mostly through the practices of critical appropriation and subversion of resources, institutional formats and languages. Jerzy Ludwiński, both an active participant in the neo-avant-garde movement and its influential theorist, emphasized that the most important tools in stimulating the neo-avant-garde art movement in Poland were meetings, seminars and

Piotrowski, Piotr: Dekada. O Syndromie Lat Siedemdziesiątych, Kulturze Artystycznej, Krytyce, Sztuce – Wybiórczo i Subiektywnie, Poznań: Obserwator, 1991, p. 20. 122 Piotrowski 2005, p. 309. 123 Ibid., p. 288. The problem of the intersection of art and politics will be explored in chapter 5. 124 Ibid., p. 29. 125 See, for instance, the recently published comprehensive joint publication that frames neoavant-garde art from Central-Eastern Europe within the concept of the second public sphere: Cseh-Varga, Katalin/ Czirak, Adam (eds.): Performance Art in the Second Public Sphere: Eventbased Art in Late Socialist Europe, London: Routledge, 2018. 126 Piotrowski also observed that, apart from political reasons, the marginalization of neo-avantgarde art was related to pragmatic problems: a lack of strong (central) art institutions that would promote neo-avant-garde values, as well as the mere incompetence of civil servants whose decisions were shaping the Polish cultural scene. See Piotrowski 1991, p. 20. 121

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“independent galleries” that were located in all parts of the country.127 All these “institutional inventions,” as he called them, constituted a system of art distribution and presentation but also “an educational platform, a system for the exchange of information on new forms of art.”128 These politically indifferent and state-sponsored artistic events, which included large group exhibitions, symposiums and discussions, proliferated in the 1970s and were retrospectively criticised as symptoms of the structural superficiality of the cultural politics of the authorities.129 This criticism echoes a debate on the condition of new art, initiated by the text Pseudo-Avant-Garde, published in 1975 by the founder of the Foksal Gallery, Włodzimierz Borowski.130 This divisive text was a manifestation of the tension related to the generational change and transformations occurring in the art field at that time. Borowski’s text documents institutional conflict, namely, the struggle for a dominant institutional position on the neoavant-garde art map. This map changed rapidly during the 1970s, and Partum’s Galeria Adres constituted one of the numerous new territories marked on it.131 The beginning of the decade saw not only a rapid increase in the number of artist-run art institutions but also the development of a new paradigm of art infrastructure. The monographer of the 1970s Polish art scene Marcin Lachowski writes that the dominant model of the art gallery in 1960 as an “art laboratory” or “autonomous artistic sphere” had been replaced by a type of institution that problematized its own institutional entanglement.132 The model of the art gallery as a phenomenologically understood “place” related to the metaphysics of presence, introduced into the Polish context by the Foksal Gallery in the mid-1960s, was succeeded by various manifestations of “non-places”, one of which being Partum’s gallery. This dynamic institutional formula of the Polish neo-avant-garde scene in the 1970s can be defined by the term “infrastructure-in-the-making”. This concept, proposed by Irit Rogoff, provides an adequate mode for conceptualizing the way in 127

In Piotrowski’s opinion, the geographical decentralization of the Polish neo-avant-garde was a consequence of the conscious cultural politics realized by the government since the mid1960s in order to maintain better control over a dispersed culture production. Piotrowski 2011, p. 219. 128 Ludwiński, Jerzy: “Awangarda awangardy”: in: Kozłowski 2009, pp. 72–77, p. 74. The text was published originally in the periodical Nadodrze, no. 19, 1971. 129 Piotrowski 1991. 130 Borowski, Wiesław: “Pseudoawangarda” in Kultura, no. 12, 1975, pp. 11–12. 131 “What distinguished Poland among the East-Central European countries”, writes Piotrowski, “was the large number of galleries functioning outside of the official exhibition circuit. Although other countries of the region, in particular East Germany, developed similar ‘unofficial’ venues in the 1970s, the Polish ones continued the tradition begun in the previous decade and during the 1970s multiplied to an unprecedented number.”See Piotrowski 2009, p. 295. 132 Lachowski, Marcin: Awangarda wobec instytucji. O sposobach prezencji sztuki w PRL-u, Lublin: Towarzystwo Naukowe Katolickiego Uniwersytetu Lubelskiego Jana Pawła II, 2006, pp. 118–119.

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which art infrastructures functioned, as it captures “the move from properly functioning structures that serve to support something already agreed upon, to the recognition of ever-greater numbers of those who have a stake in what they contribute to or benefit from.”133 In other words, “infrastructure-in-the-making” was constituted through conversations and exchanges of ideas and materials that became more important for the process of art production than the actual physical parameters such as venues or technical support. Although partially infiltrated by the secret police,134 this “infrastructure-in-the-making” was functioning as a relatively free sphere of artistic deliberation. The new institutions, understood as platforms of communication, promoted the idea of a neo-avant-garde art movement rather than the format of a temporary art exhibition.135 Luiza Nader distinguishes four anti-institutional features of the Polish independent art galleries of the 1970s: (1) understanding a gallery as a micro-institution; (2) reducing gallery premises and administrative conditions to a minimum; (3) lack of hierarchy, i.e. an equation of art theory and practice; and (4) the understanding of a gallery as a platform for confronting different opinions and art paradigms – a place for discussions and for the manifestation of artistic attitudes.136 These institutions facilitated new formulas of art characterized by a general tendency to replace the work of art as an object with its documentation: conceptual art, mail art and Fluxus-related projects with their processual character, ephemerality and hybridity; forms combining text, photography, action and body. These artistic practices were easily produced and disseminated within weaker and more ephemeral structures. In that context, acting personas/active agents and personal connections, meetings, discussion, exchanges and gestures became their constitutive elements.

The Artistic Profile of the Galeria Adres in Two Locales Occupying Infrastructure: The Galeria Adres in ZPAP’s Offices (1972–73) Ewa Partum founded the Galeria Adres in the spring of 1972, in a small space (four square metres) located under the steps of the offices of the Association of Polish Artists (ZPAP) in Łódź.137 The “independent art galleries” of the 1970s that existed parallel to the official exhibition system controlled by ZPAP were often created as

133 134 135 136 137

Rogoff 2013. See also footnote 174. See, for instance, Jakimczyk, Jarosław: Najweselszy Barak w Obozie. Tajna policja komunistyczna jako krytyk artystyczny i kurator sztuki w PRL-u, Warsaw: Akces, 2015. Ibid. Nader 2009, p. 148. Ewa Partum moved to her mother’s flat in Łódź in 1971.

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attachments to official cultural institutions such as student clubs, local culture centres, and sometimes offices or factories. The aim of the neo-avant-garde artists was not to undermine the hosting institutions by subversive practices, but rather to exploit their institutional and financial resources without initiating a dialogue. Partum’s strategy was more akin to the contemporary practices described by Rogoff, who has argued that, in regard to socially engaged art, “much of the more activistoriented work within the art field has taken the form of reoccupying infrastructures: using the pre-existing spaces and technologies, budgets and support staff, and recognized audiences in order to do something quite different.”138 Partum embraced the interventional strategy of a direct engagement with the institutional situatedness of the Galeria Adres. The artist chose a very particular fragment of art infrastructure: its soft underbelly, the Association of Polish Artists. She then performed an asignifying rupture by “doing something quite different” to the program and values represented by the association. ZPAP played a central role in the monopolized art system: it regulated the distribution of art by controlling access to exhibition spaces,139 but it also influenced professional lives and the actual living conditions of its artists. The association was responsible for the management of state commissions (the only form of paid employment available to artists) and so-called potboiler jobs (design and art production of political propaganda and, since the 1970s, also works promoting the iconography of success).140 It monopolized resources, compromised the quality of art and protected its members’ privileged position and financial interests. Apart from its regulatory powers, ZPAP had its own hierarchies and objectives: promoting modernist formulas of visual arts and privileging abstract painting and sculpture. Partum thematized the situatedness of the Galeria Adres (under the steps of the ZPAP offices) through her first artistic intervention there, which challenged the integrity of the hosting institution. It consisted of the (undocumented) action of wrapping portraits of ZPAP members, which were exhibited on the walls of the corridor. She supplemented her intervention with the following statement: “The field of artistic action / Instead of representing and representation / (the mutual adoration of each other) / requires an action in a broader sense.”141 This form of intervention was not a self-centred institutional critique nor the sort of critique of the historicity of a gallery/museum concept that could be ap138 139

Rogoff 2013. The centralized system of art distribution consisted of the network of municipal art galleries called Bureaus of Art Exhibitions (BAWs), administered by the Association of Polish Artists (ZPAP). 140 Piotrowski 1991, p. 17. 141 The original text reads: “Pole działania artystycznego / Zamiast reprezentacji i reprezentowania / (wzajemnej adoracji siebie samych) / wymaga działania artystycznego w szerszym sensie” (1972).

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plied to any cultural institution with the disposal of cultural capital. Rather, this was a guerrilla-style intervention that risked destabilizing the Galeria Adres’s own institutional position within the ZPAP organism. This policy, together with the conceptual aesthetics and transnationalism promoted by Partum, eventually led to the eviction of the gallery from the ZPAP building the following year. In the gallery’s founding manifesto, published in Polish and French (150 copies) and sent to institutions and artists in Poland and abroad,142 Partum defined the Galeria Adres as “a place, a situation, an opportunity, an offer, for information, proposition, documentation, speculation, provocation, exposition.”143 In video documentation made by the local branch of the national television broadcaster in 1971/72, the artist emphasized the importance of art theory to her practice.144 She states that the aim of the gallery was to maintain contact with leading art theoreticians such as Andrzej Kostołowski in Poland, László Beke in Hungary and Klaus Groh in West Germany.145 In 1972, Partum self-published Theses on Art 1–17, a seminal text on conceptual art by Andrzej Kostołowski, using ZPAP facilities without requesting permission from the association. Dorota Monkiewicz has emphasized the legendary status of this publication and argues that it remains one of the most important historical texts on conceptual art written in Polish.146 In the mentioned video documentation, Partum defines a paradigmatic shift in art production, namely a departure from the production of objects towards documenting ephemeral forms such as situations, events and artistic facts that take place outside of art institutions. She argues that new forms of art “can assume the form of letters, consignments, prints and informal verbal statements”, following a logic of decentralization that favours replacing the presence of a work of art with its documentation. However, echoing Kostołowski’s “Thesis 9, On an Institution”, Partum insists it is sometimes not possible to bypass an institution or traditional form of exhibition, and for this reason, she undertook the effort of organizing temporary presentations within the framework of the Galeria Adres. Significantly, as much as she initiated and maintained contact with artists and critics around the world, she spent an equal effort on publishing activities and the production of documentation. In this context, it is worth emphasizing the par-

142 At the beginning of the 1970s in Poland, French was still considered an international language but already in 1972, Ewa Partum started using English in the titles of her works and publications. 143 In 1971 Partum published a gallery manifesto that was republished in 1972 in Notatnik Robotnika Sztuki (Notebook of the Art Worker), an art zine published by Galeria EL in Elbląg. 144 Partum, Ewa:Galeria Adres Documentation, TVP Łódź, 1971/72, 3’39”, 8 mm. 145 Klaus Groh’s influential publication (Aktuelle Kunst in Osteuropa, Cologne 1972), did not include Ewa Partum’s practice. 146 Morzuch (ed.) 2015, p. 61.

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ticular status of the “Xerox degree of [artistic] culture”147 in Poland at the time. What might have been a cheap and reductive version of art in the West was a substantial logistical effort and the result of good organizational abilities in socialist Poland, which was characterized by a limited availability of publishing materials and no access to official dissemination. In her negotiations with civil servants who had access to printing equipment, Partum employed the strategy of mocking the socialist Party rhetoric because – according to the official propaganda – the Party supported young and anti-bourgeois artists. She also initiated contact with the local printing house in Łódź run by Julian Ksiażek, and it was only due to his personal decision and support for Partum’s “experimental printing” that it was possible for the Galeria Adres to carry out its publishing activities.148 Publishing catalogues and brochures was not a standard procedure then, even in the official galleries that received supplies of paper.149 Nonetheless, Partum paid attention to the quality of her publishing projects using fine and rare materials, such as chalk overlay paper, that were in permanent shortage at the time. Baudrillard writes in the context of American conceptualism that “the logic of the disappearance of art is, precisely, inversely proportional to that of the production of culture. The ‘Xerox-degree’ of culture in a state of absolute proliferation corresponds to the zero-degree of art. Because there was no “absolute proliferation”150 of culture in the Polish (or, broader Eastern European) context of the 1970s but rather a scarcity of culture, partly related to limitations on the supply of paper for publishing books and magazines, the self-published texts, catalogues, photographs or posters of that period assumed an aura akin to art objects, even before they had been validated by the global art market as such (after 1989). The “homogenisation of material and experience in the ubiquitous display of information”151 did assume in socialist states a very political meaning: self-publishing (samizdat) had a political dimension as an activity associated with civil society and insubordination, even in cases when publications did not have explicit political content. The exhibitions that took place at the Galeria Adres in the ZPAP office in 1972 were mostly related to media-oriented conceptualism. The first of these, Exhibition of One Work (22 May–15 June) by Krzysztof Wodiczko, Włodzimierz Borowski and Jan Świdziński, and the subsequent presentation of Andrzej Dłużniewski’s Jump 147

Baudrillard, Jean: “Towards the Vanishing Point of Art” (1987) in: Baudrillard, Jean:Conspiracy of Art, Manifestos, Interviews, Essays, New York: Semiotext(e), 2005, pp. 98–110, p. 105. 148 Interview with Ewa Partum, 14.07.2016 (Berlin). 149 Morzuch (ed.) 2015, p. 61. 150 Baudrillard Jean: “Beyond the Vanishing Point of Art” (1988), quoted in: Alberro, Alexander: Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003, p. 150. 151 van Tuinen, Sjoerd/ Zepke, Stephen: “Art History after Deleuze and Guattari”, introduction in van Tuinen, Sjoerd/ Zepke, Stephen (eds.): Art History after Deleuze and Guattari, Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2017, pp. 7–20, p. 17.

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(opening on 16 June) were both focused on structural analysis of the photographic medium. In October 1972, Zbigniew Warpechowski presented the installation Nothing, a conceptual work with political overtones that consisted of an empty printing press. The show can be interpreted as thematizing the actual condition of political silencing, the mechanics of self-censorship and the field of resistance – the production of “independent” culture in which the Galeria Adres participated. Warpechowski’s work can be read as a critique of the system, which Dorota Monkiewicz described as “camouflaged deep with the play of signs and meanings, in a way that prevents the political message from being immobilized and subjected to repression.”152 The same year, Partum presented her new conceptual work Eiffel Tower: The Presence of the Height along with photographic documentation of her previous projects realized in the public space (fig. 16). At the beginning of 1973, Partum realized her first international project: in collaboration with Jochen Gerz (Paris), she presented the exhibition Documentation of Recent European Art. The work of Gerz was realized by Partum according to the instructions he sent to her, and it was presented in the public space, in the main pedestrian zone in Łódź. The exhibition included documentation and works by Klaus Groh (Oldenburg), Maurice Roquet (Brussels) and Timm Ulrichs (Hanover) and was advertised in the local daily newspaper, Dziennik Łódzki. This unauthorized international program, together with the unauthorized publishing activities, led the Galeria Adres to be expelled from the ZPAP building.153 Moreover, Partum’s personal, confrontational and provocative intervention that initiated the gallery’s activities positioned the gallery from the outset as an alien body – a parasite within the structure of the official artists’ association. However, ZPAP never openly declared its reasonings for the eviction. On 14 March 1973, a year after the opening of the Galeria Adres, the presidium of the local ward of ZPAP decided to “close” the gallery. This decision was communicated as a recommendation of the general board of ZPAP to stop supporting “the dissemination of activities carried out nationally and also internationally.”154 Piotr Piotrowski has argued that the poor quality of the art produced in the 1970s in Poland was related directly to the system of financing culture because art production’s dependence on state or municipal patronage reinforced attitudes of self-censorship.155 Ewa Partum’s strategy for the future of the Galeria Adres con-

152 153 154

155

Morzuch (ed.) 2015, p. 58. Morzuch (ed.) 2015, p. 62. In the Galeria Adres archive, there are letters of support, initiated by Partum and signed by a considerable number of cultural producers, including art historians and artists related to the neo-avant-garde art movement, such as Józef Robakowski, Wojciech Bruszewski, Paweł Kwiek and Ryszard Waśko. Piotrowski 1991, p. 20.

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sisted of using her own private means, namely her inheritance from her deceased father, and only occasionally seeking out and obtaining the public funding that the socialist state offered for “independent” culture initiatives. The Galeria Adres was therefore neither structurally nor financially dependent on the official system. For this reason, it was not possible for the gallery to be closed down by the authorities.

“My gallery is a home” (1973–77) Instead of closing the Galeria Adres, as was recommended by the ZPAP presidium, Ewa Partum decided to increase her own level of financial support of the project and relocated the gallery to her mother’s flat in Rybna street, where she was living at the time. In a subsequent statement, preserved as a handwritten note in the Ewa Partum archive, Partum appropriated a new infrastructural context and declared the Galeria Adres to be an integral part of the private apartment. Partum, who shared the three-bedroom Rybna 7d flat with her mother and daughter, designated one room as a venue for the gallery activities. The artist emphasized, however, that she was not writing her gallery into the tradition of the art salon, but rather seeking a sphere in which to explore the coexistence of life and art, private and public. She concluded her statement by declaring, “my gallery is a home.”156 In this new statement, Partum thematized and explored the relationship between art and the everyday, where “the everyday” was conceptualized rather as a mode of being rather than as a form of activity. The Fluxus project of dissolving art into life or learning to cherish aesthetic pleasure in the everyday was not at the core of this aesthetic program. According to Partum’s artistic statement, “the everyday” is merely a sphere incompatible with bureaucracy and management. In other words, existing within the sphere of the everyday meant that the gallery was independent from the authorities, invisible in existing institutional terms, free of existing rules. Following Foucault, Luiza Nader proposed interpreting independent art spaces in Poland in the 1970s as “heterotopias”, spaces of otherness not set in opposition to the public sphere but excluded from it as qualitatively different – as areas for the negotiation of meanings and the pluralism of definitions.157 Partum defined the otherness of the Galeria Adres explicitly as a presupposed freedom from the system of bureaucracy and management. By exclaiming “my gallery is a home”, the artist linked the gallery with the notion of individual, but not necessarily aesthetic, experience.158 Once relocated to Partum’s apartment, the gallery was re-inscribed

156 157 158

“Moja galeria jest domem”, a handwritten and undated note in the Ewa Partum archive. Nader 2009, p. 187. A discourse on the privacy of aesthetic experience was introduced into Polish conceptual art practices much later, in exhibitions such as Private Views (1978) or Individual Mythologies

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within the discourse of privacy and experience that reinforces a notion of freedom from official doctrine. Piotrowski has also argued that the independent art galleries of the 1970s produced artistic meaning through the play of contexts.159 In the case of Partum’s gallery, this strategy assumed a particular and ambivalent form. On the one hand, the artist positioned her gallery from the outset as an institution thematizing its situatedness, an idea also reflected in the gallery’s name (meaning “Address Gallery”). On the other hand, the Galeria Adres was conceptualized not as a particular locale, but rather as an event that manifested itself through the strong visual identification Partum designed for it. Partum explored the notion of the art gallery as an idea, or as a brand, publishing documentation and organizing exhibitions by the Galeria Adres that took place outside of the flat on Rybna Street, in public places related to international exchange. Partum organized Endre Tót’s 1973 exhibition 10 Questions at the Continental Club, and in 1974, Maurice Roquet’s Entre Ensemble at the Press and Book Club, both in Łódź. The logo of the Galeria Adres, which appeared on all related print materials, was designed, published and produced by Partum to be a mark that affiliated particular objects and documents with the Galeria Adres as an institution. In this way, the change of location and context from the ZPAP headquarters to Partum’s flat did not affect the gallery’s artistic program, which continued to foster the neo-avant-garde art movement on the local, regional and transnational levels.

The Map of Transnational Networks The recent histories of East-Central European neo-avant-garde art often do not reconstruct the binary system of the official and non-official art scenes, but reconceptualize the neo-avant-garde movement in terms of transnational networks.160 The idea of a network is not merely a metaphor or a catchphrase imposed onto the past; it mirrors a morphology of the neo-avant-garde movement itself, privileging mail art as its generative apparatus. Mail art in East-Central Europe represented more than an extreme form of institutional critique.161 It was the infrastructure that enabled international reconnection: a means to perforate the political and geographical borders of the post(1980), where art has been defined a sphere of privacy in accordance with the individual character of aesthetic experience. See Nader 2009, p. 182. 159 Piotrowski 2011, p. 211. 160 See, for instance, Kemp-Welch, Klara: Networking the Bloc: Experimental Art in Eastern Europe 1965–1981, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019. 161 For more about mail art in East-Central Europe see Röder, Kornelia: Topologie und Funktionsweise des Netzwerks der Mail Art: Seine spezifische Bedeutung für Osteuropa von 1960 bis 1989, Co-

Ewa Partum’s Critical Engagement with Art Infrastructures

Yalta order. Mail art, created and institutionalized by Ray Johnson’s New York Correspondence School, became popularised in Poland at the beginning of the 1970s. Its local formula combined Johnson’s personal, private and poetic approach and discourse together with the implicit network approach of Fluxus, reinterpreting both correspondence and network art within the practices of conceptualism.162 Partum launched the Galeria Adres at a time when mail art was partially institutionalized in the West and had already had a short exhibition history.163 Through her gallery, Partum placed her practice in this existing infrastructure in order to articulate and negotiate her own position within the transnational network. The very name of Partum’s gallery, “Address”, suggests a direct and intentional connection with the mail art scene. Also, Partum has retrospectively emphasized that mail art was the essential context for how the Galeria Adres functioned.164 In the 1971/72 film documentation, she explicitly describes the mail art program of the gallery, stating: “the main activity of the gallery takes place in the sphere of correspondence and in initiating and preserving contact with non-commercial artists from other countries.”165 Although the gallery presented a heterogeneous program and served multiple functions, it was nevertheless conceived primarily as a means to enable participation in the international art movement through the mail art network. Thus, the Galeria Adres was a working platform, enabling connections to artists in East-Central Europe and in the West working within a paradigm of ephemeral, conceptual and process-based art. This dimension of Partum’s activity manifested itself in the form of a customized/amended world map, which hung on the wall in the Galeria Adres space in Partum’s apartment.166 Describing the way in which this map was created, Gislind Nabakowski writes that Partum “would mark the home cities of the artists with whom she had established contacts […]. Lines connected all these places with Łódź, located in the centre of Poland on the map. A conceptual network, a topography of interconnected lines and paths of communication resulted.”167 It was therefore a map of the circulation of materials, information, knowledges and art documentation that travelled into and out of the Galeria Adres.

logne: Salon-Verlag, 2008. English summary available at: https://www.lomholtmailartarchiv e.dk/texts/kornelia-roeder-topology-and-functionality-of-the-mail-art-network. 162 Piotrowski 2011. 163 In 1970, Ray Johnson and Marcia Tucker organized the first significant museum exhibition of mail art, which took place at the Whitney Museum in New York. 164 Interview with Ewa Partum, 14.07.2016 (Berlin). 165 Partum, Ewa: Galeria Adres Documentation, TVP Łódź, 1971/72. 166 This map was recently reconstructed by the artists for the exhibition in Warsaw 2019. See footnote 73. 167 Nabakowski 2001, pp. 130–131.

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In her essay critiquing the superficiality of the internationalist discourse on conceptual art produced in Western centres, Sophie Cras argues that those who defended the notion that conceptual art existed in every country “actually perceived not what existed but only what circulated, and most specifically, what circulated from, or towards, a well-defined centre.”168 She points out that maps were misused as a means to visualize false geographies and suggests that claims of internationalism or decentring “only hid – or even justified – persisting geographical inequalities,”169 whereas “the maps were used at the time as visual statements, to either build or deconstruct this idea of international decentring through circulation.” In some cases, the author continues, maps clearly partake in the general discourse on internationalism in vogue at the time: “Maps may, for instance, illustrate magazines and exhibition catalogues as a mere signal of their geographic ambitions.”170 The Galeria Adres map functioned as both a signal of Partum’s geographic ambitions and proof of the gallery’s internationalism, but it fulfilled a different function than the maps employed by the proponents of dematerialized art located in the Western centres. It visually constructed an aspirational or false geography assigning the Galeria Adres to a place at the centre of the art world, therefore serving the purpose – defined by Piotrowski after Dipesh Chakrabarty – of provincializing the West.171 It constituted a virtual network of art that circulated from and to the Galeria Adres, and in that sense, it did not simply duplicate actual socioeconomic geography but instead re-inscribed relative artistic geography over it. Significantly, Partum created her international network with a balanced approach between East and West, not only providing a meeting place but also an opportunity for international co-production between East-Central European artists. Many scholars have emphasized the lack of direct connections between artists from East-Central Europe, as well as their lack of mutual interests. Elena Filipovic, for instance, spoke about the inherent difficulty this situation causes for the historicization of Eastern European neo-avant-garde art practices, beyond inscribing them into the narration of Western European art. She emphasizes that “when you speak to that older generation of artists, they often don’t know the work of other artists

168 Cras, Sophie: “Global Conceptualism? Cartographies of Conceptual Art in Pursuit of Decentering” in Kaufmann et al. (eds.) 2015, pp. 167–181, p. 168. 169 Ibid. 170 Ibid. p. 176. 171 Piotrowski, in his postulate to provincialize Western art history, as expressed in various writings of his (Piotrowski 2005, 2009, 2011), refers to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s concept of provincializing Europe. See Chakrabarty 2000.

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of their own generation who were working outside their immediate local context, because there was so little communication between some socialist countries.”172 The absence of official channels for interregional communication and exchange was not merely a matter of choice, or lack of interest between the artists, but also a result of the cultural politics of the socialist states. Due to the relatively liberal cultural politics of the Polish government in the 1970s, Poland had a special function in this context: it became a place of regional reconnection, a space where EastCentral European artists came to familiarize themselves with the contemporary art production of the region.173 Still, as Włodzimierz Borowski has argued, the authorities wanted Poland to be internationally recognized as a free country with a vibrant cultural scene, yet they viewed networks of artistic cooperation across the Eastern bloc as a potential risk, as such organizations and affiliations could develop into politically subversive structures.174 In the Galeria Adres archive there are several examples of this “potentially subversive” communication and cooperation between East-Central European artists, as made possible via the infrastructure of the gallery. One of these is a letter from J. H. Kocman, who acknowledges that Czechoslovak artists Jiří Valoch, Gerta Pospíšilová, Jozef Jankovič, Martin Heřmanský and himself, who exhibited their works at the Galeria Adres in May 1974, saw documentation of the Hungarian artist Endre Tót’s works in Partum’s gallery. Another example of such an exchange is a photograph from the action realized together by Endre Tót and Ewa Partum.175 Moreover, the Galeria Adres presented its archive at international exhibitions of mail art, distributing knowledge about regional art practices. In the years 1973–77, the gallery took part in mail art initiatives, publications and exhibitions worldwide, including: Omaha Flow Systems (by Ken Friedman) at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha (1973); W.O.R.K.S.: “A Conceptographic Reading of Our World Thermometer” in Calgary (1973), the Last International Exhibition of Mail Art ’75 at the Galería Arte Nuevo in Buenos Aires (1975), An International Cyclopaedia of Plans and Occurrences at the Anderson Gallery in Richmond, Virginia (1973) and

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Filipovic, Elena/ Janevski, Ana/ Macel, Christine/ Petrešin-Bachelez, Nataša/ Pospiszyl, Tomáš/ Verwoert, Jan: “On Potential Histories, Discontinuity and Politics of Desire: A Conversation; London, 17 October 2008” in Macel et al. (eds.) 2010, pp. 23–25, p. 24. Piotr Piotrowski, referring to László Beke’s text The Hidden Dimensions of the Hungarian Art of the 1960s (1991), writes that according to Beke, a visit to Poland was a part of the education of the Eastern European intellectual. See Piotrowski 2005, p. 263. Kemp-Welch, Klara: “InternationalRelationsattheFoksalGallery”in Jachuła, Michał/ Wesołowska, Justyna (eds.): Galeria Foksal 1966–2016, Warsaw: Mazowiecki Instytut Kultury, 2016, pp. 68–80. Other evidence mentioned by Dorota Monkiewicz includes work made as a proposal for the Galeria Adres realized by Partum together with Gábor Tóth during the International Festival of Visual Text in Galeria Remont in Warsaw in 1977. See Morzuch (ed.) 2015, p. 63.

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Spatial Poem in Osaka (1975). In 1977, the Galeria Adres also participated in AntiDocumenta in Kassel (1977), organized by Wolfgang Bickhard-Bottinelli.176 The artistic map of the Galeria Adres was therefore further developed by marking trajectories of the circulation of its archive. Partum’s networking efforts and the position of her gallery were recognized both locally and internationally as early as 1973. That year, the gallery was invited to participate in a presentation conceptualized as a platform of exchange between independent galleries in Poland; the Galeria Adres participated alongside nineteen others in the first Survey of Documentation of Independent Galleries (Przegląd dokumetacji galerii niezależnych) at Galeria Repassage, which took place on 29 October in Warsaw and was initiated by the prominent neo-avant-garde artist Włodzimierz Borowski in order to strengthen mutual contacts and initiate collaborations. In March 1975, the Galeria Adres was listed in a Galeria Remont publication, based on research by Jan Wojciechowski, which focused on the phenomenon of independent galleries in Poland (1971–74) and was published on the occasion of a symposium titled The Situation of Contemporary Art. Dorota Monkiewicz points to the fact that, apart from the Galeria Adres, only two other listed institutions were involved in the international exchange, namely Galeria Akumulatory 2 (with exhibitions of Petr Štembera and Janos Urban) and Galeria Remont (exhibitions of Klaus Groh, Attslai Gábor, Tom J. Gramse, Goran Trbuljak and Petr Štembera).177 Significantly, in the section about relevant publications, Andrzej Kostołowski’s Theses on Art 1–17, published by the Galeria Adres, is listed. Documentation from the Galeria Adres archive (works of Richard Kostelanetz and Ken Friedman) was also shown during the International Festival of Students of Art Schools F-ART (IV Plener Gdański SZSP “FA-Art”) in Gdańsk in 1975, where Ewa Partum also presented her work Art of Contemplation (1975) and films from her Tautological Cinema (1973–74) series. The subsequent initiative that aimed to bring Polish independent art galleries together, CDN Presentations of Young Art (CDN Prezentacje Sztuki Młodych), was organized by the art critic and artist Jan Stanisław Wojciechowski. It took place in the summer of 1977 (02 June–31 July) in the temporary buildings under the Poniatowski Bridge in Warsaw, with the Galeria Adres participating alongside twentyone other galleries and six artistic groups. The event was accompanied by a research publication authored by Bożena Stokłosa, representing one of the first systematic

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Information about the Galeria Adres appeared in the 1970s in the following foreign publications: a Sheldon Williams article in Art and Artists, August 1972, p. 47; Vargen no. 5 and no. 6, 1975 by Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and also in an artistic project by Robin Crozier (Portrait Project, January 1976). Dorota Monkiewicz also emphasizes that this publication was quite reductive and that there were important omissions in the list of independent galleries. Morzuch (ed.) 2015 p. 56.

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attempts to analyse the phenomenon of independent art galleries in Poland. Stokłosa created a typology of local independent galleries and proposed the category of a “mail gallery” (galeria poczty), defining it as the most predominant format at the time. Stokłosa also employed the notions of a “photo-medial gallery” and “artistic group gallery” to describe different manifestations of artist-run ventures.178 Another local framework for distributing Galeria Adres documentation was the visual poetry network. In April 1976, Partum participated in the Visual Poetry Seminar organized by the Gallery of Recent Art in Wrocław. A year later, at the International Congress of Visual Text, organized by Andrzej Partum in Galeria Remont (04 February 1977), Ewa Partum presented two projects realized at the Galeria Adres in which she collaborated with other artists: photographs taken from the camera performance Exercises with Endre Tót, which was a part of the Conceptual Exercises project (1972), and A Proposal for the Adres Gallery with Gábor Tóth (1977). From a review written by Andrzej Partum, we can also extrapolate that Ewa Partum presented her Tautological Cinema series.179 To achieve her primary goal of connecting and communicating with international artists and galleries, Partum worked together with an international team of assistants who were capable of conducting correspondence in English and French: artist Ewa Zając, international students from the Film School in Łódź Kader Lagtaa and Roland Paret, and Partum’s long-time collaborator, the translator Marek Żychski. The artist created her address database and collected exchange material from a wide range of channels and by exploiting many opportunities. She gathered addresses from international press clubs, where she could research international magazines and newspapers. Partum also personally approached critics and curators visiting Łódź on the occasion of the ICOM (International Council of Museums) in Muzeum Sztuki in October 1972, where she, together with Ewa Zając, distributed Galeria Adres catalogues and leaflets with the following English-language messages: Galeria Adres will accept with great pleasure any of your publications. Ewa Partum. Galeria Adres will be grateful for any exchange material. Undoubtedly, Partum gained access to many important contacts thanks to collaboration with her husband, Andrzej Partum, who is considered a central figure in

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Stokłosa, Bożena: “Galerie autorskie. Przegląd koncepcji” in Banachowska, Katarzyna/ Wojciechowski, Jan Stanisław (eds.): CDN, Studia artystyczne, vol. 2, Warsaw: Młodzieżowa Agencja Wydawnicza, 1980, pp. 38–51. Partum, Andrzej: “Miedzynarodowy Kongres Tekstu Wizualnego” in Linia. Jednodniówka warszawskiego środowiska studentów, February 1977, p. 10.

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the Polish mail art scene. Through his Poetry Bureau, Andrzej Partum came in contact with major international mail art and Fluxus artists, including Dick Higgins and Robert Filliou. His connections also exceeded the West–East binary: in one of the photos from Andrzej Partum’s own archive, dated 1973, we can see Ewa Partum engaged in a conversation with Jorge Glusberg, who was an important agent in reconnecting the Eastern European and South American neo-avant-garde scenes. Glusberg and Klaus Groh are identified by Klara Kemp-Welch and Cristina Freire as major art networkers who travelled to Eastern Europe during the 1970s.180 After a year of intensive work reaching out to the international neo-avantgarde, Ewa Partum started receiving correspondence herself. In 1973, Ken Friedman, a self-appointed director of Fluxus West who had an important role in initiating contact with Eastern European artists, sent Ewa Partum a “Confidential International Contact List of the Arts”, which included over three thousand addresses of artists, gallerists and art collectors.181 In the same year, Partum received a parcel from Dick Higgins’s Something Else Press, with a selection of books, including Notations by John Cage.182 In other words, by 1973 the Galeria Adres became 180 Freire, Cristina/ Kemp-Welch, Klara: “Artists’ Networks in Latin America and Eastern Europe”, introduction in ARTMargins, vol. 1, June–October 2012, pp. 3–13. 181 In his essay that first appeared in print in Art and Artists, London (August 1973), Ken Friedman speaks about the content and meaning of the mailing list: “A special source of information is The International Contact List of the Arts. Sections have been published since 1966 by Fluxus West. The first major edition was released in 1972 by Fluxus West in cooperation with Image Bank, Trans Canadian Fluxus Ltd., and others in Canada. The new revised edition will appear in the Fall of 1973 by Fluxus West and Tom Ockerse Editions, of Providence, Rhode Island, including over 1,500 additions, changes, corrections, and updates of information. The list contains over 3,000 names and addresses of individuals around the world who are involved in the arts and has been used successfully by FILE MAGAZINE of Toronto for their list (originally taken directly from the list), later amended by General Idea – and in projects such as Davi Det Hompson’s Cyclopaedia or recent promotionals by FlashArt. A large number of pirates or reprints of the list are in circulation, some bearing the imprint of Fluxus West and others not. Several of these reprints have received favourable review in major art magazines, sadly lacking the credit to Fluxus West for originating and consistently developing and sharing the list since 1966.” See Friedman, Ken: “Flowing in Omaha” available online at University of Iowa Archives: http://wayback.archive-it.org/823/20120517183816/http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/ atca/subjugated/five_14.htm. 182 Something Else Press books ran in editions ranging from 1,000 to 3,000 copies. They circulated in Europe and the United States, spreading Fluxus ideas. Partum received the following books (listed here in the same order as on the list attached to Higgins’s letter): Geoffrey Hendricks, Ring Piece (1973); Richard Kostelanetz, Breakthrough Fictioneers (1973); George Brecht and Robert Filliou, Games at the Cedilla, or the Cedilla Takes Off (1967); John Cage, Notations (1969); Alison Knowles, Tomas Schmit, Benjamin Patterson, Philip Corner, The Four Suits (1965); Dick Higgins, A Book About Love & War & Death (1972); Dick Higgins, foew&ombwhnw (1969); Richard Huelsenbeck, DaDa Almanach (1966); Toby MacLennan, 1 Walked out of 2 and Forgot It (1972); Bern Porter, I’ve Left (1971); Daniel Spoerri, An Anecdoted Topography of Chance

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one of the many points of contact for Fluxus artists (Dick Higgins, Ben Vautier, Eric Andersen, Robert Filliou) who had been working together with artists from Warsaw, Budapest and Prague since the mid-1960s.183 Until the mid-1970s, however, the contact between Polish neo-avant-garde and international Fluxus artists was merely occasional, and the first Fluxus Festival in Poland did not take place until 1977, in Jarosław Kozłowski’s Galeria Akumulatory 2 in Poznań. Partum’s interest in Fluxus repeated a common pattern in the relationship between Fluxus and East-Central European neo-avant-garde artists. On the one hand, Fluxus artists who travelled to Eastern Europe, such as Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, Emmett Williams, Eric Andersen or Ben Vautier, were determined to collaborate with Eastern European artists. The initial transnational idea of Fluxus formulated by George Maciunas was to create transnational structures connecting the Western and Eastern artistic scenes by spreading Fluxus ideas through private spheres, organizing events in apartments and other non-public meeting places. This notion of communication, circulation and the exchange of materials that become information was closely related to the principles of mail art, which constituted another example of “infrastructures-in-the-making”. On the other hand, as Petra Stegmann has argued, Eastern European artists were not interested “in adopting Fluxus as an artistic practice or in defining themselves as Fluxus artists”.184 Local artists perceived Fluxus rather “as an enrichment and inspiration for their own artistic work.”185 Hungarian artist György Galántai, commenting on his own engagement with Fluxus in 1970, explains that “one of the interesting lessons […] was to see the difference between Fluxus and Concept Art as the difference between the left and right hemispheres of the human brain. Fluxus, (1966); Daniel Spoerri, The Mythological Travels of a Modern Sir John Mandeville, Being an Account of the Magic, Meatballs and other Monkey Business Peculiar to the Sojourn of Daniel Spoerri on the Isle of Symi, Together with Divers Speculations Thereon (1970); Gertrude Stein, Matisse, Picasso and Gertrude Stein (1972); Wolf Vostell and Dick Higgins, Fantastic Architecture (1970); Emmett Williams, An Anthology of Concrete Poetry (1967); John Cage, Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse); Manifestoes (Öyvind Fahlström, Robert Filliou, John Giorno, Al Hansen, Dick Higgins, Allan Kaprow, Alison Knowles, Nam June Paik, Diter Rot, Jerome Rothenberg, Wolf Vostell, Robert Watts, and Emmett Williams) (1966); Diter Rot, A Look into a Blue Tide (1967). 183 In Poland, an intensive point of contact with Fluxus in the mid-1960s was the Zamek Group (Jerzy Ludwiński, Włodzimierz Borowski, Tytus Dzieduszycki, Jan Ziemski and Ryszard Kiwerski), followed by the Foksal Gallery (from 1966), the Poetry Bureau (1971), Galeria Akumulatory 2 (1972) and from the mid-1970s also Galeria Piwna 20/26 and Riviera-Remont in Warsaw and Galeria Potocka in Kraków. 184 Stegmann, Petra: “Fluxus East” in Stegmann, Petra (ed.): Fluxus East: Fluxus Networks in Central Eastern Europe, exh. cat., Berlin, 27 September–4 November 2007, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin 2007, pp. 5–52, p. 39. 185 Ibid.

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with its identification with life, is irrational, emotional and surreal. Concept, on the other hand, is rational, constructive, and minimalist.”186 Likewise, Ewa Partum, who was working with the conceptual idiom herself, was interested merely in the new possibilities of exchange, meetings and contacts – not in adopting Fluxus attitudes,187 strategies and ideas of the everyday. In 1977, Partum used yet another medium, the art festival, to invigorate international exchange. In the Galeria Adres, she organized and hosted the Film as Idea, Film as Film, Film as Art International Film Festival. This relatively well documented event provides a good insight into the working tools, conditions, practices and geographical ambitions of the Galeria Adres. The film festival was advertised in 1977 on the first page of Klaus Groh’s IAC (International Artists’ Cooperation),188 a publication distributed in thirty-one countries – in “Western and Eastern Europe, South and North America, Australia, Japan and South Africa.”189 Effectively, twenty artists from nine countries participated in the festival: four from France (Robert Filliou, Ben Vautier, Pierre Garnier, Jochen Gerz), two from the United States (Richard Kostelanetz, Roger Cutforth), two from Switzerland (Muriel Olesen, Gerald Minkoff), two from Italy (Maurizio Nannucci, Guglielmo Achille Cavellini), one from Great Britain (Robin Crozier), one from Denmark (Eric Andersen), one from West Germany (Christian Wapler), one from Hungary (Somogyi György) and six from Poland (Marek Konieczny, Piotr Olszański, Józef Robakowski, Ewa Partum, Zbigniew Warpechowski, Marek Żychski). The Galeria Adres sent two types of invitations, with the first version asking artists to provide prepared material (films); however, in the second invitation, the gallery asked only for film scenarios and instructions. Dorota Monkiewicz has argued that some Western European artists did not want to provide films without the necessary insurance, and that therefore a call for scenarios remained the only way to stage the event.190 Here, we can also recall Piotrowski’s remark that the poor condition of Poland’s arts infrastructure (in this case related to professional art transport and art insurance) stimulated the development of conceptual practices in the country.191 Nevertheless, the idea articulated in the festival concept was to place the medium of film within a conceptual discourse and to redefine it as simply another 186 Galántai, György: “Fluxus+Conceptual=Contextual” in Stegmann (ed.) 2007, pp. 141–156, pp. 152–153. 187 See Smith, Owen F.: Fluxus: The History of an Attitude, San Diego, CA: San Diego State University Press, 1998. 188 Groh, Klaus: IAC International Artists Cooperation, no. 25, 1977. 189 Ibid. 190 Monkiewicz points to the letters from Ben Vautier, concerned about the lack of art insurance. See Morzuch (ed.) 2015, pp. 64–65. 191 Piotrowski 2011, p. 161.

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form of notation of conceptual art. The Galeria Adres acted both as a producer and a commissioner of works. According to a review published in the Polish press, two films in the festival were created based on received instructions, and other works were exhibited either as short scenarios or photos and drawings.192 The 1977 film festival is considered to be the last event associated with the Galeria Adres. In the chronologies of her artistic practice published in Self-Identification (1981) and in the Galerie Wewerka catalogues (1983), Partum indicates 1972–77 as the years the Galeria Adres was active. In 8–12 May 1978, Partum participated alongside sixty-five other Eastern and Western European artists in the mail art and visual poetry exhibition Concret 78 at the Maximal Art Gallery in Poznań, organized and run by the art critic and scholar Grzegorz Dziamski. In the list of exhibition participants, she was indeed registered as “Ewa Partum” and not “Galeria Adres”. A year later, Partum was invited by Dziamski to the exhibition Art As Revolt of Culture, which was devoted to the “contemporary problems of art and artists functioning in the industrial systems of today.”193 In other words, by the end of the 1970s the mail art network and discourse on communication was replaced by new concerns. In 1979 Partum moved to Warsaw full-time, taking with her the Galeria Adres archive and continuing to maintain artistic contacts while initiating new ones. Still in November 1979, Partum was working on the international distribution of Galeria Adres publications. In a letter to Printed Matter Inc. from 20 November 1979, Partum wrote: I include here some examples of books printed by my gallery […]. I may send you 20–50 copies of each one for circulation. […] The Theses on Art by Andrzej Kostołowski was the very first conceptual textbook in this country written by a leading Polish art theoretician and critic. That book was originally printed in 600 copies. My own books were issued in very limited editions of 20–100 copies only.194 In the same year, Partum wrote twice to Richard Demarco, who had initiated their contact by sending her his gallery catalogue195 and subsequently inviting her to contribute to the publication Edinburgh Arts 1979 and participate in Edinburgh Arts 1980. Unfortunately, Partum’s efforts to receive a passport were unsuccessful and mail/post remained her only means of participation. Moreover, at the beginning

Szwajewska, Monika: “Możliwości filmu, jako sztuki” in Odra, no. 6, 1978, Wrocław, pp. 107–108. 193 Dziamski, Grzegorz: Bulletin Maximal Art, Poznań, November 1978. 194 Ewa Partum, A Letter to Printed Matter Inc., 20.11.1978, typescript in the Ewa Partum archive. 195 Richard Demarco Gallery, Catalogue to the 1966–1976 10th anniversary exhibition of paintings, sculpture, drawings and prints acquired by Scottish public and private collections through the gallery and a ten-year record of the gallery’s activities, Edinburgh 1976. 192

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of the 1980s, Partum’s interests moved away from engaging within international networks towards organizing feminist presentations in various venues in Poland. In an undated letter to Demarco, Partum explains that in recent years her artistic attention had “turned to the feminine problem.”196 To understand the specificity of the institutional strategy of the Galeria Adres with regard to international networks, it is interesting to compare Partum’s strategy with NET, a parallel initiative launched the same year (1972) by the artist Jarosław Kozłowski and theoretician Andrzej Kostołowski. Unlike the Galeria Adres, with its strong authorial presence and intensive publishing and archiving activities, NET was conceived as a decentralized network, and its founders deliberately refused authorial licence. Its authors proposed that NET could be copied and used in all possible ways by anybody who participated in the network.197 NET functioned merely as a system of art circulation outside of art institutions; events related to the network took place in various venues, which were private (flats) or semi-private (studios). On the contrary, the Galeria Adres was defined by Partum as part of her own private life. Its locale, the artist’s flat, provided a framework for situating Partum’s activities at the centre of this infrastructure-in-the making. At the same time, the map created by Partum’s activities, and exhibited in the gallery, situated the Galeria Adres in the centre of an international network. This double centring was the opposite of NET’s idea of decentring. In other words, instead of reinventing the very concept of a network for the production and distribution of art as Kozłowski and Kostołowski did, Partum articulated and negotiated her own position within the fragments of existing networks, devising the Galeria Adres as an apparatus of acceleration and expansion in particular directions.

196 Ewa Partum, a letter to Richard Demarco, undated typescript in the Ewa Partum archive. 197 The NET manifesto (1972), signed by Jarosław Kozłowski and Andrzej Kostołowski, read: - a NET is open and uncommercial - points of the NET are: private homes, studios and any other places, where art propositions are articulated - these propositions are presented to persons interested in them - propositions may be accompanied by editions in form of prints, tapes, slides, photographs, books, films, handbills, letters, manuscripts etc. - NET has no central point and any coordination - points of the NET can be anywhere - all points of the NET are in contact among themselves and exchange concepts, propositions, projects, and other forms of articulation - the idea of NET is not new and in this moment it stops to be an authorized idea - NET can be arbitrarily developed and copied A photograph of an original typescript of the NET manifesto is available in: Kemp-Welch, Klara, “NET: An Open Proposition”, e-flux journal, no. 98, February 2019, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/98/256870/net-an-open-proposition/.

Ewa Partum’s Critical Engagement with Art Infrastructures

Appropriating Art Infrastructure In the 1971/72 video documentation, Partum defined her strategy as follows: “I decided to employ the working methods of an art institution – namely an art gallery – and incorporate these methods into my own artistic practice.”198 Partum’s words recall the notion of authorship, which, according to Helmut Drexler, “is only to be found with the ‘how’: how you deal with material, how you make use of it […]. But also, how you work within institutional structures, how you can make use of the different institutional layers.”199 Partum’s “how” consisted of appropriating the infrastructure of an art gallery into her own artistic practice, reframing the practices of contacting, organizing, producing, archiving and publishing as part of her own artistic work. In other words, the institution of the gallery became yet another medium used by the artist “to communicate the existence of art.”200 This approach corresponds with a contemporary disillusioned perspective on the art system that maintains that “the position of an artist does not seem to differ too much from the position of an institution.”201 Partum made use of the Galeria Adres to position her own artistic practice onto the map of local and international networks. She used the gallery as the infrastructure for the distribution of her ephemeral poems by ewa, which were devised as mail art carrying evocative or poetic titles: new horizon is a wave (1972), I am happy to make love with the envelope (1973), or Tatry (1974) and for organizing solo exhibitions and performances that sometimes thematized her central position within the gallery’s structure. Partum’s action Presence, which took place from 17 November to 17 December 1972, consisted of the artist being present in the gallery: the gallery was open exclusively when Partum was there, which was indeed how the gallery functioned. Ewa Tatar interprets this work as: “a woman artist’s response to the notions of space and the institution, as a proposal to perceive space through the aspect of the body’s materiality – one of the main elements of the subjective construction.” Continuing, she states: “In terms of conceptual art, Partum’s strategy can be described as breaking with the institution as something that sanctions the object of art and

198 Partum, Ewa: Galeria Adres Documentation, TVP Łódź, 1971/72. 199 Drexler, Helmut/ Foster, Hal: “On Collecting Critical Art: Helmut Drexler in Conversation with Hal Foster” in Folie, Sabine/ Holz, Georgia/ Lafer, Ilse (eds.): A Book about Collecting and Exhibiting Conceptual Art after Conceptual Art. Cologne: Walther König, 2013, pp. 245–255, p. 255. 200 I refer to the opening line of Ewa Partum’s lecture “Made by Me – The Non-Transmissibility of the Message”, 1978. 201 Gregorič 2017, p. 18.

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breaking with the object of art itself as an artwork.”202 Within the framework of Partum’s self-centred strategy, it can also be interpreted as a performative act of her artistic self-identification with the institution. In the winter of 1974 Partum realized the performance Change, which was announced on its invitation as a “retrospective exhibition”. In this case, the retrospective notion was related to Partum’s professional self-retrospection and, of course, to the Change performance itself, which thematizes looking back across time. The artist looked back at her previous artistic practice and announced a break from the current conceptual paradigm by undertaking new (feminist) objectives.203 In her text “Made by Me – The Non-Transmissibility of the Message”, written in 1978, Partum specified her strategy as a “double idea”: creating self and creating art. It was precisely the infrastructure of the Galeria Adres that enabled Partum to create herself as a conceptual artist.204 During the exhibition Made by Me, which took place in the Galeria Adres in 1973, Partum showed a series of her early poems (1971) that registered the dualism of “making art” and “making self”. In her first poems by ewa, the imprints of Partum’s lips are complemented by the word ART; another early poem, my touch is the touch of a woman, has been described as “a first sign of Partum’s female self-identification which Partum would be exploring further in her feminist works.”205 The existence of the gallery influenced and shaped possible formats of Partum’s artistic practice. In a letter to Richard Demarco she wrote: I am including a list of exhibitions in which I took part, even though the nature of my work does not always fit into the framework of the exhibitions. Very often, my works were displayed on the streets, in the centre of town, in places that are not assigned for display purposes. In view of the insufficient number of galleries with a profile that would suit my interests, I was forced to open a private gallery in the city of Lodz at the beginning of 1972. It existed until 1977 under the name Adres.206 Dorota Monkiewicz points out that Partum’s early public interventions and her actions outside of art institutions realized before the opening of the Galeria Adres were not adequately visible within artistic and cultural circles. The reason for the 202 Tatar, Ewa Małgorzata: “The Legality of Space – Plein Air Installation by Ewa Partum” in Parallel Chronologies: An Archive of East European Exhibitions (no date), http://tranzit.org/exhibitionarch ive/author/ewa-malgorzata-tatar/. 203 Partum’s feminist self-identification will be discussed in chapter 4. 204 Aneta Szyłak has argued that in Partum’s practice, the realities of art and life permeate each other, and she interprets this conjunction as a consequence of Partum’s idea that “to create art also means to create an artist”. Szyłak et al. (eds.) 2012/13, p. 10. 205 Stepken 2001, p. 19. 206 Ewa Partum, a letter to Richard Demarco, undated, in the Ewa Partum archive.

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lack of reception was, according to Monkiewicz, the absence of knowledge about new artistic practices. Therefore, Partum decided to launch the institution devised as a platform for knowledge production and used it as a means to stimulate the new art movement that she co-created.207 But what is even more important, the infrastructure of the Galeria Adres enabled Partum to appear in and perform an active role as a moderator/organizer of the neo-avant-garde art movement in Poland, and not merely as a recipient of the ideas distributed within the network, or as an artist dependent on (male) organizers. The Galeria Adres became an apparatus of self-historicization in the chosen transnational context. Through the activities of the gallery, Partum placed her practice within a fragment of the transnational network of the neo-avant-garde. This context was produced through the gallery’s publishing, production and exhibition activities and has been preserved in the form of the Galeria Adres archive.

Re-entering the Professional Art World: Engaging with the Curatorial in the Context of Redistribution after 1989 New Frame: Reconnection of Ewa Partum’s Artistic Practice with Art Infrastructures after 1989 The year 1989 marks a symbolic moment of the reconnection of Ewa Partum’s practice with national and international art infrastructures. More precisely, it was the beginning of this process, which accelerated after Partum’s first retrospective exhibition in Karlsruhe in 2001. Until 1989, Ewa Partum’s works were not included in any art historical narratives produced outside of Poland. Partum’s relocation to West Berlin on 26 November 1982 rendered her art temporarily invisible or absent from both the regional and international art scenes. Undoubtedly, the relative visibility of Partum’s practice in Poland throughout the 1970s was due to her active engagement and participation in the existing networks and events, as well as the creation of the Galeria Adres, which allowed her a flexibility that enabled her to become many types of cultural producer (artist, curator, publisher). Once she emigrated from Poland, where she has been actively negotiating her position, her practice there became gradually marginalized. In spite of Partum’s personal connection with the prominent German artist Wolf Vostell – whom she met in Warsaw in 1976208 and visited during her initial

207 Monkiewicz 2015, p. 14. 208 In 1976 in Galeria Studio in Warsaw, sixteen silk-screen prints and films by Wolf Vostell were shown. The presentation was censored and only available for a small group of viewers. Vostell and his wife Mercedes attended the presentation and they both met Ewa Partum.

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trip to West Berlin in February 1981 – Partum had limited access to existing art infrastructures and networks in West Berlin. In the anonymous note that accompanied reproductions of photographic documentation from Partum’s performance Pirouette, realized in Galerie Dialog in 1984, published in APEX Zeitschrift für Kunst, Kultur, Fotografie, Partum’s position was described as follows: Although she shared the 2nd prize with benôit maubrey (=astonishing) in the “Overcoming the WALL by Painting Over the WALL” competition, ewa partum is also rather on the margins of the Berlin art scene. the resourceful polish conceptualist had a more positive position “over there”, where she carried out pioneering actions.209 At the same time, a troubled and ambivalent relationship with the local feminist art scene, which initially embraced Partum’s work deprived the artist the possibility of distributing her work through feminist art infrastructures.210 In 1983 in the May issue of the feminist magazine Courage, Partum was still described as an artist living in Poland.211 In the period between 1982 and 1989, Partum exhibited her works only on six occasions in West Berlin’s institutions, which she accessed through personal affiliations. Introduced by the author Christian Skrzyposzek212 to gallerist Michael Wewerka, Partum was invited to arrange a solo exhibition (Arbeiten von Ewa Partum. 1970–1980) at Galerie Wewerka. During this week-long exhibition, which opened on 10 April 1983,213 Partum realized three performances (Hommage á Solidarność, Stupid Woman V, Hair Concert) and met with the audience to talk about her works. This presentation was accompanied by a slideshow that enabled her to present works not included in the exhibition. Partum also participated twice in group exhibitions at the Haus am Checkpoint Charlie (in 1982 and 1984), run and curated by Rainer Hildebrandt, whom Partum met through Vostell. In 1982, she presented a framed

209 “Ewa Partum: Pirouette” inAPEX: Zeitschrift für Kunst, Kultur, Fotografie, no. 39, 1985, pp. 104–105. The original quotation: “Obwohl sie sich beim Wettbewerb ‘Überwindung der MAUER durch Bemalung der MAUER’ den 2ten preis mit benôit maubrey (=erstaunlich) teilte, ist auch ewa partum eher randerscheinung der berliner kunstszene. eine positivere position hatte die einfallsreiche polnische konzeptionalistin sicherlich ‘drüben’, wo sie wegweisende aktionen durchführte.” 210 This problem will be discussed in chapter 4. 211 “Künstlerinnen: Ewa Partum” in Courage. Aktuelle Frauenzeitung, no. 5, 1983, pp. 56–57. 212 Christian Skrzyposzek (1943–1999) was the author of two political novels: Wolna Trybuna (1985) and Mojra (1996). 213 Galerie M. J. Wewerka opened in Berlin in 1973 and focussed on a presentation of artists related to Fluxus, object and concept art, pop art and performance. The exhibitions were often accompanied by lectures, concerts and performances. The Partum exhibition was also accompanied by a slide show and artist talk.

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object combining documentation from her performances and her signature, and in 1984 she received the second prize in a competition – as mentioned in the letter quoted above – for a work entitled Himmel West, Himmel Ost (Sky West, Sky East) that incorporated drawing and photography. That same year, Partum realized Pirouette in Galerie Dialog (1984) run by Alexander Baumgartner. In 1988, during a group presentation at the pop-up gallery of Gudrun Schulz in Barockhaus at Checkpoint Charlie, Partum realized the performance Von Subjekt zu Kunstobjekt (From Subject to Object of Art) and a year later at the Abstract Book festival, a performance Gedankenakt ist ein Kunstakt (The Act of Thinking Is an Act of Art). Partum also initiated a collaboration with the Frauenmuseum in Bonn, participating in the ART Trade Fair in 1985. In Berlin, she was also exploring open public spaces such as the Hohenzollernkanal in Spandau and the Olivaer Platz, where she arranged the action Thought Concert, 1984 (fig. 21) and a text installation based on excerpts of Goethe’s Faust (1987). During this decade, Partum received some financial support from municipal institutions, such as a grant from the Berlin Senate in 1987 that she used to finance her text installation Faust at the Olivaer Platz. A purchase of eleven poems by ewa by the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin was also a significant support: in 1983, the Neue Nationalgalerie acquired six poems by ewa and, in 1989, the Kupferstichkabinett acquired five others. It cannot be underestimated that the art idiom in which Partum operated at the time (conceptual art, performance and action) was becoming gradually less popular in Berlin and, consequently, its institutional network was shrinking. Galerie René Block, which promoted international neo-avant-garde, conceptual and performance art, closed in 1979, and this made space for initiatives that stimulated “the return of painting” (Neue Wilde) and promoted conventional gallery-based art practices. For these reasons, the distribution of Partum’s practice in the 1980s, in contrast with the previous decade, was relatively limited, although the artist, outside the system of public and official art infrastructures, did not cease producing new works. Consequently, the way in which Partum practised art in the years 1982 to 1989 resembled the conservative formula of an artist shut in his or her studio, detached from the world: an artist who does not network and does not travel. It was also the situation of an artist who seldom presents her works and therefore “does not allow the spectacle to penetrate her cognitive and emotional competencies.”214 Maybe this explains why Partum’s works produced in West Berlin in the 1980s were strongly related both to biography and to privacy, sometimes even intimacy, and they often referred to Partum’s earlier works (fig. 22). Her disconnected practice functioned in the closed system of interconnection with its own archive and history. Still, the artist occasionally tried to respond to the new tendencies in the art 214 Graw, Isabelle: “Beyond Institutional Critique” in Welchman (ed.) 2006, p. 142.

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world, such as expressive painterly gestures and object production. For instance, the physical space in which the artist scattered cardboard cut-out letters in Poland in the 1970s (Active Poetry) was replaced in the 1980s by collectable white canvases encrusted with black letterset letters (Text Installation). On the other hand, Partum’s works produced in Poland between 1965 and 1980 became materially dislocated (as she brought her archive with her to Berlin), but they were dislocated in other ways as well; lacking institutional framework and interpretational context, they were still suspended in the local art infrastructures of Poland.215 This type of situatedness, i.e. virtual dislocation, determined that sometimes photographic documentation from her actions was transformed into senseless bricolages, hybrid forms that did not accurately represent earlier works, as in the case of an object presented in 1982 at the Haus am Checkpoint Charlie – a montage in a wooden frame that combined documentation from the performances Hommage á Solidarność (1981), Self-Identification (1980) and the artist’s signature. Speaking about the marginalization or marginality of Partum’s practice in West Berlin, we cannot omit the fact that the situation of the speaking subject in Partum’s works changed when the artist became an emigrant. Also a number of reviews and texts on Partum’s art published in the local Berlin press emphasized her status as an emigrant artist.216 Partum herself admits that the initial interest in her work was related more to the political interests of Berlin’s audiences in the Solidarity movement and the state suppression of political opposition in Poland217 than in conceptual or feminist art.218 A full-page advert for Partum’s show at Galerie Wewerka published in the Berliner Kunstblatt in 1983 clearly plays on these political sentiments and allusions, presenting an image of Partum’s face from the Tautological Cinema series, with her sealed mouth juxtaposed with a headline taken from the title of another of her works: Hommage á Solidarność.219 The transformation of context (socioeconomic, historical and political) forced Partum to translate some of her previous critical gestures into new formulas that were more comprehensible for West Berlin audiences. Despite these translational

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For more about a “virtual dislocation” see Rogoff, Irit: “Geo-cultures: Circuits of Arts and Globalization” in Seijdel, Jorinde (ed.) “The Art Biennial as a Global Phenomenon”, special issue of Open, no. 16, 2009, pp. 120–128, www.onlineopen.org/geo-cultures. See, for instance, Müller, Karoline: “Ewa Partum” in Berliner Kunstblatt, no. 62, 1989, p. 51. The Independent Self-Governing Trade Union “Solidarity” (Niezależny Samorządny Związek Zawodowy “Solidarność”) was the first independent union in a Warsaw Pact country to be recognised by the state. It was a broad anti-bureaucratic social movement using methods of civil resistance to advance the causes of workers’ rights and social change. Spieker, Sven: “Artists from the Former Eastern Europe in Berlin: Ewa Partum” in ARTMargins online, 30 October 2017, http://www.artmargins.com/index.php/interviews-sp-837925570/806 -ewa-partum. Berliner Kunstblatt, no. 38, 1983, p. 81.

Ewa Partum’s Critical Engagement with Art Infrastructures

efforts and the previously mentioned solo exhibitions and presentations, Partum’s practice remained relatively unknown, and the artist herself remained isolated. Thus, until the end of the 1980s, Partum was not invited by any public art institution to participate in a group exhibition. Consequently, after 1989, the first stage of Western reception of Partum’s work followed the general trajectory of Western reception of the Eastern European neo-avant-garde. Mateusz Kapustka points to the prevalent set of stereotypes and clichés of Eastern European artists; he observes that “Eastern European artists appear almost entirely as children of the revolution […]. According to these West-friendly stereotypes, the means to achieve this higher reflective reality is utopia, absurd irony or mystical escapism.”220 An example of the implementation of such a narrative was the exhibition Bakunin in Dresden: Polish Art Today, curated by Ewa Mikina and Jolanta Ciesielska in 1990 at the Kunstpalast Düsseldorf and the Kampnagelfabrik in Hamburg.221 The exhibition, one of the first group exhibitions of Polish art in Germany after 1989, aimed to diagnose and present the state of Polish contemporary art and prepare it for the Western gaze. Bakunin in Dresden was based on an identitarian narrative (Polish artists as dissidents and rebels) that followed the stereotypes defined in Kapustka’s essay. The curatorial narration emphasized the anarchistic, revolutionary potential of Polish art. A struggle against the system was identified as a decisive context for artistic practices in Poland.222 Partum’s works shown and reproduced in the catalogue included East–West Shadow, a work realized not in socialist Poland but in West Berlin in 1984.223 This exhibition marked the first stage of the international distribution of neoavant-garde art from the former Eastern Bloc, characterized by a strategy of bolstering essentialism – in this case, the self-presentation of Polish artists as vital critical forces from the East. Another step in the redistribution was based on the

220 Kapustka, Mateusz: “Neighbouring Alterity: Eastern European Art and Global Art Studies” in Kunsttexte.de E-Journal für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte, no. 3, 2014, p. 2, https://doi.org/10.18452/7 561. 221 Bakunin in Dresden: Polnische Kunst Heute, 15 September–15 October 1990 in Düsseldorf and 03 November–09 December 1990 in Hamburg. The exhibition was organized by the Polish Ministry of Culture in collaboration with the Polish Embassy in Berlin and the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa) Stuttgart. 222 Ewa Partum’s work, including a series of photographs titled West–Ost Schatten realized in West Berlin in 1984, was presented along the works by KwieKulik, the Orange Alternative, Jacek Rydecki, Jerzy Truszkowski, Teresa Murak and Jaroslaw Modzelewski. 223 On the occasion of the exhibition, Ewa Partum realized a symbolically loaded camera performance Taking off the Red Coat (1990), which was conceived as a private action and not as a part of the exhibition. This work however fits perfectly within the curatorial narrative on the political agenda of Polish art.

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practice of adding new names to mainstream art-historical narratives. In the context of Partum’s practice, an example of such a legitimizing intervention was not only Partum’s 2001 retrospective at the Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe but also the series of exhibitions that introduced Partum’s practice as a part of the international neo-avant-garde. On the one hand, these exhibitions ossified the Western genealogy of the neo-avant-garde, focusing on the 1960s and 1970s as the moment of transition from modernism to postmodernism. On the other hand, within these shows, curators also explored and exposed local critical discourses and specific artistic positions, reconstructing the processes that formatted the plural neoavant-garde art scenes while at the same time positioning selected works within broader theoretical and historical frameworks such as global conceptualism, new media or global feminisms (so-called feminaissance exhibitions), which will be discussed in chapter 4. Partum’s works have been incorporated into art history within the framework of the exhibitions Europe-wide: Art from the 1960s at the Städtische Galerie in Karlsruhe (2002); An Adventure in Conceptual Art at the Generali Foundation in Vienna (2005); First Generation: Art and Image in Motion 1963–1986 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid (2006); and more recently, A Bigger Splash: Painting after Performance at Tate Modern (2012). At the same time, a set of exhibitions explored the effects of the political turn that took place within art history in 1989. Partum’s works from the 1970s were included in exhibitions such as Collected Views from East or West at the Generali Foundation in Vienna (2005); Performing the East at the Salzburger Kunstverein (2008); and 1989: The End of History or The Beginning of the Future? at the Kunsthalle Wien (2009/10). Another format of exhibitions reflected upon the methodologies of art history and art history of socialist Europe “marked by repression, emigration and missing archives”224 questioning the paradigm of linear art history and its canons. A series of exhibitions introduced concepts such as fragmented history, disrupted histories, non-linear history, performed history, spatial history and retroactive art history, also focusing on specific artistic interventions in art history, including self-archivization. A paradigmatic example of such presentations was the exhibition Promises of the Past: A Discontinuous History of Art in Former Eastern Europe, curated by Joanna Mytkowska and Christine Macel in 2010 at the Centre Pompidou, which featured Partum’s works among realizations by Marina Abramović, Yael Bartana, Tacita Dean, Liam Gillick, Sanja Iveković, Július Koller, Jiří Kovanda, David Maljković, Marjetica Potrč and Monika Sosnowska. A subsequent series of exhibitions problematized universal art history by focusing on “margin-to-margin” relations

224 Ronduda, Łukasz/ Zeyfan, Florian: “Introduction” in Ronduda, Łukasz/ Zeyfan, Florian (eds.): 1,2,3... Avant-Gardes: Film/Art Between Experiment and Archive, Warsaw: Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, and Berlin: Sternberg, 2007, pp. 8–11, p. 9.

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and omitting over-represented centres, giving rise to multiple geopolitical interconnections, as seen in the exhibition Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1960–1980 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2016), in which Ewa Partum’s work Autobiography (1971/74) was shown. These research exhibitions were paralleled by the distribution of Partum’s practice within a series of contemporary art biennales and other recurrent exhibitions, such as the 18th Biennale of Sydney, curated by Catherine de Zegher and Gerald McMaster (2012); La Triennale Intense Proximity at the Palais de Tokyo, curated by Okwui Enwezor (2012); or the 14th Lyon Biennale, curated by Emma Lavigne (2017). In every phase of the redistribution, mediation by the curators – not only as exhibition organizers but often as first interpreters and context providers – proved to be the only possible way to remove the shadow of Yalta, which had given an obstructed view of East-Central European art to outside observers. In the first stage of redistribution, the objective was to incorporate certain artistic propositions into circulation and grant a better visibility to previously marginalized artists. In subsequent phases, the central issue these exhibitions addressed was the production of art histories and meanings of works of art from the margins. Since the 1970s, “binding references that existed in terms of aesthetics, epistemology, theory and science have developed […] into new paths,”225 but also a constellation of art infrastructures has changed. In the 1970s Partum operated as an artist-as-curator, running, creating and appropriating art infrastructures of display and distribution. In the subsequent decades, the flexible position of the artist within a net of art infrastructures has been shared, or even replaced, by the curator that, as described by Boris Groys is a “radically secularised artist.”226 Groys argues that the curatorial position is a place from which art objects and their meanings are administered, mostly by the medium of an exhibition. The curator physically situates and contextualizes a work of art, which means that he or she relativizes it and returns it to history. Thus, Groys argues, the curator transforms an autonomous object into an illustration and makes its value dependent on narration. For these reasons, curators became a target for critique by the contemporary artist, who perceives them as “the embodiment of the dark, dangerous side of the exhibiting practice” and the “destructive doppelganger of the artist.”227

225 Morzuch Maria: “Edward Krasiński: The Blue Lightness of Being” in Schauer, Lucie (ed.): Polnische Avantgarde 1930–1990, exh. cat., Berlin, Staatliche Kunsthalle, 28 November 1992–31 January 1993, Berlin 1993, pp. 85–88, p. 85. In her text about Krasiński’s practice, Maria Morzuch argues that after many decades of activity, neo-avant-garde artists can see their works from a different contemporary perspective. 226 Groys 2008, p. 49. According to Groys, curators do everything that artists do, but have no mystical power of transforming object into art. See Groys 2008, p. 43. 227 Ibid., p. 45.

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For Partum, a visually rigid conceptual artwork, understood as a space of inscription of the artist’s intention and the realization of a pre-determined concept, does not require any further mediation.228 This way of thinking about art after a deep postmodern experience has been rendered as reductive and essentialist. The exclusive territory where the artwork can be perceived as autonomous and selfsufficient is, according to Groys, the art market, as “[a]rtworks circulating on the market are singled out, decontextualized, uncurated.”229 In his reflections on the curator’s position, Groys points to the etymology of the word “curator”, writing about its relation to the verb “to cure” and interpreting it through a Derridean pharmakon: simultaneously a remedy and a poison, something that cures and at the same time makes you weak. In the case of Partum’s disjointed, displaced, raptured and hybrid practice, suspended partially within Galeria Adres infrastructures and West Berlin’s isolation, between the autotelic artistic discourse and the paradigm of social engagement, curating can be understood as an attempt to remove aporias through the act of contextualization and cohering.

Polish Female Avant-Garde Artists Have Their Big Chance Only as Corpses (1992) Partum’s first attempt to perform an intervention at the intersection of the artistic and curatorial competences within the new constellation of art infrastructures was her work Polish Female Avant-Garde Artists Have Their Big Chance as Corpses, realized on 28 November 1992 outside the Staatliche Kunsthalle Berlin. The work engaged with the phenomena of granting institutional visibility, distributing visibility and legitimizing artists through the curatorial practice of selecting and naming. It considered how art history is produced via the institutional complex as a practice of exclusion. In her work, Ewa Partum intervened in the Polnische Avantgarde 1930–1990 exhibition, organized by the Neue Berliner Kunstverein in a cooperation with Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Berlin from November 1992 to January 1993.230 The exhibition, which in its title claimed to represent the Polish avantgarde, was a careful selection of works of twelve modern and contemporary Polish artists – including only one female artist (Katarzyna Kobro) – working in the idiom of non-figurative abstract art. In the curatorial statement, Lucie Schauer wrote that the selected artworks represented different traditions and tendencies within

228 Majewska 2014. 229 Groys 2008, p. 45. 230 Participating artists included: Miroslaw Bałka, Marek Chlanda, Stefan Gierowski, Zbigniew Gostomski, Katarzyna Kobro, Jarosław Kozłowski, Edward Krasiński, Roman Opałka, Kajetan Sosnowski, Henryk Stażewski, Władysław Strzemiński and Ryszard Winiarski.

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the field of nonfigurative work231 and that they were chosen to visualize intellectual concepts of and connections to the local tradition of unizm (a theory of “unism”) in painting.232 Within this narrative, the Polish avant-garde represented the lost link between Russian constructivism and the Western avant-garde. Difficulties in accessing Eastern European cultural material, caused by Cold War divisions, were identified as the reasons for distortions in and breaks from a universal art history. In her introductory essay, Schauer traced a history of the Polish avant-garde, emphasizing its local traditions and originality while, at the same time, pointing towards correlations between the Polish avant-garde and European avant-garde. Overall, the exhibition attempted to search for a new European identity by presenting the Eastern roots of certain Western tendencies. The exhibition was used as a means of redefining bilateral perceptions and relations: it allowed Polish artists to present themselves in the context of a transnational tradition and it allowed German viewers to acknowledge that they share the same cultural sphere as their Polish neighbours. Through her intervention, Ewa Partum revealed a hierarchy of emancipation at moments of historical emergency, at the times when so-called universal values such as freedom or equality are being negotiated, which often leads to discrimination against minorities and their particular interests. Partum pointed to those who were not being legitimized: namely, female artists. At the opening of the exhibition, accompanied by several assistants, Partum distributed black envelopes with the following text: Polnische Avantgarde Künstlerinnen haben ihre grosse Chance – erst als Leiche, Ewa Partum. This action was Partum’s response to the expulsion of art made by women out of the category of the avant-garde. Partum reacted to the relegation of female artists from art history, utilizing and quoting feminist guerrilla tactics: relocating the Guerrilla Girls’ 1989 question “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?”, Partum added that they also have to be dead. Her performative intervention aimed at feminist delegitimization of curatorial agency, undermining the curators’ capacity to select artists, i.e. to write art history. Language (lexis) and its connection with action (praxis) constituted the actual field of Partum’s artistic intervention. In it, Partum used a form of letter, constructing a genealogical connection with her mail art practice. Considering that Ewa Partum had always aimed at photographic or film documentation of her actions and performances, the fact that this action was not photographed can be interpreted as meaningful. The only remaining trace of the action is a selection of black envelopes and letters distributed during the intervention.

231

Schauer, Lucie: “Jaroslaw Kozłowski: The Eye of the Artist” in Schauer (ed.) 1993, pp. 118–122, p. 118. 232 Schauer, Lucie/ Roters, Eberhard: “Introduction” in Schauer (ed.) 1993, pp. 9–10, p. 9.

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It is important to emphasize that Ewa Partum’s works could not have been included in the Polnische Avantgarde show concept, as its curators referred to a particular post-constructivist genealogy and the exhibition was focused on non-figurative painting and sculpture. Moreover, Partum, as an artist who operated within a certain contextual vacuum in the West in the 1980s, could not have suddenly been brought back as a “Polish artist” to legitimize a narrative about cultural European unity interrupted by the political divides of the Cold War. Therefore, Partum’s action cannot be interpreted merely as a critique of the omission of her own art from the show. It was instead a response, in the form of a letter, to the language employed by the curators – to the utterance performed within the title of the exhibition. Partum used an affective language and format, addressing particular members of the audience. She deployed black condolence letters written in German, escaping the mediation of a curatorial narrative. The words utilized by Partum constituted an action in the sense developed by Hannah Arendt, who refers to the Greek notion of “action” as finding the right words in the right moment.233 Partum’s action was a critique of the statement that demarcated boundaries and created hierarchies, effectively defining the artistic avant-garde as an (almost) exclusively male phenomenon. To support this reading, it is worth mentioning that Partum did not react in a similar way in 1991 to the (also male-dominated) exhibition in the Künstlerhaus Bethanien entitled Positionen Polen, as that presentation did not seek to perform the art history of the avant-garde. Partum’s action exceeded, or rather, expanded on the concept of institutional critique. Alexander Alberro proposes a very broad definition of institutional critique, distinguishing between interventions that aim to improve the workings of the institution and those that refer to the entire system of framing culture.234 In contrast, in her polemical text, Isabelle Graw proposes distinguishing intervention as situated institutional critique performed either from the inside or from the outside of the art system.235 Ewa Partum’s work does not fit into either of these paradigms, remaining both engaged in the institionaldiscourse and dialectically enmeshed within art infrastructures. Partum chose an extra-institutional form of distribution for her work (letters were given directly to members of the public) but an institutional form of its presentation (she presented her work in the public gallery during the opening of the exhibition), thus she interfered merely with the protocols of art infrastructures – bypassing curatorial processes and undermining the

233 Arendt, Hannah:The Human Condition (1958), 2nd ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, p. 48. 234 Alberro, Alexander: “Institutions, Critique, and Institutional Critique” in Alberro, Alexander/ Stimson, Blake (eds.): Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2009, pp. 2–19. 235 Graw, Isabelle: “Beyond Institutional Critique” in Welchman (ed.) 2006, p. 143.

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curators’ decisions to include and exclude artists in art institutions but not undermining the very institution of the museum/gallery as a place of art’s presentation and as the apparatus of art history. Partum’s action undermined the institutional authority of the curator and can be described as counter-interpretation, in the sense proposed by Alenka Gregorič and Suzana Milevska, who argue that “[n]arrating and interpreting the relations between artists and other professionals in the field of art through different performative and discursive events creates parallel discourses and/or counter-interpretations of the definitions and meanings imposed by institutions through their position of authority.”236

Administering Meaning Another work realized as a response to the new set of rules related to institutional inclusion was Partum’s action Non-Exhibition – Curators: Between Privacy and Institutionalization (2005). This project arose from the reaction to the reconfiguration in the art field, in which a curator becomes an author of the meaning of works of art generated within a cohesive exhibition. This work was not a systematic intervention of self-historicization, nor a performative over-identification with the curatorial. Instead, it was a strategic reallocation of the artist to the place occupied by the curator. “The ambitions, methodologies and personal styles of curators are as essential as the artist’s work to the content of the exhibition”237 writes Michael Brenson in his well-known 1998 text “The Curator’s Moment”, in which he diagnoses the dynamics behind the curator’s rise in importance. He emphasizes that it was “the increasing institutional awareness of the importance of the audience that has made curators more visible as mediators between art and its public.”238 I would like to read Partum’s work Non-Exhibition – Curators: Between Privacy and Institutionalization (2005) in close proximity with Brenson’s text without suggesting any direct connection, apart from the fact that they are parallel instances diagnosing the same historical moment. In the video documentation of the action Non-Exhibition – Curators: Between Privacy and Institutionalization, Partum repetitively utters the paradoxical sentence that conceptual artists (herself included) do not need a public, or rather, in Partum’s interpretation, a passively understood audience. The conceptual artist does not need

236 Gregorič 2017, p. 16. 237 Brenson, Michael: “The Curator’s Moment” (1998) in: Kocur, Zoya/ Leung, Simon (eds.): Theory in Contemporary Art Since 1985, Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005, pp. 55–68, p. 58. A slightly abridged version of the article was published in 1998. 238 Brenson 2005, p. 58.

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mediators, translators or curators. The process of redistribution, related to a renewed interest in the art of the 1970s among new generations of art historians and curators, and combined with the artist’s desire for recognition, confronted conceptual artists (including Partum) with a need for a curator, sometimes even a dependency on a curator. Although exhibition-making is in fact a collective action, the authorial function has been appropriated and assigned exclusively to the curator, rendering the artist a provider of content or services.239 Brenson idealistically identifies this intrinsic conflict between artist and curator as the conflict between a commitment to art and a commitment to use art.240 While this view might be oversimplified, Partum’s work offers, on its own terms, an insight into this internal conflict. It represents an attempt to challenge the constellation of dependencies between artists and curators through an intervention into the protocols of art infrastructures. The artist performs yet another cut within that constellation to reassign the competences of the curator to the artist and the obligations of the artist to the curator. Partum realized her action on 02 December 2005 in the BWA Zielona Góra gallery, and video documentation of the action was subsequently displayed in the gallery as a part of the so-called Non-Exhibition. The artist invited two prominent Polish curators, Dorota Monkiewicz and Aneta Szyłak, who were together preparing Partum’s first Polish retrospective exhibitions at the time, working on the historicization, interpretation and re-legitimization of Partum’s practice. The retrospective was planned (and carried out) as two independent shows in two public institutions: the National Museum in Warsaw and at the Wyspa Institute of Art in Gdańsk. Both curators conducted extensive research in Partum’s archive and worked on a monographic publication, which included a series of essays by academics and critics, as well as a detailed catalogue of Partum’s work.241 Non-Exhibition was Partum’s immediate response to the curators’ request that she should refrain from exhibiting her art in Poland until the opening of both retrospective shows. Faced with the prohibition of exhibiting her own artworks, Partum decided to exhibit curators instead – to make public their motivations, thought processes and working methods. In order to do that, the artist arranged the spectacle of a semi-private but professional conversation. Partum organized a public meeting with the curators in the gallery space, devoted to the topic of the upcoming exhibitions and possible interpretations of her works. In this backstage tour de force, Partum constantly transgressed the borders between private and public spheres, quoting

239 See Fraser, Andrea: “How to Provide an Artistic Service: An Introduction” in Kocur, Zoya/ Leung, Simon (eds.) 2005, pp. 69–75. This article was first presented in conjunction with the Services exhibition in Vienna in 1994. 240 Brenson 2005, p. 65. 241 Szyłak et al. (eds.) 2012/13.

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private (but professional) text messages, emails and phone conversations, revealing the language of communication as well as the curators’ strategies of persuasion. She performatively confirms Brenson’s observation that “[t]he texture and tone of the curator’s voice […] and the shape of the conversation it sets in motion are essential to the texture and perception of contemporary art.”242 The Non-Exhibition aimed to exhibit the curatorial within the process of exhibition-making. At the same time, the artist created her own performative contraretrospective, presenting video documentation from her performances accompanied by her authorial commentary. Over the course of two hours, the participants talk, argue, eat cake and drink wine served by the “butler” (Partum’s ex-husband), and question each other’s competencies and understanding of Partum’s art. The public was invited to take part in the exchange, and in the end, some members of the audience joined the table. Partum initiated the conversation by placing the curators in the position of the artist – demanding transparency and asking the curators to declare themselves “in front of the alert eyes of our audience,” as she remarked. In his essay, Michael Brenson diagnosed the condition of the curatorial turn by focusing on questions of openness and transparency, which have become buzzwords for critical curatorial practice.243 During the Non-Exhibition conversation, one of Partum’s curators declares that her practice has always been “totally transparent” and therefore she agreed to participate in the project. Such transparency is closely related to the visibility of curatorial gestures. Boris Groys writes that “[s]ince curatorial practice can never entirely conceal itself, the main objective of curating must be to visualise itself, by making its practice explicitly visible.”244 Partum problematizes the visibility of curatorial work by revealing the transactions that take place behind the scenes, on the boundaries between the private and public spheres, pointing to the obscene actions that always remain concealed and to the conversation as a tool of curatorial practice. As Brenson writes, openness and transparency “must have a form to inspire people to believe in them, and when they have that form, they are already both an unmasking and a transformation.”245 In Non-Exhibition Ewa Partum provided a form to curatorial transparency by staging a conversation arranged around a table brought from the artist’s home. Hannah Arendt employed the metaphor of a table to describe “existing together” within the shared public sphere. Arendt wrote that “[t]o live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it;

242 243 244 245

Brenson 2005, p. 56. Brenson 2005, pp. 58–61. Groys 2008, p. 46. Brenson 2005, p. 61.

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the world, like any in-between, relates and separates men at the same time.”246 In her introduction to Arendt’s The Human Condition, Margaret Canovan argues that according to Arendt, only the experience of sharing the world together with others who look from different perspectives allows us to perceive actual reality. “Without it, we are each driven back to our own subjective experience, in which only our feelings, wants and desires have reality.”247 Partum employed a table not as a metaphor of the public sphere but as a tool that enabled her to create an allegory of the art world suspended between privacy and institutionalization, as a space that includes and excludes, “relates and separates”. The participants sit together at the table, eat cake and drink wine, and this refers us to the origin of the word “company” – which connects the private category of the social circle with the public category of an institution, namely a group of people who break bread together. It is an allegory that does not offer therapeutic consolidation as a combination of antagonistic forces in one totality (agon); rather, it presents the impossibility of a coherent reality.248 Partum takes up the curator’s place at the table by arranging, presenting and interpreting her art but also by providing the curators with a meaningful form in which they can declare themselves. Her work renders visible the private-public entanglement of art infrastructures – both physical (tables, chairs, wine, computers – transferred from her private home to the public exhibition space) and nonmaterial, such as conversation in which curatorial agency is confronted through negotiations with the artist’s desires. Partum also demonstrates in her work that “resolutions of practical problems often represent a political decision, which may impact not only the working conditions of artists but also the function and meaning of their activity.”249 The argument about a possible title of the exhibition and Partum’s doubts regarding the exhibition’s arrangements provide examples of such practical issues that could determine the meaning of her art. In this work, the artist operates from within art infrastructures and reacts to becoming a subject of a curatorial narrative; she employs her art as a defensive strategy against theoretical appropriation. Via Non-Exhibition, Partum participates in the preparation of her first retrospective show in Poland not merely as a content provider but as a mediator. Boris Groys argues that “the curator’s every mediation

246 Arendt 1998, p. 38. 247 Canovan, Margaret: “An Introduction to Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition” in Arendt 1998. pp. vii–xx, p. xv. 248 Compare Howard Caygill’s observations about Walter Benjamin’s notion of allegory in: Caygill 2004. 249 Fraser 2005, p. 71.

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is suspect: he is seen as someone standing between the artwork and its viewer.”250 Partum intervenes in the space between an artwork and a curator, performing criticism formulated already in the 1970s, most prominently by Daniel Buren in his 1972 text-intervention Exposition d’une exposition – Ausstellung einer Ausstellung (exhibition of an exhibition), published in the catalogue of Documenta 5 as a response to Harald Szeemann’s curatorial strategy.251 Not only the poor quality of the recording but also the extremely uncomfortable situation of a tense and not-staged confrontation, a situation which is usually concealed within a smooth curatorial narrative, makes the exchange in Non-Exhibition difficult to watch. Partum renders visible not only the conflict between the artist and curator but also reveals the processes of curating as a transformative repossession. On the stage, Partum performs her ownership, trying to prevent the transformation of her works into “a coloured stroke in a large fresco that escapes the artist”252 by denouncing the invisibility of fragments of infrastructures that generate new meanings of her art. Like Buren, who demanded the curatorial function be reduced to that of an organizer, Partum suggests that the only acceptable curatorial possibility is that of the curator as scientist – an art historian concerned exclusively with the reconstruction of “objective” historical contexts and the artist’s intentions. As Michael Brenson has argued, the so-called rise of the curator has been combined with a tendency of self-effacement by artists.253 Partum’s work goes against this tendency, though not necessarily by reclaiming the hegemonic position for the artist but by resisting a stabile position within art infrastructures. In an interesting way, Non-Exhibition also problematizes the specific situatedness of the artistic archive as a border space located “between institutionality and privacy”. The work simultaneously enacts/performs an opening of the archive and reveals the moment of an opening as a situation of tension resulting from the different agendas of an archive’s users and the clash of two temporalities. Partum’s retrospective exhibitions and their accompanying publications can be described as the moments of a transformation of her artistic archive. The temporality of this kind of retroactive art history is a dynamic time of returning to the past and updating for the present, whereas time within the context of the archive is a dura-

250 Groys 2008, p. 45. 251 Buren, Daniel: “Exposition d’une exposition – Ausstellung einer Ausstellung” in Documenta 5, exh. cat., Kassel, 30 June–08 October 1972, Neue Galerie, Museum Fridericianum, Kassel 1972, section 17, p. 29; reprinted as: “Exhibition of an Exhibition” in Filipovic, Elena/ van Hal, Marieke/ Øvstebø, Solveig (eds.): The Biennial Reader: An Anthology on Large-scale Perennial Exhibitions of Contemporary Art, Bergen: Bergen Kunsthall, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2010, p. 211. 252 Buren, Daniel: “Where are the Artists?” in Filipovic et al. (eds.) 2010, pp. 212–221, p. 216. 253 Brenson 2005, p. 57.

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tion related to the practice of maintenance254 , time connected with everyday life, without a vector. The place where Ewa Partum’s artistic archive functions is also connected with everyday life; it is not the institutional space of a professional studio, but rather a private living space, a semiotic and spatial context that evokes specific associations. It is a place of transformation, of continuous circulation of documents and notation: towards becoming, yet also, in the opposite direction, towards entropy. It is a liminal space in which things and documents pass from the private sphere to the realm/domain of art history; they change their status from missing to found, and from documentary to artistic. After 1989, the Ewa Partum archive has become the site of an intergenerational exchange and production of histories, primarily written in accordance with the recurring model of development, loss and return described by Clare Hemmings in her book Why Stories Matter,255 or, in accordance with its regional East-Central European variation, the paradigm of interrupted histories. Yet the fragmentedness and incompleteness of Ewa Partum’s archive reflects not merely the historical circumstances related to the fate of the art history of socialist Europe nor the limited accessibility of the technical means of documentation behind the Iron Curtain. It also results from Partum’s artistic attitude that has influenced and shaped her practices of care and maintenance. Her practice of self-historicization has been directed not towards the archival accumulation of remnants and traces of her activities but towards the amplification of her activities by a process of “self-instituting”, i.e. by assuming different institutional positions and developing strategies within art infrastructures.

Conclusion In the series of case studies presented above, I have sought to reassemble the local contexts and meanings of Partum’s constructive and deconstructive gestures, which aimed at interfering with the existing art infrastructures of socialist and post-socialist art institutions. I sought to present particular works as agents of Partum’s critical engagement with the art world’s structures and hierarchies beyond the paradigm of institutional critique. In lieu of imposing pre-constructed

254 Baraitser, Lisa: “Touching Time: Maintenance, Endurance, Care” in Frosh, Stephen (ed.): Psychosocial Imaginaries: Perspectives on Temporality, Subjectivities and Activism, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp. 21–48, p. 22. Baraitser writes that the practice of maintenance allows for a completely different kind of relationship with the dominant ideas of temporality; it allows for some sort of experiencing suspended duration, or slurry time, not related to the idea of progress or a melancholic past. 255 Hemmings 2011.

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frameworks onto this analysis, I looked closely at the material, technical, institutional and ideological conditions in the particular locales related to Ewa Partum’s practice and highlighted the networks that were relevant for this practice. Eschewing the notion of institutional critique allows us to avoid absolutizing the dichotomy of epistemic frameworks – the difference between the East and the West. The concept of institutional critique was not articulated within local (Polish) art criticism until the turn of the 1990s. However, artistic practices in the 1970s in Poland, and in other countries of the former Eastern Bloc, followed the historical trajectory of the international neo-avant-garde’s deconstruction of art institutions,256 related to the hybridization of artistic poetics and strategies and intensification of practices of networking (as seen in conceptual and mail art). By interrupting the continuity of the historical narrative, I have tried to uncover the declared and undeclared critical disposition of Partum’s practice across different places and contexts. My analysis was driven by a Foucauldian idea that aims do not determine our practices, but that practices determine our aims.257 In other words, it was not Partum’s artistic goal to practice institutional critique, but the very format of her work, based on the paradigm of the artistic experiment, undermined the existing artistic institutions and created possibilities for new constellations within art infrastructures. In the next chapter, I will further explore the local conditions and formulas of the neo-avant-garde artistic experiment realized by Partum within the conceptual idiom.

256 Foster 1998. 257 Solarska 2006, p. 67.

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Chapter 3 Ewa Partum’s Conceptual Art

Conceptualism as a Circulating Idea Ewa Partum’s Self-Historicization as a Conceptual Artist In the exhibition catalogue Ewa Partum (self-)published in autumn 1981, a few months after the opening of her Self-Identification exhibition in the Galeria Mała in Warsaw, Partum’s artistic biography was divided into a sequence of successive but overlapping phases: conceptual art (1969–1974) visual poetry (1969–1975) tautological cinema (1973–1978) since 1974 the feminine problem in art in 1972–1977 organizer and artistic director of “Adres” gallery.1 The catalogue, designed by the artist, can be interpreted as a document of her selfidentification with the field of artistic autobiography. In other documents, such as professional curricula, schedules, and artistic statements made during various interviews,2 Partum employs the same self-historicizing strategy that articulates a double continuity of her artistic practice, defining it as conceptual and – from 1974 – feminist.3 In the following chapter I want to address the questions of why and how Ewa Partum practiced conceptual art. The question “why” does not aim to reconstruct 1 2

3

Partum, Ewa: Samoidentyfikacja, self-published, 500 copies; Libra odd. 3, order no. 1045, Łódź 1981, not paginated. See, for instance, the interview conducted by Dorota Jarecka (Jarecka 2006), also the unpublished interview conducted by Marek Ławrynowicz (1987) and my interview conducted in 2004 (Majewska 2014). This narrative has also been implemented in the monograph prepared by Angelika Stepken (2001) and then complicated by the subsequent stages of rereading and redistribution of Partum’s practice.

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the artist’s intentions but to historicize Partum’s self-historicization as a conceptual artist. I also would like to examine the importance of this particular practice in the context of local and global debates about conceptual art. The “how” question aims to reconstruct the strategies Partum used in her early works. I focus here on the relationship between the unstable term “conceptual art/conceptualism” and Partum’s artistic strategies for identifying with the conceptual label. Saskia Sassen has noted that certain categories are obstacles in understanding the reality that they refer to – that they imbue practices with distinct meanings that “camouflage more than they reveal.”4 The notion of conceptualism/conceptual art certainly belongs in these categories.5 Initially, its protagonists tried to negotiate and define the boundaries between broader and narrower meanings of the term conceptual art. Retrospectively, art historians have discussed the distinction between conceptual art, which is understood as a homogeneous historical artistic trend, and a broader concept of pluralistic and geographically widespread conceptualisms. Considering historical conceptualism as a struggle for its own definition, the monographer of Polish conceptualism Luiza Nader describes it as a discursive formation that “not only establishes its object of study but also generates knowledge about itself, not having an author but being constituted through archives and texts.”6 Within the Foucauldian framework, Nader defines conceptualism as a notion in movement, as existing between and within texts and works and emerging in a dialogue.7 Alexander Alberro describes historical conceptualism as a “contested field of multiple and opposing practices rather than a single unified artistic discourse.”8 The process of the return (historicization) of historical conceptualism is, therefore, fragmentary and contradictory. Historical narratives on the genealogies of conceptual art, such as those of the administrative drive of late capitalist society (Benjamin Buchloh),9 publicity and distribution strategies (Alexander Alberro),10

4 5

6 7 8 9 10

Sassen, Saskia: Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014, p. 8. I use the terms conceptual art and conceptualism interchangeably. For recent views on the history of the circulation of both terms, see, for instance, Smith, Terry: “One and Three Ideas: Conceptualism Before, During, and After Conceptual Art” in e-flux journal, no. 29, November 2011, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/29/68078/one-and-three-ideas-conceptualism-befor e-during-and-after-conceptual-art/. Nader 2009, p. 13. See also the English summary, pp. 425–428. Nader 2009, p. 9. Alberro 1999, p. xviii. Buchloh, Benjamin H. D.: “Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions”, October, vol. 55, Winter 1990, pp. 105–143. Alberro, Alexander: Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2003.

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the dematerialization of art (Lucy Lippard),11 the ideologization of art that reveals social realities (Mari Carmen Ramirez),12 the heterogeneity of Eastern European conceptualism and its political entanglements (László Beke),13 and the feminist critique of conceptual orthodoxy and its logocentrism (Rosalyn Deutsche)14 are constantly extended through research that stems from contemporary methodological trends such as material-semiotic investigations focused on the entanglements between matter and meaning (Christian Berger)15 or intersectional readings, focused on situating Black artists’ conceptualism.16 All of them, as historical reconstructions, refer to particular sets of practices and cannot be easily extended to incorporate other bodies of work in alternative locations. On the other hand, discourse on “global conceptualism” has embraced a variety of art practices under the conceptual label that are related either directly or loosely to the notion of idea art, process or action. The current paradigm of decentring conceptualism by reconstructing its multiple points of origin follows the consensus that plural modernisms have generated plural conceptualisms. The globally employed conceptual aesthetic has therefore been interpreted within the framework of differentiated artistic biographies and local ideological and political contexts. Through this, factors such as local traditions of decentring modernism, alongside the different conditions for reception of conceptual works and different possibilities of art production and consumption are considered. Contemporary interpretations take into account that the conceptual aesthetics “characterized as neutral, purified and tautological” gave conceptual art projects “worldwide circulation, but the meaning of the artworks came from local circumstances.”17 However, such a detailed look at the local manifestation of

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Lippard, Lucy: Six Years: Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966–1972, New York: Praeger, 1973. Ramirez, Mari Carmen: “Blueprint Circuits: Conceptual Art and Politics in Latin America” in Rasmussen, Waldo (ed.): Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century, exh. cat. New York, Museum of Modern Art, 06 June–06 September 1993, pp. 156–166. Beke, László: “The Present Time of the Conceptual Art: The Political Implications of Eastern European Art”, conference paper at Workshop Barcelona: Radical Conceptual Art Revisited, May 2007, http://www.vividradicalmemory.org/htm/workshop/bcn_Essays/Present_Beke_en g.pdf. Rike (ed.) 2004. Berger, Christian (ed.): Conceptualism and Materiality: Matters of Art and Politics, Leiden: Brill, 2019. Aikens, Nick/ pui san lok, susan/ Orlando, Sophie (eds.): Conceptualism – Intersectional Readings, International Framings; Situating ‘Black Artists and Modernism’ in Europe, Eindhoven: Van Abbe Museum, 2019. Piotrowski, Piotr: “The Global NETwork: An Approach to Comparative Art History” in Kaufmann (eds.) 2015, pp. 149–165, p. 163.

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conceptual art “threatens to make local and regional differences more important, more fundamental, than whatever label is used to link them.”18 Given the incoherence between the local and global perspectives on conceptual art and the lack of essential qualities of the notion of “conceptual”, how can we approach the relationship between a particular, embedded and embodied artistic practice and the conceptual label? This question is particularly difficult if we consider a hybrid, unorthodox conceptual artistic practice located in the semi-periphery of the art world – a practice that undermined the normative, androcentric definition of conceptual art and was initially excluded from local historical narratives on conceptual art. Until recently, the historicization of Polish conceptualism relied on recovering, and thus repeating, the voices of the main (male) participants in the movement, who were engaged with conceptualism of tautological and linguistic origins. The subsequent stage of historicization, marked by a generational and methodological change, focused on questions of archive and memory, effectively enabling new readings (and meanings) that produced new canons.19 Using a vocabulary indebted to trauma studies, Luiza Nader has observed that a significant line was drawn throughout this entire historicization process by Wiesław Borowski’s text “Pseudoawangarda” published in Kultura Magazine (1975). Ewa Partum’s work was qualified as part of socially and culturally harmful practices that Borowski describes as pseudo-avant-garde. These impure practices were characterized by their refusal to maintain art as an autonomous practice, which was defined by Borowski as the only correct way of practising avant-garde art. Nader describes this text and its reception as a certain “critical experience transmitted into the future, from whose effects artists and art historians […] cannot free themselves to this day”.20 Anna Markowska considers Borowski’s text as a manifestation of generational conflict: a symptom of the transition from the autotelic modernist idiom towards postmodern open practices.21 18 19

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Elkins, James: “Afterword” in Kaufmann (eds.) 2015, pp. 203–229, p. 222. It is also important to emphasize that the fact that conceptual art in Poland developed on the margins of official artistic life conditioned not only the former historical debate within conceptualism itself but also contemporary processes of historization of these practices. Nader 2009, p. 28. Anna Markowska writes: “As Borowski’s paper made public the transition from modernity to postmodernity, and did it from the position of being modernist, it is a good starting point to show the erosion of consensus of 1955 and the strong need to create agonistic space, which has been characteristic since 1989. Wiesław Borowski decided to fight progressive artists other than those exhibiting in the Foksal Gallery in the pages of an official magazine with a rather dubious reputation, to preserve the status of the only legitimate avant-garde. It remains a paradox that a good number of young artists who made their debuts in the ’70s regarded this prominent gallery of international reputation as having the ambivalent status of an official gallery. The article Pseudo-Avant-Garde discrediting the progressive fellow artists

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While analysing this shift, Polish art historians have emphasized the initial simultaneity of both paradigms, arguing that the reception of neo-avant-garde strategies or poetics (deconstruction, appropriation, public intervention) took place within the modernist language of autonomous tautological art practice.22 Several art critics and art historians who were involved in the development of “Polish conceptualism” have devoted themselves to formulating its local specificity, which escapes the diffusional narrative about distribution of knowledges from centre to periphery. Although most historians recognize the transfer of concepts and knowledge from the West to the East, they reconstruct the processes of receiving and adapting these flows as complex and site-specific, shaped by the local dynamics of decentring modernity and undermining of socialist art institutions. Polish historical models of the development of conceptual art have focused on the localized meanings of terms such as autonomy, utopia, engagement and imagination while problematizing the tension between transgressive and conformist aspects of conceptual art.23 Andrzej Turowski has argued that Polish conceptual artists did not formulate any political critique of the culture as such – as was at the centre of the critical strategies of Western conceptual artists – and he criticizes tautological conceptual art for its pseudo-criticality and legitimization of Gierek’s pseudo-liberal and pseudoconsumeristic Second Republic program.24 A similar critique was formulated re-

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proved to be an anachronistic attempt to resurrect the artists’ ‘thaw’ consensus with the government. It turned out that in the communist state, there had been no solidarity among the artists, because some of them preferred to replicate the patterns of authoritarian power placing themselves in a privileged and pro-monopoly position. Although the Foksal Gallery opposed the communist state, it adopted some of its tactics and values.” An excerpt from the English summary of: Markowska, Anna: Dwa przełomy. Sztuka polska po 1955 i 1989 roku (Two Turning Points: Polish Art after 1955 and 1989), Toruń: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika, 2012. It is also important to emphasize that all active neo-avant-garde female artists (except Maria Stangret, who was married to Tadeusz Kantor) were classified as “Pseudo-Avant-Garde”. See, for instance, Piotrowski 2011. Andrzej Turowski identified the specificity of Polish neo-avant-garde practices by developing the concept of “ideosis” – a theoretical model related to Gramsci’s notion of cultural hegemony and Althussers’s Ideological State Apparatus. Ideosis has been defined as an ideologically saturated space of thoughts and systems in which individual choices are always submitted to the soft power of hegemonic political strategies. Turowski, Andrzej: “Polska Ideoza” in Hrankowska, Teresa (ed.): Sztuka Polska po 1945 roku. Materiały Stowarzyszenia Historyków Sztuki, 1984, Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1987, pp. 31–38. Turowski 1987. However, in a more recent essay Turowski argues that “Polish conceptualism, preaching the utopia of artistic neutrality, became saturated with political content in the ideosis of that time, and itself exploited conceptual art in order to smuggle political content.” See Szyłak et al. (eds.) 2012/13, p. 48.

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trospectively by Piotr Piotrowski in his text Dekada published in 1991.25 However, in his book Znaczenia modernizmu (The Meanings of Modernism), published in 2001, Piotrowski defined conceptual art, which was chronologically preceded by objectrelated art, as a critique of certain modernist ideas. “Conceptual artists”, he writes, “believed that they can control an idea. Declaring concepts as a basic material of art, they opened a way to the complete neutralization of aesthetics and general critique of modernist utopias and myths.”26 Grzegorz Dziamski delineates the inner development of this debate as: questioning art and asking about its sense and purpose; questioning the relationship between art and reality; and questioning the contextual conditions of art.27 Following Rosalyn Deutsche in her critique of the androcentric canon of Western conceptualism, Luiza Nader argues that the above-discussed authors shared a tendency to exclude from the history of conceptual art those practices that questioned a construction of subjectivity, identity or desire.28 Andrzej Turowski retrospectively noted that the conceptualism of Ewa Partum “had nothing to do with the conceptualism of male orthodoxy, so for a long time it was pushed to the margins and was not recognized even as an alternative method of thinking and acting.”29 According to Nader the homogeneous notion of conceptual art, i.e. Turowski’s “male orthodoxy”, functioned merely as “a phantasm of an art historian” who desired to create a coherent narrative about the past.30 If for the whole generation of art historians conceptualism functioned as a phantasm of a coherent past, for Partum and her peers, the concept of autotelic and tautological art functioned as a frame that organized their artistic imagi-

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Piotrowski 1991. Piotrowski 2011, p. 165. Dziamski 2010. Nader 2009, p. 31. Szyłak et al. (eds.) 2012/13, pp. 54–56. Nader 2009, p. 9. Historical narrations on Polish conceptualism have also been constructed within retrospective group exhibitions. The exhibition Conceptual Reflection in Polish Art: Experiences of Discourse 1965–75 curated by Paweł Polit took place in 1999 in Warsaw at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art. It focused on multiple definitions of conceptualism and advocated the notion of an attitude as crucial for this practice. Partum’s art was not shown at the exhibition, but she was nevertheless mentioned in a text published in the catalogue (referencing her works The Legality of Space and activities at the Galeria Adres). In The Autonomous Conceptual Movement, a following exhibition organized in 2002 by artists working in the mediums of photography, film and performance and hosted by the Galeria Labirynt in Lublin, several works of Partum were exhibited. However, their interpretation was reductive as a consequence of the tautological and literal reading imposed by the narration of the exhibition. Partum’s works were not directly mentioned in the accompanying catalogue; the published texts were mostly an expression of a romantic cult of creative individuality. See also Nader 2009, pp. 30–31.

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nation. Looking at this relation within the framework of the libidinal economy, conceptualism can be releveled as an object of desire for a generation of artists who were developing their artistic language in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Polish literary scholar Maria Janion, who approaches the notion of phantasm from an anthropological perspective,31 defines a phantasm as situated between a myth and a stereotype and therefore, as sharing the features of both: the transgressive potential of myth and the conformist aspect of stereotype.32 In the same way, we can follow transgressive/oppositional and conventional/decorous trends within the practices of conceptual art realized in the context of real socialism, related to the political foundations of the phantasm of autonomous culture. Utopian desire, described by Alberro as the need to create a space of pure artistic discourse,33 was in the context of real socialism accelerated by the general tendency to absolutize high culture as “the last refuge of values”34 that had political, economic but also psychological foundations.35 Gislind Nabakowski has noted this psychological dimension in Partum’s identification with the autotelic discourse of conceptual art and interprets Partum’s mythologization of conceptualism as compensation. She writes that “Partum perceived conceptual art as a socio-cultural context enabling an independent mode of living in opposition to the communist regime.”36 31

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Janion, Maria: Niesamowita Słowiańszczyzna. Fantazmaty literatury, Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2007. According to Robert Pruszczyński, “In contemporary humanism, the notion of a phantasm is employed as an operative category, and its subsequent uses move away from the psychoanalytical origin. The phantasm is often understood as a synonym of a phantasy and the process of fantasizing. From the latter, it differs as a scenario structure.” See Pruszczyński, Robert: “Polskie poszukiwania teorii fantazmatu. Maria Janion, Krystyna Kłosińska, Jacek Kochanowski” in Wierzejska, Jagoda/ Wójcik, Tomasz/ Zieniewicz, Andrzej (eds.): Fantazmaty i fetysze w literaturze polskiej XX (i XXI) wieku, Warsaw: Wydawnictwo: ELIPSA, 2011, pp. 246–256, p. 246. Pruszczyński 2011, p. 250. Alberro, Alexander: “Reconsidering Conceptual Art, 1966–1977” in Alberro, Alexander/ Stimson, Blake (eds.): Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999, pp. xvi–xxxv. Piotrowski writes that: “Art written with a lowercase a was suspect for Eastern Europeans. […] They needed art with a capital A as a manifestation of the defence of culture with a capital C. Even if they used ordinary everyday objects in their production, they elevated them to Great Art, and placed them in the symbolic, aesthetic, and poetic order. They felt that they had a mission to defend art, not to discredit it, since they knew that the latter was a goal of the powers that be, the regime originating in the Soviets.” See: Piotrowski, Piotr: “Why Were There No Great Pop Art Curatorial Projects in Eastern Europe in the 1960s?” in Öhrner Annika (ed.): Art in Transfer in the Era of Pop: Curatorial Practices and Transnational Strategies, Stockholm: Sördertörn University Press, 2017, pp. 21–35, p. 33. Piotrowski 2005, p. 33. Nabakowski 2001, p. 132.

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Jacqueline Rose, in her psychoanalytically informed studies of historical processes, links fantasy to group identification and defines it as an act in realizing historical desires related to commonly experienced trauma.37 This concept of fantasy “illuminates […] underexamined connections between the most intimate personal experiences and the most public actions of nation-states.”38 Fantasies are redemptive “protective functions”, but, as Rose argues, fantasy “is also a way of reelaborating and therefore partially recognizing the memory which is struggling, against the psychic odds, to be heard.”39 The trauma for Partum and generations of Polish artists educated during socialism was the trauma of the instrumentalization and politicization of art, the degradation and denigration of culture, and the permanent presence of doublespeak and propaganda. It was also the trauma of an institutional suppression of the local avant-garde tradition and the trauma of an imposed separation from the developments of progressive international art. Partum’s claiming the conceptual label in the context of her double off-centerness40 – a marginalization of her practice in face of the Anglo-American hegemony of conceptual art and the local hegemony of conceptual art promoted by its male practitioners in Poland, retrospectively confirmed by local art historians – has to be considered as an act of self-identification. It was also a gesture that made it possible to establish the visibility of her artistic practice both locally and internationally.

The Map of Local Circulation – Concept Art / Idea Art / Impossible Art Conceptual artistic discourse arose within the Polish neo-avant-garde scene at the end of the 1960s, and it was related to innovative modes of presentation and distribution of art. The work of art, newly formulated as the notation of a concept, took many forms. In turn, the nascent vocabulary of conceptual practices began to incorporate notions of “concept art” (sztuka pojeciowa), “idea art” (sztuka ideii), and 37 38

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Rose, Jacqueline: “States of Fantasy” in Justin, Clemens/ Naparstek, Ben (eds.): The Jacqueline Rose Reader, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011, pp. 123–138. Clemens, Justin/ Naparstek, Ben: “Reading Jaqueline Rose: An Introduction”, in (eds.) Clemens, Justin/ Naparstek, Ben: The Jacqueline Rose Reader, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011, pp 1–24, p. 1. Rose 2011, p. 127. Ana Longoni writes: “With the off-center term I intend to refer to what is away of the center but also to a center that is not recognized as such, that is missed, disconcerted, which is out of its axis. Raymond Williams, in Politics of Modernism calls to analyse the avant-gardes with their inconsistencies and distances, running away from the comfortable and today internationally adapted forms of their incorporation and naturalisation.” See Longoni, Ana: “Other Beginnings of Conceptualism (Argentine and Latin-American)” in Papers d’Art, no. 93, 2007, pp. 155–158, http://www.vividradicalmemory.org/htm/workshop/bcn_Essays/Inicios_Longoni_ eng.pdf.

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“impossible art” (sztuka niemożliwa).41 The relational geography of conceptual art was established in Poland by several open-air events, meetings and the community of artist-run galleries discussed in the previous chapter, in which Ewa Partum actively participated. One of the most important collective events that stimulated the development of conceptual art in Poland was the First Symposium of Artists and Scientists, or Puławy 66, initiated and organized by Jerzy Ludwiński, the leading theoretician of conceptual art in Poland. Ludwiński’s interpretation of the dematerialization of art was specifically embedded in the context of real socialism, as “he advocated for the dematerialisation of art as a moral response to the productivist model, stating provocatively that it is important to create as little as possible.”42 This local aspect of dematerialization strategy becomes particularly evident in the context of the symposium’s location: a factory and its infrastructure. Taking place in the Puławy Chemical Factory, the symposium brought together dozens of artists and theoreticians, who produced and discussed art during the event’s official scientific conference, social meetings and colloquiums.43 Partum, who was still a student at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts at the time, took part in the artistic plein-air organized by the academy as part of the symposium program. Photographic documentation shows Partum attending evening colloquiums, appearing at the opening of the post-plein-air exhibition and, with the factory in the background, working on her paintings. The motto of the symposium, Art in the Changing World, alluded to the new scientific and technological developments that were to serve as a context for the connection between art and scientific research. The artists invited to the symposium responded to the motto by creating various forms of actions and installations “undermining the traditional concept of art as creating something permanent.”44 41

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The term sztuka pojeciowa, which translates as “concept art”, was employed for instance in the title of the exhibition Sztuka Pojeciowa that took place in December 1970, in Galeria Pod Moną Lisą in Wrocław, run by Jerzy Ludwiński. The exhibition consisted of documentation presented on A4 paper of the projects and concepts of artists (Jan Chwałczyk, Zbigniew Dłubak, Stanisław Dróżdż, Antoni Dzieduszycki, Jacek Fedorowicz, Wanda Gołkowska, Zdzisław Jurkiewicz, Barbara Kozłowska, Andrzej Lachowicz, Natalia LL, Jerzy Ludwiński, Zbigniew Makarewicz, Maria Michałowska, Jerzy Rosołowicz, Anastazy Wiśniewski). Fowkes, Maja/ Fowkes, Reuben: “I Live on Earth: Cosmic Realms and the Place of Nature in the Work of Natalia LL” in Jakubowska, Agata (ed.): Natalia LL: Consumer Art and Beyond, Warsaw: CSW Zamek Ujazdowski, 2016, pp. 105–127, p. 111. Around forty artists participated in Puławy 66, at the First Symposium of Artists and Scientists, including Jerzy Bereś, Włodzimierz Borowski, Jan Chwałczyk, Jerzy Fedorowicz, Wanda Gołkowska, Tadeusz Kantor, Grzegorz Kowalski, Edward Krasiński, Liliana Lewicka, Henryk Morel, Andrzej Pawłowski, Ryszard Winiarski and Jan Ziemski. Leśniewska, Anna Maria: “Puławy 1966”, in EXIT, no. 3/71, July–September 2007, http://kwart alnik.exit.art.pl/article.php?edition=27&id=478.

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Artistic actions took place within the public space outside of and within the factory grounds. In an unpublished interview conducted by Marek Ławrynowicz (1987), Ewa Partum describes one of the realizations as “provocative, reckless and dematerialized”, revealing the hierarchy of values relevant for the artist at the time, related to artistic experimentation and the anti-viewer strategy.45 During the same Puławy 1966 symposium, the founding manifesto of the Foksal Gallery, Introduction to the General Theory of Place, was publicly announced by Mariusz Tchorek and Anka Ptaszkowska. At the Foksal Gallery, conceptual discourse developed among other discourses in the late 1960s and early 1970s.46 The leading curator of the gallery (since 1970), Andrzej Turowski, retrospectively described Partum’s affiliation with Foksal as “discussions that took place on the doorstep of the gallery.”47 In fact, Partum visited the gallery frequently, often in the company of Andrzej Partum; however, she was never invited to exhibit in the venue.48 45

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Jerzy Ludwiński in the essay “Włodzimierz Borowski – podróż do świata nieskończonych małości”, published in the exhibition catalogue edited by Jarosław Kozłowski, Ślady/Traces, 1956–1995, Warsaw: Centrum Sztuki Wspotczesnej, 1996 wrote: “Venue: Municipal Nitrogen Plant – furnaces producing urea (ingredient in fertilizers). Time 10.00 p.m. Coaches with participants from the Symposium and invited guests enter the Plant. Everyone stands in front of the furnaces, in the defined space with the loudspeakers. The scene is dark except for the massive gas burners, which roar loudly, illuminating the furnaces from below. After a while I ascend to a small gallery via a flight of stairs. I am wearing a tuxedo [...]. Spotlights directed at the furnaces are illuminated. They light up and dim down at the pace of a heartbeat. I am left alone in a small gallery, over a dozen metres above the ground. I begin speaking into the microphone. I say that, delighted with the beauty of the industrial landscape, I feel I can do little except treat the object from which I am speaking as a work of art and, as such, return it to the management of the Nitrogen Plant. At the same time, I ask that the object be treated with extraordinary care, as signs saying ‘explosive area’ are hung around it. In order to commemorate the moment, I begin to sing a song of my own composition with the lyrics ‘Urea, urea’, pausing every now and then to remind people about the warning signs. At a certain moment, my enthusiasm reaches its peak and the melody segues into the national anthem. I stop singing and descend the stairs [...]. I feel my and their embarrassment, their outrage, and contempt for such a failed performance. The management of the Plant is outraged.” Nader 2009, p. 228. In the first stage of the gallery’s existence, the most important artists affiliated with/shown at Foksal were Tadeusz Kantor and the post-constructivist painter Henryk Stażewski. In terms of its international program, Foksal mainly presented Western European and US artists – organizing only one exhibition of Eastern European artists (from Hungary) in May 1971. Szyłak et al. (eds.) 2012/13, p. 44. Turowski’s text can be read as a performative utterance concerned with inscribing Partum’s practice retrospectively into the history of the conceptual art movement in Poland. Speaking from the position of an insider and looking back at the Polish art scene of the 1970s, Turowski acknowledges the masculinity of the movement and the tendency not to recognize creative women. The only female artist whose works were exhibited in the Foksal Gallery was Maria Stangret, who was Kantor’s wife. Wiktoria Szczupacka, in her research on the presence of women at the

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In terms of local contacts and connections, it is important to mention Ewa Partum’s professional relationship with her husband Andrzej Partum, who was active as a poet, performer and visual artist since the end of the 1950s. Initially, Ewa and Andrzej Partum worked together, and her installation An Area under Poetic Licence (17 April 1971) inaugurated the activities of Andrzej Partum’s Poetry Bureau (1971–85), in Warsaw in the attic of the Hotel Polonia. In their work, both Ewa Partum and Andrzej Partum’s institution mocked the bureaucratic legal language of the socialist regime by linking the concept of administration with the notion of poetry. A year earlier, the couple self-published a book of poetry entitled Tlenek Zasobów (Oxide of Resources). In 1972 Ewa Partum took part in the event ART OUT,49 organized by the Poetry Bureau, realizing her first public action, Active Poetry, in a pedestrian tunnel in Warsaw alongside another ephemeral project, by Stanislaw Dróżdż (Concrete Poetry), Marceli Baccialerlli (Semantic Photomontages), Zbigniew Warpechowski (Poetic Work) and Gerard Kwiatkowski (Art Laboratory).50 At the beginning of the 1970s, Ewa Partum encountered many relevant local, regional and international actors in the conceptual art scene through the Poetry Bureau, including Andrzej Kostołowski, Daniel Buren and Jan Świdziński. Through the infrastructure of the Galeria Adres, Ewa Partum maintained these contacts and initiated new connections with local artists and theoreticians related to the conceptual circle, such as Krzysztof Wodiczko, Włodzimierz Borowski and Andrzej Dłużniewski. In 1970 Ewa Partum relocated from Warsaw to Łódź, where, in the same year, the Workshop of the Film Form was launched by artists studying at the Film School in Łódź, transforming the city into a new artistic centre of media-orientated conceptualism.51 In Łódź, where Partum opened her Galeria Adres in 1972,

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Foksal Gallery concluded that there were three categories of women present in the gallery: cleaners, models and administrative assistants. See Szczupacka, Wiktoria: Invisible Organizers or Weird Kittens: Conceptual Female Artists in the 1970s in Poland, doctoral dissertation, Polish Academy of Sciences, Institute of Art, Warsaw (in progress). The action took place on 05 January 1972. Andrzej Partum continued to invite Ewa Partum to artistic events throughout the 1970s, for instance to the International Congress of Visual Text, organized by him in 1977 at Galeria Remont. In contrast, Ewa Partum did not involve him in her own projects, which Andrzej Partum noted on the back of a photograph dated 1973. He wrote: “Ewa Partum never encouraged me to participate in the activities of the Galeria Adres. It was, unfortunately, her very advanced professional independence.” Founding members of the Workshop of the Film Form were Wojciech Bruszewski, Paweł Kwiek, Józef Robakowski, Andrzej Różycki and Zbigniew Rybczyński. They were later joined by Ryszard Waśko, Jan Freda, Marek Koterski, Ryszard Lenczewski, Janusz Połom, Jacek Łomnicki, Antoni Mikołajczyk, Kazimierz Bendkowski, Krzysztof Krauze and Wacław Antczak.

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conceptualism was practiced within the framework of a few ephemeral conceptual art galleries.52 Although active and present as an artist and animator of the artistic movement in Poland, Partum was never consecrated as a member of the exclusive conceptualist circle, a group of mainly male producers of culture who, until recently, had been considered the sole representatives of the conceptual movement in Poland.53 She was also not in contact with most of the galleries affiliated with the conceptual art movement, such as Galeria Permafo (1972–81) in Wrocław54 and Galeria Akumulatory 2 (1972–90) in Poznań, founded by Jarosław Kozłowski, even though Partum was working together with Kozłowski’s collaborator, the theoretician Andrzej Kostołowski. However, important for the development of Partum’s conceptual vocabulary, strategies and new artistic contacts were the fourth and fifth editions of the Biennale of Spatial Forms, organized by Gerard Kwiatkowski in Galeria EL in Elblag.55 These editions of the Biennale responded to trends and developments in the Polish art scene, concentrating on conceptual art (1971) and on the medium of film (1973). Not only were Partum’s works presented and realized during these events, they were also published in the first issue of the zine Notatnik Robotnika Sztuki (Notebook of the Art Worker) (1972) that accompanied the Biennale and was described by Andrzej Kostołowski as the first independent art magazine in Poland.56 The fourth edition of the Biennale of Spatial Forms, organized and curated by Gerard Kwiatkowski and Marian Bogusz (08–12 September 1971) under the title The Dreamers’ Congress, is considered one of most important collective articulations

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In May 1971, the conceptual art gallery 80 x 140 was founded by Jerzy Treliński. The gallery, located in the same building as Partum’s Galeria Adres, in the offices of the Association of Polish Artists (ZPAP), consisted of an index card which indicated its dimensions. The gallery activities took place in the ZPAP building, as well as outside the location. The main action associated with the 80 x 140 gallery was Treliński’s project Self-Tautologies, which consisted of the artist writing his surname on various surfaces. After May 1972, the gallery co-existed with another conceptual gallery, A4, namely a page of paper in the A4 format authored by Andrzej Pierzgalski. Partum was not invited to participate in the event considered the first collective manifestation of conceptual tendencies in Poland, the seminar Wrocław 1970, a mythologized founding moment of Polish conceptualism, which gathered the most prominent artists and theoreticians of the scene, including Jerzy Bereś, Tadeusz Kantor, Zbigniew Makarewicz, Zbigniew Gostomski, Anastazy B. Wiśniewski, Wanda Gołkowska and many others. For more about the Wrocław 70 seminar, see Nader 2009, p. 341. Although Partum had seen the Permafo exhibition hosted by Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, 03 January–04 July 1972. Ewa Partum met Gerard Kwiatkowski at the symposium Puławy 66. Interview with Ewa Partum, 14.07.2016 (Berlin). Kostołowski, Andrzej: “Ewy Partum krytyka kryteriów” in Arteon, vol. 10, no. 18, 2001, p. 31.

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of conceptual tendencies in Poland. The organizers aimed to move the focus from the execution of artworks understood as material objects towards the process, action and communication of various discursive projects. There were also practical reasons for this emphasis on the “project” stage of presented and discussed works: the institution was lacking materials, and some concepts were not realized due to financial reasons. In a review published in 1973, Ryszard Tomczyk wrote that conceptual art as defined during the Biennale was “an ephemeral art of reduction” that assumed the forms of lectures, statements, slideshows, presentations, diagrams, performances, photographic documentation and information.57 It was a practice characterized by the denigration of visuality on behalf of the discursive strategies of communication. In April 1976, Ewa Partum participated in another collective event organized by an institution related to media-oriented conceptualism, the Seminar of Visual Poetry at Galeria Sztuki Najnowszej (the Gallery of Recent Art) (1973–78), run by Anna and Roman Kutera and Lech Mrożek in Wrocław. The exhibition was “the first such large-scale presentation in the country of the so-called concrete poetry.”58 Two years later, Ewa Partum showed her works at the Wrocław Triennial of Drawing, at the Galeria Awangarda, where she exhibited her poems by ewa, books and films by ewa. Aside from the conceptual art network, from the beginning of the 1970s, Partum exhibited and presented her works in galleries that constituted an important part of the infrastructure of the Warsaw and Lublin action art and, later, performance art scenes. She showed her works at Galeria Współczesna in Warsaw in June 1970, and stills from Tautological Cinema were featured in Galeria Współczesna magazine in 1975. At Muzeum O, which later became Galeria Repassage during the First Art Cleaning festival (05–06 May 1972) organized by Włodzimierz Borowski, Paweł Freisler and Jan Świdziński, Partum realized the action un peu, beaucoup, passionnément, pas du tout, a performative work that consisted of burning four pieces of paper according to the instructions in the title and then displaying the results of the action. In 1974, Partum participated in the Lublin Spring Theatre Meetings hosted by the Galeria Labirynt and curated by Andrzej Kostołowski, and in June 1977 she presented her works in a solo exhibition there.59 In December 1975, she 57 58

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Tomczyk, Ryszard: “Elbląskie Laboratorium Sztuki w latach 1969–1971” in Rocznik Elbląski, vol .6, 1973, pp. 256–269. Markowska, Anna: “Trzeba przetrzeć tę szybę. Powikłane dzieje wrocławskiej Galerii Sztuki Najnowszej (1975–1980) w ACK Pałacyk” in Markowska, Anna (ed.), Galeria Sztuki Najnowszej: “Awangarda nie biła braw”, part 1, Wrocław: Muzeum Współczesne Wrocław, 2014, pp. 22–132, p. 31. The artist talks and presentations by Ewa Partum and Andrzej Partum took place on 14 April 1976. Although Ewa Partum had practiced action art (from 1971) and performance art (from 1974), she did not participate in the I AM International Artists’ Meetings in Galeria Remont, orga-

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was invited for a solo exhibition at Galeria Repassage, showing her poems, books and films by ewa. It can be concluded that Partum’s approach to conceptual art was shaped in a dialogue with local heterogeneous practices of process and action art and the visual/concrete poetry scene. Although Partum was not in direct contact with the network of Polish conceptual art galleries, she collaborated with major theoreticians of the conceptual art movement in Poland, namely Jan Świdziński and Andrzej Kostołowski, and participated in important collective events that enabled her to exchange her ideas with other practitioners of conceptual art. Subsequently, she expanded her vocabulary through transnational communication with Fluxus, mail art and the international neo-avant-garde, which was made possible through the infrastructure of the Galeria Adres.

Transnational Aspirations and Flows As recent research has revealed, for Polish political authorities and the secret political police that infiltrated the conceptual art scene, the conceptual art movement remained dangerous not only due to its transnational aspirations and connections, but also because it was considered an entirely Western phenomenon.60 On the other hand, the current paradigm of decentring conceptualism by reconstructing its multiple points of origin follows the consensus that plural modernisms generated plural conceptualisms. Peter Wollen has argued in the catalogue of the exhibition Global Conceptualism that “conceptual art had a significant impact in challenging the geographical hierarchy of core and periphery in the art world.”61 Still, it is important to remain aware of the historical trajectories of the circulation of artistic concepts in the 1970s that generated specific art geographies of historical conceptualism – locally, regionally and transnationally.

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nized by Henryk Gajewski, which took place in April 1978 and is considered to be the first festival of performance art in Eastern Europe. The participants included: Albert van der Weide, Servie Janssen, Alison Knowles, Marga van Mechelen, Tibor Hajas, Hendrick Have, Fred Licht, Franco Vaccari, Peter Bartoš, Joël Maréchal, Laboratorium TP, Hans Koens, Titus Muizelaar, Klaas Gubbels, Akademia Ruchu, Krzysztof Zarębski, Gerald Minkoff, Petr Štembera, Ulises Carrión, Marten Hendricks, Raul Marroquin, Harrie de Kroon and Hans Eijkelboom. Jakimczyk 2015, p. 212. Wollen, Peter: “Global Conceptualism and North American Conceptualism” in Camnitzer, Luis/ Farver, Jane/ Weiss, Rachel/ Beke, László (eds.): Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin 1950s–1980s, exh. cat., New York, Queens Museum of Art, 28 April–29 August 1999; Minneapolis, MN, Walker Art Center, 19 December 1999–5 March 2000; Miami Art Museum, 23 June–27 August 2000; Cambridge, MA, List Visual Arts Center at MIT, 24 October–3 December 2000; New York 1999, pp. 73–85, p. 85.

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In early1970s Poland, there were many institutional and non-institutional actors distributing various knowledges about American and Western European conceptualism. In Partum’s close artistic circle, a primary source of this West-to-East knowledge was the artist and theoretician Jan Świdziński. At the beginning of the decade, Świdziński, who was researching semiology and cybernetics at the time, published a series of articles that configured the debate on conceptual art in Poland by referring to the developments in the Western world. In his text “A Debate on the Existence of Art”, published in 1970, Świdziński not only references artistic practices and exhibitions but also refers to the impact of the writings of Roman Jakobson, Carl Jung, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault on the then-current debate on idea-based art.62 Świdziński also refers to Pierre Gaudibert’s writings, which distinguished four major tendencies in contemporary art: political art, cognitive art, anti-art and conceptual art. Following Gaudibert, Świdziński described conceptual art as “the most shocking form of art currently offered; it is visual art that not only refuses to be art, but also refuses to be visual.”63 In terms of institutional actors, it was Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, with its international program of exhibitions and meetings, which played an important role in distributing knowledge about developments in Western European and American art. Many events that took place at Muzeum Sztuki “shifted the boundaries marked out in each (socialist) country between what was official and what was unofficial”,64 as they gave rise to unofficial contacts. According to the self-historicizing narrative she adopted, Partum first encountered information about the Western conceptual art movement, and specifically about Joseph Kosuth’s practice, in 1972 during a conversation with Parisian artist Gérard Titus-Carmel.65 In the same year, Partum employed the term “conceptual” for the first time in the title of her photographic series Conceptual Exercises (figs. 23-30) which was subsequently reproduced in a paper format of a book by ewa. As already indicated, 1972 was also the year Partum founded the Galeria Adres, which

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Świdziński, Jan: “Spór o istnienie sztuki” in Życie i Myśl, no. 5/1970, pp. 98–105. Moreover, Świdziński refers to many contemporary art world events relevant to conceptualism, such as the exhibition When Attitudes Become Forms (1969) at the Kunsthalle Bern, recalling that the motto of the exhibition was Live in Your Head, and the exhibition Concept: Documentation of a Contemporary Art Direction (1969) at the Städtisches Museum Leverkusen (Ibid.). In May 1971 he delivered a lecture on that topic at Galeria Współczesna in Warsaw explicitly entitled Konceptualizm. Bazin et al. (eds.) 2016, p. 25. Interview with Ewa Partum, 14.09.2015 (Berlin). Gérard Titus-Carmel was invited by the director Ryszard Stanisławski to Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź for an exhibition that took place 23 May–25 June 1972.

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functioned as the infrastructure of both a transnational reconnection and a production of conceptual works by ewa. Dorota Monkiewicz argued that Partum organized the Galeria Adres especially in order to develop and distribute information about conceptual art: “The knowledge was to be brought by Western Bloc artists, and the ambitious task that Partum had set herself was to cross the border between two blocs.”66 In 1973 Partum attended Bernar Venet’s presentation in Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź.67 Venet, who at the end of 1970 had resigned (temporarily) from producing art in favour of speculating on the nature of art, defined his own artistic practice as rational, methodical, de-personalized and almost scientific.68 Exploring the opportunity his visit presented, Partum invited Venet to view her works in the Galeria Adres, and in return, the artist sent her his catalogues from the exhibition at the Foksal Gallery. Also Andrzej Partum participated in the dissemination of transnational conceptual art discourse in Poland. In May 1974, he organized an exhibition entitled Conceptual Art, showing works by Robin Crozier, Robert Filliou and Klaus Groh; a year later in 1975, he showed Robert Filliou’s works, announcing Filliou in the invitation as “one of the precursors of conceptual art.” In the Galeria Adres archive, there is an undated typescript entitled Conceptual Art, most likely written in 1978; its unnamed author deliberates on the AngloAmerican history of conceptualism, locating the beginnings of the discourse in 1961 (Henry Flynt’s An Anthology of Chance Operations), defining Wittgenstein’s analytical philosophy and Sol LeWitt’s essay “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” (1967) as its origins. A substantive part of the text is devoted to the analysis of Joseph Kosuth’s artistic practice and writings. In a handwritten note, Partum supplemented the text with a list of publications and statements, which retrospectively extended the Western genealogy of conceptual art, incorporating Partum’s own practice into the narrative.69 Transnational aspirations, which not only characterized conceptual art but the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde practices in general, were rooted in a desire for transnational communication achieved by the standardization of artistic language, a promise held by the conceptual aesthetic. Nevertheless, artists who were acculturated in real socialism or in advanced capitalism referred to conceptual aesthetics

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Morzuch (ed.) 2015, p. 58. Bernar Venet’s presentation in Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź took place on 24 April 1973. See, for instance, Tansini, Laura: “A Conversation with Bernar Venet: A Renaissance Artist of the Third Millennium” in Sculpture, vol. 23, no. 4, May 2004. Ewa Partum’s text “Made by Me” was written in 1978, therefore we can assume that the anonymous typescript “Conceptual Art” was made after this date. Publications listed in the note include: Joel Fisher, 1976 London; Alicja Kępińska, Od systemu do faktu (From System to Fact); Joseph Kosuth, Art After Philosophy 1975; Ewa Partum, made by me.

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for various reasons and sent different messages through their conceptual realizations. In late 1967, Joseph Kosuth wrote: “We have our own time and our own reality and it need not be justified by being hooked into European art history.”70 Partum’s motivations were not quite opposite: her aim was to disconnect from the past but at the same time to connect with the ongoing international development of European and American art. Western art and its histories constituted a point of reference for Partum’s “historical feel” for the artistic field.71 Bourdieu describes this “historical feel” as an element of the consciousness of a professional artist who has a historical feel for the field’s “past and its future developments, for all that still remains to be done.”72 If we can speak of the years 1970 to 1972 as the time of the opening of Partum’s practice towards fragments of the broader international discourse of conceptualism, we cannot interpret this openness merely in terms of the reception of certain aesthetics, ideas or culture transfers. The works realized by Partum before this date formed the basis on which the artist reacted to the various knowledges of the conceptual art movement that were disseminated via mail art and Fluxus networks, and by local actors who were in international communication.

Practicing Conceptualism “If you want to say something – speak in the language of the language.” Tautology as an Organizing Principle In the mid-1960s, Ewa Partum started experimenting with meaning-production by exploring the potentiality of tautology as a strategy. Tautology was appropriated by conceptual artists from the language of logic that, according to Alicja Kępińska, characterizes “the greatest analytical tension that had a meaningful influence on the change in the concept of expression.” Kępińska writes that “through tautology, language was presented in its basic, fact-stating, non-expressive function.”73 This formula corresponds with Ewa Partum’s declarations about the meaning of conceptualism. Questioned about her understanding of conceptualism, Partum provides a similar answer, arguing that “conceptual art was intentionally exempted from in-

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Quoted in: Alberro 2003, p. 29. Bourdieu, Pierre: “The Intellectual Field: A World Apart” (1990) in: Kocur et al. (eds.) 2005, pp.11–18, p. 17. Bourdieu 2005, p. 17. Polit (ed.) 2000, p. 197.

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terpretation. […] In the case of a conceptual artwork, its form remains its actual statement,” adding that her points of departure were transparency and tautology.74 In her early practice, Partum was interested in tautology and repetition as issues related not only to the ontological status of art. Partum re-territorialized tautology from the field of language to the field of intermedia practice, performing certain subversive over-identification with conceptual discourse. She explored tautology as the structural logic of not only language-based but also visually oriented and performative works. This ultimately led to a break with the conceptual framework by accelerating and re-evaluating contradictions within the conceptual discourse. Initially, Partum was searching for a formula for artwork that was self-reflective, that moved away from the notion of expression, subjectivity and psychologism. Partum, who aimed to “expunge the last vestiges of the old order,”75 operating from the territory of decentralized painting and self-critical poetry (écriture) – both released from the constraints of representation and the ideology of mimetism – utilized an aesthetic based on tautology and repetition to create artworks understood as autotelic structures that disseminate meanings. She created hybrid spatio-temporal structures that became the subject themselves.76 In her early realizations, the artist combined elements of written language, material objects, action and photography. These works were developed in a dialogue with natural surroundings, often in the context of art events (exhibitions, artistic plein-airs, festivals), where Partum created “situations” rendered in the form of photographic images. In her first documented work, Presence/Absence (1965), Partum performatively abandons “the specific medium of painting altogether in favour of the generic category of Art.”77 The work consists of a series of small photographs (6 x 9 cm), which in fact represent two separate actions. The first series (figs. 31-32) follows a logical sequence: Presence shows the artist rising from the canvas spread out on the floor and creating a diagonal outline with her body, which the artist later emphatically traced with a thick black marker. Absence depicts a canvas stretched on the ground with the artist’s body outline, her shoes and her sunglasses as traces of her presence. The second series (figs. 33-35) consists of three images that show the artist posing in front of a composition made from the stretched canvases from before. 74

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Majewska 2014. Partum’s statements echo Kosuth’s argument for the “deemphasis of language in favor of meaning” (Alberro 1999, p. xix) as well as Kosuth’s argument that “[c]onceptual art annexes the function of the critic […; it] makes the middle-man unnecessary.” Kosuth, Joseph: “Introductory Note to Art-Language by the American Editor” in Art-Language, vol. 1, no. 2, February 1970, reprinted in Kosuth, Joseph: Art After Philosophy and After: Collected Writings. 1966–1990, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991, p. 39. Foster 1996, p. 127. Deleuze, Gilles: “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?” (1967) in: Deleuze, Gilles: Desert Islands and Other Texts, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004, pp. 170–192. Alberro 2003, p. 29.

Ewa Partum’s Conceptual Art

In the first case, the artist stands between canvases of different dimensions; her feet point directly into the geometric centre of the photograph. In the second photo, Partum is shown from above as she shows the shadow her hands cast on the canvas and again alludes to the presence of the author. In the third photo, the artist holds the rectangular canvas, looks directly into the camera and composes her body in the frame of the canvas. Organized in this way, the photographs indicate three different measures of proximity between the artist and the canvases: (1) being present amid canvases, (2) performing indexical traces by marking and (3) by touching the canvas. The photographs are in portrait format and allude to the portrait function: it is actually Partum’s self-portrait as an artist that distances herself from the (discipline) of painting. The work’s hybridity can be described using the historical term “intermedia”, indicating the intention to work within the space in between particular mediums. Dick Higgins’s definition of intermedia, coined in 1966, linked the rise of intermedia art with the social and political changes in Western society.78 In her use of the intermedia strategy in Presence/Absence, Partum represented the processes of unlearning about art conventions: instead of painting on canvas, she realized a camera action with un-painted canvases, and subsequently a drawing on photography.79 This resulted in a visual proposition about signifying instances of painting, photography and action. Partum recalls the circumstances of creating this early work as being, to a certain extent, accidental. She pictures herself as an isolated young artist, performing gestures aimed at undermining the traditional procedures of art-making.80 The narrative about this first documented artwork serves as a myth of origin not only in Partum’s self-historicization but also in the narratives created after her first retrospective exhibition (2001). Within this reading, the work Presence/Absence is inscribed into the narrative of the genealogy of Partum’s practice as a source of

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See Higgins, Dick: “Intermedia” in Something Else Press, The Something Else NEWSLETTER, vol. 1, no. 1, February, 1966, http://www.primaryinformation.org/oldsite/SEP/Something-Else-Pres s_Newsletter_V1N1.pdf and Higgins, Dick: “Fluxus: Theory and Reception” in Friedman, Ken (ed.): The Fluxus Reader, Chichester, UK: Academy Editions, 1998, p. 221. In the catalogue of Partum’s retrospective exhibition (2001), the work Presence/Absence has been described as a “performance”. See Stepken 2001, p. 17. In an unpublished interview conducted by Marek Ławrynowicz (1987), Ewa Partum mentions the title Drawings, referring to her earlier formal experiments with drawing inspired by Strzemiński’s theory of unizm (“unism”). The artist was on holiday in Sopot and took her canvases with her to paint. However, due to the bad weather conditions, she was unable to continue painting and she decided to do something else with the materials. Earlier, Partum had experimented with applying natural materials such as sand and stones onto canvas. Interview with Ewa Partum, 14.07 2016 (Berlin).

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formats such as “the temporary project, art outdoors, inclusion of one’s own body [and] representation in a one-to-one translation”.81 In this carefully composed series of images, Partum’s body constitutes a main factor that organizes the dynamics of the pictures. Partum repurposed the empty canvas as a background for her action that preceded her feminist politics. At the same time, the artist transfers her artistic focus from painting as an activity and discipline (that she would be practising as a student at the art academy until 1970) towards the possibilities of photography as a means of rendering artistic action. In Partum’s archive, there are different photographs taken during the action that have been excluded from the series. Presence/Absence therefore constitutes a carefully arranged photographic double cycle that shows a tendency to compose through narrative. Moreover, the photographs represent the equivalent of thinking through the painterly means of a balanced visual composition. Thus, the photographic transcription does not function as mere documentation of the action, or a depiction of the arrangement (installation), but instead it is re-described as art that exceeds rigid artistic conventions and mediums. Partum’s work’s structural logic is based on tautology: the outline of Partum’s body constitutes a trace of her presence, “the memory of an ever-receding origin that always remains elusively outside of what it produces in the present.”82 Thus Partum simultaneously thematizes the trace of the author and the spectral essence of photography that “always contains a trace of a thing that was once there.”83 Conceptualizing the shift from painting to photography in Lacanian terms, Rosalind Krauss speaks about the change from the Symbolic to the Imaginary order. According to Krauss, the Symbolic “finds its way into pictorial art through the human consciousness, operating behind the forms of representation, forming connections between the objects and their meanings.” Krauss connects photography with the Imaginary order: “the power of photography is an index and its meaning resides in those modes of identification which are associated with Imaginary.”84 Within this interpretational framework, in her first artwork – i.e. the work positioned retrospectively as her first within Partum’s self-historicizing narrative – the artist performs a shift from the Symbolic to the Imaginary, locating the genealogy of her

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Stepken 2001, p. 17. Jay, Martin:Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994, p. 506. Jay continues, stating that according to Derrida, “representations can never be replaced by the pure presence of what they represent. But neither can their difference from the ‘things’ they represent be completely effaced in the name of a realm of pure simulacra entirely without a trace of reference.” Ibid. Krauss, Rosalind: The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985, p. 203.

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artistic practice in the realm of “games of mirroring, of duplication, of reversed identification and projection, always in the mode of the double.”85 Although the work Presence/Absence is considered one of the first neo-avantgarde interventions in the public space in Poland, its primary public (its potential witness) was not directly addressed. For this reason, I would rather define it as a form of experimental activity that incorporated a natural setting. In another work, The Luncheon on the Grass, after Manet (figs. 36-37), realized in 1971 during the Fourth Biennale of Spatial Forms, The Dreamers’ Congress in Elbląg, the primary public consisted of the artists, critics and art theorists who participated in the Biennale and who had been invited by Partum to take part in a spatio-semantic game. Based on a preliminary remark stored in the Partum archive, we can state that an operation on the consciousness of the public has been included in the concept of this work. Partum writes: A difference between the artistic language of old and new art. A quote from an existing work of art: the painting by Édouard Manet, in which the artist decided to withdraw from an artistic convention. He succeeded in discovering something new and at the same time agitating against the bourgeois mentality of the audience.86 The Luncheon on the Grass, after Manet was designed as a temporary installation that aimed at spatially rewriting Manet’s famous painting and activating the audience to read allusions and make connections. Partum used a reference to the actual painting as the source of an action that took place in real time and in physical space and was photographically reproduced. She was referring to the local tradition of Tadeusz Kantor’s happenings, such as his 1967 The Raft of The Medusa and 1969 The Anatomy Lesson after Rembrandt, which were developed in dialogue with the history of European classical painting. Her work was an analytical alternative to the quasitheatrical events directed and performed by Kantor: a critique of their expanded choreography and spectacularity. The Luncheon on the Grass, after Manet also marked the beginning of the practice of the repetition and reordering of cultural texts of high modernism, to which Partum introduced a component of physical space and chance operations. In this work, like in Presence/Absence, an empty, unstretched canvas appears as a sign of painting and serves as a surface for traces of the author’s presence. This time, Partum referred to the particular painting and translated its visual language into a formula that combined linguistic signs and material objects. Tomasz Załuski has reconstructed three lines of interpretation that placed Manet’s art at the crux of a modernist revolution. In Greenbergian reading, Manet’s works are a symbolic initiation of painterly modernism due to their openness for 85 86

Deleuze 2004, p. 172 Undated handwritten notes in the Ewa Partum archive.

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presenting the surface on which they were painted. In T. J. Clark’s interpretation, they appear as an articulation of a doubt about the possibility of representation. The third tendency, represented by André Malraux, relates to the arbitrariness and creativity of an artist.87 These interpretations, which simultaneously explore three possible readings of Manet’s paintings, provide a framework for the articulation of the three stages of Partum’s deconstructive action. In the first stage, Partum performed the reification of the surface: the artist placed an empty white canvas on the grass, almost like a picnic blanket. In place of a pictorial representation, she proposed a performative translation of the painting’s title, offering the possibility of the actual event: a picnic on the lawn. Secondly, Partum wrote the title of the work, her own name (at the top) and Manet’s name on the canvas. Next to the canvas, Partum again transcribed the title of Manet’s painting directly on the lawn. The canvas itself became merely a space for the revealing of the author and his/her creativity: “after Manet” was overwritten with “by Ewa Partum”, creating a form of palimpsest signature. Partum translated this spatial deconstruction of Manet’s painting into a series of photographs that reaffirmed her authorial presence: documentation consists of a sequence of images that show the artist as part of the installation. In this work, Partum played with the literality of tautological reasoning: Manet’s The Luncheon on the Grass has been transcribed on the grass, while the canvas became the space for the artist’s signature. This strategy of performing tautology was developed further in two works that employed photography. In 1972 at the Galeria Adres, the artist realized the installation Eiffel Tower: The Presence of the Height (fig. 16). Initially, the work consisted of a selection of objects accompanied by written texts. Partum demonstrated “the presence of the height” by exposing three balls of rope representing “a little, a little more and the whole height” of the Eiffel Tower. The tower, defined in the accompanying text as a culturally recognizable sign of height, was to be reconstructed in the viewers’ imagination or memory, and consequently, it became recategorized as a mental process.88 This realization was subsequently exhibited as a photographic installation depicting images of the ropes, accordingly entitled un peu, un peu plus, le tout (a little, a little more, and the whole). Partum aimed here at juxtaposing different possibilities of communicating height, combining distinctive forms of notation related to textual information, visual connotation and the presence of material objects in a subsequent stage that returned to the medium of photography combined with evocative titles.

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Załuski 2012, p. 249. Partum, Ewa: Wieża Eiffla. Obecność wysokości (Eiffel Tower: The Presence of the Height), Galeria Adres, Łódź 1972.

Ewa Partum’s Conceptual Art

In another work, entitled The Act of Contemplation, realized at the F-ART Symposium of Recent Art, Artistic Attitudes 75, which took place in Gdańsk from 1–10 September 1975, Partum included the audience in her action while at the same time commenting on the character of this participation.89 The artist projected on a wall a photographic image depicting a Japanese family meditating in a stone garden. In front of the projection Partum set up a row of chairs for the viewers, arranging the situation as “the act of contemplation of a contemplation.” As in the other works mentioned, Partum used photography here to postpone the implementation of the concept, since it was only possible to close a repeating circle of tautological considerations within the photographic documentation. The etymological meaning of “tautology” is to say the same thing twice. In Partum’s early works tautology was a principle that connected arranged ephemeral situations or actions with their photographic renderings. Here, photography had a special and important function: it was used to show an action or situation again – to complement a tautological cycle. Thus, although Partum contested conventional media such as painting, she did not adopt a simply anti-visual attitude. The tautologies created by Partum operated within the regime of visuality. In the context of Western culture, the anti-visual impulse of conceptual art was related to the fact that “people started to deal with the world aesthetically.”90 As summarized by Alberro, Kosuth “concludes that the survival and continuation of art in an era when the visual and the aesthetic have become supreme, when ‘the entire human environment [has become] a work of art,’91 […] depends on the ability of advanced artists to negate those realms.”92 In the Polish context, i.e. in the visual sphere of state socialism, a degradation of visuality did not relate to the critique of the spectacle of mass society. According to Ludwiński, “a degradation of not only objects, but most of all of visuality in favour of a process, within which objects are merely symptoms”, was related to the autotelic artistic discourse focused on a deconstruction of conventional media and traditional manifestations of art.93 Visuality as such was not considered a field for deconstructive gestures related to social critique. It was instead a fossilized language that became the field of critical gestures. In that

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F-ART Symposium of Recent Art, Artistic Attitudes 75, was organized by Lech Mrożek, Piotr Olszański and Henryk Zdrojewski in the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk as a festival of art students from the Baltic States. Partum presented documentation of Galeria Adres activities including works by Richard Kostelanetz and Ken Friedman. Kosuth, Joseph: “Art After Philosophy”, reprinted from Studio International, October 1969 in: Alberro et al. (eds.) 1999, pp. 158–177, p. 162. McLuhan, Marshall/ Fiore, Quentin: The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, New York: Bantam, 1967, p. 68. Alberro 2003, p. 49. Ludwiński 2009, p. 43.

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context, artistic strategies focused on language and apparently devoid of oppositionality assumed a political dimension. Moreover, an emphasis on working towards an individual artistic language, which is an idiosyncratic mode of communication and is subject to the artist’s complete control, can be viewed in this context as a subversive and countercultural practice. Partum positioned visuality at the centre of her artistic language by means of photography. Photographs were not conceptualized as an “imperfect substitute for actions and events, adding extra layers of meaning and creating autonomous works of art that bore only a tangential relationship to the original event.”94 If her works were conceptualized as fragmented, mediated instances of conceptual artworks (across event, photographic representation and presentation), photographic image was a subsequent stage in the continued medial transformation of a processual and durational work of art, structurally linked to the original event by the concept of repetition. At the same time, Partum problematized patterns of spectatorship: by producing connotative photographic images, such as Presence/Absence, The Luncheon on the Grass, after Manet and Eiffel Tower, Partum pointed to the fact that meanings are made in a social activity that involves the viewer.95 Ion Grigorescu, who worked under the harsh conditions of Ceauşescu’s Romania, emphasized that Western artists and artists who were working abroad at the time and who were doing their camera actions in institutional frameworks had a “public and things available to them” and for this reason, their artistic production was “clearly inscribed in the general rules of the genre”.96 For Partum and her colleagues, there were no rules of the genre, but several other rules that had to be obstructed. It was a moment of experimentation with possible uses of photographic and filmic representation that went beyond the problem of art distribution. Some of Partum’s works from that period relate to the trend in Polish conceptualism described as “medialism”, characterized by a special focus on the technological means of representation. In the Tautological Cinema series (1973–74), a cycle of short 8 mm films, Partum thematized the notion of tautology in the films’ structural logic and within the series title.97 Łukasz Ronduda, who emphasized that Ewa Partum was the first female artist to be involved in structural cinema in Poland, interprets the Tautological Cinema series as a work about the impossibility of communicating an idea – merely as an illustration of such an impossibility, referring to the title of Partum’s lecture from 1978, “The Non-Transmissibility of the Message”,

94 95 96 97

Pospiszyl et al. (eds.) 2002, p. 123. In her later works, the feminist difference will also be articulated in knowledge about normalized connotation systems and patterns of spectatorship. See Galmeanu, Alex: Ion Grigorescu – Video Portrait, 2014, 73’18” at https://more.alexgalmeanu .com/projects/ion_grigorescu/. Partum, Ewa: Tautological Cinema, 1973, 4’20’’, no sound, 8 mm.

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to which I will return later.98 However, if we interpret this series alongside other works produced at the time by Partum, our conclusion may be quite the opposite. On the one hand, it is worth positioning this series in the context of the thenongoing structuralist debates related to the problematic of film language, but on the other hand, it is also important to investigate the actual circumstances of the production and presentation of the Tautological Cinema series. The artists working in Poland at the beginning of the 1970s were eager to incorporate technological mediums that opened up new possibilities in art production. Still, film as a medium was relatively inaccessible.99 In Łódź, members of the Workshop of the Film Form (1970–77), a group of artists engaged in structural film that occupied a strategic position in between contemporary art and cinema,100 had unlimited access to the means of professional film production due to their affiliation with the Łódź Film School. Films realized by the Workshop were described as a meta-critique of the institution of cinematography and mediated reality.101 Partum’s films were her first experiences in working with the film camera, although not necessarily with using a film camera. Even when the artist was recording herself, she was still simultaneously located in front of the camera, performing for it (fig. 38), holding boards with credits and titles, and presenting her other works, such as poems by ewa. Certain films from the Tautological Cinema series were filmed for Partum by anonymous assistants.102 In a series of photographs from 1973 (figs. 39-40), we see the artist posing with the film camera while working on the Tautological Cinema series. Although these images represent an archetypal motif of feminist art, a woman with a camera, they were also a means for Partum’s self-representation as a conceptual artist working in the field of “medialism”. Films from the Tautological Cinema series, also those without an obviously manifested presence of the artist, begin with the credit line: film by ewa. Two deal with the problem of the notation of time within the materiality of celluloid tape: in 10 Metres of Film Tape, Partum transmits information about the quantity of tape that

98

Ronduda 2009, p. 142. See also Ronduda, Łukasz: Subversive Strategies in the Media Arts: Józef Robakowski’s Found Footage and Video Scratch” in Piotr Krajewski and Violetta Kutlubasis-Krajewska (eds.): From Monument to Market: Video Art and Public Space, Wrocław: WRO Center. 107–117. 99 At the time of Partum’s studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, there was only one film camera available to students at the Drawing Department (which was the academy’s most progressive department). 100 Ronduda 2009, pp. 266–270. 101 Ibid., p. 271. 102 When questioned about this, Partum argues that it is not relevant who carried out the filming according to her concepts. Interview with Ewa Partum, 22.11.2017 (Berlin). In one of her films (Active Poetry), we can see the artist giving instructions to the camera person.

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runs through the projector; in Concert, she visualizes the concept of eternity by referring to the symbolism of the landscape, showing the image of the sea, where the infinite repetition of waves is complemented by the word “etc.” In another film, the artist makes exaggerated gestures, covers her eyes, ears and face, and alludes to physical means of communication and the convention of film representation. This sequence of frames bears a resemblance to the series of photographs Conceptual Exercises, realized in the Galeria Adres in 1972, in which Partum poses both alone and together with an assistant, performing exercises of “not hearing, not speaking, not listening and not being seen”. Although Partum was interested in the materiality and structure of the medium of film, she appropriated existing discourse about film as a philosophical practice rather than attempted to reinvent it. Instead, her films can be described as performative research into the possibilities of 8 mm film to be structured by the concept of tautology. The “mark of genre” of the Tautological Cinema series provided within the title of the work is hybrid and refers simultaneously to the discourse of conceptual art (“Tautological”) and the institution of cinematography (“Cinema”).103 Ronduda writes that the films realized by the Workshop of Film Form aimed to show that reality created by media cannot be identified with the real picture of the world but only with the physical materiality and reality of celluloid.104 Partum employed “film as film” in its celluloid nature merely as the means to produce a conceptual work of art rather than to comment on mediated reality. This relation to structural film discourse is confirmed explicitly in Partum’s texts published on the occasion of the Film as Idea, Film as Film, Film as Art festival organized in the Galeria Adres in 1977. In the invitation to the festival, Partum writes: The main purpose of the festival is to treat film as film. The works presented in 8 x 8 mm format are intended to embrace: Artistic Facts, The Art of Action, and Documentation. We wish to propagate authentic values of film art originating in the premise of “art as art” in contrast to professional endeavours.105 It is interesting to contrast these goals with the curatorial program of the Cinema Laboratory (1973), which was organized by the Workshop of the Film Form and in which the participating artists discussed the need for “pure cinema” and not “pure

103 I refer to the essay “The Law of Genre”, in which Derrida asks: “can one identify a work of art, of whatever sort, but especially a work of discursive art, if it does not bear the mark of a genre, if it does not signal or mention it or make it remarkable in any way?” See Derrida, Jacques: “The Law of Genre” in Critical Inquiry, vol. 7, no. 1, Autumn 1980, pp. 55–81. 104 Ronduda 2009, p. 279. 105 Invitation to the Film as Idea, Film as Film, Film as Art International Film Festival, typescript, Galeria Adres, Łódź 1977.

Ewa Partum’s Conceptual Art

film”.106 The Tautological Cinema series was also accompanied by a text, in which Partum explored the problem of auto-thematic transmission: This is not dealing with aesthetics, this is a new kind of philosophical practice in an area where relations between the film image and the movement of the camera exhaust the range of interests in the reality of film.107 Therefore, Partum’s aim was not to liberate the medium of film from the imposed constraints of meaning production in order to comment on (mediated) reality, it was rather a purified medium that she appropriated for creating a new site-specific formulation of tautology. During the Fifth Biennale of Spatial Forms, co-organized by members of the Workshop of the Film Form (15–20 June 1973) under the title Kino-Laboratorium, Partum presented part of her Tautological Cinema series during the festival’s survey of Polish and international structural films.108 The Biennale that year was focused on issues regarding film’s language and materiality. Alongside her Tautological Cinema films, Partum also arranged a delegated performance entitled If you want to say something – speak in the language of the language, which was conceived as an enacted/staged tautology. Partum asked the audience to repeat the sentence that made up the title of the action. The films’ and the performance’s structural logic were parallel, both being conceptual tautologies realized in a medium-specific formula: film and speech, respectively. In 1974, Partum created the book by ewa, which consisted of the same sentence in several languages: If you want to say something – speak in the language of the language. This work also reveals a relational geography of Partum’s connections and international aspirations. As well as Polish, Partum used German, as the international language adopted by many Eastern European artists to communicate with each other; French, as the language of cultural aspirations, which was replaced by English in Partum’s texts around 1972/73 due to her intensified mail art contacts; and Danish and Hungarian, as languages of some of the artists that collaborated with the Galeria Adres. In 1976, in the work Drawing TV (fig. 41), Partum extended her catalogue of “speaking in the language of the language.” In this case, the artist focused on the process of drawing performed in an expanded field, i.e. on an everyday object. 106 Fifth Biennale Form Przestrzennych Galeria EL in Elbląg, Informator: Kino Laboratorium 1973, typescript, Elbląg 1973. 107 Partum, Ewa: Tautological Cinema, 1973, typescript in the Ewa Partum archive. 108 Participants of the Kino-Laboratorium included: the Workshop of the Film Form, Studio Eksperymentalne Polskiego Radia i Telewizji from Warsaw, Studio Kompozycji Emocjonalnej from Wrocław, Grupa w Składzie from Warsaw, ART – Laboratorium from Poznań, Grupa “Remont” from Warsaw, Gdańska Scena Eksperymentalna, Wielobranżowa Spółdzielnia Poetycka from Poznań, Studio Béla Balázs from Budapest and thirty individual artists from Poland, Argentina, Holland, Spain, Canada, France, Hungary and Scotland.

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The work was exhibited for the first time in 1978 at the International Triennial of Drawing in Wrocław. It consists of a series of photographic images showing abstract lines and outlines made on TV monitors and 8 mm film documentation (6’01”) presenting Partum’s hands drawing on the TV screens, creating abstract lines and outlines of the figures that appear on the screen (news readers and speakers), as well as an image of a snowy screen representing interrupted transmission. This conceptual work assumed an explicitly political dimension in the context of the socialist regime. At the time, Polish television functioned primarily as a means of propaganda. Moreover, the mid-1970s were characterised by a rapid rise in the popularity and distribution of television; the country’s average number of TV sets per household increased, and a second broadcast channel was introduced.109 In other words, television became a relevant channel for imposing the official vision of reality, and any intervention that questioned its status was seen as oppositional and critical. In her lecture “Made by Me: The Non-Transmissibility of the Message”, which Partum delivered at the international seminar A New Art in the Pursuit of Qualities, at Jankowice (23–25 April 1978), organized by the Maximal Art Gallery run by Grzegorz Dziamski, Partum retrospectively, from the point of view of 1978, explained the reasons for her insistence upon structural repetitions in her earlier works. She defined art practice as a disinterested set of operations on reality, objects, concepts and ideas. She described artworks merely as forms of information about art’s existence and defined practising art as an exercise in the repetition of the message about art’s existence. Partum’s statement echoes other texts that circulated during the early 1970s among artists and critics in Poland. For instance, in his statement from 1972 entitled “Portrait of Art”, Jan Chwałczyk wrote: “Every material embodiment of an idea (while it is being assimilated by individuals) marks the beginning of multiplication leading to the emergence of yet another stereotype.”110 Also according to Partum’s statement, the most dangerous threats to art’s existence are the forms of its realizations, its embodiments, and a set of artistic conventions. Discussing Kosuth’s approach to art, Alberro writes that “the relevance of the actual material production of the work was simply to communicate the underlying, essentially abstract idea. In this spirit, he proposed what was basically a new ontological task for the modernist artist: to produce artworks that function as absolutely stable and contextless tautological structures.”111 Partum, on the contrary, grounded her tautological structures within particular materialities; in that sense, they were situated and medium-specific and not merely linguistic. 109 Szyłak et al. (eds.) 2012/13, p. 68. 110 Chwałczyk, Jan: “A Portrait of Art” (1972), reprinted in: Polit (ed.) 2000, p. 23. 111 Alberro 2003, p. 39.

Ewa Partum’s Conceptual Art

To understand the political dimension of this strategy, it is also worth to consider what was rejected through the notion of tautology. According to Luis Camnitzer, the conceptual procedure of “demediatization” aimed at sending messages through “lossless information systems”,112 eliminating open meaning and the need for interpretation. It was related to the interest in emergent information theories, popularized in Poland in art circles by the writings of Ludwiński and Porębski. The use of tautology in conceptual art produced under the conditions of advanced capitalism have worked to “exploit the dissolution of the sign, to demonstrate the reification of aesthetic language”113 and its arbitrariness. In the case of socialist regimes, tautology, as the logic that eliminates redundancy and stabilizes meaning, worked to protect the sign from any form of penetration by the dominant ideology. It can be concluded that the tautology employed by Partum within her site-specific media investigations was, on the one hand, a strategy to connect to the horizon of “conceptual art”, to develop her artistic language within this particular transnational artistic context, and, on the other hand, it acquired the specific function of controlling one’s own artistic message.114

Repetitions and Raptures: Res Extensa (Subject, Body, Desire); The Critique of Conceptualism Tautology is a particular form of repetition. Partum has used repetition in many different ways in her practice: (1) thematizing it, as in the works analysed earlier in this chapter, (2) creating works (figs. 19-20) or a series of artworks that build upon the same organizing principle (poems by ewa Active Poetry), and (3) repeating her own gestures or works by other authors (Active Poetry with texts by James Joyce and Marcel Proust, as well as the series of Hommage á …). In everyday communication, repetition is used to strengthen a message, but constant repetition weakens an argument. Within the same logic, the repetitions employed by Partum as a strategy of identification with analytical conceptual discourse worked as a tool to undermine it. Partum used a subversive strategy that brings to mind “having her cake and eating it”, or “wearing both a platform and a flip-flop”: two ways Alexandra Kokoli 112 113 114

Camnitzer, Luis: Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2007, p. 33. Foster 1996, p. 80. Another interpretation of the political dimension of the Tautological Cinema series is proposed by Mike Sperlinger, who writes that “Tautological cinema […] appears to give up on claims to reality. And yet, in doing so it holds up a mirror to totalitarianism, which attempts to completely determine (social and political) reality: tautological film reflects tautological ideology.” See Sperlinger, Mike: “Tautological Cinema: Some Notes on Self-Evidence in the Workshop of the Film Form” in Kuźmicz, Marika/ Ronduda, Łukasz (eds.): Workshop of the Film Form, Warsaw: Arton Foundation; Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2017, pp. 193–199, p. 199.

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has playfully described other conceptualist artistic practice.115 This sort of strategy accelerates the conceptual logic in order to break it open from the inside. The proliferation of repetitive structures can be interpreted as a sign of the repression of the subject/desire within the rigid format of conceptual aesthetics based on reason. However, the repetitions in Partum’s conceptual works refrain from a monotony “that destroys all possible metaphors.”116 They are structured with raptures that, as we have already seen in the tautology-based works, reintroduce the notions of the subject, the author and the body into a conceptual work of art. We can describe them as cracks in the phallocentric symbolic order. In the next section, I would like to look closely at the ways in which the subject becomes restored in Partum’s conceptual works. Luiza Nader argues that Partum’s work indicates “the non-identity written into conceptual art: the tension between the erasure of the traces of the author and the birth of the sovereign subject.”117 The subject in Partum’s works emerges outside of universalistic constraints – it enters the stage straight away as “she” and, in that sense, assists in the death of the universalized author. Thus, as Nader eloquently puts it, Partum “introduces into the experience of conceptualism the notion of Difference, which subjected to repression, enabled the foundation of definitional homogeneity and, together with that, the conceptual identity that is based on Reason.”118 The subject that is restored in Partum’s conceptual works cannot be decisively stabilized, as it takes the nomadic form of a fragmentary signifier following a disintegrative dynamic. Partum reintroduces the subject to a conceptual work of art through two contradictory logics: (1) in a topological manner, the subject understood as a position in the structural space of the artistic proposition, with its function determined by the structural order of the work, and (2) within a substantial or essentialist logic, as a subject that relates to the empirical author. To the first category belongs a “creative subject” that is introduced, for instance, through Partum’s signature in poems by ewa and the works made by ewa: a theoretical subject that sanctions an act of interpretation – the so-called “author” removed by poststructuralism. In some of Partum’s works, the artist develops a particularization of this authorial subject – it returns as a “desiring subject” through connotative language, as a critique of the phallocentric ideology of the cogito, a subjectivity concealed in a conceptual work of art.

115 116 117 118

Kokoli, Alexandra: “Read my QR: Quilla Constance and Conceptualist Promise of Intelligibility” in Aikens, Nick et al. (eds.) 2019, pp. 36–65, p. 39. Dimitrijević, Nena: “Gorgona: Art as a Way of Existence” in Pospiszyl et al. (eds.) 2002, pp. 124–140, p. 132. Nader 2009, p. 32. Ibid.

Ewa Partum’s Conceptual Art

On the other hand, the empirical author is being revealed through a confessional language and biographism; namely, the first-person narratives and marks of the body as in poems by ewa through the imprints of Partum’s lips. The empirical author returns, therefore, not as a stable subject of the logocentric order that distributes meaning, but rather as one of the levels of meaning production. Or, to borrow phrasing from Barthes, she (the author) “becomes one of many figures in the story, and her life is not a source of the story, but rather a competitive tale.”119 If we consider nomadism of the subject as found in Partum’s early practice in psychoanalytical terms, where subjectivity is described as “never set once and for all but structured as a relay of anticipations,”120 we can read this hesitation as a process of the constitution of Partum’s artistic subject through deferred action. It was temporarily integrated, after overcoming the conceptual experience, in the work mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Self-Identification (1980), but it was never immobilized, and it continued to transform in Partum’s performative works. Considering the structural logic of Partum’s early works, the question of “Who is speaking?” can be answered in a couple of ways. Sometimes, it is the language that is speaking (Eiffel Tower, 1972), sometimes the “author” is speaking as in poem: my touch is the touch of a woman, 1971 (fig. 17) and sometimes it is Ewa Partum who is speaking as in Autobiography, 1971/74 and poem by ewa with her daughter Berenika, 1974 (fig. 18). As the title of her first work, Presence/Absence, indicates, we have to contend with an uncertainty concerning the presence and absence of the subject in Partum’s early practice. This hesitation is registered in particular works but also in between them, in a series of works through repetition, and it follows “deconstruction’s preference for undecidability over closure.”121 The hesitation can also be viewed in terms of a constant movement between the structural logics of indexical and sign economies (“an indexical grounding in the presence of the body or the site that follows a program of reduction of the conventional sign to a trace, and the arbitrariness of sign economy, its relative mobility and position”).122 Signs created by Partum become idiosyncratic ingredients of her private idiolect. They signify only within the framework of this particular symbolic practice; their meanings are created through constant repetition. These idiosyncratic signs include Partum’s lip imprints, and later, her naked body. Tomasz Załuski emphases that “on the one hand, Partum considered signs as elements of material reality – on the other, she treated elements of this reality, including her own body, as tautological, self-re-

Burzyńska, Anna: Dekonstrukcja, Polityka i Performatyka, Kraków: Wydawnictwo Universitas, 2013, p. 190. 120 Foster 1996, p. 207. 121 Jay 1994, p. 515. 122 Foster 1996, p. 74. 119

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ferential signs (referring to themselves), but also capable of generating meanings thanks to mutual relationships and configurations.”123 In Presence/Absence, as well as in The Luncheon on the Grass, both instances of the subject, the creative author and the empirical author have been problematized in the context of photographic representation. Both works represent a hesitation between the indexical and the sign economies. They play with the unsettling and – shaking the notions of representation and presence – do not resolve the problem of the authorial subject; rather, they suspend it in the spirit of Derrida’s vigilant refusal to valorise one side of binary oppositions.”124 In many of Partum’s works, the subject revealed through the repetitions can be described as a “desiring subject” which is indicated by cracks within a pattern, by something that does not fit. During the First Cleaning of Art event (05–06 May 1972) at Muzeum O in Warsaw, Partum realized the performance un peu, beaucoup, passionnément, pas du tout. The artist used four sheets of paper and burned them accordingly: “a little”, “more”, “passionately” and “not at all”. A combination of denotative statements with an affective language connoting erotic passion was complemented by the presence of fire. The work that originated in this performance was later exhibited as a series of burned pages alluding to the form of drawing. Its meaning was generated by a juxtaposition of traces of fire with the title, which worked as an instruction for activating viewers’ imagination. The connotative function of language was also employed in film by ewa (1972), which represents the artist’s hands ripping a locust tree leaf, supplemented with “etcetera” written at the bottom of the frame. This image is intertwined with an allusion to the pictorial motif effeuiller la marguerite – the “he loves me, he loves me not” fortune-telling game. A relatively long close-up shot of the artist’s lips, together with the ambivalent subtitle “touch”, which can be read as both a descriptive and imperative statement, introduces a certain sexual tension. This is then followed with a frame showing poem by ewa, my touch is the touch of a woman (1971). The logic of the connotation is combined here with a seemingly descriptive visual language. This rupture allows a desiring subject to emerge and at the same time to disappear within the structural pattern.

123

Załuski, Tomasz: “Kobieta walcząca o pozycję w polu produkcji artystycznej. Samoidentyfkacja, samoorganizacja i amoemancypacja według Ewy Partum” (A Woman Fighting for Her Position in the Field of Art Production: Self-Identification, Self-Organization and SelfEmancipation According to Ewa Partum) in: Baron-Milian, Marta/ Kałuża, Anna/ Szopa, Katarzyna (eds.): Płeć awangardy, Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 2019, pp. 290–305. 124 Jay 1994, p. 506. The author continues: “This meant that he [Derrida] was just as critical of theorists who believed in the possibility of doing away with the illusions of sight as he was of those who believed visual expertise could provide illuminations of truth.”

Ewa Partum’s Conceptual Art

The most consequent use of serialism and repetition in the process of revealing the subject was employed by Partum in her poems by ewa series, which restored the connection between intention and meaning in a conceptual work of art. Poems by ewa can be accessed or analysed from many different perspectives: They were created within the context of mail art, as intimate works delivered directly to the recipient, and in that sense, they are examples of the anti-institutional tendencies prevalent in the art of the 1970s. They are also a perfect exemplification of the strategy of serialism, as all have similar measurements (most of them an A4 page) and are composed using a limited number of elements – black letters, short texts and the imprints of Partum’s lips – but each one is individualized.125 The first poems by ewa were created in 1971 and Partum still continues to make them (2020), including in sub-series such as the Millennium Series (2000) and Fragments (1980), which references works of Goethe and Proust. During the existence of the Galeria Adres (1972–77), poems were sent to other artists and presented at mail art exhibitions; in 1982 one poem appeared in Numero Quattro, edited by Sol LeWitt. Some poems by ewa have recently been framed for Partum’s retrospective in 2001 in Karlsruhe. The artist emphasizes, however, that this presentation is merely a form of a protection, or passive conservation, and that the poems were created initially as ephemera.126 Most of the poems by ewa combine imprints of the artist’s lips with other forms of notation. Existing interpretations explain the poems as a manifestation of écriture feminine, of women’s writing, where the female body’s difference is inscribed in text, or of parler femme, i.e. speaking as a woman.127 Undoubtedly, reading the poems by ewa with or through Hélène Cixous’s Le Rire de la Méduse (1975) or Luce Irigaray’s and Julia Kristeva’s texts can be very productive. On the other hand, these preposterous readings reduce Partum’s works to a (perfect) illustration of feminist literary theories, which undermines their historical alterity and the context in which they were produced and distributed, i.e. conceptual art discourse. Moreover, as Agata Jakubowska has observed, the imprints of Partum’s lips, with which the artist “writes”, remain completely incomprehensible without being supplemented with letters or text.128 Thus Partum did not aspire to create an alternative feminine writing, as her texts still depended on the logocentric textual order. This is not to say that

125

126 127 128

In the 1970s, Partum realized around thirty different poems by ewa. Most were created with lipstick imprints or deconstructed texts and scattered letters. The exception is a poem by ewa dated 1974, in which the artist incorporated a photograph of herself breastfeeding her baby daughter Berenika. Interview with Ewa Partum, 9.11.2015 (Berlin). See, for instance, Dawidek Gryglicka 2012, and Monkiewicz and Turowski in Szyłak et al. (eds.) 2012/13. Jakubowska, Agata: “Niemożliwość porozumienia. Feminizm indywidualny Ewy Partum”, in Obieg, 2 November 2006.

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Partum’s linguistic works were lacking “redemptive, utopian impulse”,129 but that this impulse was rather related to overcoming constraints and revealing paradoxes in the local conceptual discourse than with the feminist linguistic investigations. From this perspective, it can be argued that Partum employed her lipstick writing to enrich the conceptual work’s poetics with another form of notation related to the everyday experience. Since her practice was grounded in language, and poems by ewa were realized as a form of visual poetry, Partum was inclined to analyse the position of the speaking subject of her works. In this context, it is interesting to refer to Agata Jakubowska’s reflections on the genealogy of Partum’s feminism. Jakubowska argues that it was precisely Partum’s conceptual experiments with language that prompted her to question the gender of the speaking subject and the conditions of speech.130 In her engagement with language, Partum moved from the (conceptual) poetic to the (feminist) politic.131 I therefore propose to read Partum’s poems by ewa as parallel to rather than together with poststructuralist feminist literary theory and to interpret them within the context of Partum’s conceptual identification as a critical response to conceptual non-identity – as an accumulation of traces of the subject(s) and as an intensification of the hesitation between the indexicality (related to the body and its traces) and the arbitrariness of sign. The imprint of Partum’s lips in the poems by ewa series constitutes the indexical mark of the subject – it is a “registration of sheer physical presence” and a “reduction of the sign to a trace.”132 On the other hand, it is a sign in an alternative private language, an idiosyncratic form of notation that follows the paradigm of “withdrawal from the language as a form of communication by means of speaking in private allusions and riddles.”133 In that context, Partum’s lip writing can be as an uncoded message that must be supplemented with another type of notation.134 The language of poems by ewa is hybrid. It does not derive from the “insistence on a language of proximity rather than distance, a language closer to the sense

129 Martin Jay on Derrida’s project. See Jay 1994, p. 497. 130 Jakubowska, Agata: “Niemożność porozumienia. Feminizm indywidualny Ewy Partum” in Obieg, 02 November 2006. 131 For Partum, practising conceptualism forced the issue of “whether a work of art understood as form of visual communication can continue to signify without revealing the speaking subject and without containing the message relevant for the external world.” See Krauss 1985, p. 202. Angela Dimitrakaki, recalling Craig Owens’s argument about the affinity between feminism and postmodernism, argues that the postmodern emphasis on language, textuality and the fluidity of meaning “introduced an opportunity to think through and about the significance of a discursive and more broadly representational space for the circulation of ideology and the entrenchment of gender roles and hierarchies.” Dimitrakaki 2013, p. 42. 132 Krauss 1985, p. 209. 133 Ibid., p. 200. 134 Ibid., p. 211.

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of touch and taste than sight”;135 it is instead based on the tension between these two possible forms of cognition. In poems, Partum juxtaposes tactile with textual to create an accumulative form of notation following the same principle as found in her installation A Field Arranged by Imagination (1970), where she established a field of relations between linguistic poetry and material objects. It is also an attempt to overcome the dichotomy of reading and looking. The subject reveals itself in poems by ewa through language and body. Partum introduces the notion of touch in both registers: thematizing it within the text (my touch is the touch of a woman) and performing it by marking a sheet of paper with her lips. The issue of touch has been analysed within the framework of corporal feminist discourse that considers the mind-body relationship through psychoanalysis, and this may be a good guide to understanding this issue in Partum’s art. Elizabeth Grosz has convincingly argued that the haptic precedes the differentiation between the active and passive, as well as before the subject and the object.136 Exploring the possibilities of haptic notation can be interpreted in this light as a strategy employed to further destabilize the position of a subject. There are three types of texts that accompany imprints of Partum’s lips: (1) appropriated and deconstructed, de-semanticized fragments of literary texts; (2) Partum’s statements in confessional language such as my touch is the touch of a woman; and (3) abstract concepts such as “love” or “art”. There are also exceptions: the poem with an imprint of lips and alphabet letters and the poem with completely erased text. In the first of type of poems the letters are scattered on the page, as in the series Active Poetry, where letters are dispersed in the physical space. The genealogy of this gesture reaches back to the text installation realized by Partum in 1971 in the Poetry Bureau. The artist scattered a couple sets of cardboard cut-out alphabets on the floor and referred to the institutional status of the space in the title of the installation: An Area under Poetic Licence (1971). In this work, Partum elaborated on the principle of reification of language and the critique of its referential model that took place within the field of modern literature, extending it through the materialization of the letters. The photographic images from Partum’s action, published in the zine Notatnik Robotnika Sztuki (Notebook of the Art Worker) in a printed format, became one of her first poems by ewa. Partum’s works from the series Active Poetry were based on a repetition of selfreflective modernist texts by James Joyce and Marcel Proust, and later also on the philosophical texts of Immanuel Kant, combined strategies of transgression and deconstruction. In her first action (1971), Partum draws on James Joyce’s Ulysses, 135 136

Jay 1994, p. 529. Grosz, Elizabeth:Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994.

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published for the first time in Polish in 1969. This is a classic test sample of selfreflective literature, described by Barthes as “tautological.”137 As Anna Burzyńska argues, for Derrida, écriture became a symptom through which it was possible to reveal how an ideologized metaphysical system functions – to catch it in its misuses.138 For Partum, self-reflective literature provided a model that enabled her to deconstruct the paradigm of representation within visual art without simultaneously declaring herself on the side of pure presence. At the same time, the artist read out and fulfilled the program of self-reflective literature by extending the boundaries of the language understood as text. In poems by ewa, a process of notation was given its material source in the shape of Partum’s lips. In the Active Poetry series, Partum wrote fragments of literary works into “another dimension” (as Partum phrased it in her master’s dissertation), pursuing in the materiality of the letters a new level of Le dégre zéro de l’écriture. Partum’s actions undermined the representative and mimetic ideology of literature: throwing letters onto a sheet of paper or the grass was the consequence of a performative embodied reading. It was not an interpretation that reconstructed a sense imposed by an author, but a reinterpretation that constructed sense by de-territorializing it from the field of literature to the field of visual arts. In Active Poetry, Partum inserted materialized “naked letters” into the world. Active Poetry was, in that sense, a performative critique not of language as such, but rather of its uses within the conceptual aesthetic. Partum’s deconstructive scenarios, her “radically impure mixing” 139 of orders, have wrenched away the conceptual claim to purity.

Conclusion If conceptual art “does away with the importance of the art object in favour of emphasizing the artist’s motivations”,140 Partum’s identification with conceptualism has to become the object of study. Although “conceptual art is often considered resistant to identity politics”,141 in this chapter, it was considered as a tool for establishing a certain artistic identity in a particular geo-political context. Partum’s 137 138 139

Burzyńska 2013, p. 102. Ibid., p. 115. “If deconstruction has a sociology,” writes Simon Critchley, “then it is a sociology of impurity, of contamination. Culture and tradition are hybrid ensembles, they are the products of radically impure mixing and mongrelism.” Critchley, Simon: “Black Socrates? Questioning the Philosophical Tradition”, Radical Philosophy, no. 69 January/February 1995, pp. 17–26, p. 23. 140 Dimitrijević 2002, p. 128. 141 Aikens, Nick/ pui san lok, susan/ Orlando, Sophie: “Introduction” in Aikens et al. (eds.) 2019, pp. 4–14, p. 7.

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artistic production was originally not realized for the museum, the market or the public. It was produced in the context of art events, temporary presentations, and communication for the making of a conceptual artist who identified herself with the international art movement. However, as I have aimed to demonstrate in this analysis, Partum’s engagement with the conceptualism of tautological and linguistic currents was not subordinate to either metropolitan or local patterns or canons. She practiced conceptual art contrapuntally, incorporating it into her artistic practice and contesting it from within.”142 Partum realized her contrapuntal conceptualism by employing “poetical means” related to the imagination.143 In the previous chapter, I investigated the genealogy of Partum’s politics of imagination, and within the alternative line of inquiry in this chapter, I focused on the imperative of artistic experiment developed within the autonomous conceptual art discourse. In her early works, Partum employed tautology and repetition as organizing principles, as she was exploring possibilities for meaning production and subsequently revealing breaks and ruptures within the phantasm of “pure art”. In the following chapter, I will further investigate Partum’s rupture with the conceptual idiom, namely her feminist identification and its subsequent manifestations in different locales.

142 Critchley 1995, p. 24. 143 Ronduda 2009, p. 8.

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Chapter 4 Feminist Identifications in Ewa Partum’s Artistic Practice

Feminist Self-Identification (1980) Self-Identification (1980) is a split self-portrait in which Partum projects herself as a multiple (figs. 42-46). The work consists of twelve photomontages and performance documentation (fig. 47) accompanied by the artist’s statement that marks the moment in which the feminist agenda in Partum’s practice becomes articulated discursively. This work provides the vocabulary and intellectual framework for analysing the feminist aesthetics Partum employed in her performative works released in socialist Poland between 1974 and 1982, which go beyond “presenting positive imagery of femininity” and the critique of “patriarchal foundations of viewing pleasure.”1 In her photomontages, Partum inserts cut-out photographs of her naked self into the images of populated urban public spaces. Referring to Derrida, Amelia Jones emphasizes that it is the impossibility of defining what art is that moves us towards projecting the subject who is the origin of the work onto the work itself. Derrida called this process a restitution, returning a work to its author.2 My interpretation of Self-Identification also returns the work to the author by focusing on its performative agency and by approaching Self-Identification as both Partum’s visual statement about women’s position in Polish society and Partum’s self-identification as a feminist artist.

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Amelia Jones characterizes a paradigm shift between 1970s and 1980s Anglo-American feminism, arguing that in the 1970s its focus was on activism, collaboration and culturally constructed femininity whereas in the 1980s this shifted to deconstructive critiques of the male gaze. See Jones, Amelia: “The Sexual Politics of the Dinner Party: A Critical Context” in Jones, Amelia (ed.): Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party in Feminist Art History, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996, pp. 84–118, p. 98. Jones, Amelia: Seeing Differently: A History and the Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts, New York: Routledge, 2012, p. 2.

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Since feminism is a pluralistic terrain manifested within different ideological perspectives, I would like to determine its precise meaning in Partum’s practice. This can be established through the discursive statements that have accompanied her work and been directed against a certain form of ideological control and oppression. In this context, however, it is worth recalling a general definition of feminism as formulated by Dimitrakaki, who emphasizes that feminism addresses actually existing social relations of power and “is a form of social struggle that claims its visibility in the public sphere and seeks to place women in the polis.”3 The place of a woman in the urban space has been traditionally defined as a space of the interior – of the private sphere of a household. In the series SelfIdentification, Partum introduces a representation of a naked woman to the exterior, (as though) posing in various instances of public space. She appears on the streets of Warsaw next to a policewoman, beside a woman with a pushchair, walking in a crowd, casuallyposing beside national monuments and governmental buildings, in the library, in the company of men, in the bookshop, among other women in the queues that were a permanent feature of the Polish urban landscape at the beginning of the 1980s, and in front of TV screens displayed in a shop. Partum excluded some of the images4 from the final series, as they generated an effect of sexual tension and were, in her words, “too erotic.”5 In Self-Identification, Partum visualizes the impossibility of and her refusal to identify with any existing normative female subject positions available in the Polish People’s Republic. In her manifesto that accompanied the work, Partum speaks about “the role model for a woman – a creation of the patriarchal society, functioning in the form of the norms of social life, which effectively handicap women, with the semblance of respecting them.”6 The artist discusses a set of subject positions available to women in Polish society: a mother, a housewife, a representative of specific professions or of local community, revealing gender as a non-exclusive aspect of female subjectivity. SelfIdentification is not a strategy employed in order to connect or disconnect with any of these socialist and bourgeois role models; rather, it is an individual gesture of othering, an act of self-determination and self-definition beyond the given possibilities. Partum creates a visual narrative constructed upon a principle of “neither”: “I don’t belong here nor do I belong there.”

3 4

5 6

Dimitrakaki 2013, p. 28. These images were on display in 1980 at Galeria ON during the Women’s Art Festival and again in 2015 at the commercial Galeria Aleksander Bruno, Warsaw. In the second case, Ewa Partum did not consider them a part of the Self-Identification series. Interview with Ewa Partum, 9.11.2015 (Berlin). Partum, Ewa: Self-Identification, 1979/80 typescript in the Ewa Partum archive.

Feminist Identifications in Ewa Partum’s Artistic Practice

In terms of their visual structure, Partum’s Self-Identification photomontages have been arranged to maintain the illusion of the actual presence of a naked body in the depicted scenes of urban public life. In Walking Up and Walking Down, two photocollages from the series Individual Mythologies created by the Hungarian artist Orsolya (Orshi) Drozdik in 1977, that artist uses a similar strategy to comment on the place of the female subject in the public sphere of the socialist state. Drozdik also inserts herself into a public space, in this case in front of a Lenin monument in the midst of a state celebration. Her body is visibly larger than those of the people in the crowd. Partum’s compositions, on the contrary, adjust images of her body proportionally and in terms of gesture in a manner that simulates visual unity of time and space within each image. She seeks to create the effect of sharing the space with other photographed people. In order to increase their visual unity, manually arranged photomontages were rephotographed and subsequently printed on canvases.7 Thus, in Self-Identification, Partum critically appropriates a strategy of mimicry or self-colonization, adopted by the female subject to identify with the system of oppression. But by trying to adjust, she remains visibly different and therefore reveals the strangeness of the cultural “mould”8 provided for the female subject. In her earlier manifesto that accompanied the performance Change (1979), Partum formulated this problem explicitly, saying that “A woman lives in the social structure that is alien to her.”9 Self-Identification is a visual articulation of this condition; it is a visual confirmation of otherness. In its accompanying statement, Partum defines “a woman” as a socially constructed category within the patriarchal system, which also conditions the meaning of the female body as a sexual fetish. Partum’s discursive statement echoes a speech that the Polish writer Zofia Nałkowska gave at the Congress of Polish Women in 1907: “Observations on the Ethical Tasks of the Women’s Movement”, reproduced in the volume Widzenia bliskie i dalekie (Warsaw 1957) and including the statements: “Our liberation has to give us a new criterion of classification, a new ethical census. Neither our erotic qualities nor our attitude toward men should dictate our morality.10 […] We want a complete 7

8

9 10

At the first presentation, at the Galeria Mała PSP-ZPAP, the photocollages were displayed in the form of photographs, and in 1982 for the Cleaning Carpet Gallery exhibition, they were printed on canvases. Mulvey, Laura: “Fears, Fantasies and the Male Unconscious, or ‘You Don’t Know What Is Happening, Do You, Mr Jones?’” (1973) in: Mulvey, Laura:Visual and Other Pleasures, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989, pp. 6–13, p. 11. Partum, Ewa: Change, 1979, typescript in the Ewa Partum archive. Nałkowska, Zofia: “Reflections on the Ethical Goals of the Women’s Movement”, a lecture given at the Congress of Polish Women, Warsaw 1907. Reprinted in: Górnicka-Boratyńska, Aneta (ed.): Chcemy całego życia: antologia polskich tekstów feministycznych z lat 1870–1939, Warsaw: Czarna Owca, 1999, pp. 323–329, p. 327. The original text reads: “Wyzwolenie nasze musi

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life!”11 Partum referred directly to this local feminist tradition in her own polemical article published in 1979 emphasizing the difference between the objectives of firstwave feminism and its contemporary agenda. She writes: The actual problem of woman today is not the need to become like men, as our Suffragette great-grandmothers [Emancypantki] postulated, but rather, it is the consciousness of the specific issues related to being a woman. For this reason, I believe in the relevance of feminist art, which gives a woman artist the ability to define herself by articulating the experience of “being a woman” in a patriarchal society.12 “These specific issues” refer to the experience of women’s oppression in a particular time and place. The conclusion in which Partum deliberates on the function of feminist art recalls again Nałkowska’s vision of art’s function with respect to women’s liberation – as not only a tool of liberation but also the only existing field of self-identification.13 In an unpublished note from 1980, Partum described that year as devoted to “investigating the problem of the identification of women in society.”14 Identification is understood here as something imposed on women by a patriarchal culture in which women cannot remain true to themselves. Diana Fuss, recalling the colonial history of the notion of identification, has argued that identification indicates a “form of violent appropriation in which the Other is deposed and assimilated in the lordly domain of Self.”15 By contrast, the critical notion of self-identification mobilized by Partum for her radical feminist politics points to the possibility of an incompleteness that is embedded in the process of identification.16 Self-Identification is a feminist reclamation of identification as a woman; it implies not an essentialist

11 12 13

14 15 16

nam dać nowe zupełnie kryterium klasyfikacji, nowy cenzus etyczny. Nie właściwości erotyczne, nasz stosunek do mężczyzn powinien orzekać o naszej moralności.” Nałkowska 1999, p. 329. The original text reads: “Chcemy całego życia!” Partum, Ewa: “Prawdziwy problem Ewy Partum” in Kultura, vol. 38, no. 849, 23 September 1979, p. 8. Nałkowska writes: “Women are not able to, and do not like to, express themselves honestly; they lie to themselves and lie to others, constantly playing different roles imposed on them by society. There is, however, one discipline in which women are able to express themselves as themselves – art and literature.” See Nałkowska 1999, p. 328; The original text reads: “Kobiety nie umieją, nie lubią, nie chcą wypowiadać się szczerze, kłamią w stosunku do świata i w stosunku do siebie, grają rozliczne role przez inercje niewoli. […]. Jest jednak dziedzina, w której indywidualność kobiety zaczyna uzewnętrznić się szczerze. Dziedzina tą jest literatura i sztuka.” Partum, Ewa: handwritten notes, undated, in the Ewa Partum archive. Fuss 1995, p. 145. Stuart Hall in a book introduction titled “Who Needs Identity?” writes that “there is always ‘too much’ or ‘too little’ – an over-determination or a lack, but never a proper fit, a totality.

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but a strategic positionality understood as a “process of articulation, a suturing, an over-determination not a subsumption.”17 Partum’s series Self-Identification can be read as the articulation of “subjectivity as arrival”, as visualisation of coming to be a woman. Andrea Dimitrakaki refers to this concept elaborated by Vassilis Tsianos and Dimitris Papadopoulos, who conceptualize difference as a constitutive moment of the everyday, defining feminism as something that starts from the “embodied experience of exclusion on the level of the everyday” and that “intends to rearticulate it and to insert difference as a constitutive moment of the everyday.”18 Dimitrakaki defines feminist aims as working towards the incorporation of new social subjectivities, concluding that feminism “is the fight for representation […]. In this sense, subjectivity connected to the event of representation is neither a departure, nor a facility – it is an arrival.”19 The “subjectivity as arrival” in Self-Identification is articulated in a series of theatrical enactments and maintained by the naked artist’s body, a “material and symbolic resource required to sustain it.”20 The work incorporates an image of Partum’s nude body to articulate the self-difference that derives from the everyday experience of exclusion. This critical notion of identification “operates as a mark of selfdifference, opening up a space for the self to relate to itself as a self, as a self that is perpetually other.”21 In Partum’s work, this process of self-othering and self-recognition takes place on a visual plane: Partum represents herself as a woman free from any social costume. The process of identification itself is based, to a large extent, on visual clues. In her book Seeing Differently, Amelia Jones has demonstrated that identification relies on visual information.22 In Self-Identification Partum also reveals that identification is a process embedded in the visual sphere, and for this reason, art becomes a privileged territory for performing feminist self-identification.

17 18

19 20 21

22

Like all signifying practices, it is subject to the play of difference.” See Hall, Stuart/ Gay, Paul du (eds.): Questions of Cultural Identity, London: Sage, 1996, pp. 1–17, p. 7. Hall 1996, p. 3. Tsianos, Vassilis/ Papadopoulos, Dimitris: “Who is Afraid of Immaterial Workers? Embodied Capitalism, Precarity, Imperceptibility” (2006), http://preclab.net/text/06-TsianosPapadopou los.pdf. Quoted in Dimitrakaki 2013, p. 54. Dimitrakaki 2013, p. 54. Dimitrakaki juxtaposes the concept of “subjectivity as arrival” to “subjectivity as departure” articulated within postmodern critical theory. Jones 2012. Fuss 1995, pp. 9–10. Quoted in: Jones, Amelia: “1970/2007: The Legacy of Feminist Art” in Aliaga, Juan Vicente (ed.): Gender Battle: The Impact of Feminism in the Art of the 1970s, exh. cat., Santiago de Compostela, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, 13 September–9 December 2007, pp. 297–310, p. 299. Jones 2012.

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Partum’s dual project of Self-Identification, as both a “coming to be” woman and feminist artist, was aimed at articulating a feminist subject but also at achieving feminist effects.23 In her photomontages, Partum simulated and therefore postulated an action of accessing and transforming the public sphere as a woman. At the opening of the exhibition Self-Identification at the Galeria Mała PSP-ZPAF on 29 April 1980, Partum performed naked inside the gallery and then moved outside, into the actual public space, where she positioned herself next to a newly married couple who were leaving the registry office. The institution of marriage, as well as other socially approved forms of ritual and cultural masquerade, was problematized in Partum’s other performances. In the context of Self-Identification, it is important to ask what the function of this “opening” performance was. To answer this question, I will consider the circumstances of the first (1980) and subsequent (1982) presentations of the Self-Identification series. The Galeria Mała24 was an official gallery of the Polish Association of Art Photographers (ZPAF) and was at the time one of the most important galleries in Poland, presenting photographic works of Polish neo-avant-garde artists. It was located in the centre of Warsaw, in close proximity to government buildings. Before the opening of Partum’s exhibition, a representative of the Main Office for the Control of the Press, Publications and Public Performance (i.e. the censorship office) visited the gallery, which was a standard procedure at the time. After negotiations conducted by Barbara Grabowska, who emphasized the artistic qualities of photomontages and referred to the long tradition of the nude in artistic photography, permission was received. However, the photomontage showing the naked Partum posing in front of the headquarters of the State Council had to be withdrawn. Partum, however, did not request a permission to realize performances during the opening of the exhibition and arranged with the gallery curators that she would take exclusive responsibility for her action. During the opening, introduced by a short speech by Jan Świdziński “that had hardly anything to do with her message,”25 the naked artist read her feminist manifesto, which was also written on the blackboard. In photographs from the opening, we see the naked artist reading her text, closely surrounded by a group of people, some with cameras directed at her, but most turning their eyes away from her nakedness. The images show Partum’s

23

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See Jones, Amelia: “Feminist Subjects Versus Feminist Effects: The Curating of Feminist Art (or is it the Feminist Curating of Art?)” in On Curating, no. 29, http://www.on-curating.org/iss ue-29-reader/feminist-subjects-versus-feminist-effects-the-curating-of-feminist-art-or-is-it-t he-feminist-curating-of-art.html. The Galeria Mała PSP-ZPAF (1977–2006) was run at the time by Barbara Grabowska and Marek Grygiel. Jakubowska, Agata: “Niemożność porozumienia. Feminizm indywidualny Ewy Partum” in Obieg, 02 November 2006, p. 15.

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body assuming a neutral non-sexual pose reminiscent of the rhetoric of bodies performing public duties, which strongly contrasts with her nakedness. After making her statement, Partum left the gallery and appeared naked in a busy public space (Plac Zamkowy 8) in central Warsaw, attempting to create the durational equivalent of photomontages, which lasted approximately three minutes. On the one hand, this opening performance was an action aimed at the registration and production of photographic and video documentation, which would render the already produced and presented photomontages real/istic. On the other hand, the performance was conceptualized as a validating gesture: a counter-ritual of assigning meaning to Partum’s naked body and producing it as a tool of social critique. The artist confronted working in the real public space of the gallery and the street, as if it was not sufficient to photograph the body in the studio and represent it in her collages. In that way Partum activated the body as a tool of social dissent available to everybody. The boundaries of artistic freedom in socialist Poland were clearly marked and known to artists. Usually, the authorities did not interfere with actions that took place within the gallery space or within other art institutions, but it was not possible to perform or organize artistic events directly on the streets. This was not because of the potential for direct political content but rather because the public could react in unpredictable ways. The general public was prone to read any form of public demonstration in a political way, as had been the case with Beckett plays or Kantor’s performances, which were interpreted both by audiences and censors as a symbolic rendering of the “Polish condition.”26 Thus, as long as art remained confined to the gallery space and professional audiences, it remained safe for the authorities, but once art left the gallery, it could become impossible to control and could “infuse new unknown social experiences”.27 In her book Migrating the Feminine, which discusses feminism in contemporary Egyptian contexts, Nora Amin argues that only by controlling fear can one become a free subject.28 Amin portrays the female body as penetrated by the notion of shame and fear. She argues that the presence of female physicality in the public space is always political as it disturbs the masculine order and re-identifies the public territory: “The female presence challenges the paradigm of power and provokes trimming actions in order to confront the threat to the identity of the public sphere.”29 Although the Polish culture of the early 1980s cannot be directly compared with the contemporary Egyptian condition, Amin’s remarks can provide

26 27 28 29

Kemp-Welch has also argued that Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1956) was interpreted in Poland in a directly political way. See Kemp-Welch 2014, p. 19. Ibid. Amin, Nora: Migrating the Feminine, Berlin: 60pages, 2015, p. 59. Ibid., p. 36.

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a framework within which Partum’s performative action can be understood with respect to the empirical effects of performing/acting naked in the public space of a post-totalitarian country. Amin articulates her urge to work on changing her own perceptions: to view naked female bodies not as victimized shameful bodies but as active agents and as bodies acting upon political reality.30 The presence of Partum’s naked, vulnerable body in the crowd of clothed people just a couple of months before the introduction of martial law31 can be seen as working towards challenging the perception of female physicality and the limits of its expression in relation to political action. In another context, Griselda Pollock recalls practices in Nigeria and South Africa in which the exposure of female bodies in public “can be and has been used for political threat.”32 Partum’s individual uprising, her corporeal occupation of physical space and her use of the naked vulnerable body-as-object that disrupts the public sphere pre-figured collective protests to come,33 and it paralleled the practices of resistance, assembly and occupation34 initiated by the Solidarity (Solidarność) movement. The first uncensored and complete presentation of the Self-Identification series took place in Łódź in the underground Carpet Cleaning Gallery on 09 August 1982, while Poland was under martial law and after the Solidarność union of Warsaw artists published a manifesto that called for a boycott of official art institutions (April 1982).35 For the first time, Partum presented the previously censored photomon-

30

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Amin recalls the scenes she witnessed in Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring in 2011 – she has seen women crossing the square naked, who participated in the protest and were raped by the male mob. Ibid., p. 59. Martial law was introduced in Poland on 13 January 1981 and lasted until 31 December 1982. Pollock, Griselda: Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archive, London: Routledge, 2007, p. 23. On this topic see also Ewa Majewska’s essay “Ewa Partum or Feminism That is Yet to Come” in which Ewa Majewska argues that Ewa Partum’s art anticipated not only social developments but also theoretical solutions. See Morzuch, Maria (ed.): Ewa Partum: Nothing Stops the Idea of Art, exh. cat., Łódź, Muzeum Sztuki, 24 November 2014–15 February 2015, Łódź 2015, pp. 76–86. For contemporary theory on bodies of/in protest, see Butler, Judith: Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Jakubowska 2016, p. 9.

Feminist Identifications in Ewa Partum’s Artistic Practice

tage showing her in front of the State Council building (fig. 43).36 The work was accompanied by the performance Hommage á, devoted to the Solidarity movement. During this performance, the naked Partum created the inscription “Solidarność”, kissing each letter of the word, which was spelled out in alphabet letters attached to a cardboard. While the Self-Identification series introduced the female subject into the Polish public sphere, the performance Hommage á was a gendered self-identification with the masculinist brotherhood of Solidarity, which embodied the paradigm of Polish national culture defined by Maria Janion as based on male bonds where “the community of maleness is stronger than the community of blood”.37

Ewa Partum’s Situated Feminism Cornelia Butler proposes that Ewa Partum in her feminist performances simultaneously addressed the effects of patriarchy and socialism in the public sphere. Butler argues that: Partum’s move to use her naked body in her performances was a radical and provocative gesture in socialist Poland, and her work was met with government censorship and public disapproval. […] Like Sonia Andrade, Cecila Vicuña and other women artist living in parts of the world isolated from burgeoning centres of feminist activity, Partum was driven to invent an artistic language that would simultaneously address the patriarchal oppression of women and the stultifying effects of socialism on the culture at large.38 The perception of “simultaneous criticality” or the “simultaneity of the critique”, i.e. feminist and anti-socialist, as articulated by Butler, arises from the tacit assumption that there is a “normative” form of patriarchal oppression and a set of appropriate strategies of critique and resistance. However, as analysis of Self-Identification demonstrates, Partum did not address socialist oppression and the patriarchy simultaneously. Instead, she addressed a particular form of patriarchal oppression that simultaneously shut women out of the public sphere and relegated the female

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The third presentation of Self-Identification took place during the festival/exhibition Women’s Art in Galeria ON in Poznań in November 1980 in the framework of Partum’s feminist performance. Partum presented the series of photocollages, as well as her manifesto printed in a form of newspaper, and documentation from the performance Change (1979) and the performance Women, Marriage Is Against You, which will be discussed later in this chapter. Here I would like to point out that this new performance can be interpreted as a durational and performative extension of the series Self-Identification. Janion 2007. Butler, Cornelia: “Ewa Partum” in Mark, Lisa Gabrielle (ed.) 2007, pp. 280–281, p. 281.

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body to immanence, excluding it from the possibility of becoming a tool for political action and reducing it, as Partum puts it in one of her (undated) preparatory manuscripts, “to a biological and consumerist function.”39 The notion of situated feminism, which I would like to explore here in both of its meanings – as situated in the particular body, “the grounds from which to speak as a woman”,40 and as situated in the particular cultural and sociopolitical context – aims to articulate Partum’s feminism as dialectically embedded in a specific form of the patriarchy: in the local Polish socialist version which thrived under a condition of relative isolation from the feminist movement. To consider the specificity of the context in which Partum produced SelfIdentification, it has to be emphasized that Partum did not collaborate or negotiate her feminist claims together with other artists or activists, as female creatives in the West did. The only instance of such a collaboration was Partum’s participation in the first nationwide exhibition of women’s art, organized by Izabela Gustowska and Krystyna Piotrowska at Galeria ON in Poznań in November 1980.41 This exhibition, realized as a “statement without a fixed meaning”,42 i.e. as a set of disconnected presentations, revealed a rupture between Partum’s selfconscious feminist practice and the collective identification with “women’s art”, as endorsed by the exhibition’s organizers.43 In retrospect, this show functions as a prefiguration of the modes of redistribution of Partum’s practice after 1989. In the context of recent regional art history, there is no more compelling and complex example of mediating the minor (East-Central European art) through the

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Partum, Ewa: handwritten notes, undated, in the Ewa Partum archive. Rich, Adrienne: “Notes toward a Politics of Location” in Rich, Adrienne: Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–1985, New York: Norton, 1986, pp. 211–231, p. 213. The exhibition also included works by Izabela Gustowska, Krystyna Piotrowska, Maria Pinińska-Bereś, Anna Kutera and Teresa Tyszkiewicz. For more about the history of all-women exhibitions in Poland see Jakubowska, Agata: “No Groups but Friendship. All-Women Initiatives in Poland at the Turn of the 1980s” in Deepwell, Katy/ Jakubowska, Agata (eds.): All-Women Art Spaces in Europe in the Long 1970s, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017, pp. 229-247. Sorkin, Jenni: “The Feminist Nomad: The All-Women Group Shows” in Mark (ed.) 2007, pp. 458–472, pp. 460. Ewa Małgorzata Tatar writes: “The curators invited definitive figures of the time such as Maria Pinińska-Bereś, Natalia LL, and Partum to participate, as well as representatives of the younger generation, such as Teresa Tyszkiewicz. Asked about the concept of the show, Gustowska said that she was familiar with most of the artists, apart from Ewa Partum, whom they invited owing to her clear-cut artistic position.” See Tatar, Ewa Małgorzata: “The Modes of Surfaces – Ewa Partum’s and Teresa Tyszkiewicz’s Feminist Projects” in Le Journal de La Triennale, no. 2, 2007, pp. 30–39, p. 30, https://www.cnap.fr/sites/default/files/import_destination/document/ 124586_le-journal-de-la-triennale--2--4headsandanear--emilierenardreng.pdf.

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major (Western art) than the historicization of East-Central European feminist artistic practices of the 1970s and 1980s. Until recently, historicizing narratives were focused on the so-called resistance of many Eastern European neo-avant-garde female cultural producers to identify themselves as “feminist artists”.44 This resistance has been interpreted as related to the local dynamic of decentring modernism,45 “where artists routinely combined a postmodern visuality and poetics with modernist discourses.”46 More recent scholarship questions this approach for its presupposition that female cultural producers embedded in completely different social and material circumstances should at all be operating within recognizably Western feminist rhetoric in order to produce feminist art.47 Art historians and 44

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In Polish context in 1997 Izabela Kowalczyk argued that Polish female artists used some elements of feminist aesthetics in their work in a superficial manner not reflecting on a new paradigm of art related to the feminist turn. She argued that “Feminism only started developing in Poland after the collapse of communism, and it is significant that so far it has neither been effective nor indeed popular among women themselves. The national tradition and Catholic Church both fostered the model of a passive woman for whom the most important values were: family, home and children. In such a context it seems incredible that even in the 1970s there appeared certain artistic actions that brought into play the problems identified by of feminism, such as the works of Ewa Partum, Natalia LL and Maria Pinińska-Bereś. Those artists took up the problems of the objectification of women – of showing them as consumer objects, and of the fetishization of the female body. Consequently, they all rejected the passive representation of the woman. Denouncing the gaze of the male beholder aiming at the appropriation of the female body, they debunked the male beholder himself. However, their art may be criticized as mostly an all too simple imitation of the Western art of the 1970s.” See Kowalczyk 1997, p. 151. One of the micro-narrations that conceptualized this so-called resistance was that of “latent feminism”, a term introduced by Zora Rusinová for Eastern European artists (in this case, Slovakian artists) who to a considerable extent refused to identify themselves with feminist discourse and preferred to speak about genderless art, at the same time creating art that engaged with the feminist problematic. Other descriptions of this situation include “intuitive feminism” or “proto-feminism”, or as in the case of Polish art history “feminist intuitions” (Ewa Tatar) or “feminist interventions” and “feminist motives” (Izabela Kowalczyk), “proto-feminism” (Ewa Toniak). See Tatar, Ewa Małgorzata: “The Modes of Surfaces – Ewa Partum’s and Teresa Tyszkiewicz’s Feminist Projects” in La Triennial, no. 2, 2012, pp. 30–39, https://www.cnap.fr/sites/default/files/import_destination/document/12458 6_le-journal-de-la-triennale--2--4headsandanear--emilierenardreng.pdf; Kowalczyk, Izabela: “Prekursorki wciąż w izolacji” in Obieg, 06 May 2011; Kowalczyk, Izabela: “Wątki feministyczne w sztuce polskiej/Feminist Motifs in Polish Art” in Artium Quaestiones, vol. 8, 1997, pp. 135–152; Toniak, Ewa: “Niemożliwa?” in 3 kobiety. Maria Pinińska-Bereś, Natalia Lach-Lachowicz, Ewa Partum, exh. cat., Warsaw, Zachęta National Gallery of Art, 01 March–08 May 2011, Warsaw 2011, pp. 4–10, p. 9. Piotrowski, Piotr: “Male Artist’s Body: National Identity vs. Identity Politics” (1998) in: Pejić, Bojana (ed.) 2010, pp. 127–136, p. 129. See, for instance, Beáta Hock’s book on the socialist methods of women’s emancipation and Hungarian feminist art without feminist audiences: Hock, Beáta: Gendered Creative Options

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curators today view radical gestures and practices of women artists in the socialist part of Europe not “solely in terms of the politics of the women’s movement” but also as “a revolt against accepted (common and popular) media, materials and techniques as well as rebellious attitudes in the face of the gender roles ascribed to women artists.”48 In the case of Ewa Partum’s artistic practice, however, we are dealing with another dynamic that cannot be inscribed into regional narratives on gendering modernism or into the “‘socialist way of women’s emancipation’ that, in Eastern European societies, ran parallel to the second wave of modern feminism”49 . Partum’s practice must be recognized as a reversal of so-called “latent feminism” – recognized as an unambiguous, active self-identification with feminist politics and a self-articulation of the feminist discourse that results both from critical analysis of local social conditions and from personal experience of working in the predominantly male art scene, supplemented by random fragments of Western second-wave feminist discourse, which were derived from texts and images that circulated in socialist Poland at the end of the 1970s. Partum articulated her feminist stance in 1974 during her performance Change, but at that time the notion of “feminist art” did not appear directly in her statements. In 1978, during the ZPAP Art Festival, Partum accompanied her series Emphatic Portraits with the statement “my problem is a problem of a woman”, which was the articulation of her feminist politics. In her polemical article published in 1979 in Kultura magazine, the artist made explicit reference to the concept of feminist art, in which she defined feminism as the intellectual framework and interpretative context for her art. She also used the term “feminism” in the titles of her presentations; for instance, she announced her performance Change during the 1979 Łódź Art Week as Feminist Art. Angela Dimitrakaki proposes that the feminist art movement should be renamed as the feminist art and art history movement “since art history played a major role in the movement’s claims and directions [and] illuminated the inseparability of art as a gendered practice from the power relations constituting a gendered society.”50 Although in the Polish context we cannot speak about feminist art history

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and Social Voices: Politics, Cinema and the Visual Arts in State-Socialist and Post-Socialist Hungary, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2013. Jakubowska Agata: “The Circulation of Feminist Ideas in Communist Poland” in Hock et al. (eds.) 2018, pp .135–148. See also the recent exhibition catalogue: Altmann, Suzanne/ Lozo, Katarina and Hilke Wagner, Hilke (eds.): The Medea Insurrection: Radical Women Artists behind the Iron Curtain, exh. cat., Dresden, Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau, 08 December 2018–31 March 2019, Cologne 2019. Hock, Beáta: “Women Artists’ Trajectories and Networks within the Hungarian Underground Art Scene and Beyond” in Bazin et al. (eds.), 2016, pp. 113–124, p. 114. Dimitrakaki 2013, p. 3.

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until the 1990s, according to Agata Jakubowska we can consider “the circulation of feminist ideas” 51 in the 1970s and 1980s within critical texts on art exhibitions and understand them as a means of transferring knowledge about second-wave feminist movements in the West. Partum came into contact with Western feminist discourse around 1977/78, although she had the possibility to familiarize herself with visual material related to feminist art a few years earlier. In 1973, the artist received the Something Else Press publication Fantastic Architecture, edited by Dick Higgins and Wolf Vostell, in which Carolee Schneemann Parts of a Body House was reproduced. Kathy O’Dell described this particular reproduction in her essay on Fluxus and feminism as follows: Schneemann displayed a nude self-portrait (Schneemann 1969). The image of her body appears across the middle of the book, with semi-transparent pages of text separating the two parts of the picture. The superimposition of Schneemann’s body and text constitutes a send-up of the Playboy centrefold tradition. Unlike Playboy centrefolds, however, which typically feature women in poses configured by men, Schneemann’s self-portrait is in a position of her own construction, poised as if ready to pounce, eyes assertively, if not warily, trained on the viewer.52 The Schneemann reproduction was a random fragment of a Western feminist visual sphere provided within the non-feminist context of the Something Else Press publication. Moreover, according to O’Dell, the image was manipulated during the publication process. Originally it was supposed to be accompanied by the text and additional drawings, but it was transformed to limit the excessiveness and agency of the body and text relationship.53 Still, this material can be identified as the first visual trace of feminist art that Partum came into contact with.54 Local discursive sources of feminism in Poland in the 1970s included texts and literary works related to first-wave feminism.55 Translations of Western canonical second-wave feminist texts were limited to Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex, published in 1972, which was interpreted as a work from the threshold between philosophy and sexuality and did not elicit serious debate at the time,56 and to

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Hock et al. (eds.) 2018. O’Dell, Kathy: “Fluxus Feminus” in Drama Review, no. 41, January 1997, pp. 43–60, p. 48. Ibid., p. 49. When questioned about the image, Partum insists that she did not at the time associate Schneemann with feminism but merely with Fluxus. Interview with Ewa Partum, 14.02.2016 (Berlin). Writings of Irena Krzywicka (1899–1994), Maria Morozowicz-Szczepkowska (1885–1968) and Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński (1874–1941) and the already mentioned Zofia Nałkowska (1884–1954). Desperak, Iza: “Perspektywa gender w socjologii a tłumaczenia” in Przegląd Socjologii Jakościowej, vol. 7, no. 2, July 2011, pp. 84–93, p. 90.

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the anthology of translations Nobody is Born a Woman, which appeared in 1982.57 The first articles in the Polish press discussing feminism in art appeared in 1977.58 Knowing this context, it is worth mentioning an undated handwritten note in Partum’s archive entitled Anti-Patriarchal Contestations, in which the artist mentions Kate Millet’s feminist classic, Sexual Politics,59 with the following commentary: The anachronistic idea of the essential difference between female sexuality and the passivity of women. The role that is assigned to women in the sexual act is the product of a patriarchal culture. Women are handicapped by the existing social system.60 Since it is not clear when the note was made, it can be interpreted either as a summary of the mentioned titles, which were not available in Polish in the 1970s, or as a confirmation of Partum’s own anti-essentialist definition of female sexuality.61 Agata Jakubowska emphasizes that no text from the field of feminist art writing had been translated into Polish during socialism.62 Jakubowska also points to the fact that the language skills of artists and theoreticians at the time made the wider reception of texts in their original languages difficult. Government-enforced travel limits made direct exchanges such as participation in international feminist art exhibitions almost impossible.63 Nevertheless, in the second half of the 1970s, several artists and art writers “transferred feminist ideas across the Iron Curtain”,64 or more precisely, they transferred Western second-wave feminist ideas. In March 1977, the artist Natalia LL wrote a text dedicated to Feminist Tendencies in the Arts, which was presented as a lecture in galleries in Lublin (during her solo exhibition Categorical Sentences from 57

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Hołówka, Teresa (ed.): Nikt nie rodzi się kobietą, Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1982. The publication included translations of texts by M. Mead, H. Mayer Hacker, K. Millet, L. M. Glennon, J. M. Bardwick, E. Douvan, S. Macintyre, Ch. Delphy, J. J. Thomson, Ch. Pierce, J S. Brownmiller, P. Mainardi, A. Shulman, D. Densmore, A. Koedt, and an essay by A. Jasińska: “Dylematy feminizmu”. Morawski, Stefan: “Neofeminizm w sztuce” in Sztuka, no. 4, 1977, pp. 57–63. In terms of art, the author refers only to the catalogue of the Berlin exhibition Künstlerinnen International 1888–1977. See also Baworowska, Barbara: “Sztuka kobiet” in Sztuka, no. 4/5, 1978, p. 70. Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics was published in the United States in 1970. Partum also mentions in her note the book “E. Johnson Human Sexual Perspective (1966 W.H. Masters Virginia)” referring to the classic book Human Sexual Response by Masters and Johnson. Partum, Ewa: handwritten notes, undated, in the Ewa Partum archive. Still, the most relevant question is: Why has Partum researched these Western sources? I will explore this question in the further part of this chapter in an analysis of the performance Change, in which the artist referenced Western feminist texts. Hock et al. (eds.) 2018, p. 137. Ibid., p. 139. Ibid..

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the Field of Post-Consumer Art) and in Katowice (as part of the symposium The Bordering States of Photography). Natalia LL discussed recent feminist art initiatives, such as an issue of Heute Kunst (no. 9, 1975) edited by Gislind Nabakowski that was devoted entirely to the topic of feminist art. She referred to Nabakowski’s editorial Feminismus und Kunst, which discussed, among other issues, the problem of the specificity of female experience, a topic that also resonated strongly in Partum’s feminist manifestos. This text was a result of Natalia LL’s exchanges during her three-month long scholarship in New York in 1977 where she met feminist artists, including Carolee Schneemann. In 1978, Natalia LL organized a small exhibition of women’s art in Wrocław in Galeria Jatki PSP, showing works by Carolee Schneemann, Naomi Meidan, Suzy Lake and herself.65 Due to her international recognition and contacts, Natalia LL became a major actor in how knowledge about the Western feminist movement and feminist art was distributed in Poland at the end of the 1970s. She also participated in several international exhibitions devoted to feminist and women’s art.66 However, the artist did not identify herself with the Western feminist movement but created art which articulated a strongly gendered perspective. Other Polish female artists who resisted association with the second-wave feminist label – including Maria Pinińska-Bereś, Krystyna Piotrowska, Izabella Gustowska, Teresa Murak, Zofia Kulik, Jolanta Marcolla and Anna Kutera – were also working within a field that can be interpreted, from our present perspective, as explicitly or implicitly feminist. Maria Pinińska-Bereś, for instance, at the beginning of the 1970s produced works related to her experience as a woman and as a female artist, such as the sculpture Is a Woman a Human Being? (1972), and she employed the word “feminism” in her performance Washing I realized on 20 November 1980 in Galeria ON in Poznań during the Women’s Art exhibition where Partum realized her performance provocatively entitled: Women, Marriage Is Against You. We can conclude that the circulation of feminist ideas in Poland in the 1970s was limited, but that among the neo-avant-garde female artists, such ideas were known. Agata Jakubowska points to the fact that although a small group of artworks and critical texts referred directly to feminist discourse, “feminism as a po65

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In Galeria Jatki, Wrocław (1978), Natalia LL exhibited her Categorical Statements from the Sphere of Post-Consumer Art (1975), Carolee Schneemann’s artist’s publication Cezanne, She Was a Great Painter (1975), a photo by Suzy Lake showing a woman with her body bound by a rope – shown as an installation, with the rope in the space separating the art from the audience – and Naomi Meidan’s collages on maternity covered by traditional nappies hanging on the walls. Frauen-Kunst-Neue Tendenzen, Innsbruck (1975), Frauen Machen Kunst, Bonn (1976), Magma. Rassegna internazionale di donne artiste, Brescia, Ferrara, Verona (1976) and Feministische Kunst International, Amsterdam, The Hague, Groningen, Den Bosch, Middelburg, Alkmaar, Breda, Nijmegen (1978–81).

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litical idea, as an interpretory framework, as an ideological base, remained alien.”67 The author adds that: “By Polish artists and art critics it was perceived as an ideology and hard to accept as something that makes art subjected to politics. After the trauma of mandatory socialist realism accompanied by political terror, they strongly supported autonomous high art, which they perceived as a guarantee of artistic freedom.”68 The reluctance to accept any form of political ramification of art, which was a common stance for artists and critics in socialist Poland, resulted in a reinforcement of modernist myths of the universality and disinterestedness of art. Although Ewa Partum maintained many transnational contacts through Galeria Adres infrastructures, she did not receive any recognition from fellow feminist artists and critics in the West at the time. Partum tried to use the infrastructure of the Galeria Adres to initiate such contact. For instance, as the artist remembers, she sent or planned to send69 material consisting of the Galeria Adres catalogues and Self-Identification catalogue published in 1981 to the following feminist art critics and institutions: Lucy Lippard, VALIE EXPORT, Gislind Nabakowski, the FEM organization in Mexico City, the Feminist Art Journal in New York and to De Appel in Amsterdam, where the touring exhibition Feministische Kunst International curated by Marlite Halbertsma took place at the turn of 1978/79.70 This exhibition included works by Natalia LL, whose Post-Consumer Art was also featured in 1976 on the cover of the February issue of Flash Art.71 During her interview with Dorota Jarecka, Partum acknowledged the lack of contact with Polish female artists, adding that “in terms of contacts with women, only those who were abroad were getting in touch, such as Muriel Olesen or Alison Knowles.”72 Grzegorz Dziamski, who invited Partum several times to artistic events organized at the Maximal Art Gallery in Poznań in the years 1978–80 and who was one

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Hock et al. (eds.) 2018, p. 146. Ibid. Interview with Ewa Partum, 14.07.2016 (Berlin).(). From the undated manuscript entitled Sending catalogues, written supposedly in 1981. The Feministische Kunst International exhibition was presented in Amsterdam, 29 November 1978–31 January 1979; Den Haag, 10 November 1979–6 January 1980; Groningen, 21 January–20 February 1980; Den Bosch, 22 March–11 May 1980. The mentioned manuscript also includes Dick Higgins’s name. Questioned about the list of addresses, Partum insists that the team of the Galeria Adres collected these contacts from all possible sources including magazines available in public libraries. It is likely that the manuscript was written in 1980, although the Feminist Journal existed only until 1977 but Partum could not have known about that at the time. Interview with Ewa Partum, 22.11.2017 (Berlin). Jarecka 2006. There are no traces of Partum’s contact with Alison Knowles in Partum’s archives.

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of the first critics who described Partum’s art as feminist practice,73 argued that Partum’s naked body presented during the Self-Identification performance could not have been covered by any theoretical explanation at the time (1980) because “Polish critics had as much to say about Ewa Partum’s performance as an elderly lady passing in the street or the traffic policewoman from the exhibited photomontages could have, if only they had the chance to meet the naked Ewa Partum in reality.”74 In the light of more recent research on the circulation of feminist ideas, this view seems to be an exaggeration, though the contrary opinion (that Partum’s naked body was perceived and perceivable within the framework of feminist discourse by critics and the general public alike) would also be untrue. A discursive covering of Partum’s naked body was provided merely by the artist’s statements and manifestos, as well as by the titles of her works. In her writings Partum not only expressed her feminist postulates but also explicitly positioned feminism “as a political idea and as an interpretory framework” of her artistic work. For these reasons, Partum’s feminist didactic performances, which will be discussed later in this chapter, were accompanied by meetings with the audience, talks and presentations on the topic of feminism and feminist art. On the other hand, the lack of “discursive coverage” of her naked body by a commonly known narrative enabled her to achieve the effects of shock and disruption necessary to carry out her feminist pedagogy. Acting as a lone artivist, Partum directly targeted the officially propagated image of an already-existing equal rights in Poland and revealed a vacant territory previously occupied by women’s organizations which had been dissolved or centralized within the official League of Polish Women after 1945. The Polish government’s policy was to prevent the existence and development of independent feminist or women’s organizations, as they might work to prove that women’s rights in socialist Poland were limited.75 Ultimately, in spite of the official socialist rhetoric, the Polish People’s Republic was in fact a patriarchal Catholic country: a

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Dziamski, Grzegorz: “Sztuka feministyczna I” in Miesiecznik Literacki, no. 2–3, 1988, pp. 104–116; and “Sztuka feministyczna II” in Miesiecznik Literacki, no. 4, 1988, pp. 81–90. Dziamski, Grzegorz: “Art Written by Body” in Stepken (ed.) 2001, pp. 156–157, p. 156. 1952 Constitution: Article 78: (1) Women in the Republic of Poland shall have equal rights with men in all fields of public, political, economic, social and cultural life. (2) The equality of the rights of women shall be guaranteed by: 1. equal rights with men to work and to be paid according to the principle “equal pay for equal work,” the right to rest and leisure, to social insurance, to education, to honors and decorations, and to hold public offices; 2. mother-andchild care, protection of expectant mothers, paid leave before and after confinement, the development of a network of maternity clinics, crèches and nursery schools, the extension of a network of service establishments and canteens; 3. The Republic of Poland shall strengthen the position of women in society, especially of gainfully employed mothers and women. The Constitution of Poland (1952): http://servat.unibe.ch/icl/pl01000_.html.

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reservoir of traditional values where the state upheld the stability of conservative traditions. Anna Markowska has highlighted that in socialist Poland, artists were considered the guardians of a “high culture” understood in terms of preservational stability and national tradition and which had little to do with the Western paradigm of questioning the political and social status quo.76 From the beginning of the 1970s, Polish authorities had been seeking a new legitimization of their power, finding it not in international socialist history but in the national history and traditionstrengthening conservative tendencies within the official culture.77 The neo-avantgarde scene functioned as a semi-autonomous public sphere that was ultimately produced through this cultural politics of the state; it preserved the mechanisms that regulated the status of women and the meanings attributed to the female body. Ewa Partum was a member of a male-dominated neo-avant-garde art scene created within the absence of a feminist movement. The presence of a female artist within this circle was restricted to the position of a “significant other” of the male artists.78 Female practitioners entered almost exclusively as wives/partners of the core male members,79 and Partum herself was married to the celebrated artist Andrzej Partum. Avant-garde art practices were determined and defined within the androcentric mythology of universalism, elitism and intellectualism. Translated into a social practice, this meant that only male practitioners defined status within the group and the value of an artistic production.80 Also the language of artistic critique often revealed sexist attitudes and patriarchal strategies: analyses of artistic objects made by women artists were often accompanied or replaced by commentaries about the artists’ appearances.81 76 77 78 79

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Markowska, Anna: Definiowanie sztuki-objaśnianie świata. O pojmowaniu sztuki w PRL-u, Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 2003, p. 11. Piotrowski 1991. See Hussakowska, Maria: “Czy polska sztuka konceptualna ma płeć?” (What is the Gender of Polish Conceptual Art?) in: Sztuka i Dokumentacja, no. 6, 2012, pp. 29–39. Anna Markowska, in her research on Grupa Krakowska, demonstrated that women were allowed into art circles exclusively as wives of core members. See Markowska, Anna: Sztuka w Krzysztoforach: między stylem a doświadczeniem, Kraków: Stowarzyszenie Artystyczne Grupa Krakowska, 2000. Marta Leśniakowska also argues that the idea that women, “from nature”, are not capable of creating High Art, that their biological and intellectual condition predestines them to decorative arts, influenced language changes introduced within a grammar reform in the 1960s; for instance, the female form of the noun “architect” (architekta) was erased in favour of the masculine form. See Leśniakowska, Marta: “Polskie architektki w dyskursie nowoczesności” in Toniak, Ewa (ed.): Alina Ślesińska:1922–1994, exh. cat., Warsaw, Narodowa Galeria Sztuki Zachęta, 08 December 2007–24 February 2008, Warsaw 2007, pp. 31–40, p. 33. See, for instance, Toniak, Ewa: Olbrzymki. Kobiety i socrealizm, Kraków: Korporacja Ha!art, 2008.

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There are further factors that determined the possible formulas of feminist art in the 1970s and early 1980s in the country. Although in socialist Poland women were not completely excluded from economic power (through their employment), their status and function in society was dependent to a great extent on unpaid work in the private sphere and their roles as mothers and wives. As early as 1947, the authorities started limiting women’s access to certain professions. In her analysis of public debate during the Khrushchev thaw, Małgorzata Fidelis traced the genealogy of the “Polish way to socialism” promoted by the Gomułka government (1956–70) as based on the idea of the separation of the public and private spheres, a preservation of the integrity of the family and traditional gender roles where women are reduced to reproduction and work within the home. Fidelis writes that emphasizing sexual difference and gender hierarchy was at the core of the concept of Polish socialism. Within this paradigm, women were defined as wives and mothers and female sexuality was demonized.82 There is also one more factor worth considering with respect to Partum’s feminism. The lack of political representation of women in the system of power, i.e. in the socialist elite, could not become an object of transformative critique for feminist artistic practice. The actual system of power in the 1970s, an undemocratic single-party leadership controlled by the Soviet Union, could not be challenged or transformed through feminist intervention but only completely boycotted. Similarly, any economic demand could not be directly addressed by feminist art practice. In other words, actual politics was not the place to act. Therefore, the realm of broadly understood culture became the site designated for feminist politics: the national culture that functioned within the romantic-symbolic paradigm, the everyday culture of gendered routines, the visual culture of socialism and the artistic culture of the male neo-avant-garde.

Indicating Victims and Oppressors: Feminist Pedagogy in Performances in Socialist Poland (1974–82) “Feminism is epistemologically committed to realism.” – Toril Moi83 In her group of performances created between 1974 and 1982, Partum articulated the problem of the social status of women and also demonstrated that the entire category of women’s identity was constructed in a socio-historical process and, 82 83

Fidelis, Małgorzata: Women, Communism, and Industrialization in Postwar Poland, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Moi, Toril:Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (1985), 13th. ed., London: Routledge, 1995, p. 83.

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through rituals and institutions (marriage), became a part of the operating ideology. In these works, Partum’s demand for cultural recognition came together with her critique of neo-avant-garde masculinist culture. To historicize Partum’s feminist performances, i.e. to treat them as historical objects, it is necessary to ask what it meant to postulate recognition or to criticize the cultural misrepresentation of women in the socialist Poland of that time. And where – besides Partum’s personal experiences – were the intellectual sources of her feminist art? In her first feminist action, Change (17 December 1974), realized in the Galeria Adres in Łódź in the presence of the camera and a small audience, Partum, with the assistance of professional make-up artists, subjected her face to the process of ageing (figs. 48-50). Invitations to the action consisted of a postcard with the message Now My Idea is a Golden Idea, written in accordingly coloured text. The performance was documented, and we can access it today through a series of colour and blackand-white photographs showing the artist’s face and the process of applying makeup as well as through a recently rediscovered recording made by Józef Robakowski. Change was a provocative and even confrontational action in which Partum exposed patriarchal hierarchies – the very fact that women’s value (her value) was determined and dependent on their (her) sexual attractiveness and youth – i.e. on their (her) biological attributes – that caused an objectification of the female body. The work can be compared with camera performances realized by other East-Central European women artists: Art Must Be Beautiful, Artist Must Be Beautiful (1975) by Marina Abramović, in which the artist relentlessly repeats the sentence articulated in the title while furiously brushing her hair for forty-five minutes, or with Sanja Iveković’s video Instructions No. 1 (1976), for example. All three artists used their faces as a field of artistic intervention, not merely presenting images of the final effect but also enacting processes of objectification in front of the audience and for the camera. When this visually compelling work is juxtaposed with photographic works of Western feminist artists, it becomes yet another instance of the critique of the politics of representation. In the catalogue of the WACK! exhibition, Partum’s work was described as follows: “Change challenges assumptions about female beauty while illustrating women’s complicated relationships with time and ageing.”84 However, the artist was not taking a stance against the popular culture industry, since visuals of female sexuality were not pervasive in 1970s Poland in the way they were in the image-saturated West. To understand this difference, it is interesting to compare Partum’s Change work with a performative photograph by American artist Martha Wilson, who worked with a seemingly similar strategy. In 1973, Wilson realized Posturing: Age Transformation (colour photograph and text), in which she represented the stereotypical female anxiety of the “post-thirty” 84

Butler, Cornelia 2007, p. 281.

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status in society. The photograph depicts the twenty-five-year-old artist portrayed as a fifty-year-old woman trying to look twenty-five. Also, in her camera performance Appearance as Value (1972), Wilson rendered the sexism of social hierarchies visible. However, apart from commenting on the social status of women, Wilson was also making a statement about photography as a technology that participates in the objectification of women, rendering it as a tool for the perpetuation of femininity as a masquerade. Like Partum, Wilson did not issue a statement on her personal feelings/attributes but utilized her personal attributes (face) and experiences (discrimination) to perform a critique of the patriarchal culture and masqueraded femaleness. Still, Partum’s artistic strategy differs from Wilson’s camera performance: in her action Partum reveals the effects of the process of transformation from a young face to an old one, rather than images of mascaraed femininity. The images produced during the Change action focus on the articulation of the process and visualisation of the difference – showing her face simultaneously before and after the process of changing. It is worth mentioning that Partum was at that time working for the film industry as a set designer and costume maker. In her action, she transferred familiar procedures of transforming appearance into a critical artistic strategy. She was interested in visualizing the process of constructing the female appearance and represented her face as the product of such work. In 1978 Partum disseminated the documentation from Change in the public space in a poster action, moving her interests away from the semi-autonomous artistic sphere and towards the mainstream public. Partum participated in the ZPAP Festival of Fine Arts in Warsaw with 600 copies of Emphatic Portraits (fig. 51) which were distributed on the streets of Warsaw, thus invading the public sphere and expanding the notion of the political. Here again, Partum reappropriated a typical element of the film industry’s infrastructure in a subversive way. She altered the photograph realized during the Change action and combined it with the feminist statement: my problem is a problem of a woman. Subsequently, Partum arranged a series of photographs posing in front of her Emphatic Portraits posters in different locations on the streets of Warsaw. Judith Butler writes that the feminist impulse: has often emerged in the recognition that my pain or my silence or my anger or my perception is finally not mine alone, and that it delimits me in a shared cultural situation which in turn enables and empowers me in certain unanticipated ways. The personal is thus implicitly political inasmuch as it is conditioned by shared social structures, but the personal has also been immunized against political challenge to the extent that the public/ private distinctions endure.85

85

Butler, Judith: “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” in Jones, Ameila (ed.): The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, London: Routledge, 2003, pp. 392–401, p. 395.

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This tension between the public/private and the resistance to renegotiate their boundaries within dominant culture was rendered visible by the reception of Partum’s work. In a tongue-in-cheek review published in the weekly magazine Kultura, the established mainstream art critic Andrzej Osęka accused Partum of engaging the general public with her personal concerns related to her beauty.86 In an equally sarcastic response, Partum explained that her intention was to introduce feminist discourse and feminist concerns and not to flatter official regime critics.87 This exchange, in an unanticipated way, enabled Partum to distribute knowledge about feminist art through the channel of the official cultural magazine. In 1979, Partum further developed her concept introduced in the Change action. In Galeria ZPAP Na Piętrze during the Łódź Art Week festival that took place 24–30 September, Partum realized Change: My Problem Is a Problem of a Woman (28 September), in which she repeated the gesture of ageing her skin, this time extending the procedure onto half of her body (figs. 52-53). The performance was repeated later in the Galeria Art Forum in 1980 for the documentary film poem by ewa by Ryszard Brylski. In 1979 the performance was announced on the invitation explicitly as: Feminist Art. In the Partum archive, there is a note describing the performance that was probably written that same year. Partum writes in a descriptive manner, avoiding the first-person pronoun and in a seemingly cool, analytical tone that suggests this would be a desirable mode of reception for her work: Feminist Art “Change” A 2-hour-long presentation during which, in the presence of the audience, a team of film make-up artists simulated the ageing of half of the body of the author of the performance. The operation was recorded as a video and a set of photographic images. The initial and final stages of this procedure were accompanied by statements about art by other feminist artists and the artist herself. It included statements by Valie Export, Marlite Halbertsma, Lucy Lippard and Ewa Partum.88 The Change action lasted two hours but the recording is only seven minutes and sixteen seconds long. The picture from a second video camera that recorded the performance was projected in real-time onto a TV screen in the exhibition space. Documentation of the performance was initially recorded with sound, but the audio recording has been damaged.

86 87 88

Osęka, Andrzej: “Prawdziwy problem Ewy Partum” in Kultura, no. 27 (838), 08 July 1979. Partum 1979. In various statements made later, Ewa Partum refers only to the texts by VALIE EXPORT and Lucy Lippard and omits Marlite Halbertsma, who was a curator of the Feministische Kunst International traveling exhibition (1979–80).

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In this fragmented recording we can see the interior of the gallery, organized visually by the repetitive pattern of Partum’s photographic portrait displayed as a multiple on the wall. Subsequent frames show Partum speaking to the audience. For the duration of the video, the camera moves between detailed close-ups of Partum’s face, eyes, breasts, skin, her daughter Berenika, the working hands of the make-up artists, and the TV screen that depicts the whole scene. In other words, the documentation is self-referential – it shows the process of recording. Apart from the process of transforming Partum’s physical appearance, in which the body is exposed as a passive object, the film depicts moments of Partum’s active verbal engagement with the audience. During the performance, the artist reads out her manifesto, later developed further in Self-Identification, in which she encourages women to direct their own lives, as she actively directs the course of the performance. Partum also exhibits a statement: “A male artist has no biography. However, a female artist has one. It is important if she is young or old”; she thus positions her work as operating in the context of the artistic male neo-avant-garde. At this point, it becomes clear that within Partum’s artistic practice, feminist art has been defined as having a critical pedagogical and persuasive function. Pedagogy is understood here as a transformative process, and its ultimate aim is to awaken women’s awareness (consciousness) by denouncing the patriarchal order and to pressure women to perform feminist self-identification. Partum did not intend to determine what the new “mould” or new role should be; instead, she pointed to the historicity and relativity of the normative definition of “a woman” and created a chance to articulate subjectivity-as-arrival. She visualized it as a split body in a process – as a body that cannot be categorized and stabilized as old or young, beautiful or non-attractive, active or passive. In addition to reading aloud her manifesto during the performance, Partum played from a tape recorder and read out excerpts of texts by Lucy Lippard and VALIE EXPORT. According to Ewa Partum, these texts came from the publication Künstlerinnen International 1877–1977, a catalogue of the feminist exhibition developed by the Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK) research team (1974–77) and shown in Berlin in 1977.89 The catalogue documented this eclectic and affirmative project of women’s art and included information on contemporary feminist artistic practices by Ulrike Rosenbach, Ketty La Rocca, Marina Abramović, VALIE EXPORT, Brigit Jürgenssen, Maria Lassnig, Louise Bourgeois, Judy Chicago and many others. Agata Jakubowska emphasizes that it “was the first exhibition of its

89

Lucy Lippard, “Versuch einer feministishen Kunstkritik”, an excerpt from Lippard’s From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art, New York: Penguin, 1976, and VALIE EXPORT “Überlegungen zum Verhältnis von Frau und Kreativität” in Bierther, Ursula et al. (eds.): Künstlerinnen International 1877–1977, exh. cat., Berlin, Schloss Charlottenburg, Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK), 09 March–10 April 1977, Berlin 1977, pp. 86–88 and pp. 100–104.

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type in Europe, the exhibition that presented a historical overview of women artists who were considered to be most important.”90 Considering that Partum never worked together with other female artists in Poland or elsewhere, except at the Women’s Art festival at Galeria ON in Poznań in 1980, this publication, most likely received by Partum already in 1978, not only provided her with information about feminist art practices but also with a sense of the virtual community of feminist artists. It is impossible to determine which passages from a translation of Lucy Lippard’s text From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art, and VALIE EXPORT’s text Überlegungen zum Verhältnis von Frau und Kreativität were recorded by Partum, who also had them translated. It is only clear that to speak out as feminist artist in Poland, to articulate the position of a woman in Polish society, Partum appropriated the words of Lucy Lippard and VALIE EXPORT. This gesture should not be understood simply as a transfer of knowledge about Western art, or in terms of the reception and dissemination of Western feminist ideas. It should be interpreted considering how the West was perceived in socialist Poland. In other words, it is necessary to acknowledge the authority of the Western “free voice” to understand the meaning of the appropriation of Lippard’s and EXPORT’s statements. Texts by Western feminists carried a cultural capital that Partum, as a female artist operating in the male-dominated avant-garde circles, was lacking. She utilized the words of Lippard and EXPORT in order to strengthen the persuasive capacity of her performance and to validate her stance as a feminist artist in the eyes of the audience and (male) artistic peers. During the performance, Partum announced her body “a work of art” through a performative utterance: when the alteration of her skin was complete, she declared: “Ladies and Gentlemen, today you have witnessed the creation of a work of art.” It was, however, not the flesh of the body but its surface that was utilized by the artist to perform her feminist critique. It was a symbolic intervention into the body, restricted to the level of its surface and to the visual effect. Partum’s statement declaring her body a work of art is in a certain way reminiscent of Carolee Schneemann’s words uttered about her Eye Body (1963) series of camera actions: “I establish my body as visual territory,” which marked the body as an integral material of Schneemann’s work.91 The juxtaposition of both statements points to the different ramifications of the body within feminist body art. Schneemann was working within the frame of the phenomenology of perception and she refers to visuality as such; Partum does not abandon the notion of art as a separate signifying realm or symbolic system and refers to the possibility of transcending the body’s immanence within this conceptual framework. Partum propo90 91

Hock et al. (eds.) 2018, p. 141. Jones, Amelia:Body Art/Performing the Subject, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998, p. 2.

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sed a form of subversive artistic objectification and reification of the female body, redefined within an artistic discourse. Also, it is interesting to bring together Partum’s Change manifesto and Schneemann’s text written on her Interior Scroll (1975) to reveal Partum’s body/mind dualism. It can be argued that Partum’s manifesto could be written on Schneemann’s scroll, but Schneemann’s scroll could never be placed within Partum’s body, as Partum’s body did not have any interior. It was not a consummate living sexual body, but the body-sign, disciplined and composed by the mind. In an unpublished interview from 1987, Partum explained that the organizing principle of this work, as in her earlier linguistic works, was a tautology and she therefore called her action a conceptual performance. Partum specified the discourse that allowed her to sublimate her physical body and turn it into an artistic tool as conceptual art discourse: Since I started creating works about myself, i.e. based on my own experiences – which is always a generic topic anyway – I turned to my body as a means of making art. It was about myself through myself. It could only have been made by me. In that sense, it was a tautological work of art.92 In her subsequent performance, Women, Marriage Is Against You at Galeria ON in Poznań at the Festival of Women’s Art on 20 November 1980, her pedagogical strategy developed further into the form of giving instructions to the oppressed (fig. 12). This action was not about the presence of the artist in public as an interlocutor, as in some of Joseph Beuys’s actions whose purpose was to involve the audience in the common search for answers about art boundaries.93 As RoseLee Goldberg has argued, many female artists in the mid-1970s explored performance as a means to increase audience awareness of their own position as the audience and in the patriarchal society. Julia Heyward separated her audience into male and female in 1976 at the Whitney Museum; Adrian Piper exposed the audience as victims of manipulation by media and the performer herself in Some Reflective Surfaces (1975); Ulrike Rosenbach played with the public’s consciousness in Don’t Believe I’m an Amazon (1975).94 Partum’s strategy was less analytical and more pragmatic: she was not reflecting on the set of circumstances and properties of a performance as a medium. She rather assumed a performance as an effective and immediate form of communication and pointed to the performativity of social reality outside the artistic discourse. She referred to the institution of marriage as a means of manipulation

92 93 94

Transcript of the unpublished interview conducted by Marek Ławrynowicz, Berlin 1987. Goldberg, RoseLee: Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (1979), London: Thames and Hudson, 2001, p. 151. Goldberg 2001, p. 174.

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and reproduction of patriarchy.95 She spoke directly to the presumably female audience (pronoun “you”) in the title of her performance and explored the conative function of language to initiate a process where individual members of the audience acknowledge and respond to the ideology of patriarchy, thereby recognizing themselves as oppressed.96 At the beginning of her action, Partum stood motionless in a wedding gown wrapped in packing foil. She has also the inscription “for Man” attached to the foil. As soon as the wedding march began, Partum started cutting herself out of the wedding attire until she was naked. Then she went on to explain the symbolism of the romanticism of the wedding dress and the danger it represents for women as a trap where they lose their freedom. During her talk, the film documentation of her performance Change was presented on a TV screen. At the end, Partum signed fragments of her wedding dress and distributed them to members of the audience. In 1981, at the Galeria Labirynt in Lublin, Partum realized another performance devoted to the institution of marriage: The Wedding Attire (fig. 54). Red-coloured posters with the action title Women, Marriage Is Against You were distributed throughout the city as a means of both information about the art event and as feminist agitprop. On 20 March, Partum realized her performance and one day later she hosted an event with an assembled audience in order to present documentation from earlier performances and speak about feminist art. The dramaturgy of the action was altered from Galeria ON presentation of Women, Marriage Is Against You: the artist performed in the company of an assistant who was dressed up and was acting as a groom. Partum entered the gallery space naked, carrying the banner “Women, Marriage Is Against You” trailing behind her like a wedding train. She placed the banner in front of the platform on which the “groom” was standing and dressed herself in the wedding gown that was hanging on the coat stand. Next, she taped her mouth with white Scotch tape and the “groom” put a veil over her face. They both assumed traditional poses for a series of wedding photographs that simultaneously functioned as documentation of the performance. In this edition of the wedding performance, Partum deployed a school blackboard. The text it displayed, written in white chalk, described a wedding dress as a symbol of male domination: The inequality between the woman and the man in the world of male civilisation a woman created in this tradition 95 96

Partum herself was married twice. I refer to Roman Jakobson’s theory of communicative language functions, where the conative function denotes a vocative or imperative addressing of the receiver. See, for instance, Jakobson, Roman: “Linguistics and Poetics” in Sebeok, Thomas A. (ed.): Style in Language, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960, pp. 350–377.

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is bound by obedience in the face of her own false desires shaped in the process of alienation.97 During this performance, Partum alluded to Marcel Duchamp’s work La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires même. Erratum Musical (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors Even. Erratum Musical), an ultimate articulation of intellectually charged avant-garde practice. This Duchampian connection was strengthened in her subsequent performance Stupid Woman, in which she appropriated one of the aleatory compositions written by Duchamp, Erratum Musical. The amplification of artistic references can be interpreted as a strategic form of creating “protective cover” for Partum’s nudity. In a similar way, Jerzy Bereś employed a reference to Duchamp’s practice in his naked Dialogue with Marcel Duchamp performances.98 In a series of five performances entitled Stupid Woman, realized between 1981 and 1983,99 Partum performed an exaggerated version of the hysterical woman, the trope that identifies madness and hysteria with the stereotypical vision of femininity. Violating the personal space of male members of the audience, Partum directly addressed selected viewers, forcing them to become participants. A first version of this performance was realized during the International Symposium Miastko 81, in Świeszyno in September 1981, to which Partum was invited by Andrzej Kostołowski, who curated the event with Stanisław Urbański. Partum entered the stage naked wearing high heels, her body adorned with Christmas tree lights. To the music of Duchamp’s composition Erratum Musical (1913), written for three voices, which are “written out separately, and there is no indication by the author whether they should be performed separately or together as a trio”,100 Partum produced cacophonic sounds while applying makeup to her face and simultaneously saying: to be beautiful, to smell beautiful, to be in love, to be nice to one’s audience, really to be. Partum received the recording of Erratum Musical from Wolf Vostell, whom she visited in February 1981 in his Kreuzberg studio in West Berlin. While interpreting Duchamp’s work, she also sought to establish an artistic lineage of her own practice Partum, Ewa: Strój Ślubny (Wedding Attire) 1980, typescript in the Ewa Partum archive. This performance recalled the title of Pierre Cabanne’s publication Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (1971). See also: Kemp-Welch, Klara: “Attacking Objectification: Jerzy Bereś in Dialogue with Marcel Duchamp” in Jordan, Mel/ Miles, Malcolm (eds.): Art Theory and PostSocialism, Bristol, UK: Intellect Press, 2008, pp. 21–31. 99 Five editions of the performance Stupid Woman took place at: (1) International Symposium, Miastko, 1981; (2) BWA gallery, Kraków, 1981; (3) Klub Pod Jaszczurami, Kraków, 1981; (4) Galeria Dziekanka, Warsaw, 1981; (5) Galerie Wewerka, Berlin, 1983. 100 Kotik, Petr: “The Music of Marcel Duchamp”, liner notes to the CD Music of Marcel Duchamp, Edition Block and Paula Cooper Gallery, (1991), http://www.artesonoro.net/artesonoroglobal/ MarcelDuchamp.html.

97 98

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– to connect it with the tradition of Duchamp’s art and therefore to place it in the proximity of Fluxus, which also strongly relied on Duchampian tradition.101 During the Stupid Woman performance, Partum kissed the hands of men from the audience, reversing the gender order of the custom that has its roots in medieval vassal ritual. Kissing the hands of women as an expression of male courtesy was the form of ritual Partum referred to in her Self-Identification manifesto as “the semblance of respecting women but in fact making them handicapped.” An even more aggressive version of Stupid Woman took place at the student club Pod Jaszczurami in Kraków on 16 November 1981. Partum was invited to the event, which included artistic presentations by Andrzej Partum and Jan Świdziński and a presentation of documentation from Manifestacje Performance (Performance Manifestations), the first performance festival in Kraków.102 Stupid Woman 3 (fig. 55) was performed at the BWA gallery a couple of days later, on 19 November 1981 during the Ninth International Kraków Meetings, organized by Andrzej Kostołowski and Maria Pinińska-Bereś.103 Partum expanded the dramaturgy of the performance, again incorporating an assistant and more props (fan, cosmetics, alcohol, and photocopied dollars). She spoke about care and beauty practices while the assistant kept offering her wine. She approached viewers with the questions Do you fancy me? Do you love me? For every positive answer, she demanded written proof. She also kissed the spectators and offered them alcohol.104 Stupid Woman 4 took place in Warsaw at Galeria Dziekanka on 20 November 1981. During the performance, the naked artist forced some men selected from the audience to kiss her. In the final version of the performance, Stupid Woman 5 (fig. 56), in Berlin on 17 April 1983, she enacted a madness using verbal means as well – speaking and screaming out senseless sentences in Polish, which the Germanspeaking audience was unable to decipher.

References to Fluxus aesthetics were even more evident in Partum’s later performance Hair Concert (1983), which will be discussed later in this chapter. 102 The following artists participated in the Manifestacje Performance festival: Andrzej DudekDürer, Władysław Kaźmierczak, Marek Konieczny, Fredo Ojda, Marek Sobociński, Wojciech Stefanik, Michał Bieganowski, Jan Świdziński, Artur Tajber, Anastazy Wiśniewski, Daniel Wnuk, Grupa M.U.R. and Grupa Łódź Kaliska. 103 The Ninth International Kraków Meetings included the following artists: Maria PinińskaBereś, Jerzy Bereś, Andrzej Dudek-Dürer, Rasa Todosijević, Stuart Brisley, Christine Chifrun, Ian Robertson, Wojciech Stefanik, Albert van der Weide, Andrzej Matuszewski and Władysław Kaźmierczak. 104 While in Kraków, Partum met Stanisław Urbański, who would accompany her during her first trip to West Berlin in February 1981. Urbański collaborated with Wolf Vostell and presented documentation of Vostell’s happenings at the ZPAP Galeria Pryzmat in Kraków. Urbański also presented Joseph Kosuth’s writings and organized a large mail art exhibition there. He also ran Galeria Forum, also in Kraków. 101

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Partum, unlike male Polish performers such as Zbigniew Warpechowski, did not explore her actual bodily boundaries or highlight the physical experience in her performances. Without question, these actions were physically demanding and exhausting, but their focus was on the mental strength of a nude artist who provocatively exceeded the personal limits of male viewers. After finishing her performances, Partum each time thanked her involuntary participants, therefore marking the borders between spectacle and reality verbally through the statement: “Thank you! It was a performance.” Moreover, mocking the gesture of professional actors, she bowed to the audience. In that way, performances of Stupid Woman combined elements of the unexplained, unexpected and accidental (aleatory music, the reaction of the public) with a rigid scenario of enacted aggression. The motif of repressed aggression was thematized by female performers, such as in the famous Cut Piece performed by Yoko Ono for the first time in 1964 or Marina Abramović’s durational Rhythm 0 (1974). Yoko Ono’s work was initially realised in relation to the peace movement’s rhetoric and objectives; the artist positioned herself as a passive object in the hands of the participants. In Marina Abramović’s action, members of audience were invited to do what they wanted to the artist using any of seventy-two objects placed on a table, including a loaded gun. Both actions included a possibility of transgressing the corporal limits of their performers. In contrast, Partum’s work was a confrontational theatrical action that utilized aggression merely as a means to establish reaction: to generate in its viewers a consciousness of being the subjects and objects of the patriarchy and to thematize violence as that system’s structural feature. Within the format of performance, Partum expanded the aspect of inequality between the performer and the viewer defined by Peggy Phelan as rooted in the concept of European theatre. “Much Western theatre,” writes Phelan, “evokes desire based upon and stimulated by the inequality between the performer and the spectator – and by the potential domination of the silent spectator.”105 Partum exploited this inequality and made it an organizing principle of her works to parallel and emphasize the inequalities within the patriarchal system. She was following the Brechtian idea “of imposing an uncomfortable and self-conscious state on the audience” – though not “in an attempt to reduce the gap between the two”,106 but rather in order to enlarge this gap. In her earlier conceptual works, Partum attributed an openness and contingency to the process of intersubjective interpretation, which she clearly distinguished from the process of meaning production by an artist. Partum sought to realize this concept of the work of art as a site of the artist’s intentions also within the medium of performance. Thus, her performances were never abstract but followed a story 105 Phelan, Peggy: Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, London: Routledge, 1993, p. 163. 106 Goldberg 2001, p. 162.

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line and, as such, were consciously enacted scripts. It was “art with content” as opposed to “art without content”, as Seth Price has described Vito Acconci’s practice.107 The content of Partum’s feminist performances consisted of the problem of a woman that she experienced in her everyday life and in her professional practice as a female neo-avant-garde artist; it was therefore also related to certain aspects of Partum’s personal history. In her essay on autobiographical performances, RoseLee Goldberg writes that because “conceptual art implied the experience of time, space and material rather than their representation in the form of objects, the body became the most direct medium of expression.”108 The medium of performance was therefore “an ideal means to materialize art concepts.”109 For Partum, however, performance had become a means to materialize feminist critical pedagogy – the practice understood as a form of raising consciousness through art – since, as she stated in her manifesto, “only after discovering her own consciousness will a women be able to create a new social structure.”110 Consequently, Partum’s early performances cannot be inscribed into the logic of action, task or ritual111 but rather into the logic of acting. Their concept has more in common with Brecht’s category of epic theatre than with the ritualistic notion of body art and the meat joy of Carolee Schneemann. We can also refer in this context to the hybrid description “guerrilla theatre/conceptual art” coined by Kathleen Cioffi for the collective actions organized in the 1980s by the Orange Alternative movement in Poland.112 Partum’s unwritten feminist scripts, repeated several times in different institutional constellations, do not belong to the “long tradition of anti-theatricalism” in the artistic performance discourse defined by Rebecca Schneider as “debased if not downright feared as destructive of the pristine ideality of all things marked ‘original’.”113 In her actions, Partum’s composed body was the means to produce a distancing/alienation effect, which provoked a rational reflection on women’s position in

107 Quoted in Auslander, Philip: “The Performativity of Performance Documentation” in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, vol. 28, no. 3, September 2006, pp. 1–10, p. 4. 108 Goldberg 2001, p. 153. 109 Ibid., p. 155. 110 Partum, Ewa: Change, 1979. 111 “Three Models of Body Art” in Foster et al. (eds.) 2011, p. 609. 112 Cioffi, Kathleen: Alternative Theatre in Poland 1954–1989, Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1999, p. 44. 113 Schneider, Rebecca: Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment, London: Routledge, 2011, p. 99. Schneider’s performance theory emphasizes performance’s nonlinearity and inter(in)animatedness.

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society through the strategy of visual interpellation.114 It was a practice of situating viewers in the field of meaning production that closely involves the recognition of oneself as a member of that world of meaning. Those who turned their gaze to Partum’s naked body had to recognize themselves either as dominant subjects or suppressed objects of the patriarchy. In other words, by directly calling on the viewers, Partum forced them to produce two kinds of subjectivities: the oppressed and the oppressors. This process can also be explained by referring to Amelia Jones’s concept of the queer feminist durationality that is “enacted in cases where the representational power of the artwork pulls the spectator into a temporary identification.”115 If Partum directly addressed women in the Change and Marriage performances, in the Stupid Woman series, which was performed in the context of international artist meetings dominated by male cultural producers, or in places related to performance art (Galeria Pracownia Dziekanka), Partum addressed men: specifically, those who were her fellow artists and critics who constituted the audience of her performances. The paranoid and hysterical woman impersonated by Partum was a visualization of the male perception of transgressive female creatives. In his recent essay about Ewa Partum’s art, Andrzej Turowski admits that there was a tendency not to recognize creative women artists in the 1970s and 1980s in Poland.116 In a far more dramatic statement made during the funeral of Maria-Pinińska-Bereś in 1999, the performance artist and Partum’s former partner, Zbigniew Warpechowski, spoke about the marginalization and lack of appreciation of the artistic work of Pinińska-Bereś “because she was a woman.” Warpechowski admitted that ignoring Pinińska-Bereś’s art while appreciating art produced by her “genius husband Jerzy Bereś” was perceived in artistic circles as “the natural order of things.”117

The Active Body: Rhetoric of Disinterestedness “Feminism makes ambivalence a necessary worldview.” – Peggy Phelan118

114

115 116 117

I refer to Louis Althusser’s concept of interpellation, as proposed in his text Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (1969), published in English in: Althusser, Louis: Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, London: New Left Books, 1971, pp. 121–176. Dimitrakaki 2013, p. 57. Szyłak et al. (eds.) 2012/13, p. 52. Quoted in: Buczak, Dominika: “Różowa rewolta” in Wysokie Obcasy Magazine, 03 March 2008.

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In her performances realized in socialist Poland, by inserting the previously static and marginalized female naked body into the scene, activating it “in space and time […] as an actor rather than object”,119 Partum reclaimed for woman the role of the creative individual and inverted the logic of modern art where the female body is identified as a bearer rather than a producer of meaning. She also seized the territory secured for the male neo-avant-garde artist. Partum thus revealed the hidden logic of the exclusionism underlying art and the identity of the artist and worked to transform these notions by incorporating a female subject. As we have seen, Self-Identification was not the beginning but rather a culmination of a series of performative gestures aimed at developing an individualized language of feminist art practice. It was a moment of clarification of Partum’s feminist aesthetics based on her decision to use the naked body to produce feminist art. During this process, Partum’s body became an artistic tool: initially the artist used its surfaces (lips, face and skin), later its photographic representation, and finally the naked body itself became an active agent in her performances.120 In the Self-Identification series, narrative content tautologically merged with the meaning of the body generated within the inner narrative of Partum’s art. In the manifesto that accompanied Self-Identification, Ewa Partum announced that she would perform naked until the social situation of women improves. From that date, she used her naked body in her performances – as an erotically neutralized “feminist sign.” But what did it mean to represent, use and perform a naked female body under state socialism, “lobbying for radical social change”?121 The meaning of Partum’s naked body differed from the body used as a tool for self-discovery in feminist body art practices in the West, in which the body conveys a notion of an embedded desiring subject that refers to the ontology of presence, and can be interpreted from poststructuralist and phenomenological per-

Phelan, Peggy: “Feminism Makes Ambivalence a Necessary Worldview” in Artforum, vol. 42, October 2003, p. 148. 119 Jones 2012, p. 31. 120 In 1974, a significant rearrangement also took place within the ongoing series of poems by ewa, which can be identified as the process of gendering a supposedly universal speaking subject, the “lyrical I” of the conceptual work of art. Partum included her personal experience of motherhood in the poem by ewa that incorporates a photograph of the artist breastfeeding her daughter. In the same year, Partum altered the work Autobiography. Partum removed one of the names of the male creators of culture from the banner in order to introduce the name of her daughter, Berenika, who was born the same year. In 1978, the poem my touch is the touch of a woman assumed a new formula: my problem is a problem of a woman. 121 In her introduction to Gender Check: A Reader, Bojana Pejić observed that “[i]n contrast to their colleagues in the West, women artists in Eastern Europe active in the same period lacked the experience of a mass women’s movement lobbying for radical social change.” Pejić, Bojana: “Introduction: Eppur si muove!” in Pejić (ed.) 2010, pp. 13–35, p. 21. 118

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spectives.122 The meaning of an active naked body in Partum’s performances must instead be considered within the framework of the local artistic strategies and local forms of visual culture. Since the 1960s, the naked body had been a tool employed frequently by male East- Central European neo-avant-garde artists in performances and actions.123 Piotr Piotrowski has pointed out that the traditional duality of body and soul was often reinforced by these practices, which also “epitomized the traditional male role of the active subject” while at the same time challenging the visual culture taboos of conservative and prudish societies by exposing the male genitals.124 Piotrowski argues that, consequently, “in these presentations, the male body confirmed its traditional functions rather than became an instrument of critical practice that would challenge the social foundations of identity politics.”125 Although there were many male artists exploiting their naked bodies, only a few would gender or sexualize their bodies in their practices.126 In Poland, it was Jerzy Bereś who “turned his gender into a medium of expression”.127 Bereś approached his naked body employed in his performances as an “artist’s monument”.128 Piotrowski argued that Bereś’s naked body became a vehicle of authority confirmed by the phallocentrism of European culture, “which was referred to in a positive and not a critical sense”.129 Bereś’s body, discursively turned into a tool within his artistic practice, was indeed gendered but not sexualized; it was not presented as a sensual or erotic body, but merely as a body marked as male. In an interview conducted in 2016, Ewa Partum discussed Jerzy Bereś’s performance Prophecy I, which she has seen in the Foksal Gallery in 1968, as a work that

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Jones 1998, p. 20. See, for instance, the exhibition catalogue Body and the East: From the 1960s to the Present, edited by Zdenka Badovinac, with essays by Joseph Backstein, Iara Boubnova, Jurij Krpan, Ileana Pintilie, Kristine Stiles, Branka Stipančić, Igor Zabel and others. The book includes essays on eighty artists from fourteen countries: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, the former East Germany, Hungary, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia and Yugoslavia. Badovinac, Zdenka: Body and the East: From the 1960s to the Present, exh. cat., Ljubljana, Moderna Galerija, 07 July–27 September 1998, Ljubljana 1998. 124 Piotrowski: “Male Artist’s Body” in Pejić (ed.) 2010, p. 130. 125 Ibid., p. 127. 126 Ibid., p. 127. Piotrowski continues: “The body was defined by these artists not just in terms of subjectivity (my body) but also as a universal phenomenon (human body). Sometimes it played a purely instrumental role, functioning as an almost transparent surface that contrasted with the opaque artist’s ‘interior’.” 127 Ibid. 128 Jerzy Bereś’s performance Artist’s Monument (Pomnik Artysty) was realized in 1978. 129 Piotrowski: “Male Artist’s Body”, in Pejić (ed.) 2010, p. 131.

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influenced her views on the possibilities of employing the body in artistic practice based on action.130 The body employed by Partum in Self-Identification and her performances was also gendered – i.e. marked as a female body but not sexualized. It was a body without pleasure and without excess – a body without expression. It merely included what Dimitrakaki has called “a certain corporal reality that is instrumental to the labour of the sign, that is, of the female artists’ body.”131 However, it also included cultural marks of female sexuality. As many other female artists, Partum performed wearing high heels and heavy makeup. Unlike her Western colleagues, however, Partum was not operating in the context of a consumerist society saturated with images of objectified, fetishized women; she was not engaging with massmedia culture, as this culture was in a different stage of development in Poland. Obviously, some form of proto-consumerist popular culture did exist, and it was characteristic of the post-totalitarian condition of the 1970s. In Poland, as David Crowley describes, the consumerist revolution introduced under the label of Second Poland “inadvertently pointed to the phantasmagorical aspect of a ‘new’ Poland made in the image of Western modernity.”132 He argues that the 1960s and 1970s saw the growth of “socialist consumerism” across the Eastern Bloc, though this phenomenon was “found largely, if not entirely in the realm of images rather than things.”133 Films, culture and lifestyle magazines such as Ty i Ja adapted from French sources, press articles, books and television programs, as well as advertising and selected Western European and American films screened in Polish cinemas134 offered a visual spectrum of ideals of the female body, beauty and desire. The Polish Venus (1970–91) series of annual exhibitions organized by the Krakow Photographic Society, which focused on female photographic portraits and nudes and became a signifier of the relative liberalization of Polish visual culture in the 1970s, was considered controversial, but at the same time, it became one of the most popular photographic exhibitions in the history of Polish photography. A similar narrative focused on “female beauty” was explored in exhibitions organized by Muzeum 130 Interview with Ewa Partum, 14.02.2016 (Berlin). During this action, Jerzy Bereś dragged a felled tree to the gallery from a nearby park and then, wearing only a red and white piece of canvas on his otherwise-naked body, constructed the work, putting on top of the wooden structure a bow of red and white string made from his garment. 131 Dimitrakaki 2013, p. 76. 132 Crowley, David: “Consumer Art and Other Commodity Aesthetics in Eastern Europe under Communist Rule” in Jakubowska, Agata (ed.): Natalia LL: Consumer Art and Beyond, CSW Zamek Ujazdowski, Warsaw 2016, pp. 129–141, p. 138. 133 Crowley, 2016, p. 133–134. 134 Iordanova, Dina: Cinema of the Other Europe: The Industry and Artistry of East Central European Film, New York: Wallflower Press, 2003, p. 28.

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Sztuki in Łódź such as Woman in Art (08 March–06 April 1975) and Women in Polish Painting in the Teofilów Textile Factory (03 July–04 November 1975). The ideology that underlined the iconography of the female body in popular culture was often not only traditional but also misogynistic. One distinct example is provided by the popular feature film Jealousy and Medicine (1973) directed by Janusz Majewski, in which the female protagonist’s body is exposed to the camera and the viewers’ gaze during the surgery performed by her lover/doctor. The love affair between a gynaecologist and his patient shows the conflation between women’s anatomical features and their social status. In many neo-avant-garde films, directed by male and female artists alike, the female body is represented also as fragmented and fetishized. In films by Teresa Tyszkiewicz and Zdzisław Sosnowski, such as The Other Side (1980), Permanent Position (1979) or Adaptation (1981), the eye of the camera moves constantly over the surface of female legs, shoes, lips and red painted nails. It can be concluded that in Polish visual culture of the 1970s, in both the mainstream and neo-avant-garde artistic circles, the naked female body was a bearer of two possible meanings: it was either revealed as a sexual object of the desiring male gaze, an object of heterosexual erotization as in Majewski’s film, or, as in more conservative and traditional artistic practices, (allegedly) sublimated through disinterested judgement and revealed as an object of contemplation, a synonym of beauty or formal harmony (Polish Venus). In order words, it followed a traditional classic valorization of the female body as “a topos of pleasure and passivity.”135 In this constellation, Partum worked to propose a new reading of the naked female body within the artistic order that went beyond rhetoric of the pose where the body acquires its meaning from the outside. In Self-Identification Partum thematized posing as such – she posed naked in front of the camera in a photography studio and subsequently cut out her silhouette from the photographs and inserted them into images of public spaces – thus inscribing the body into a political narrative. On the one hand, through this gesture, Partum paralleled the strategy of an active, desexualized but gendered body, as that in Jerzy Bereś’s performances. On the other hand, with her manifestos, she revealed the economy of the gaze and exposed the practice of objectification and fetishization of the female body. She reappropriated the rhetoric of disinterestedness and deployed her gendered female body “against the grain of masculinist assumptions.”136 Partum thematized the notion of disinterestedness directly in her work Love Positions, which was realized in Bolesławiec in 1979 during the workshop New Art in

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Piotrowski: “Male Artist’s Body”, in Pejić (ed.) 2010, p. 128. Jones 1998, p. 3. I paraphrase Jones’s statement about Carolee Schneemann’s work Eye Body, in which she deployed her sexualised body “within the language of abstract expressionism but against the grain of its masculinist assumptions.”

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Searching for Values/International Meeting of Creators.137 The work consisted of a presentation of an audio recording of a passionate and expressive sex act between a man and a woman, which was then followed by a cool and intellectual commentary performed by Partum, who read an excerpt from Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving.138 The juxtaposition of the documentation of a sexual act with a scientific narrative can be interpreted as a performative rendering of disinterest. The notion of disinterestedness recalls the Kantian paradigm of the disinterested attitude of the viewer towards a work of art – an encounter where one should not judge the work subjectively, i.e. based on personal taste or interest, but rather operate within a universal mode indifferent to the existence of the artwork. The Kantian disinterested judge of aesthetics was the paradigmatic subject of the modern era.139 Within conceptual art and its critique of visuality, this notion transformed into the assumption that it is language that is neutral and transparent. In her earlier conceptual linguistic works from the series poems by ewa, Partum deconstructed the supposedly indifferent speaking subject of a conceptual artwork, registering her personal “I” to reveal the desiring subject. In her performative body works, she extended this procedure to demonstrate that the supposedly universal subject of a conceptual work is produced/enacted by the gendered body. At the same time, on the level of her declarations and uncompromised intentionality, Partum did not completely abandon the myth of pure cognition.140 By appropriating the rhetoric of disinterestedness, Partum reinforced the distinction between body and mind, underestimating its very phallocentrism as exposed by Judith Butler in her critique of Beauvoir’s dualism.141 Amelia Jones writes that

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The Student Festival was organized by Grzegorz Dziamski with the collaboration of the Academy of Agriculture and the Student Club “Nurt” from Poznań. 138 Description of this work in the Ewa Partum archive, undated handwritten note. 139 Jones, 2012, p. 27. 140 Jones, 1998, p. 152. Jones recalls Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex (1949), in which de Beauvoir articulated the subordination of women in terms of them being relegated to immanence – whereas transcendence was available only to men in the patriarchy. She emphasizes that Beauvoir makes clear that “this in no way suggests that any subject, male or female, achieves successful transcendence (pure cognition and uncompromised intentionality), rather it is to emphasize that women are doubly removed from such a possibility while, within the facilitation of the myths of patriarchy, the singular alienation of male subject can be elided or occluded such that they appear to sustain such a mystical transcendence.” 141 In Gender Trouble Butler writes: “Beauvoir proposes that the female body ought to be the situation and instrumentality of women’s freedom and not a deforming and limiting essence […]. In the philosophical tradition that begins with Plato and continues through Descartes, Husserl and Sartre, the ontological distinction between soul (consciousness, mind) and body invariably supports relations of political and psychic subordination and hierarchy. The mind not only subjugates the body, but occasionally entertains the fantasy of fleeing its embodiment altogether. The culture associations of the mind with masculinity and the body with

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through exposing and challenging the masculinism embedded in the assumptions of disinterestedness, Western female body artists destabilized the structures of conventional art history and criticism.142 Although Partum questioned the phallic privilege that produced the notion of disinterestedness, she did not question the capability of the existing system of knowledge to bestow on women the same capacities and attributes it had attributed to men. Or rather, she had not questioned it yet, as she would move towards this problematic in the subsequent stage of her career, in West Berlin. In socialist Poland, Partum did not undermine the epistemic frameworks of patriarchal knowledge within her cultural claims. To a certain extent, Partum was following what Kristeva has called the logic of identification – identification “with certain values, not with ideological (this is combated and rightly so as reactionary) but rather with the logical and ontological values of rationality dominant in the nation-state.”143 This ambivalence of Partum’s practice has internal and external origins. First of all, it reflects the artist’s situatedness, a position from which she operated. As a member of the male-dominated neo-avant-garde, Partum’s position was split and contradictory; she was simultaneously acting outside and within the patriarchal system and she was speaking with and against it. There is also an inherent discrepancy related to the very notion of disinterestedness elaborated by Derrida in his critical reading of Kant. The paradox of Kantian aesthetics – inherent to modernist art and theory as a whole –relates to the dynamics of the work of art as accessed by a subjective, sensuous being, whose perception must be rendered disinterested, objective and universal.144 Dorota Monkiewicz has argued that the body deployed by Partum was “a phantasm of femininity”,145 with the body dressed in sexualized visual signs: red lipstick and high heels. Gislind Nabakowski describes Partum’s strategy as “mascaraed femininity”.146 These descriptions can be extended by looking at Angela Sachs’s analysis, based on her research into the socialist visual sphere of the German Democratic Republic that can shine a light on the specific reasons Partum engaged with a representation of a phantasmic rather than a real woman. Sachs argues femininity are well-documented within the field of philosophy of feminism.” See Butler, Judith: Gender Trouble (1990), 2nd ed., London: Routledge, 2007, pp. 16–17. See also: Butler 2003. 142 Jones 1998, p. 5. 143 Kristeva, Julia: “Women’s Time” in Signs, vol. 7, no. 1, Autumn 1981, pp. 13–35, p. 19. 144 Jones 2012, p. 28. “Kantian aesthetics,” writes Jones, “poses a bridge between the impossibly separated realms of subject and object. The Kantian aesthetics attempts to suture the impossible chasm between people with sensory apparatuses that allow us to access to the world (of course in a deeply subjective way, as senses are by definition individualized) and objects by offering a system of interpretation that can and in fact must claim to be universal.” 145 Szyłak et al. (eds.) 2012/13, p. 76. 146 Nabakowski 2001.

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that representations of real women – particularized, with names and professions – appeared in the socialist visual sphere much less than naked “muses, Eves and sirens.”147 Thus, Sachs would argue, in Partum’s works, she was referring to the visual culture inhabited by Polish Venuses – to symbols and allegories, rather than realistic representations of contemporary women. Moreover, as revealed in Partum’s manifestos, for her, femininity was constructed and contingent: the body, as well as the make-up and the shoes, remained merely a part of the visual entourage of femininity – an element of signification. According to Laura Mulvey, the female form has been used “as a mould into which meaning has been poured by the dominant culture.”148 By using high heels and red lipstick, Partum pointed to the visual aspects of this mould and therefore thematized the phenomenon of fetishization that takes place in the visual sphere: the process in which the female body becomes merely an object of display and a screen for the projection of male desire. In that context, it is more accurate to describe Partum’s strategy as mimicry of femininity rather than a masquerade: mimicry understood as “a tactic of dissent, as a transformation that involves the deliberate taking up of a cultural role for political ends.”149 Diana Fuss emphasizes that “the critical difference between masquerade and mimicry – between a non-ironic imitation of a role and a parodic hyperbolization of that role – depends on the degree and readability of its excess.”150 Fuss analyses the opposite understanding of mimicry as elaborated in postcolonial discourse, where it is understood as an instrument of political regulation. She argues that both concepts of mimicry – as subversion and subjugation – cross and interact, and that the strategy of mimesis can be deployed to counter “prescribed identifications”.151 Fuss concludes that “[g]iven the various and continually changing cultural coordinates that locate identity at the site of both fantasy and power,” it is the context that decides whether a particular mimesis is disruptive or revisionary.152 This ambivalence is inscribed in Partum’s use of the strategy of mimicry. For this reason, one might argue that Partum worked toward articulating and stabilizing the context of her feminist works within both discursive frameworks: the feminist discourse, in her texts and speeches, and the conceptual art discourse via references to tautology and to the work of Marcel Duchamp. 147

Sachs, Angela: “From Outstanding Workers to Sirens: Representations of Women in the German Democratic Republic (1995)” in Pejić (ed.) 2010, pp. 79–95. 148 Mulvey 1989, p. 11. Referring to Freud, the author claims that “fetishism involves displacing the sight of women’s imaginary castration onto a variety of reassuring but often surprising objects” – shoes – [….] and so on”. 149 Fuss 1995, p. 28. 150 Ibid., p. 146. 151 Ibid., p. 148. 152 Fuss 1995, p. 148.

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Partum insisted (and still insists) on reading her naked body as a desexualized feminist sign used in order to articulate a narrative about the subordinated status of women in culture and society by seizing territories and discourses predominantly owned by male artists in the guise of universal subjects. In her introduction to Vision and Difference, Griselda Pollock refers to a 1978 Elizabeth Cowie article and its “theorization of the social production of sexual difference.”153 Writing about the body as a sign, Cowie argued that “[w]omen are a visual sign, but not a straightforward signifier.”154 Partum sought to claim the function of a straightforward signifier for the female naked body. Within her artistic idiolect, she created discursive conditions where her naked body could assume the function of a feminist signifier. The simultaneity of presenting and transcending the sexuality of the feminine and feminized body constitutes the core of feminist aesthetics proposed by Partum, and this can only be understood in the sociohistorical context of Polish culture of the 1970s. The affirmation of the female body and exploration of female sexuality, as in the emancipatory practices of Western body artists (for example, of Carolee Schneemann), was not at stake in Partum’s art. It is worth mentioning that after 1989 Partum abandoned using her naked body as a medium on the grounds of not being able to maintain its meaning in the context of a consumerist and youthobsessed culture.155 It can be argued that her strategy around the naked body, as it was based on shock and aggression, was only possible in the absence of both the excessive mass-media culture and the feminist discourse able to cover Partum’s naked body immediately with meaning. Writing for a Western readership in 1981, Andrzej Kostołowski described Partum’s feminist strategy as follows: Her point of view is more extreme than that of many Polish women artists, and in some respects, it is similar to many “feminist” artists in other countries. During the early seventies, she made some very courageous gestures – for example, she distributed letters containing visual poems among crowds in public places in Warsaw. But as a feminist artist, she differs from feminists in other countries, because her precise performances seem to be more individualistic – and she, in her nakedness, more personal. Indeed, she seems to dislike other women.156

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Pollock 1993, p. 12. Ibid., p. 13. Interview with Ewa Partum, 14.09.2015 (Berlin). The only exception remains a performance, Flamenco in White, realized for Wolf Vostell at his sixtieth birthday party in Malpartida de Cáceres in 1992. Kostołowski, Andrzej: “Towards a Dream-Book of Polish Art” in a brochure of the exhibition 3 Polish Artists, Air Gallery, London 1981/82, typescript, not paginated.

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Ironically, due to a mistake, Partum’s name was omitted from Kostołowski’s text and the above description was attributed to the artist Maria Pinińska-Bereś.

The Feminist Emigrant Body: Performances in West Berlin (1982–89) The transfer of Partum’s art practice from socialist Poland to West Berlin in 1982, and especially her strategy of performing naked, have to be seen as a process of the resignification of her active body followed by a rearticulation of its meaning in a new political, social and artistic context. As bell hooks writes, “by moving we confront the realities of change and location.”157 In the case of Partum’s transfer from the East to the West, the realities of change and location merged into a new discursive staging for her work. In West Berlin, Partum was forced to confront not only changes related to the political relocation (from real socialism to liberal democracy) but also changes of her own position as a speaking subject, as well as those related to the reception of her work. I would like to briefly consider these changes and, in the next part of the chapter, look closely at how Partum navigated through them in her performances. In the performances realized in Poland, Partum employed her naked gendered body as a female body; in West Berlin, it was no longer merely a female body, but it had also become an emigrant body. This change of social status had consequences for Partum’s artistic practice – it meant that the meaning of her basic tool had been politically rewritten. As Agata Jakubowska argues, “in Poland, as a woman, she [Partum] was a subaltern but a privileged one. In West Berlin, she became a subaltern in a double way – as a woman and as an immigrant”158 – and as a consequence, “she stopped speaking mainly on behalf of women.”159 Partum’s naked acting body had been inscribed into an emigrant-immigrant binary system of identification which, after the political events of 1989 and 2004,160 was rewritten with a vocabulary that enables us to distinguish privileged voluntary transnational migrants who exercise the prerogative to travel according to global capital and those who move because of expulsions generated by capital or war as political, economic and ecological refugees. As an East-Central European singlemother emigrant, Partum’s position was rather closer to the political refugee than to the privileged position of the transnational migrant.

hooks, bell: “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness” in Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, no. 36, 1989, pp. 15–23. 158 Jakubowska 2016, p. 14. 159 Ibid., p. 17. 160 The 2004 accession of Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia and Hungary to the European Union. 157

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Partum left Poland during its period of martial law, which had limited her rights as a citizen and prevented her from continuing to exhibit her work outside the underground “third culture” network.161 Partum’s emigration was part of a wider phenomenon known in Polish historiography as the “second great emigration”, or “solidarity emigration”, when around one million people, mainly young and educated, left the country. Not finding any prospects for personal and professional development in socialist Poland of the 1980s, they took advantage of the liberalization of emigration policy that was then underway.162 Thus Partum was displaced due to pressures related to the local political situation and faced with new pressures and constraints in her chosen location. Partum, as an exilic subject, was therefore at the opposite pole from Martha Rosler’s Frequent Flyer 163 : as an infrequent flyer, Partum did not embrace or represent mobility. On the contrary, due to new economic circumstances that prevented social or touristic mobility, she had become immobilized in various new ways. In this new context, her acting body, previously constructed as a straightforward signifier, transformed to become an allegory or personification. Partum performed naked in front of a Western and Polish expatriate audience as a representation of the Eastern European radical dissident artist. Agata Jakubowska has argued that Partum came to symbolize Eastern Europe as such; moreover, her naked body became an “allegorical figure embodying the concept of her work.”164 Jakubowska relates the allegorization of Partum’s naked body with the disappearance of the emancipatory character of Partum’s nakedness. Zdenka Badovinac convincingly argues that the Western gaze perceives Eastern Europe in terms of passivity and femininity.165 Thus the conflation of the meaning of Partum’s body with Eastern Europe was based on the customary conflation of the female body with nature as such. I will try to demonstrate that Partum approached this immobilization of the meaning of her body actively and in many different ways,

In his book Znaczenia Modernizmu (The Meanings of Modernism), Piotr Piotrowski defines initiatives outside the binary system of the official culture and the opposition accommodated and supported by the Catholic Church as a circle of “third culture”; the Carpet Cleaning Gallery, in which Partum performed her first edition of Hommage á Solidarność (9.08.1982) would be an example of this. See Piotrowski: Znaczenia Modernizmu, 2011, pp. 220–236. 162 In 1982, a permission for legal emigration was granted to around 24,000 Polish citizens. 163 See Rosler, Martha: In the Place of the Public: Observations of a Frequent Flyer, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 1998. 164 In her comparative analysis of both editions of Ewa Partum’s Hommage á Solidarność, Agata Jakubowska concluded that the usage of Polish and the presence of an interpreter in its second edition created a situation in which the binary oppositions of Man versus Woman, Dressed versus Naked and West versus East dominated the performance’s meaning. See Jakubowska 2016, p. 12, and p. 15. 165 Badovinac, Zdenka: “Schengen Women” (2008) in: Pejić (ed.) 2010, pp. 197–203.

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ranging from referring directly to the political framing (West–East Shadow, 1984) and its cultural ramification as a personification of nature (From Subject to Object of Art, 1988) to seeking to disturb this reading by emphasizing its (the body’s) individual biography (Pirouette 1984, Hommage á Leonardo 1986). The other factor that has to be considered regarding Partum’s relocation is the change of the context itself. Context has to be understood broadly, not only in terms of political or social conditions but, as proposed by Arjun Appadurai, “as a space that generates meaning by generating real and possible relationships and intended and unintended effects for viewers.”166 Partum transferred her feminist practice from a country with an absence of feminist discourse to a country with a developed feminist movement; from real socialism to liberal democracy; from a socialist culture of doublespeak to a mass culture of consumption; from a country behind the metaphorical Iron Curtain, to a city curtained by a real Wall. In the new context, Partum’s confrontational strategy of critical pedagogy and raising feminist consciousness lost its purpose. Ultimately, the artist turned gradually inwards towards a personal story, a biography of her body and its connectivity with the bureaucratic state/city apparatus.167 Partum moved from one tradition of open, community-focused and engaged poetics towards a more individualistic and intimate poetic. The paradox was that Partum was only able to finally find members of the feminist-artistic community in West Berlin. But in Berlin Partum’s critical pedagogy transformed into body art – a formula of art through, on and about the body. Also, her new works reconceptualized the topic of victimhood, from positioning women as victims of the patriarchy towards presenting her personal experiences and entanglements. At the same time, Partum reconceptualized the body as the actual object of political and physical oppression (East–West Shadow, 1984; Marriage Disasters, 1987). Finally, it is also important to consider the transfer of Partum’s practice in the context of the rupture related to the chronology of neo-avant-garde practices in the West and East. At the beginning of the 1980s, the status of performance art – a medium pragmatically employed by Partum in her feminist work – differed in West Berlin and socialist Poland. Galerie René Block, which was a hub of experimental performance art throughout the 1960s, closed in 1979.168 The art world’s interest in performance art was replaced by a new enthusiasm for expressionist painting (Neue Wilde) and punk music. Examining the unifying role of performance art as

166 Appadurai, Arjun: The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition, London: Verso, 2013, p. 264. 167 Ewa Partum’s work Private Performance (1985), which deals in a very specific way with the notion of art in the public space, will be analysed in chapter 5. 168 See Block, René: “Fluxus and Fluxism in Berlin 1964–1976” in McShine, Kynaston (ed.): Berlinart 1961–1987, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1987.

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an autonomous art practice in both Berlins during the 1970s, Claudia Mesch argues that performance reached its cultural zenith in West Berlin in the 1960s and that by the 1980s West German intellectuals had cast it as a failure in terms of political effectiveness.169 Also, as Agata Jakubowska emphasizes, the female nude “virtually vanished from contemporary art around 1980” after “severe critique formulated by some feminist art critics, who saw presentations of their naked body as a collaborating with a patriarchal regime in promoting visual pleasure drawn from the objectification of the female body.”170 I would like to propose that in this context, Partum radicalized the scenarios of her performances, resigning from activism in favour of more expressive and dramatic body actions and, at the same time, moved towards more analytical use of performance as a medium. Instead of reproducing statements about the objectification of female bodies, she proposed a deliberation on the status of the object and subject in art based on action. Between 1982 and 1992 Partum performed naked several times in front of a watching audience, and also in her studio (home), she realized a series of camera performances utilizing her body not only as an active tool but also as a material and surface for action. During her solo exhibition, Ewa Partum Works 1970–1980 at Galerie Wewerka in West Berlin (10–17 April 1983), Partum presented three performances: two of them were repeats (Hommage á Solidarność, Stupid Woman 4) and one of them, Hair Concert, was designed especially for the new audience. Partum’s first West Berlin performance, Hair Concert (fig. 57) was realized as an element of her retrospective exhibition and thus it was framed within the context of her feminist practice. The aesthetic employed by Partum in Hair Concert was reminiscent of Fluxus events; it included music, everyday objects, self-aggression and absurdity. However, unlike Nam June Paik in One for Violin (1962), Partum did not follow the principle of symbolically destroying commercialized and professionalized culture, and she did not destroy the musical instrument. Instead, she symbolically damaged herself, destroying her own “beauty” while sabotaging the aesthetic ideals of high culture. Partum entered the gallery space naked and positioned herself next to a record player that played Chopin’s Piano Concerto in F Minor, op. 21, performed by Artur Rubinstein, thus using the work of two Polish-born émigrés. During her performance, Partum verbally expressed enthusiasm for the music and its beauty while cutting her long hair, its trimmings falling on the turntable and effectively blocking

169 Mesch, Claudia: Modern Art at the Berlin Wall: Demarcating Culture in the Cold War Germanys, London: I. B. Tauris, 2009, p. 18. 170 Jakubowska 2016, p. 15. Regarding the critique of the strategy of employing the naked body in feminist art, see, for instance, Kelly, Mary: “Re-Viewing Modernist Criticism” in Screen, vol. 22, no. 3, 01 September 1981, pp. 41–52.

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the record. In Hair Concert, Partum aimed at “producing an art object through an action,”171 proposing a more analytical than interventional approach to the medium of performance. The action can be reconstructed on the basis of Partum’s memory and a sequence of images (black-and-white) taken at Galerie Wewerka.172 Partum also preserved in her archive the props that were used during the performances and produced through her action: the Chopin record, scissors and the envelope containing Partum’s cut hair. In this work, the artist did not resign from a gendered interpretation of her own experience, but at the same time, she concentrated instead on the artistic possibilities of performance as a medium. Her concurrent references to her personal beauty and the artistic beauty of the artwork (music) were aimed at a deconstruction of the myth of the pure aesthetic that applies both to the female body and to art. Partum repeated this performance on two other occasions: in 1985 at the Frauenmuseum in Bonn during the presentation of her works within the framework of an art fair, and at the Kampnagelfabrik in Hamburg on 04 November 1990 as part of the group exhibition Bakunin in Dresden.173 In the series of performances Aesthetic, realized in Berlin (1988 and 1993), Hamburg (1990), Bonn (1991), Malpartida de Cáceres (1992), Poznań (1995) and Warsaw (2006), Partum reformulated the destructive gesture articulated in Hair Concert by burning paper letters arranged into the word “Aesthetic” (in Polish, German and Spanish) and distributing the ashes in envelopes among the audience as art objects made through a destructive action rather than creative act. The first realization of Aesthetic took place in November 1988 at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, where Partum was invited by the painter Anita Stand, to perform in the context of Stand’s solo exhibition.174 According to the (unpublished) instructions sent by Partum to the organizers of a parallel action in Poznań in 1995, the ashes created through burning paper letters should be collected in envelopes and sent to cultural and art institutions.175 In the following year, on 23 November 1984 at Galerie Dialog, Partum reaffirmed the strategy of combining aggressive, self-centred and seemingly absurd gestures with the production of objects through an action in her performance Pirouette (fig. 58). In this case, the performance also functioned as a private ritual that marked 171 172

173 174 175

Interview with Ewa Partum, 14.09.2015 (Berlin). In the artist’s archive, there are also images from this performance reprinted on red paper visually reminiscent of expressive punk aesthetics showing Partum’s face covered with hair and her raised hand holding a pair of scissors. See Fuhrmann, Siegfried/ Keyser, Milly: KX. Kunst auf Kampnagel Dokumentation Aug. 90–Dez. 91, Hamburg 1991. Ewa Partum met Anita Stand through Karoline Müller, who ran the Ladengalerie in West Berlin. Undated note from the Ewa Partum archive.

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a new direction in Partum’s artistic practice: a move towards articulating her private experience through reworking and reusing her earlier artistic projects in new configurations. The performance was both photographed and filmed (6”53’). The first scene in the film documentation shows a pre-recorded scene of Partum, fully clothed, presenting the title page and slowly, deliberately reading the following text in German: It is a personal experience. Between us, in this moment, there is also the past which we carry within us as the most intimate space. This continuity establishes a link that recurs between us and time. It is the key to reality, if we want to look at ourselves from the inside out, like a pirouette. I tried to destroy my feelings, the feelings that relate to the past. This past and what was important for us forms a link with us, like the mirror’s reflection with the original.176 The subsequent scene shows the beginning of the actual live performance: the naked artist reading what is presumably the same text in front of the watching audience. Partum enters the gallery space naked, save for her heavy make-up and her ice-skates, which have replaced her customary high heels. The artist had arranged a large mirror (2 x 2 metres) on the floor in the centre of the gallery space, and in the performance she uses lace to hang an enlarged photographic portrait from the action Change (1974) above it. The image had been altered – one side of Partum’s face, which had previously been “aged”, was replaced by a collage of decomposed fragments of the same photographic image. Partum held the image face down over the mirror and spun it. Another photograph depicting Partum’s naked figure, abstracted from one of the images used in Self-Identification, was attached by a strip of paper to a fan. Partum switched on the fan and the image started spinning while the artist stood motionless, watching. Then she, too, slowly started spinning around the mirror. When the photograph had been destroyed by the fan, Partum moved onto the surface of the mirror and started breaking it with her ice skates, symbolically breaking with the image of her professional past and simultaneously replacing a work of art created in 1974 (Change) with a new object – a broken mirror. This work, as well as performances of Hair Concert and Aesthetic, as according to Partum’s instructions, has been shown in the framework of Partum’s solo exhibitions (2001, 2006) not in the form of artistic documentation, but rather as installations combining photographic documentation with the objects created through action. Kristine Stiles has argued that action in art not only “couples the conceptual with the physical but at the same time shifts the conventional subject-object relation instantiated in traditional viewing conditions away from their sole dependence

176

Stepken 2001, p. 22.

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on representation (metaphor) to connection (metonymy).”177 This line of inquiry, i.e. performative questioning of the relationship between the subject and the object of art and problematizing their relationship through the notion of connectivity became vital for conceptualizations of Partum’s West Berlin performances.178 Partum developed her strategy further in her camera performance Hommage á Leonardo from 1986 (fig. 59), in which she posed naked in front of a mirror while holding a camera, creating a series of images in response to the Leonardo da Vinci painting Lady with an Ermine (1489/90). In the sequence of images, the artist poses naked in a conventional way “as an object of art history” but at the same time revealing herself as its subject – the author of the image. However, the character of this work, i.e. a camera performance, was not entirely freely chosen. It was also the result of Partum’s situation. Her return to studio (home) practice was to a certain extent imposed by circumstances; namely, a lack of professional connections and possibilities to work with and for art institutions in West Berlin. This disconnection from art infrastructures, as discussed in chapter 2, correlated with Partum’s turn towards personal history, but also with the articulation of her personal situatedness. In the case of Hommage á Leonardo, the iconic image used by Partum in her artistic dialogue plays an important role in both Partum’s personal biography and Polish art history, as it is the only work by Leonardo da Vinci held in a Polish collection. In that work, Partum also recalls her first experiences with art, which were related to this particular painting – as a teenager, she performed as the Lady with an Ermine character in an amateur theatre production in the local culture centre in Grodzisk Mazowiecki. In another home-work, Dove of Peace in Red Square (1987), Partum rephotographed TV images of a German amateur pilot who landed in Red Square. In appropriating filmed frames, she revealed her position – as a viewer rather than a participant in history, located in front of the screen and separated from the actual public space.

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Stiles, Kristine: “Uncorrupted Joy: International Art Actions” in Ferguson, Russel (ed.): Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object 1949–1979, exh. cat., Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, 08 February–10 May 1998, Los Angeles 1998, pp. 227– 329, p. 227. We could also consider these works within another interpretative framework – contemporary performance theory that emphasizes the performance’s reliance on the logic of the archive. In her political critique of understanding performance as a medium of disappearance, Rebecca Schneider poses a question: “Should we not think of the ways in which the archive depends upon performance, indeed the ways in which the archive performs the equation of performance with disappearance, even as it performs the service of ‘saving’?” Schneider 2011, p. 99. When read along these lines Partum’s Aesthetic actions of burning paper letters that form the word can be interpreted as works that show that “disappearance is not antithetical with remains”, since the work is preserved through and within remains that were created in the process of a work disappearance.

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In her work Marriage Disasters (fig. 60), realized in 1987, Partum returned to the theme of her own face as explored in her work Change (fig. 61) in 1974 and Empathic Portraits in 1978. However, unlike the previous realizations, where her face was merely a tool for constructing a visual narrative of the female position in a patriarchal society, in this photographic work, the marks on Partum’s face were real; the performance was replaced by an actual event. In Marriage Disasters, Partum intensified her strategy from autobiographical to confessional: the image becomes a document from life that speaks about her personal experience of living in a violent relationship that left traces on her own face. Another set of strategies explored by Partum relates to the use of her body as a surface for dispersed text. In these works, Partum further examined the relationship between the subject and the object of an artwork, also articulating this topic directly through the artwork titles. The strategy of transforming the body’s surface as employed by Partum in her works Change (1974 and 1979) in performances realized in the following decade was combined with the strategy of performing text. In winter 1988 during a group presentation at Galerie Gudrun Schulz179 at Checkpoint Charlie, in Barockhaus, the Kunsthaus supported by the Berufsverband Bildender Künstler, Partum realized the work From Subject to Object of Art (figs. 62-64) and, a year later, the performance The Act of Thinking Is An Act of Art during the Abstract Book event at Bahnhof Westend. In both realizations, Partum reevaluated and problematized her rhetoric of disinterestedness by directly referring to Kant’s words. During the performance From Subject to Object of Art in Galerie Gudrun Schulz, Partum read fragments from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in Polish to a predominantly German audience. After reading, she deconstructed the text into letters and, while spelling them out, she placed black letterset letters on her naked body, starting from her feet and moving towards her face and into her mouth until she choked and could no longer speak. The performance was presented alongside some of Partum’s other linguistic works. On the floor, Partum distributed white cardboard letters (Active Poetry); she also presented works from a series, Text Installations (1989), that combined white canvases with white cardboard and black letterset letters and a music stand that Partum used during her performance. In this constellation, the physical space of the gallery, the space of the canvas and Partum’s body were linked as a realm of a materialized and deconstructed text. In a review published in the Berliner Kunstblatt in 1989, Karoline Müller emphasized the contrast between the white cardboard letters scattered in the space of the gallery and the black letterset 179

Partum met Gudrun Schulz through Wolf Vostell. Details of the group exhibition remain unclear; Ewa Partum remembers that three other artists were presenting their paintings. Interview with Ewa Partum, 22.11.2017 (Berlin).

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letters on Partum’s body that represented, according to the critic, the two worlds in which Partum worked and lived. Müller’s associative interpretation emphasized merely a metaphorical dimension of Partum’s performance where “[t]he body is the linen and the stretcher. Hands and letters are brush and paint.”180 In her archive, Partum placed photographic documentation from this performance next to the photographs of Text Installation (Goethe, 1989) and Konzeptinstallation (Conceptual Installation) canvases with fragments of cassette tapes entitled Chopin, II Konzert F-Moll, Schubert, Schumann, Mozart. Some of the images also show music stands in front of the canvases. A similar installation combining Text Installations, poems by ewa and material objects such as music stands, records, cardboard letters (Active Poetry) and stone bricks symbolising a ruin of the Berlin Wall, was realized by Partum couple of years earlier at the Frauenmuseum in Bonn during the 1985 Women’s Art Fair. The second performance in which Partum drew from Kant’s texts was realized during the Abstract Book event organized by the artist group Der Kongreß at Bahnhof Westend (14–15 October 1989), to which Partum was invited by the artist Martin von Ostrowski.181 Partum repeated the scenario of From Subject to Object of Art with yet another passage of Kant’s writing, the well-known passage from The Critique of Practical Reason (1788): “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” This performance was accompanied by a presentation of a book by ewa: The Act of Thinking is an Act of Art. As Karen Lang has argued, the idealized Kantian subject progressing from the starry heavens above to the moral law below “charts a path from nature to reason that opens onto vistas of infinite possibility once the ‘animality’ of the subject is left behind. The autonomy of the subject is maintained only in so far as the subject’s relation to nature”.182 Partum uncovered the relation with nature by revealing the subject as a gendered body; she spelled out Kant’s words, decomposed them into letters and choked on them. She reversed the order in which the Kantian subject is established in a move from nature to reason. Her nakedness represented a “defining negativity”, about which Judith Butler writes that it defines the subject from the outside.183 Partum did not advocate a re-emergence of the subject in nature, she

180 Müller, Karoline: “Ewa Partum” in Berliner Kunstblatt, no. 62, 1989, p. 51. 181 The artist Martin von Ostrowski launched the group Der Kongreß in 1989 together with JanMichael Sobottka and Toni Wirthmüller. 182 Lang, Karen: “Reason and Remainders: Kantian Performativity in Art History” in Jones, Amelia/ Stephenson, Andrew (eds.): Performing the Body, Performing the Text, London: Routledge, 1999, pp. 11–29, p. 13. 183 Butler, Judith: Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, London: Routledge, 1993, p. 190.

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instead revealed the fictiveness of the Kantian subject as one that has to transcend both internal and external nature. Lang also states that while “Kant’s philosophical enterprise indicates that the subject of reason is male,” nature is always represented in art history as female and “appears in the guise of personification.”184 By resisting the allegorization of her own body by putting it to action, Partum resisted the “Kantian performativity” in art history: a “drama played out between male and female, wherein the female will be equated with nature, while the male will serve as the artist, philosopher or ideal spectator.”185 At the same time, Partum made a statement on the fetishization of the art object and proposed its reinstalment through action, removing it from the realm of metaphor (representation) into the realm of connectivity and relationality. The title of the second performance – The Act of Thinking Is an Act of Art – was also written in paper letters outside the building, where Partum set them on fire, as in her Aesthetic performances. This was not another attempt to dematerialize art. It was a further elaboration of the metonymical relationship between the subject and the object of art – the conceptual and physical relationship within an artwork. The remaining ashes were again distributed in signed envelopes to the members of the audience as documents of the artistic action and artistic objects produced through a destructive action. There are two further aspects of these performances that must also be considered, both related to the specificity of the Polish conceptual art tradition and its conceptual artists’ preoccupation with Kant’s writings. Kant’s texts have been used in critical linguistic interventions by many Polish conceptual artists.186 At the same time, the subject of conceptual art assumed a Kantian model of cogito that guaranteed a smooth and free transmission of content that was achieved at the cost of the medium of language.187 Partum reformulated this conceptual tradition; she not only deconstructed Kant’s writings by spreading the letters over the surface of her body but, moreover, choked on them and swallowed them performatively, enacting the non-transitivity of language, undermining the modernist myth of the transparency of language that was so uncritically accepted within conceptual textual games. The other aspect of Partum’s textual performances relates to the use of her body as a substitute for a public space. Under the conditions of centralized spectacle

184 Lang 1999, p. 14. 185 Ibid. 186 See, for instance, Jarosław Kozłowski’s book Reality (1972) based on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and in which the artist reduces Kant’s treatise to its punctuation, showing the neutral reality of the texts. 187 Burzyńska 2013, p. 162.

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in socialist Poland, Partum distributed letters (Active Poetry) in public venues and spaces, seeking to access and penetrate the post-totalitarian public sphere. In the pluralistic space of West Berlin, distributing letters in public places merely required a permission from the authorities or a private owner and did not create comparable tensions. In order to access public debate in a liberal democracy, the artist had to penetrate the boundaries that run through her geobody – “a body that is turned into an allegory for a gendered, racialized, and nationalized body”188 – rather than to perform the body in the public space. Consequently, the public space became, for Partum, merely a scenography which was either neutral (as in Active Poetry) or theatrical, as in the work East–West Shadow (1984). Although East–West Shadow involved appearing naked in public, it was not conceived as a public action. In this camera performance Partum posed naked in front of the Berlin Wall in order to produce a series of images entitled Sky West, Sky East (fig. 65) for a competition at the Museum at Checkpoint Charlie titled Overcoming the Wall by Painting Over the Wall, for which she received the second prize. Claudia Mesch has argued that performance artists were particularly attuned to the theatrical spaces of the Cold War and often used Berlin’s physical space in a propagandistic way, employing the Wall as proscenium.189 In the case of East–West Shadow, Partum used the physical space and her own body in a theatrical way, constructing a very strong and dramatic image of the divide that runs through the body, land and sky. Her nakedness did not only recall gendered experience but also reflected on the biopolitical condition of the divide. Considering the political agency of Partum’s performances and the interrupted connectivity of this practice with historical reality, it is worth mentioning that Partum’s autotelic and self-referential performance The Act of Thinking Is an Act of Art was realized in mid-October 1989, just a few weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall (09 November 1989), and there are no traces of any political tensions in this work. Regarding Partum’s West Berlin performances, it is particularly interesting to consider how Partum’s performances could have been interpreted in the light of the local West Berlin performance tradition. It is most likely that her performances were read within the framework of Fluxus feminism, as a gendered critique of the body and text relation. According to Kathy O’Dell, it was the female feminist performers during the 1960s and 1970s (Charlotte Moorman, Carolee Schneemann and Kate Millet)190 that challenged the relationship between body and text inscribed within Fluxus aesthetics. It was due to their excessive body–text relations – “the

188 Biemann, Ursula: “Performing the Border: On Gender, Transnational Bodies, and Technology” in Sadowski-Smith, Claudia (ed.): Globalization on the Line: Culture, Capital, and Citizenship at U.S. Borders, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, pp. 99–118, p. 112. 189 Mesch 2009, p. 162. 190 O’Dell 1997.

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concept of women’s texts exceeding the body but never leaving it and all its sexual politics behind”191 – that they were often dismissed or excluded (unconsciously) from Fluxus history.192 Partum’s combinatory use of body and text and her references to musical scores might have been perceived in West Berlin at the end of 1980s as a part of this heritage, or rather as its belated actualization.193 It is also important to emphasize Partum’s troubled and ambivalent relationship with the West Berlin feminist art scene. On the one hand, Ewa Partum received a considerable amount of support from local feminist artists and activists. On the other hand, Partum refused to integrate or collaborate within the local feminist circles. Questioned about the reasons for this refusal, Partum retrospectively argues that she considered art produced by the Berlin feminist artists too eclectic, affirmative, essentialist (an articulation of “weibliche Ästhetik”) and limited in terms of artistic formats (sculpture, painting, drawing).194 For Partum, feminist art practice was not limited to art with the feminist content or to art made by women, but it was merely art rooted in a particular artistic language genealogically related to conceptual art. In other words, it was not the patriarchy alone that was contested by Partum in her feminist works, but it was also the androcentric modernist aesthetic related to painting, sculpture and other conventional media. 191 192 193

Ibid., p. 46. Ibid., p. 52. Kathy O’Dell suggests also another possible psychoanalytical reading of the strategy of writing on/through the female body, positioning Fluxus-related female performances in the middle ground between essentialism and constructionism. The author writes: “Differing from the theories of the conflationists/essentialists who believe woman can ‘write the body,’ Lacan believes the body is ‘already written.’ That is, the body, of which one becomes conscious by increments throughout child development, is already written by the unconscious mind. By locating precise shifts in this development-moment when verbal language skills come into being to represent the unconscious, Lacan opens the door for individuals to seize control of what these moments entail, to take command of the powers of representation through which the body is already and always will be mediated, to marshal such effort toward doing one’s mediating oneself. What is so compelling, I believe, about the artworks I have been addressing, is that there was an oppositional strategy at work (at least partially reminiscent of essentialist views) as well as a strategy inculcated with psychoanalytic principles (prescient of later developments in constructionism). One strategy was never privileged over the other. Both were in operation. For example, for all of Millett’s ‘writing from the body,’ it should not be forgotten that her motivating story was that of the worst possible case scenario of the ‘body already written.’ Indeed, Millett has continually demarcated woman’s difference from man in her work, but it is always in terms of a highly politicized and socialized difference. And while works like Ono’s Cut Piece, Schneemann’s Interior Scroll, and Kubota’s Vagina Painting may all focus on the body as a seemingly pure, wholly natural entity, they simultaneously literalize the activities, respectively, of shaping, writing, and painting. In so doing, the works represent the phenomenon of symbolic representation itself.” See O’Dell 1997, pp. 55–56. 194 Interview with Ewa Partum, 14.07.2016 (Berlin).

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However, Partum’s links to the local scene should not be underestimated. Partum was able to come to Berlin due to a fictive invitation to participate in the exhibition at the Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK) arranged by the fellow artist Detel Aurand, whom Partum met in Warsaw in 1981 and who helped her settle in Berlin. While still in Poland, Partum came into contact with the circle around the nGbK working group responsible for organizing the exhibition Künstlerinnen International 1888–1977 (Ursula Bierther, Evelyn Kuwertz, Karin Petersen, Inge Schumacher, Sarah Schumann, Ulrike Stelzl and Petra Zöfelt) and in 1978 she received the catalogue from this exhibition.195 Once in Berlin, Partum was offered the possibility to exhibit at the non-profit project space Frauengalerie Andere Zeichen run by Ebba Sakel but due to her financial limitations and scepticism towards the gallery’s eclectic program, Partum did not arrange an exhibition.196 On the occasion of her exhibition at Galerie Wewerka in April 1983, Partum’s works were featured in the fifth issue of Courage: Aktuelle Frauenzeitung, a wellknown feminist art zine.197 Partum was also supported by Karoline Müller, who was closely involved throughout the 1980s with the Association of Berlin Women Artists 1867 (Vereins der Berliner Künstlerinnen 1867 e.V.). Müller authored the previously mentioned review about Partum’s performance at Galerie Gudrun Schulz published in 1989 in the Berliner Kunstblatt.198 Together with Inge Huber she also edited a publication (Zur Physiologie der Bildenden Kunst. Künstlerinnen Multiplikatorinnen Kunsthistorikerinen Berlin 1985–1987. Portraits Materialem Register (On the Physiology of Fine Arts: Artists, Multiplicators, Art Historians, Berlin 1985–1987; Portraits in Material Register),199 that featured Partum’s photographic portrait among works of other Berlin-based female cultural producers. In the reproduced portrait, Partum’s face and décolletage are shown covered with black letterset letters. This photographic image differs from the drawing by Wolf Vostell that articulated the double genealogy of Partum’s artistic practice and 195

Among the contemporary German artists represented in the catalogue, Partum was interested mainly in the performative works of Ulrike Rosenbach. Interview with Ewa Partum, 14.07.2016 (Berlin). 196 Interview with Ewa Partum, 14.07.2016 (Berlin). In an article on women’s cultural projects in West Berlin published in Fotografie Magazine no. 39, 1985, p. 88, Frauengalerie Andere Zeichen was described as follows: “In these protective spaces, women learned to gain courage, to be artistically active themselves, to work artistically on their environment and their own life even without professional qualifications.” Both aspects, the focus on painting and the focus on non-professional approach, were not acceptable for Partum. 197 A short text was accompanied by the reproduction of two photographs from the Stupid Woman performance and poem by ewa subtitled Alphabet (1972). 198 Müller 1989. 199 Huber, Inge/ Müller Karoline (eds.): Zur Physiologie der bildenden Kunst, Künstlerinnen, Multiplikatorinnen, Kunsthistorikerinnen Berlin 1985–1987. Porträts, Materialien, Register, Berlin: Ladengalerie, 1987.

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revealed Partum’s art as rooted in constructivist tradition and body art. Here, the photograph, taken by the artist Birgit Kleber in 1987, specifies Partum’s artistic genealogy as a synergy of body and text.200 Considering Partum’s position as an emigrant artist, this linguistic aspect assumes yet another dimension: it alludes to the difficulties in communication and the perplexity of the process of translation. Partum’s face and body have been depicted as a filter that deconstructs linear text, rendering it incomprehensible. This portrait can be interpreted as a metaphor of Partum’s artistic practice in the decade of the 1980s in West Berlin, namely, the condition of the non-transmissibility of the message.201 A specific example of Partum’s troubled relationship with the West Berlin feminist scene was Partum’s withdrawal from the multimedia project Perlen vor die Säue (Pearls before Swine), organized in 1991 (31 May–30 June) in the nGbK and which combined an exhibition with a publication.202 The exhibition dealt with the liberating potential of the obscene in visual arts, focusing on issues such as female sexuality, erotic pleasure, birth, death and violence. In a letter to the exhibition organizers, Partum explained the reasons for withdrawing her work – a performance of Stupid Woman – from the program that accompanied the exhibition. Within the offered arrangement, Partum argued, her work’s meaning would be manipulated.203 Thus, not only the affirmative narrative of Frauenkunst, but also the radical emancipatory feminist rhetoric, with its potential of endangering the disinterestedness inscribed in Partum’s works, prompted the artist to distance herself from the West Berlin feminist art initiatives.

The Contemporary Gendered Economic Subject: The Delegated Performance Pearls (2006) In her performances realized in West Berlin during the 1980s, Partum refrained from her feminist pedagogy and, as argued above, explored another possibility of meaning production. As an emigrant subject, she deployed her naked acting body in a practice that went beyond the feminist politics of recognition towards a bodily deconstruction of the universalism of Kant’s cogito within art and art history 200 The photograph was presented at the Birgit Kleber solo exhibition at the Heimatmuseum Charlottenburg in 1989 and reproduced in the catalogue from the exhibition. See Kleber, Birgit: Künstlerinnen-Portraits, exh. cat., Berlin, Heimatmuseum Charlottenburg, 16 April–31 May 1989, Berlin 1989. 201 Ewa Partum, “Made by Me – The Non-Transmissibility of the Message”, 1978. 202 The working team for the project included: Elfie Anneser, Barbara Boes, Friederike Hammann, Jule Pfeiffer, Krimhild Pflaumer, Caudia Schillinger, Beatrice Ellen Stammer, Astrid Wehmeyer, Silke Wenk. 203 Letter dated 06.06.1991, in the Ewa Partum archive.

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discourses. Partum returned to feminist activism in 2006 in the context of a new configuration of the sociopolitical order, namely in the framework of globalization and the persistently unequal and gendered division of labour. Angela Dimitrakaki writes about the recent shift within artistic discourse from the postcolonial/postmodern towards the problems of globalization in terms of a change in contemporary art from a cultural subject that dealt with questions of location, identity politics, otherness and difference towards an economic subject.204 Within her work Pearls, realized in 2006, Partum performed this transition within her own practice.205 The artist built on her experience from Poland in the 1970s and 1980s that, in many aspects, anticipated the post-1990 feminist turn that embraced a feminist critique that “moves from woman to women” and “incorporates a problematization that shifts attention from the abstraction of a woman to the materiality of women’s lives.”206 Partum realized her group performance Pearls (figs. 66-67) on 27 April 2006 at the Museo Vostell Malpartida, in Malpartida de Cáceres, Spain. According to Partum the title of the performance refers to the stereotypical description of an immigrant cleaner, particularly, an illegally employed Polish woman working in Germany.207 The women employed by Partum in Pearls were also immigrant workers from other semi-peripheral countries: Ecuador and Brazil. To quote Françoise Lionnet and Shu-Mei Shih’s analytical framing, Partum, in this work, laterally linked spaces and struggles.208 She provided and arranged a scene not only in which migrants could become visible members of the transnational community, but also in which they were able to articulate their own marginal position within this community. Partum did not restrict herself to reflection on individual, atomized biographies; instead, she incorporated the families of the women as members of the audience (she arranged transport to bring them to the museum). During the performance, which consisted of cleaning the museum and kissing yellow fabric, the employers of the cleaners were also present in the audience. The performance became an infrastructure for a connection, creating a durational community of illegal female workers, their families and their employers. The work performed by emigrant women became visible: by means of their physical work, the fabric was transformed into the Spanish flag. Through this gesture, their role in the economy of the country was symbolically acknowledged, first of all by themselves and, further, by their families and employers, whom Partum had positioned as viewers.

204 Dimitrakaki 2013, pp. 1–25. 205 The first signals of this shift can be traced in Partum’s work Private Performance (1985), discussed in chapter 5. 206 Dimitrakaki 2013, p. 51. 207 Interview with Ewa Partum, (14.07.2016) (Berlin). 208 Lionnet et al. 2005, p. 2.

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Partum’s work considers how the production of otherness is related to economic power in global and national contexts. It also points to this national context as one that has changed its parameters; it can no longer be defined as “the site of homogeneous time and territorialized space but is increasingly inflected by a transnationality that suggests the intersection of ‘multiple spatiotemporal (dis)orders’.”209 Pearls works transversally, connecting minor positions across national borders, establishing a transnational connection between disempowered social groups and referring not to imagined communities but to the actual transnational community of female immigrants from semi-peripheral and peripheral countries. It therefore presents a view of transnationality beyond romantic aestheticization of geographical displacement; it also does not conflate the global with the urban. The meaning of this work relates to the fact that, as an emigrant herself, Partum cannot be described as value parasite.210 She is speaking from an embodied position from which she is expressing not a “cosmopolitan solidarity” but a “minor solidarity”. Partum’s Pearls is not about complicated cultural identities in a post-national world but rather about national infrastructures that still regulate people’s everyday lives in different trans/national locations within a globalized world. The work Pearls was bought by a Polish foundation (Gessel Foundation) and bequeathed to the National Museum in Warsaw. It can be speculated that it was the topic of the work, the focus on female economic others, that rendered it relevant to these Polish constituencies. To conclude, I would like to quote an opening line from the Gessel Foundation statement published on its website: “We have played a significant role in transformation of the Polish economy, assisting with the inflow of foreign investment to Poland and in development of the country’s capital markets.”211

Translating Ewa Partum’s Feminist Art Globally Redistribution within the “Feminaissance” Exhibitions In her essay “Polish Women between the West and the Past”, which discusses the history of Polish feminism within the framework of a discourse on the decentralization of feminism, Elżbieta Matynia writes that: Feminism is a political and cultural project that has its global dimensions and its own local expressions and accomplishments, which sometimes does not lend it209 Ibid., p. 6. 210 Harvey 1993, p. 26. 211 See the Gessel Foundation website, https://gessel.pl/en/about-us/.

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self easily to an exact translation. Feminism is global, but it functions in multiple locations, and perhaps its biggest strength is its polyphony of voices.212 In recent years, this polyphony of voices has been articulated within various feminist survey exhibitions initiated and presented in the United States and Europe. These exhibitions were preceded by extensive research programmes and supplemented by catalogues and readers on the topic. They presented feminist works from the margins alongside canonized works created in the context of Western consumerist mass-capitalism. These shows “re-examined, re-visited and re-exhibited feminist art”213 and granted visibility to many previously unknown female artists. They also influenced the acquisition politics of public museums, which started to work towards filling the gaps in their collections. As Mirjam Westen has argued, the new acquisitions generated “new interpretative possibilities […] with more reach and complexity – transforming feminist practices from the 70s and the 80s into a productive field for new generations.”214 Thus, it was not only a process of expanding the canon by inserting new names and practices, but also, supposedly, a process of questioning the presuppositions of the canon. Moreover, the search for cross-generational references and dialogues not only challenged the image of historical feminist practices but also enabled audiences to look differently at current feminist art. Maria Hussakowska argues that through recent exhibitions Ewa Partum has achieved the status of being “a mother of Polish feminist art”.215 Considering the transnational circulation of Partum’s art, one can pose a question: How does Partum’s art practice function or perform transnationally? As Helena Reckitt points out, “incorporating artists into histories they were never a part of has violent connotations. Such a tactic can end up validating dominant canons and refreshing them with material from the ‘margins’, which is removed from its original context and leaves prevailing clues and dominance intact.”216 Was/is Partum’s work influencing the prerequisites of the received canon? Or was/is it discursively reduced to representing already existing narratives? In other words, was/is it (Western) feminist second-wave discourse that spoke through Partum’s art, or was/is Partum’s art speaking itself in the exhibitions?

Matynia, Elżbieta: “Polish Women Between the West and the Past” in Szyłak, Aneta (ed.): Architectures of Gender: Contemporary Women’s Art in Poland, exh. cat., New York, Sculpture Centre, 11 April–8 June 2003, New York 2003, pp. 32–40, p. 39. 213 Westen 2010, p. 14 214 Ibid. 215 Hussakowska 2012, p. 38. 216 Reckitt, Helena: “Troubling Canons: Curating and Exhibiting Women’s and Feminist Art, A Roundtable Discussion” in Iskin, Ruth E. (ed.): Re-envisioning the Contemporary Art Canon: Perspectives in a Global World, London: Routledge 2017, pp. 252–271, p. 253. 212

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Ewa Partum participated in feminist-centred exhibitions mostly with photographic documentation of her performances from the 1970s and 1980s. The historical alterity of Partum’s work was translated within a global spatial model of feminism following a narrative on multiple simultaneous feminisms. Additionally, a set of micro-narrations articulating the complexity of multiple feminisms have been created within each of these survey exhibitions, focusing on topics such as critique of representation, the social construction of gender, and the notion of the personal as political. Within the exhibition WACK! Art and The Feminist Revolution, organized in 2007 at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and which aimed to decentre the received canon of feminist art and included “women of other geographies, formal approaches, sociopolitical alliances, and critical and theoretical positions,”217 Partum’s feminist works were presented in the “social sculpture” section, among works by Marta Minujín and Richard Squires, Lygia Clark, Bonnie Shrek and Suzanne Lacy. The exhibition brought together diversified practices and presented them as articulations of the feminist art movement. Thus, Partum’s art documentation entered a transnational circulation framed by a narrative of plural feminisms that were retrospectively cohered by curatorial gesture into a “transnational feminism art movement”. According to the curatorial statement, the show was predicated “on the notion that gender was and remains fundamental to culture and that a contemporary understanding of the feminism in art must […] look to the late 1960s and 70s.”218 Therefore, Partum’s art has been positioned as a link to contemporary art practices, and with this narration, it has been returned to global art history. The curatorial focus was not on explicit feminist declarations or artistic identifications with feminism but rather on art practices that “sensitize politically through the visual content.”219 Indeed, Partum’s declarations (and motivations) were omitted in favour of the visual properties of her works: Her Change performances (1974 and 1979) were represented by two photographs, a poster and a silent video, whereas Partum’s manifestos from the action were not included. The curators identified two central tenets of broadly understood feminism: the private is political and all representation is political. In that context, Partum’s Change was rendered readable outside of its sociopolitical context as a work related to the critique of patriarchal ideology inscribed in the visual representation of women. There was also, however, another interpretative frame related to social sculpture discourse: “a practice that expanded the parameters of art and its intersection with

217 218 219

Butler, Cornelia: “Art and Feminism: An Ideology of Shifting Criteria” in Mark (ed.) 2007, pp. 15–23; p. 16. Ibid., p. 15. Ibid.

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politics.”220 Partum’s work was presented next to a series of works that questioned the dichotomy between art and activism, the perceiving subject and perceived object, and the lived experience and conceptual framework – realisations that worked on social codes through body practices. This contextualization pointed to the performative dimension of Partum’s art so that the presented images could have been perceived not only in terms of a critique of representation but also serve as points of access to the performativity of Partum’s practice. A subsequent show, Gender Battle, focused on art and activism in the 1970s and took place at the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea in Santiago de Compostela in 2007.221 Partum’s video documentation Change (1979) was shown in a section devoted to “the constructions of beauty and other cultural, educational and media stereotypes” alongside works by Eleanor Antin, Ana Mendieta, Martha Rosler, Eugènia Balcells, Dara Birnbaum, Sanja Iveković and others. The works by female artists working in the 1970s were presented within the social and political context of the struggle (battle) for equal rights for women, an “irrepressible desire to change the world”222 and “different moments of cultural agitation”223 in the West related to second-wave feminism and the feminist protest movement. Thus, the time frame of the exhibition (the 1970s) was orientated towards a Western genealogy of feminism. However, the show linked various art practices within which the subject was positioned as ideological or, as Amelia Jones has argued, which worked towards dislocating the “epistemological structures of knowledge in Euro-American culture”224 as a prelude to the current postcolonial and intersectional demands for class, gender and race equality. An exhibition catalogue essay by Manuel Oliveira emphasized the anti-institutional potential of the movement and argued that the works were created on the fringes of the institutions – in the sphere of experience.225 Therefore, feminism was rearticulated as an ideology that does not provide universal answers and solutions but rather embodied and situated knowledge. In that context, could Partum’s individual experience be rearticulated and accessed? Or rather, could it have been universalized as woman’s experience in a patriarchal society? Again, Partum’s work was presented in the catalogue without an accompanying text, thus its effect relied instead on its intensive visual rhetoric and, among other photographic and video works, was contextualized as a battlefield with stereotypes related to female beauty. However, a catalogue essay by Jones problematized the 220 Butler 2007, p. 15. 221 The exhibition at the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea was curated by Juan Vicente Aliaga and included works by over fifty artists. 222 Oliveira, Manuel: “The Relevance of the Feminist Paradigm” in Aliaga (ed.) 2007, pp. 259–265, p. 259. 223 Ibid., p. 265. 224 Jones 2007, p. 297. 225 Oliveira 2007, p. 260.

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use of photographic self-imagery and the body as a means of providing a common interpretative framework for the geographically dispersed media practices of the 1970s. Jones argued that: The insistence in seventies feminist art theory and practice on the body as a sign, but also a lived vehicle through which gendered identification is performed was realised in order to enact their bodies across codes of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, nationality and class through photographic imagery.226 A project that contextualized Partum’s practice within a more specific interpretative framework was the programme Re.act.feminism: A Performing Archive, initiated in 2008 by the Akademie der Künste in Berlin and curated by Bettina Knaup and Beatrice Ellen Stammer. It was devised as “a temporary, growing collection of documentary material”227 of feminist, gender-critical and queer performance that was presented across various European countries between 2011 and 2013 and aimed at pluralizing the feminist performance canon. Within this project, performance was defined as a paradigmatic medium for feminist art – as a medium that links private with public and enables intervention in the public sphere. In their curatorial essay, Knaup and Stammer emphasized that by “focusing on the creative, acting and knowing body and by appropriating the new medium of video”, female artists were enabled to transform their position from object to subject.228 Partum’s works served as an exemplification of this process: documentation of Change (1979) and Active Poetry (1971), as well as Self-Identification (1980) were presented at various venues. In the accompanying publication, Self-Identification was included as a part of the visual essay on “Body Controls and Measuring Acts”, which presented documentation from performances by VALIE EXPORT, Esther Ferrer, Anna Bella Geiger, Mona Hatoum, Orlan, Tanja Ostojić and many others that explored practices of controlling the body, including “state oppression by authoritarian regimes, the omnipresent surveillance of public spaces and control of free movement”.229 Thus, within this framework, the status of Partum’s work as performance documentation was accentuated and problematized for the first time. In terms of interpretation, her practice was defined as actively engaged with the public sphere, where the body was merely a tool for intervention used in strategies that relied on “ignoring, subverting or ridiculing existing laws, rules, norms and regulation”.230

226 Jones 2007, pp. 306–307. 227 Knaup, Bettina and Stammer, Beatrice Ellen: “Introduction” in Knaup, Bettina/ Stammer, Beatrice Ellen (eds.): Re.act.feminism – A Performing Archive, London 2014, pp. 9–14, p. 11. 228 Knaup et al. 2014, p. 10. 229 Knaup, Bettina and Stammer, Beatrice Ellen: “Body Control and Measuring Acts” in Knaup et al. (eds.) 2014, pp. 138–147, p. 138. 230 Ibid,

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In 2009, the Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Arnhem, organized the exhibition Rebelle: Art and Feminism 1969–2009, which presented Partum’s work among works by eighty-eight other artists. The show, curated by Miriam Westen, aimed to further decentralize the canon of Western feminist art and, at the same time, provide a transnational contextualisation of Dutch feminist art practices. Partum’s works were presented within a narrative of her engagement with a critique of the representation of femininity in mass media and art history. The video documentation Change (1979) was accompanied by Hommage á Leonardo da Vinci (1986), an installation that consisted of a series of colour photographs, a music stand and a book with a reproduction of da Vinci’s painting Lady with an Ermine. As described earlier, Partum appropriated this iconic image of a woman from Polish art history and performatively assigned to it a new meaning embedded within her biography. As the curator of the exhibition observed, “exhibiting so many works of art from so many different backgrounds under a single heading carries with it a risk of urging the visitor to interpret each work in just one way”, and she emphasized the multiple and often contradictory motivations that underline works of art labelled as feminist.231 These motivations, however, have not been rendered visible in the case of Partum’s work. While Change is a documentation of the performance realized in front of the watching audience in socialist Poland, a second presented work, Hommage á Leonardo da Vinci (1986), was a private performance, realized by an emigrant artist who was disconnected from the local art scene. In that juxtaposition, the visual rhetoric and thematic correlation of both works was emphasized at the expense of the differences of their social and political agendas. Within the curatorial narrative, feminism has been conceptualized as a mode of thought rather than as a particular system of aesthetics: the aim of the curator was to represent a multiplicity of female experiences, but also to point out the similarities in different geographical, social and cultural contexts. Ewa Partum’s work functioned as both generically feminist – an intervention that questioned “the gaze” – and as a specifically localized East-Central European practice. Although the curator’s statement and structure of the show pointed to the intersectionality of oppression and positioned discrimination against women among other forms of oppression directed against race, ethnicity, religion, nationality or sexual orientation, the specificity of the artist’s experience as a woman in the creative sector in socialist Poland and an emigrant artist in West Berlin was not articulated in the narration of the exhibition. Partum’s art functioned rather as a previously underrepresented representation of Eastern European feminism following the paradigm of the decentralization and pluralization of feminist art by adding new works to the Western canon. The wave of “the feminaissance” that granted a prominent position to feminist art in temporary exhibitions at public art institutions, biennales and other events 231

Westen 2010, p. 5.

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also influenced the acquisition policy of corporate art collections.232 One of them, Sammlung Verbund, in Vienna, hosts a large collection of feminist art from the region of East-Central Europe and initiated the travelling exhibition (2015–18) Woman: The Feminist Avant-Garde from the 1970s; Works from the Sammlung Verbund, which was shown, among other places, at the Palais des Beaux-Arts (BOZAR) in Brussels, Hamburger Kunsthalle (2015), Photographers’ Gallery in London (2016) and Zentrum für Kunst und Medien (ZKM) in Karlsruhe (2017). The catalogue from this exhibition plays an important role in the circulation of knowledge about Partum’s art. It provides information about Partum’s practice and contains reproductions of Change (1974 and 1979) as well as East–West Shadow (1984), realized by Partum in West Berlin. It also paradoxically confirms the new canon created within the ongoing process of “pluralization of the canon” initiated by the exhibitions Globalising Feminisms (2007) and WACK! Finally, I would like to consider an exhibition that approached transnational feminist practices from a geographically specific point. In 2010, an extensive research project initiated by the ERSTE Foundation – Gender Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe – was finalized with an exhibition of the same name, which included over two hundred artists and was presented at MUMOK in Vienna and the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw. The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue and a reader, edited by the curator Bojana Pejić, and deployed “a comparative methodology […] focusing its energies on the needs of a regional feminist transnationalism.”233 Partum’s practice was represented by video documentation of Change (1979) and presented in the context of Eastern European art that explored the notion of gender and gendered differences from many ideological, methodological and artistic perspectives. This project varies from the abovementioned global approaches that aimed at decentring the Western canon. At stake here was the formulation of a collective Eastern European position – an attempt by Eastern European feminist and gender scholars (of whom twenty-four took part in the research) to create “a coherent, consistent and original feminist and gender discourse in Eastern European visual art.”234 Here, Partum’s art performed yet another strategic role: it functioned as evidence of a feminist consciousness and the presence of feminist practices in the 1970s in Eastern Europe and, at the same time, as a historical source of the gendered turn that happened in Eastern Europe in

232 Westen 2010, p. 14. The author mentions the following institutions involved in collecting feminist art: FRAC Lorraine in Metz, and the Generali Foundation and the ERSTE Foundation, both in Vienna. All three institutions have acquired Ewa Partum works. 233 Dimitrakaki 2013, p. 15. 234 Pachmanová, Martina: “In? Out? In Between? Some Notes on the Invisibility of a Nascent Eastern European Feminist and Gender Discourse in Contemporary Art Theory” (2009) in: Pejić (ed.) 2010, pp. 37–49, p. 38.

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the 1990s. As Pejić emphasized, this turn included “countless publications thematizing the body, sexuality and feminine and masculine identities in post-socialist art, and, albeit far less frequently, identifying gender regimes in visual repetitions manufactured during the socialist past.”235 The contextual differences of the development of feminist practices produced within the socialist East and capitalist West were analysed and acknowledged by researchers participating in the Gender Check project. Eastern European female neoavant-garde artists often refused to and continue to refuse to identify themselves with feminist discourse. Thus one of the micro-narrations created within the Gender Check exhibition and accompanying publications was that of “latent feminism”, a term introduced by Zora Rusinová to denote the Eastern European artists (in her case, Slovakian artists) who to a considerable extent refused to identify with feminist discourse and preferred to speak about genderless art while at the same time creating art that engaged with feminist issues.236 It can be argued that Gender Check’s most significant outcome was precisely the theorization and historicization of this “resistance” towards feminist rhetoric among Eastern European female artists. The art produced by women artists that touched upon feminist themes has been reframed within a discourse of gendering modernism that allows us to understand how the artists subtly reprised and even opposed the modernist codex by introducing non-artistic materials in their work […] (e.g. intimacy and sexuality), which indirectly (Kolářová and Želibská) or explicitly (Iveković) question the concept of autonomous art – an art that does not relate to the extra-artistic and does not refer to first-hand reality.237 Reframing Partum’s art within a narration on latent feminism significantly reduces and misinterprets it, since without acknowledging her productive and direct engagement with feminist discourse, Partum’s work on the vocabulary of feminist art and the pedagogical dimension of her practice remained unarticulated. Nevertheless, the Gender Check exhibition introduced an important shift within scholarship on feminist art in Eastern Europe. Whereas in the catalogue essay of the WACK! exhibition, Cornelia Butler wrote about women artists who positioned themselves vis-à-vis the feminist movement, the Gender Check Reader pursued a “politics of the context” in articulating the “diverse similitude”238 of Eastern European art scenes through extensive analysis of particular national contexts “not to ally

235 Pejić 2010, p. 13. 236 Rusinová, Zora: “The Totalitarian Period and Latent Feminism” (2003) in: Pejić (ed.) 2010, pp. 145–149. 237 Pejić 2010, p. 22. 238 Ibid., p. 32.

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feminism with nationalism”239 but “to recognize that there are differences in the perception of what the stakes are for feminism and the different approaches to feminist ideas in different nation-states around the world.”240 The above-mentioned globalising feminism shows have been criticized for being “marketed as elaborate social events, positioning the curator and the institution itself as authoritative in narrating a particular and generally quite conservative and safe institutional history of contemporary art.”241 From the perspective of materialist feminism they were also criticized for not problematizing and not recognizing globalisation as an exploitative force – for refusing to attend to the relationship between economic processes and cultural representation. In other words, they promoted a utopian vision of feminist globalization.242 Also, by neglecting the contemporary visual economy of globalization, they did not employ art with feminist content as a means of critique of the current condition but instead kept it as “a form of regional tasting”243 and perpetuated a nostalgic narration of the return of feminism.244 Effectively, as Kimberly Lamm argues, through the exhibitions “the circulation of feminist ideas and the spread of feminist movement can be appropriated by Western feminist discourses, which themselves have been appropriated by Western imperial projects.245 A specific example of such appropriation, according to Marina Gržinić, is provided by the Gender Check exhibition being sponsored by the ERSTE Foundation that “besides banking […] produces cultural politics”246 as well. In her critical review, Gržinić, referring to Arjun Appadurai, argued that the show was organized within a colonial logic that aimed at producing an enumerative community: “The enumerative logic implemented in the construction of the show is [also] coming near to 239 Ibid., p. 31. 240 Deepwell, Katy: “Questioning Stereotypes of Feminist Art Practice” in n.paradoxa, online issue, no. 2, February 1997, http://www.ktpress.co.uk/pdf/nparadoxaissue2_Katy-Deepwell_55 –62.pdf; quoted in Pejić 2010, p. 31. 241 Jones 2007, p. 300. 242 See, for instance, Dimitrakaki, Angela: “The 2008 Effect: Thoughts on Art World Feminism in the Shadow of Global Capitalism” in Third Text, vol. 27, no. 4, August 2013, pp. 579–588. 243 Weinbaum, Alys Eve/ Joseph, Miranda/ Ramamurthy, Priti: “Towards a New Feminist Internationalism” in Kennedy, Elizabeth Lapovsky/ Beins, Agatha (eds.): Women’s Studies for the Future: Foundations, Interrogations, Politics, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005, pp. 207–228, p. 218. 244 Hemmings 2011. 245 Lamm, Kimberly: “Gestures of Inclusion, Bodily Damage and the Hauntings of Exploitation in Global Feminism” in Horne, Victoria/ Perry, Lara (eds.): Feminism and Art History Now: Radical Critiques of Theory and Practice, London: I. B. Tauris, 2017, pp. 230–259, p. 247. 246 Gržinić, Marina: “Analysis of the Exhibition Gender Check – Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe, Museum of Modern Art, (MUMOK), Vienna, November 2009–February 2010” in European Institute for Progressive Culture Policies, December 2009.

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a logic of constituting protectorates and zones of control.”247 Gržinić pointed out that it is a process resembling “a brutal colonial logic of forced subjugation of whole territories of art and social practices to a gender administrative logic of counting nameless bodies in order to be governed in the future properly.”248 In effect, the author argues, the exhibition was not about the East and the West, but about “a vulgar capitalist orientated gender mainstreaming [,…] about the transformation of the whole territory of former Eastern Europe into a polygon for checking gender.”249

Performance Documentation250 and the Feminist Content Limited access to the technical means of documentation and art production in the 1970s and 1980s indirectly shaped the modes of writing the histories of EastCentral European feminist and performance art. Partum’s performances were often only partially documented and have to be reconstructed by referring to the artist’s statements. In the “feminaissance exhibitions” catalogues, Partum’s feminist performative works were represented merely by photographic documentation. As “artworks” they resulted ultimately from a set of translational spatial and temporal operations: transfers from the Former East to the Former West, from the ephemeral events to their documentation. On the possibility of the historical truth of performance art, Amelia Jones writes that “there is no possibility of an unmediated relationship with any kind of cultural product, including body art.” The scholar argues that “while the experience of viewing a photograph and reading a text is clearly different from that of sitting in a small room watching an artist perform, neither has a privileged relationship to the performance.”251 Even if we agree with Jones’s questioning the ontological priority of the live event and accept the mutual supplementarity of photography and performance, we can still ask whether the photographs and their contemporary rearrangements alone constitute an adequate point of access to Partum’s works understood as historical objects. If not, what role do they perform in historical exhibitions of the feminist art movement? Does the artist herself participate in the production of the reflection about modes of accessing her performances? And finally, what is Partum’s position (implicated in her works) on the process through 247 248 249 250

251

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Here I am not interested in the complex issue of performance documentation as developed within contemporary performance theory, but in the status of documentation as a part of Partum’s performance practice. Jones, Amelia: “Presence in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation” in Art Journal, vol. 56, no. 4, Winter 1997, pp. 11–18, p. 11.

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which documentation becomes artistically independent from the event/work that it refers to? Partum conceptualized her performances as anti-commodity but not as antiarchival works. Despite technical, logistic or financial difficulties throughout her practice, she tried to ensure that her performances were photographically documented and, when possible, also filmed, as in the case of Change (1979), and elements of Women, Marriage Is Against You (1980), Self-Identification (1980), Hommage á Solidarność (1982) and Pirouette (1984). In some cases, film documentation has been lost (Marriage performances). Other performances, i.e. East–West Shadow (1984), were staged without an audience, explicitly as events to be documented. Philip Auslander emphasizes the preservation aspect of performance documentation. He argues that “performance artists who were interested in preserving their work quickly become fully conscious of the need to stage it for the camera as much as for an immediately present audience.”252 Jones also emphasized that artists were always “aware of the dependence of performance on documentation to attain a symbolic status within the realm of culture.”253 In the case of Partum’s practice, it was not only the aspects of preservation and self-positioning that generated her performances’ dependence on documentation. Partum’s experience as a conceptual artist and preoccupation with the notation of art also influenced the modes in which she worked with performance as a medium and documentation as a material for the communication of art. The problem of documentation “as art” was taken up by Partum directly in her activities in the Galeria Adres, where she was presenting and producing conceptual art manifested in the form of mail art, textual information, photographic documentation or instruction. Within the discourse of conceptualism, documentation was reframed as a medium to communicate “art presence”. This formula of thinking about art documentation, described by Peter Osborne as ontological homogenization of the artwork and its archive, also influenced Partum’s work with the medium of performance where documentation regained an equal status to the live event, both being merely the means of communicating “art’s existence” and, in the case of Partum’s feminist works, the artist’s feminist agenda.254 The documentation of Partum’s performances was rarely executed by the artist herself, but it was always arranged and rearranged by her. Partum started working

252 Auslander 2006, p. 3. 253 Jones 1997, p. 13. 254 In Peter Osborne’s essay “Archive as Afterlife and Life of Art”, the author deals with the issue of the post-conceptual ontology of contemporary art. Osborne focuses his attention on the ontological homogenisation of an art object and its documentation, which implies an extended concept of the archive that he defines as an intrinsic part of a contemporary artwork. See Osborne, Peter, The Postconceptual Condition: Critical Essays, London: Verso, 2018.

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with photographic documentation in 1965 in her camera performance Presence/Absence. In 1978, she reused photographs from the performance Change (1974) in the series Emphatic Portraits (1978/79). During her process of art production in the 1970s and 1980s, followed by the redistribution of this practice after 2001, the artist’s archive was constantly being rearranged by the transformation of objects and documentation through the mediums of installation and exhibition; it therefore includes a constantly moving collection of documents and their reconfigurations – works made and re-made for exhibitions.255 Technological changes and new exhibition opportunities after 1989 enabled Partum to reconfigure some of her works – to reprint photographs on a larger scale on modern, more resistant materials such as brushed aluminium composite panels (alu-dibond), such as the photographs from the Change performance, enlarged and reprinted in 2006. Anna Markowska has argued elsewhere that these kinds of transformations are market-oriented. She writes that it is precisely the large retrospective exhibitions of previously anti-establishment artists, who were challenging the mainstream of Gierek’s epoch in the 1970s, that foster the process of commercialization of these practices, delivering works that can participate in further exchange and circulation within the institutional context.256 However, I would like to point to the fact that these reformulations are/were not only in line with the scenarios embedded in the “original” documentation of Partum’s works, they were also congruent with the way Partum worked as early as the mid-1960s: i.e. using contemporary technical possibilities to produce art and art documentation. In other words, the value and the meaning of the works is situated not in vintage materiality of “romantic grainy black and white photos or scratchy films”,257 because at that time they were technically advanced expressions of artistic concepts. There are two particularly good examples that illustrate the process of this re-articulation. In the case of the work East–West Shadow (1984), its initial form of presentation aimed at creating a visual illusion of the Berlin Wall (for instance, during the exhibition Bakunin in Dresden in 1990). The work was presented as an accumulation of postcards showing the naked artist in front of the Wall. The image was reprinted for the Gdańsk retrospective (2006) on photographic paper with the dimensions 245 x 100 cm. Its new materiality and visuality, delivered using contemporary techni-

255 This aspect of Partum’s practice can be compared with the Fluxus predicament that each Fluxus work implicates a possibility of the subsequent work. 256 See also Markowska 2016. 257 This is how Rebecca Schneider ironically referred to the documentation in her lecture “Performance and Documentation, Acting in Ruins and the Question of Duration”, given on October 22, 2014 at the SFU Harbour Centre, presented by the Institute for Performance Studies. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhf1T4KdHvU.

Feminist Identifications in Ewa Partum’s Artistic Practice

ques, articulated the effect of monumentality and seriality that Partum sought to achieve in the first place. In the case of photographs from the Stupid Woman performance, their enlargement rendered the visual effect of the “original” documentation with more contemporary means. Carefully arranged photographs from this frequently repeated performance show the isolated figure of the artist situated in a darkened space, or alternatively, close-ups of the artist face and her interactions with the audience. Visually they allude to the notion of a portrait in their composition, format and the title of the performance: Stupid Woman. Reprinted on large plates of alu-dibond, each measuring 50 x 226 cm and accompanied by a light box (110 x 220 cm), they merge frames from different editions of the same performance realized a couple of days apart at the Bureau of Artistic Exhibitions (BWA) in Kraków and later in Miastko (1981). At stake here is not a representation of a particular life event, but rather a reproduction of the effect and the performance scenario: its idea as well as its visual properties. By enlarging the documentation and creating an installation that includes a lightbox, the visual impact of this theatrical work has been amplified. In his text on the performativity of performance documentation, Auslander argues that performances in the documentary category have a dual existence: The purpose of most performance art documentation is to make the artist’s work available to a larger audience, not to capture the performance as an ‘interactional accomplishment’ to which a specific audience and a specific set of performers are coming together under specific circumstances make equally significant contributions. […] In that sense, performance art documentation participates in the fine art tradition of the reproduction of works rather than the ethnographic tradition of capturing events.258 The rearrangements of Partum’s performance documentation follow the same principle; they are realized in order to make works available to a secondary audience by translating them into a contemporary visual idiom. These medial transformations strengthen the images, which have to compete for attention in the more intensive contemporary visual iconosphere. But does this contemporary rendering completely mask a tension between interpretative presence and historical alterity? Do these installations produce the effect of a fiction or a wholly fictive space? Auslander distinguishes two modes of performance documentation: documentary and theatrical. A documentary mode provides a record from which a performance can be partially reconstructed, and which can serve as evidence of the existence of the work of art – of the original event.259 Certainly Partum’s rearran258 Auslander 2006, p. 6. 259 Ibid., p. 2.

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gements of photographs serve this purpose of representing, i.e. documenting, the event. Even more, their value and presence within blockbuster feminist exhibitions are tied to them being evidence of her emancipatory feminist actions in socialist Poland in the 1970s and 1980s and, later, in West Berlin. The new rearrangements of photographs, regardless of whether they belong to the category of camera performance or performance for/with the audience, do not problematize the illusionary nature of the ontological connection between them and the event they show. Although photographs from Partum’s performances are not theatrical in the sense defined by Auslander (“the image we see thus records an event that never took place except in the photograph itself”260 ), they have been used to create theatricalized arrangements of display characterized by the deployment of different formats, materials, fabrics and mediums. The strategic relationship between these displays and the original event relies on the re-articulation of the performance scenario and its affective dimension achieved by a visual amplification. As it has been argued earlier, Partum’s feminist performances in socialist Poland were staged to teach and to challenge the audience of both genders: to awaken a (feminist) consciousness. Theatricalization and spectacularization enable a simulation of the confrontational qualities of Partum’s performances in which she spoke, sung, approached the audience, touched members of the audience and violated their personal space. Yet, photographic documentation alone is not able to recall or register the critical pedagogical dimension of Partum’s performances. To convey the actual event to the secondary audiences, it is also important to accompany images with discursive material: Partum’s manifestos, which constitute an integral part of her feminist work. Otherwise, we merely encounter an “object-oriented de-contextualisation in the guise of historical re-contextualisation”261 within the discourse of global/plural feminisms.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have tried to demonstrate how Partum, in her feminist practice, navigated through the changing conditions of the production and reception of her works in different locales and locations. Partum’s feminist art in the 1970s paralleled a development that took place within the Polish conceptual art scene at large as was discussed in chapter 3. Within Western art history, this paradigm shift has been identified as the transition from modernism to postmodernism or, as Micha-

260 Ibid. 261 Kwon, Miwon: One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002, p. 41.

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el Baldwin and Mel Ramsden put it: “Modernism’s nervous breakdown”.262 In the Polish context, this turn has been reconstructed as a gradual process of the opening towards reality performed within a tacit discourse of art’s relative autonomy. This ambivalence is also evident in Partum’s feminist art in which she connected to reality via feminist content but in which – via conceptual rhetoric – she remained connected to the notion of art as an autotelic symbolic practice. In July 1977, Jan Świdziński organized the international conference Art as Activity in the Context of Reality at Galeria Remont in Warsaw. In the same year, Anna and Roman Kutera initiated the project Local Actions, working with and for local communities. There are also many other instances and modes of social engagement in the arts of the late 1970s, realized by artists previously engaged in conceptual autotelic discourse or photo-medialism. It this context, it is worth mentioning Ewa Partum’s work Autobiography (1971/74), amended by the artist in 1974. The work consists of a large white banner displaying Partum’s name, which is spelled out in letters formed by a composite of names of male cultural producers. A change to this pattern was then imposed by a real event: the birth of Partum’s daughter Berenika in 1974, whose name was added to the list of people who constituted Partum’s biography. This work and its alteration demonstrates how life entered Partum’s conceptual work. It also demonstrates Partum’s growing interests in the issues related to being a woman and the challenges related to women’s lives, such as motherhood, which in this work becomes a part of Partum’s intellectual biography and her identity as an artist. The work documents the moment in which Partum started positioning the fact of being a woman within her professional narrative. Partum’s identification as a feminist artist, perceived as the extension of her conceptual practice towards reality, remained rare – not only in the context of Polish but also East-Central European art history. While Partum worked towards becoming identified and incorporated within a collective narrative of conceptual art in her early practice, in the next stage of her career she pursued an individualized path that resulted in the temporary marginalization of her practice. Subsequently, this practice was granted visibility as an effect of a resurgence of interest in women’s art and neo-avant-garde artists from the margins. In this process, the documentation of Partum’s performances was integrated into the narrative on global plural feminisms, which implicitly privileges the Western genealogy of second-wave feminism. Effectively, certain works produced by Partum in the 1980s and later have been excluded from global feminists art histories as they could be considered merely as belated.

262 This remark made at the Conference on Conceptual Art at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London in 1995.

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Partum’s own approach to a global feminism was articulated in her work Pearls (2006), in which she tackled the issue of the unequal global division of labour “as a feature constructing social relations”.263 This critical understanding of the global differs from the idealized notion of a plural feminist global perspective by assigning to the global an economically gendered dimension.

263 Sokołowska, Joanna: “Undoing the East: Towards the World’s (Semi-)Peripheries” in Hock et al. (eds.) 2018, pp. 177–186, p. 180.

Chapter 5 The Spaces of the Political: Ewa Partum’s Works in the Public Space “Art is not outside politics, but politics resides within its production, its distribution, and its reception.” – Hito Steyerl1

Public and Private Spheres in Partum’s Work Before discussing the relationship between Partum’s political works2 in the public space and her engagement in the public sphere, I would like to return briefly to the notion of the public and private in Partum’s art. The meaning of the private and personal in Partum’s work has been analysed exclusively with the framework of feminist discourse. In her text The Private is Political, Ewa Małgorzata Tatar describes the porous relationship between private and public in Ewa Partum’s practice, arguing that “the conscious appropriation of the field of privacy and creating a basis for her activities from it meant that successive works by Ewa Partum appeared as cracks and ruptures in both the private and the public. They constitute a common collection that doesn’t belong to either of these spaces.”3 Nabakowski also notes that for Partum, “private becomes political and can be utilized to reveal a patriarchal rule in society, which brings her close to the Western artists dealing with issues of identity politics.”4 Acknowledging this dependency of private and public in the context of gendered struggle, I shall explore this porous border in specific locales and political contexts – i.e. in two different political systems: socialist Poland and democratic West Berlin. Since Partum performed her initial feminist 1 2

3 4

Steyerl, Hito: “Politics of Art: Contemporary Art and the Transition to Post-Democracy” in eflux journal, no. 21, December 2010, pp. 1–8, p. 8. Chantal Mouffe defines “the political” as referring “to the dimension of antagonism […] constitutive of human society” whereas “politics” “is a set of practices and institutions through which an order is created. See Mouffe, Chantal:On the Political (Thinking in Action), New York: Routledge, 2005, p. 9. Szyłak et al. (eds.), 2012/13, p. 106. Nabakowski 2001, pp. 133–134.

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identification in 1974 (Change), I do not intend to preposterously reassign her work realized prior to that date – such as The Legality of Space (1971) – to the series of feminist statements. I will, however, point to her gendered experience in the public space as the condition that influenced the format of her work. To maintain the continuity of her critical feminist practice in West Berlin, Partum was forced to reinvent and pluralize her feminist strategy, as well as to find ways to engage in a meaningful way with the public sphere. Private Performance will, therefore, be presented as a result of the artist’s rethinking of public/private relations and the reformulation of Partum’s feminist pedagogy towards bodily manifestations of the gendered experience in both the private and public spheres.

The Public Space – East and West Rosalyn Deutsche has emphasized there is a common misconception that working in the public space is always “inextricably linked to democratic ideals”.5 In the specific case of the Polish People’s Republic, artistic actions in public spaces were often financed and supported by the socialist regime or municipal authorities. On the other hand, artistic projects realized in the public space in West Berlin in the 1980s were not necessarily engaging with the conditions of democracy. Claudia Mesch points out that artists were often utilizing the West Berlin urban landscape merely as a dramatic political scenography.6 Therefore, before discussing the specificities of Partum’s strategies of working in the public space in both locations, I would like to indicate some general but less obvious differences between working in the public space in socialist Poland in the 1970s and in West Berlin in the 1980s. Both spaces are understood here as socially constructed places7 and are defined beyond the cliché of cultural difference that conceptualizes the West in terms of the institutional culture of spectacle and the East as private, anarchical non-conformist dissident culture, where the home or the studio of an artist became an area of territorial sovereignty.

Art in the Public Space in Socialist Europe In order to capture both the specificity of the Polish condition in the 1970s and the particularity of Partum’s approach, I would like to refer to the broader regional

5 6 7

Deutsche, Rosalyn: “Art and Public Space: Questions of Democracy” in Social Text, no. 33, 1992, pp. 34–52, p. 34. Mesch 2009. Harvey 1993.

The Spaces of the Political: Ewa Partum’s Works in the Public Space

context of art in public spaces in socialist Europe. Despite each socialist country’s unique political history and distinctive dynamics of decentring modernism, some generalizations regarding the use of the public space in relation to political engagements in arts can still be made. Piotr Piotrowski has argued that after 1989, art produced in post-socialist Europe was driven by “agoraphilia” – a desire to enter the public space and to perform critical actions for and in the social realm.8 Piotrowski notes that this agoraphilia was a reaction to years of imposed withdrawal from the public space and public life. Regardless of the level of its advancement within a particular country, a strategic feature of the socialist regime was to suppress political and social life, artistic creativity and culture in general. Although authorities in different countries used various methods to implement this politics, their goals were the same everywhere: to make individual and collective civic initiatives fully dependent on the state monopoly and to suppress the entire public sphere under one ideological doctrine.9 Piotrowski described this attitude as “agoraphobia” and demonstrated that in the context of artistic practice, it was implemented through preventive censorship that made actions in the public space either impossible or only possible under the control of bureaucrats and the militia. In 1987 Václav Havel wrote that in a condition of post-totalitarian rule, private and public life “are inseparable; they are like two linked vessels and one cannot be represented truthfully if the other is ignored.”10 Although Havel’s words resemble Foucault’s elaboration on the biopolitics and technologies of discipline and regulation, this passage should be read rather as a straightforward description of real living conditions. In the post-totalitarian condition of the 1970s, characterized by the infiltration of private life by bureaucratic regulatory procedures that limited and organized the lives of all the members of society, the “torture chambers were changed into the upholstered offices of faceless bureaucrats.”11 The artists working in public urban spaces in socialist countries often performed untraceable gestures of appropriation mocking the regime’s totalizing aspirations, such as the Happsoc actions in mid-1960s Bratislava organized by Stano Filko, Alex Mlynárčik and Zita Kostrová. In the condition of post–Prague Spring “normalisation”, Jiří Kovanda engaged passers-by with unnoticeable activities of establishing social contact. Some of the actions merely took the form of conceptual declarations: “a nominalist event rather than a performative one, highlighting

8 9 10

11

Piotrowski, Piotr: Art and Democracy in Post-Communist Europe, London: Reaktion Books, 2012. Piotrowski 2012, p. 7. Havel, Václav: “History and Totalitarianism” (1987) in: Wilson, Paul (ed.): Vaclav Havel: Open Letters; Selected Prose 1965–1990, London: Faber and Faber, 1991, p. 328. Quoted in Kemp-Welch 2014, p. 6. Ibid.

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obstacles in organizing large-scale artistic Happenings unofficially.”12 These urban actions were often not perceived as art by others – as Kemp-Welch argued, they were “so off the register that it was not considered art by the authorities.”13 Also, the practices inspired by or related to Fluxus often took place in an urban context, such as Milan Knížák’s One-Person Demonstration (1964) or Július Koller’s Antihappening in Bratislava (1968) realized on a tennis court, or his Question Mark (1969) realized in a public swimming pool. These kinds of experimental practices of the 1960s used the cityscape merely as an ingredient of reality to be included in a formal structure of the work, which aimed at a critique of traditional media of art. Partum’s work Presence/Absence (1965) can be located within this tradition. Thus the “non-studio practices” that followed the “transformation of the artwork into art action” – to quote the title of the text by Tomáš Štrauss, published in 1967 in Výtvarný život 14 – were framed within non-political discourses focused on art autonomy. The political analogies could have been read between the lines or, as in the case of Kemp-Welch’s analysis, retroactively reconstructed. At the same time, actions, happenings and performances as forms of art that develop in an uncontrollable way, and concurrently give the artist a chance to fully control his or her work, have been perceived by the authorities as potentially dangerous and implicitly political.15 Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez defines the actions that took place in public space as “resilient practices” and argues that in cases of appropriating the public space, “artists’ risk management, a constitutive part of their actions, was unrehearsed.”16 In socialist Hungary, Yugoslavia and Poland, select number of artists worked in the public space in order to comment on political reality. Hungarian neo-avantgarde artists focused not only on political messages, but also on the public reception and public manifestation of art,17 and can be exemplified in the artistic practice of Tamás Szentjóby. Some of his actions took place within the public space. In Sit Out – Be Forbidden (October 1972), he was tied to a chair placed in front of the Hotel Intercontinental in Budapest, his mouth sealed with black bandaging, in an homage to the Black Panther activist Bobby Seale. On that occasion, he was arrested by the state police. Although the content of his action was in line with the official party rhetoric in support of US civil rights activists, its public form was unacceptable for 12 13 14 15 16

17

Kemp-Welch 2014, p. 68. Ibid., p. 60. Štrauss, Tomáš: “On the Question of the Transformation of the ‘Art Work’ to the ‘Art Action’” in Výtvarný život, vol. 12, no. 4, 1967. Quoted in Kemp-Welch 2014, p. 327. Piotrowski 2005, p. 280 and Kemp-Welch 2014. Petrešin-Bachelez, Nataša: “Resilient Practices, Practices of Affect: A Few Case Studies on Performances in Public Space and Their Controversies in the Former Eastern Europe” in Dziewańska, Marta/ Lepecki, André (eds.) Points of Convergence: Alternative Views on Performance, Warsaw: Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2017, pp. 213–232, p. 214. Piotrowski 2009, pp. 273–285.

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the authorities that wanted to maintain a monopoly over all forms of public protests and demonstrations.18 In 1978, another politically engaged artist, Gyula Pauer, realized the installation Forest of Blackboards, placing signs with absurd slogans in Nagyatád Park in Budapest. Unlike Partum’s The Legality of Space, his installation was “arrested” and dismantled by the state police. In this context, it is also worth mentioning Endre Tót’s ironic public actions such as the demonstration I’m Glad If I Can Hold This in My Hand (1976). Performative works with political overtones realized directly in the urban landscape were also characteristic of 1970s Yugoslavia. The Zagreb-based collective the Group of Six Artists, and artists such as Tomislav Gotovac and Slobodan “Braco” Dimitrijević (Accidental Passer-by, 1971) all explored the body as a medium in the public space. Gotovac in particular was a figure who combined neo-avant-garde interest with everyday activities with a strategy of “testing the boundaries of public space within the socialist state and its mechanisms”.19 A work that achieved an iconic status for how it, realized in a feminist idiom, articulated the conditions of surveillance and porousness of the boundaries between private and public spheres is undoubtedly Triangle (1979) by Sanja Iveković, in which the artist “played her own politics of display against State politics of display”.20 In other socialist European countries in the 1970s there were either no direct attempts or no possibilities to enter the public debate through an artistic statement made in the public space. Klara Kemp-Welch has argued that, due to ideology’s total appropriation of the public sphere in the countries of real socialism, a different tradition of political art based on the dissident philosophy of antipolitics was developed. This notion was interconnected with a different understanding of real politics, which came to specify the job performed by the party leaders and government.21 Artistic antipolitics was close to the etymological root of the word “politics”, referring to the Greek politeia (πολιτεία) – pointing to the social function of art.22 In her analysis, Kemp-Welch reconnects the histories of artistic practices with political history, looking at the rhetoric of disinterest, doubt, dissent, humour, reticence and dialogue understood as strategies of antipolitics. She emphasizes the relationship between the art of the late 1960s and early 1970s and the new form of resistance that emerged in East-Central Europe based on the idea of self-organization, which would develop into effective political opposition. She writes:

18 19 20 21

22

Ibid., p. 276. Petrešin-Bachelez 2017, p. 218. Ibid., p. 221. The most striking example of this general attitude was a statement by Polish protesters in the shipyard of Gdańsk in August 1980, who issued a letter to the government which began with the sentence: “Politics is your business, not ours.” Piotrowski 2005, p. 274.

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Participants would actively enjoy the benefits of self-organization and freedom of expression, across an increasing range of social activities. A non-coercive sphere for engaged citizens with a sense of common purpose could reclaim the public space monopolized by the Socialist Party and promote democratic values.23 Thus, according to Kemp-Welch, political action, especially in the 1970s, was not performed within the hegemonic public sphere, but rather it was realized within multiple semi-oppositional public spheres, sometimes called a parallel (Yugoslavia) or autonomous (East Germany) non-official culture or a culture in the greyzone (Czechoslovakia), and it was aimed at the re-conceptualization of political subjectivation rather than directly challenging the actual political status quo. For this reason, the artistic activity as such was perceived by its producers as a form of civic engagement. In the Polish context, the strategy of political indifference or antipolitics has been retrospectively criticized as a manifestation of pragmatic opportunism. Arts autonomy was to a certain extent produced by the cultural politics of the state.24 Piotrowski has emphasized, however, that in the 1970s, Polish art was also structured by the tension between the aesthetics of critical engagement and a modernist aesthetic related to theoretical attempts to justify the autonomy of art in the context of the “total appropriation of reality by the language of ideology.”25 Works realized in public spaces in the 1960s in Poland were not aimed at engaging with the conditions of public life. Rather, they utilized the space as additional material for art-making. In the 1960s, the artistic discourse on space was related to the search for art’s place in real life, which was understood as everyday life26 and not in terms of political reality. This artistic discourse was rooted in the post-constructivist tradition that was fostered within a series of seminars and open-air meetings co-organized and supervised by the local and central authorities. They functioned simultaneously as arenas of formal experimentation and places for collaboration between artists and workers. This included the First Biennale of Spatial Forms in Elbląg (1963), the Symposium of Artists and Scientists in Puławy (1967), the Third Złote Grono Symposium (1967) in Zielona Góra and, finally, the Wrocław 70 Symposium (1970). These events were organized in collaboration with factories, which provided so-called social sponsorship that functioned as a rationed and approved form of social engagement – a form of cooperation initiated and encouraged by the state. Public art produced within biennales and open-air meetings and seminars took the form of environments, spatial arrangements and abstract sculptures placed sometimes within the cityscape. All the events were organized with a non23 24 25 26

Kemp-Welch 2014, p. 3. Piotrowski 2011, p. 125. Ibid., pp. 133–134. Kowalska 1975, p. 169.

The Spaces of the Political: Ewa Partum’s Works in the Public Space

political imperative to produce art that would elaborate on the experience of the space, to preserve a relationship with urban planning and to develop projects – some possible to implement, others not.27 At the beginning of the 1970s, spatial discourse was reshaped by the artists working within the idiom of conceptual art. The space–art relationship was reformulated in terms of overcoming formal constraints through spatial rearrangements and was affected by the discourse on the dematerialization of art. This stage was also driven by artists’ desire to confront the neutralization of art caused by its appropriation by institutional systems.28 The paradigmatic example of a conceptual work engaged with the public space is Zbigniew Gostomski’s project It Begins in Wrocław (1970), which consisted of the idea of symmetrically marking the whole globe with material elements, or, Jarosław Kozłowski’s Sphere of Imagination (1970), an action of placing blackboards written with the artwork’s titular slogan in public spaces. At the time, conceptual artists were aware of the limits of artistic freedom that regulated their work. It was only in the 1980s that street actions assumed a more direct character. Writing about the Orange Alternative, Amy Bryzgel emphasizes that the members of the group did not seek permission to stage their events, which would then be stopped by the state police, and their participants often arrested. Unlike the artists of the 1970s, they aimed at conscious confrontation with authorities and performed a reappropriation of public space. According to Mirosław Pęczak, a member of the Orange Alternative, the artists felt that “the street belongs to them,” reflecting an assertion of a citizens’ right to public space that did not exist under socialist rule.29 This kind of collective action was a form of “agoraphilia” that, according to Piotrowski, became a dominant idiom in the critical art of the 1990s and that, as I will propose in my reading of The Legality of Space (1971), was also an organizing principle of Ewa Partum’s work.

The Production of the Public Space in West Berlin Partum moved to West Berlin in 1982, where she continued to work with the mediums of performance and active poetry, realizing some of her works in the public space. To paraphrase Piotrowski, we can argue that at the time, West Berlin embod-

27 28 29

Schiller, Konrad: Awangarda na Dzikim Zachodzie. O Wystawach i Sympozjach Złotego Grona w Zielonej Górze, Warsaw and Zielona Góra 2015, p. 267. Polit, Paweł: “Andrzej Turowski in an Interview with Paweł Polit” in Polit (ed.) 2000, pp. 211–213, p. 213. Bryzgel 2013, p. 168.

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ied “agoraphilia” or, rather, represented a spectacle of “agoraphilia” in a physically enclosed city. David Harvey had argued that there is an intriguing mix of socio-geographical perceptions, expectations and material conditions at work which need to be unpacked if we are to think more cogently about how urban design in general and the shaping of urban public space in particular might influence politics in the public sphere.30 I would like to look briefly at these perceptions, expectations and material conditions in order to define the possible limits of political action in the public space of West Berlin. As an isolated political enclave physically confined by the tangible materialization of the Iron Curtain, West Berlin had a great but merely symbolic significance for West Germany’s economy and for the West in general. Although politically and economically integrated with the Federal Republic of Germany, West Berlin was not economically competitive. In fact, its economy relied on subsidies from the federal government, which at the beginning of the 1980s made up 60 percent of its budget. In such a way, it was a liminal space in every sense: the frontier and the margin of “the Capitalist West”, which affected the ways in which its urban space was constructed. Despite the neon signs, advertising posters, shop windows and “other trappings of post-war Western prosperity,”31 it can be argued that it was not so much a space produced by the economic interests of real estate and corporations (which shape the urban spaces of the West) as a space produced by the politics of the Cold War. The Cold War itself was rooted in spatial politics that relied on containing “the spread” of communism that, as Susan Buck-Morss has argued, was seen as a virus.32 The “territorialization of socialism [communism] as a spatial threat”33 was therefore embodied within the structure of Berlin as a divided city. The physical development of the city depended directly on political decisions. During and after the war, the rebuilders and planners of both sides of Berlin (West and East) were determined to turn their respective parts of the city into autonomous entities; they were to gradually free each other from dependence or “contamination from the other side.”34 However after the 1970s, East–West relations resumed, leading to “discrete technical discussions and negotiations” on common

30 31 32 33 34

Harvey, David: “The Political Economy of Public Space” in Low, Setha/ Smith, Neil (eds.): The Politics of Public Space, London: Routledge, 2005, pp. 17–34, p. 17. Ladd, Brian: The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, p. 13. Buck-Morss 2000, p. 12. Ibid. Ladd 1998, p. 178.

The Spaces of the Political: Ewa Partum’s Works in the Public Space

infrastructures (water, gas, electricity, garbage),35 which can be defined as the beginning of a spatial reattachment that preceded political reunion. Undoubtedly, the space of both Berlins was shaped by the East–West competition. The Western planners intended to present a “free” Berlin – i.e. a city that promoted the individuality of its buildings and a non-authoritarian, decentralized urban order as a clear alternative to Communism and adequate response to the monumentality and centrality that characterized Eastern urban planning.36 In her book criticizing the hegemonic neocolonialist views of the cultural “winners” of the Cold War, Claudia Mesch proposes a more radical reading. She argues that the public space of West Berlin was a manifestation of Cold War culture, “an elaborate theatrical stage for performing the Cold War itself.”37 Mesch points out that the “propagandistic use of Berlin’s physical space and of the wall-as-proscenium carried over into the culture war; at every turn West German arts funding was to result in an iconic product that ‘proved’ – as did Mies’ New National Gallery, but also countless other works – that superior art and cultural innovation could only come out of the West.”38 The space of West Berlin was loaded with political meaning, which was distributed unevenly. Its epicentre was the area surrounding the Berlin Wall, which was characterized by a considerable police presence, while the Wall itself became a screen for actions, concerts and performances that were the artistic expression of life in a Divided City. The Wall, as Ladd has noted, was “antithetical to the mobility that characterizes a modern city.”39 It contradicted the idea of a modern city space characterized by the circulation and constant movement of people and goods. The surroundings of the Wall in the West – unlike in East Berlin – were highly neglected, since the proximity of the Wall devalued old neighbourhoods. The effects of the divide was particularly visible in Kreuzberg, where “working-class populations were increasingly supplanted by an odd mix of Turkish migrant workers and the growing West Berlin alternative society of self-styled dropouts, artists, musicians,

35 36

37 38

39

Ibid., p. 179. Ibid., p.188. Ladd argues, for instance, that redevelopment of the Hansaviertel (1957) was a conscious response to Stalinallee. However, as Ladd emphasizes, the planners of both sides of Berlin remained in direct contact until 1956 and even afterwards tried to avoid “projects that would negate their counterparts’ work, should the Wall disappear”. See Ladd 1998, p. 180. Mesch writes that both East and West Berlin are shown in Ilya Kabakov’s collection of images Die Endlichkeit der Freiheit (1990), Mesch 2008, p. 163. Mesch 2008, p. 162. The author describes the New National Gallery in West Berlin in similar terms – as a showcase for the staging of Cold War divisions and conflicts. These politics were equally present in East Berlin, visible in developments such as Alexanderplatz, Karl-MarxAllee and the Lustgarten. Ladd 1998, p. 19.

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punks, anarchists and squatters.”40 From 1980 onwards, squatters took possession of many empty buildings in Berlin and especially in Kreuzberg. On the other hand, the new city centre was created in the area around Kurfürstendamm, which became a “genuine capitalist showcase”.41 The politicisation of the landscape was also particularly evident in the openly contested and deliberated processes of creating historical monuments and sites of remembrance that aimed to shape the collective identity of the city.42 Deliberation as a process and pluralization as an effect were the main structural features of the West Berlin public space. Unlike in socialist Berlin, where the public space was appropriated as a stage for centralized public ceremonies, the space of West Berlin became a scene of multiple articulations. Artistic use of the public space that was regulated by the local authorities was negotiable. The Berlin Kunst am Bau Reform (1979), an “art-in-architecture” public works law, introduced new municipally-funded possibilities for artists to engage with the public space.43 Artists who intended to perform major re-adjustments to the city’s urban structure were obliged to obtain permission from the local authorities and private owners. Others, who proposed more ephemeral formulas, acted without permission, operating within the borders set by the subjective responses of individual passers-by.44 In the 1980s, when Partum moved to West Berlin, the city was celebrated as a hedonistic and free space of excess and creativity, “a place where people could do what they want [and] pursue what they were interested in,”45 where counterculture was thriving, partly due to the city’s special status that made its residents exempt from the usual West German military conscription laws.46 The public space of West Berlin had become a realm of unlimited expression, a manifestation of the rebellious “spirit” of the city, and situating an artistic action within the urban landscape without being subordinated to this political narration was problematic. 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

Ladd 1998, p. 14. Ibid., p. 181. Ibid., p. 1. For more on the impact of the Berlin’s “Kunst im Stadtraum” program, seeFotografie, no. 39, 1985, pp. 57–59. Partum realized herInstallations at the Hohenzollernkanal (1984) and Olivaer Platz (1987) without requesting or receiving permission to do so. Ilin, Anna: “David Bowie and West Berlin’s ’70s and ’80s Subculture”, Deutsche Welle online, 29 October 2019, https://p.dw.com/p/17iXV In the late 1970s the Social–Liberal (SPD/FPD) coalition government was capitalizing on this image, encouraging economic policies that moved the city’s economy from manufacturing towards creative business in sectors such as high technology, advanced services and information processing. However, in 1981, the Social Democrats (SPD) were ousted from the government in West Berlin and replaced by the Christian Democrats (CDU) for the first time since 1955.

The Spaces of the Political: Ewa Partum’s Works in the Public Space

In other capitals of the West, urban aesthetic practices were often concerned with the fact that an urban space under capitalism is easily transformed into private property or remains under state control. The public space of West Berlin, however, was to a great extent owned and administered by the local authorities, thus targeting the privatization of the space, gentrification and fragmentation were also arranged differently. Also, the shaping of the space by capital was intensely contested by activists and squatters who, from the 1980s, questioned the urban politics implemented by the CDU government (from 1981). Moreover, throughout the Cold War period, state funds in West Berlin “continued to be distributed liberally for cultural projects and artists continued elaborate projects in alternative space venues there.”47 Thus the West Berlin alternative artistic scene was produced to a certain extent by the bureaucratic regime of municipal politics, and the possibility of dissent, which characterizes any democratic state, was turned into culture politics. Consequently, it is more useful to think of the West Berlin public space not in terms of a unity but as a multiplicity of counter-public spaces, each articulated differently.48 Working in such a multiplicity of public spaces did not necessarily imply political engagement. It often meant working with a symbolic, dramatized context of the city utilized as scenography of the Cold War (The Wall), or temporarily negotiating the use of a deindustrialized space administered by the city or private proprietors. If Partum wanted to reclaim the public space as a location of political interaction, she had to employ a strategy other than merely performing the body within the context of the city. Therefore, in her work Private Performance, which took place at the Registry Office, Partum proposed a comprehensive tactic of engagement within a site where local political power met state power. Contemporary analyses of the relationship between power and space in late capitalism, and especially those made from the perspective of the Italian Autonomia, conceptualize the regime of power as generated by capital, which “organizes and administers life as productivity,”49 thus in terms akin to those used to describe the post-totalitarian regime. These analyses speak of the total appropriation of everyday life and public space, by the capital and of politics, respectively. This parallel has been articulated in the dissident writings by Jindřich Chalupecký, who compared the suppression of culture in socialist Czechoslovakia to a corset, which in the West was imposed by business and money. Chalupecký argued that in socialist

47 48

49

Mesch 2008, p. 162. Mouffe, Chantal: “Which Public Space for Critical Artistic Practices?” presentation at the Institute of Choreography and Dance (Firkin Crane) as part of Cork Caucus, 2005, pp 149–171, p.163, https://readingpublicimage.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/chantal_mouffe_cork_caucus.pdf. Dimitrakaki 2013, p. 10.

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Europe, bureaucratization was a certain equivalent of Western commercialization.50 However, as I have attempted to demonstrate above, neither socialist Poland in the 1970s nor West Berlin in the 1980s embodied this binary division in a straightforward way. In the next section, I will argue that Ewa Partum’s works in the public space diagnosed these complex and rather opaque interrelations between bureaucratization and consumerism, private and public, in both regimes.

The Legality of Space (1971) “On the 8th of March 1968, the protest burst out at the university. I went there with my friends from the art academy. I was standing in the courtyard and the militia came in and started beating up students. A boy next to me was hit and covered in blood. I shouted: What is going on here? Why are the civil police beating up citizens? […] If it wasn’t for March ’68, I would probably never have made my installation The Legality of Space.” – Ewa Partum51   “Space was a resource to be apportioned like any other in the command economy.” – David Crowley52 My interpretation of Ewa Partum’s The Legality of Space (figs. 68-69) represents a form of strategic reading focused on revealing the political dimension of this realization in two discursive contexts: the public space of the Polish People’s Republic and the public space of the neoliberal conditions of post-transformational Poland. The repetition of the work, realized in 2012, is considered as an additional interpretative context of the originary event, as a form of its preservation and interpretation. The juxtaposition of both events also enables us to represent the political 50

51 52

Piotrowski 2009, p. 253. Chalupecký’s text was published in English as Jindřich Chalupecký: “Art in Bohemia: Its Merchants, Bureaucrats and Creators” in Cross Currents, vol. 9, 1990, pp. 147–162. Interview in Jarecka 2006. Crowley, David: “Warsaw Interiors: The Public Life of Private Spaces 1949–65” in Crowley, David/ Reid, Susan E. (eds.):Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc, Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2002, pp. 181–206, p. 202.

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agenda of Partum’s work as contingent and historical. In this perspective, The Legality is perceived not only as a work in the public space but, particularly, as a work addressing the public space as the sphere of the relation of power. It defines an empirical public space, the central City Square, as the field of a debate that constitutes the discursive public sphere. Thus, it is not about tracing the political overtones in Partum’s work, but rather pointing at her direct engagement with the politics of resistance in a post-totalitarian regime, reading The Legality of Space as a statement about the restrictions and regulations of the social and individual by the state apparatus, which takes the form of dividing and appropriating public space. Writing about antipolitics, Klara Kemp-Welch argues that “civil society in 1970s Central Europe was conceived of as the non-governmental sphere of politics.”53 The aim of the politics understood as antipolitics and conceptualized in terms of an active and engaged citizenry was defined by Hungarian writer György Konrád, who described it as “strengthening the horizontal human relationships of civil society against the vertical human relationships of military society.”54 For this reason, antipolitcs took place underground, in unofficial or parallel public spheres. In The Legality of Space, Partum implemented an operation on the ground and within the regime of visibility; she was working at the interface of power, thematizing the ways in which the public space has been appropriated by the socialist discourse.55 In other words, Partum was working outside the principle of dissidence as described by Havel, who argued that the “dissident does not operate in the realm of genuine power at all.”56 Partum’s work was not a “politic outside the politic” or a “politic outside a sphere of power” but, rather, an action revealing the mechanisms of power performed from the centre. At this point, I would like to briefly return to the political situation in Poland at the beginning of the 1970s and its historical interpretation. In December 1970 in Gdańsk, Szczecin, Gdynia and Elbląg workers protested against increases in basic food prices. During the protests, forty-five workers were killed and over one thousand injured by members of the militia and army. This effectively forced the government to reshuffle: Władysław Gomułka, the leader responsible for the antiSemitic campaign of 1968, was replaced by Edward Gierek – a pragmatic politician who offered a new vision of proto-consumerism and superficial Westernisation based on Western credits and licences. By the end of the 1960s, the Socialist Party had lost the support of intellectuals and workers alike. Adam Michnik observed at the time that political change im-

53 54 55 56

Kemp-Welch 2014, p. 3. Ibid., p. 4. Partum only worked in “underground” galleries during Poland’s period of martial law, but even then, she referred directly to the political situation current at the time. Kemp-Welch 2014, p. 5.

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posed “from above” was no longer an option. Marxist-Leninist doctrine was now a “dead creature, an empty gesture, an official ritual, nothing more.”57 Ideas emphasizing the inflexibility of the system were broadly spread. Also, Leszek Kołakowski emphasized the impossibility of change, at the same time diagnosing that “the inflexibility was based on people’s belief in inflexibility.”58 If oppositional intellectualists such as Adam Michnik and Jacek Kuroń argued that reclaiming the public sphere was only possible by an effort of self-organization, by spreading a “refusal of state demands into society as a whole,”59 in The Legality of Space Partum publicly staged this refusal in time and space by ridiculing state demands five years before the major opposition organization – the Committee of Defence of Workers (KOR) was launched. The Legality of Space was realized by Ewa Partum in Liberty Square (Plac Wolności), the central square of the city of Łódź, in the spring of 1971 (21–23 April). Its site consisted of an empty lot created after the demolition of a tenement building. The heavy traffic and general bustle of the urban activity on the opposite side of the square only accentuated the void. Partum’s original idea was to cover the external walls of an adjacent tenement with large mirrors to thus reflect the life that was buzzing around. This act would symbolically heal the hollow public space by making the most of its intrinsic potential while, at the same time, reveal the illusory nature of its openness and public nature – its phoney liberty. The name of the square, Liberty Square, Plac Wolności, is a typical name for central squares in Polish cities, generally introduced after Poland regained its independence in 1918. During socialism, most of the squares became marked with monuments to the Red Army, which replaced previous statues imposed by the Nazis during the Second World War. In the case of the Liberty Square in Łódź, the statue of the Polish national hero Tadeusz Kościuszko, destroyed by the Nazis during the occupation, was rebuilt and reinstalled in 1960. Thus, the site was loaded with meaning related to the struggle for national independence. In a vacant part of the square, Partum placed a collection of traffic signs and information boards, accompanied by her artist’s statement and her active presence. In order to realize the work, Partum had to obtain permission from the municipal authorities and receive the support of the Bureau of Artistic Exhibitions (BAW), which was a part of the official gallery network monopolized by the state. Therefore, her artistic action was legal and legalized from both local and central vantage

57 58 59

Michnik, Adam, Letters from Prison and Other Essays, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987, p. 146. Kołakowski, Leszek: “Hope and Hopelessness” in Survey, Summer 1971, pp. 37–52; quoted by Kemp-Welch 2014 p. 222. Kemp-Welch 2014, p. 224.

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points. In her negotiations with the authorities, Partum appropriated official socialist rhetoric to persuade officials to support her anti-materialist, anti-bourgeois and avant-garde art and coerced the confused bureaucrats by arguing that the state should provide young artists with the means and possibilities to develop their egalitarian art designed for the general public.60 With the help of Partum’s narrative, the authorities did not treat the work as deliberately provocative, even though, as Klara Kemp-Welch demonstrated in her analysis of the reception of Tadeusz Kantor’s performances, the authorities were often overreactive and prompt to making literal or symbolic interpretations of artistic actions in the public space, since they could not tolerate “someone else attempting to formulate opinions about what is good and bad in public.”61 It can be argued that the fact that Partum was a woman helped her to negotiate more free space within the public realm, as she was less likely to be perceived by the authorities as potentially political. During his one year of research in the National Archives of the Polish Secret Police in Warsaw, Łukasz Ronduda did not find any traces of operations conducted against or about Ewa Partum.62 We can conclude that, in contrast to some male conceptual artists, Partum was not considered as potentially political by the authorities and she could therefore enjoy more freedom in the public space than her male peers. In her study on the influence of political conditions on the development of artistic style in socialist Europe, Kata Krasznahorkai emphasizes the relevance of the secret police archives as historical material able to “provide a more nuanced view of the impact of particular political situations on style and the emergence of (artistic) strategies.”63 The fact that the authorities did not have any interest in Partum’s artistic activities certainly influenced her artistic style towards more open and explicit public engagement. Thus, in her provocative and confrontational work, Ewa Partum used a strategy of appropriation and interception of the means of communication used by the authorities without any repercussions. In her other realizations in public spaces from the same period, such as An Area under Poetic Licence (1971) or the ongoing series Active Poetry (begun in 1971), Partum was working with cardboard letters, a characteristic material used for propaganda slogans placed in public spaces, schools, offices, factories, etc. The artists distributed letters in the underground pedestrian tunnels in Warsaw to the complete surprise and confusion of the accidental audience. In

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Interview with Ewa Partum, 14.07.2016 (Berlin). Kemp-Welch 2014, p. 31. Ronduda, Łukasz: “Neoawangarda w teczkach SB” in Ronduda 2009, pp. 244–263. Krasznahorkai, Kata: “Heightened Alert: The Underground Art Scene in the Sight of the Secret Police – Surveillance Files as a Resource for Research into Artist’s Activities in the Underground of the 1960s and 1970s” in Bazin et al. (eds.) 2016, pp. 125–135, p. 135.

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her Active Poetry actions, Partum articulated both the postmodern impulse of destabilization of the text and the impulse of social engagement by referring to the materiality of street protest and to the materiality of propaganda slogans.64 The boards and signs used in The Legality of Space were, like the cardboard letters in the Active Poetry actions, yet another means of one-sided communication between authorities and citizens – a monologue that was taking place in the public space. Partum employed real prohibition and public order signs such as “No Smoking” but also included absurd slogans of her own invention: “It is prohibited to forbid”, and similar. Since all the traffic signs were borrowed from the city’s Department of Traffic and Communication, the work was guarded by members of the state police (milicja) for the duration of the event, thus making them unwilling actors in it. Partum, as part of a subversive game with authorities, exhibited uniformed members of the milicja, including them in a three-day-long happening of controlling and preserving “the legality of space.” Unlike Kantor’s happenings, which also often took place in the public space and were escorted by the militia – such as Happening Letter (1967) – Partum did not play with a carnivalesque suspension of order. On the contrary, she thematized the notion of order within both the structure of the work and its rigid aesthetics, also emphasizing it in the title. The installation was accompanied by a statement in which the artist explained her intentions and also formulated the notion of freedom as an “empty space, which should not be filled with any possible experience or consumption.” Partum’s rhetoric revolved around the notion of disinterestedness and experience, but also the seemingly inadequate notion of consumption. The complete text on the board read: THE SITUATION OF TOTAL PROHIBITION the smaller a field of manual action the larger the expansion of the space as a fact. through a negation of the possibility of any situation in the conceptual sphere. THE SMALLER A FIELD FOR ANY GIVEN ACTION, THE GREATER THE POSSIBILITY FOR AN ENTIRELY FREE SPACE TO ARISE. THE SPACE IS INVISIBLE, UNVEILED, DISINTERESTED the disinterestedness of the space is its contingency, is an artistic fact. Any action is here superfluous.

64

Dimitrakaki 2013, p. 42. In the same passage, Angela Dimitrakaki argues that “post-structuralism became the signature intellectual venture of postmodernism precisely because it promised to focus exclusively on the text and claim ‘destabilisation’ as something that occurs in systems of language (as opposed to the materiality of street protest).”

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  THIS SITUATION SERVES ONLY TO PRESERVE A FREE SPACE, WHICH SHOULD NOT BE FILLED BY ANY POSSIBLE EXPERIENCE. Václav Havel argued that post-totalitarian society was merely another form of industrialized consumerist society.65 Following Havel, Piotr Piotrowski defined three main features of the post-totalitarian system: (1) it functions in a condition of social stability with already accepted rules; (2) it is inscribed in the geopolitical order; and (3) the justifying ideology of dictatorship disappears and functions merely as an alibi – as a communication ritual. Piotrowski concluded that a post-totalitarian society eschews its right to democracy, i.e. the right to power in exchange for material security guaranteed by authorities. The ritualization of ideology displaces the metaphysics of revolution present at a time of heroic dictatorship and masks the real values of the new order, which are in fact mirroring Western consumerist culture.66 In the 1970s, in Poland as well as in Yugoslavia, a post-totalitarian regime was developed from processes of totalitarian power structures interlocking with consumerist systems of values that, in effect, produced conformist models of behaviour.67 The Poland of that decade, as Piotrowski has argued, was in fact a perfect example of a post-totalitarian society, with its ideological ritualization and consumerist system of values juxtaposed with an absence of commodities on the market and pervasive state control.68 David Crowley describes Gierek’s political vision implemented during that time as “banal socialism”. It is worth quoting his description in length: Poland in the 1970s was a strange and even schizophrenic country. The decade opened with violent riots over attempts to raise the prices of basic foodstuffs like bread and milk. These events propelled the avuncular figure of Edward Gierek to power. As First Party Secretary, he promised a Second Poland, a new age of prosperity and comfort that would transform the lives of ordinary people. Take consumer goods in lieu of proletarian democracy – that was his offer.69 In this light, Partum’s references to consumerism and consumption do not seem out of place – even if consumerism did not exist as an everyday experience, it did exist “in the sphere of images.”70 At the same time, the mechanics of post-totalitar65 66 67 68 69 70

This argument was also developed by Susan Buck-Morss in Dreamworld and Catastrophe, 2000. Piotrowski 2009, p. 287. Ibid., pp. 288–290. Piotrowski 2005, p. 288. Crowley, David: “Art and Consumption” in Ronduda et al. (eds.) 2007, pp. 16–27, p. 19. Crowley 2016, p. 134.

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ian power in the 1970s was not based on terror but on harassment and discipline implemented by a regulatory form of language.71 In her action, Partum sought to waive or abolish this function of language by accumulating ad absurdum verbal orders, thus freeing the space from any possibility of administration. She staged an explosion of space management by channelling an implosion of the power of language: No admission! No landing! No feeding! No smoking! Everything is prohibited! It is prohibited to concede! Silence! Consumption forbidden! Do not stop in the passage! Do not climb the tower! Following Havel, Piotrowski argues that the paramount feature of the social situation in post-totalitarian Poland was a conformist attitude that was especially prevalent in artistic circles. This conformism was manifested in non-critical attitudes and self-censorship and was fundamental to the micro-physics of power that produced the local artistic culture.72 Piotrowski contrasts artistic circles with literary circles, showing that in the Polish context, the ethos of the artist-dissident was never developed; unlike literary authors, artists were merely considered harmless dreamers: non-engaged idealists rather than public intellectuals.73 In her work, Partum performatively took up the topic of the artist as a public intellectual engaged in social and political affairs. Included in the structure of The Legality of Space was a concept of the artist as an activist who performs a direct action in reality rather than only analyses the parameters of art. Partum resigned from the conceptual analytic role and, through performative action, embodied the role of an activist. At the opening of the installation on 21 April, Partum was driven around the square’s central monument in a van and shouted through a loudspeaker slogans written on the boards she had made. This activist role was amplified by the visual form of the installation itself, which generated connotations and associations with forms of public protest and demonstration. The action of placing signs and boards in a public space generated a field of confrontation with the non-dispersed, centralized power. The Legality of Space addressed and problematized the hegemonic public sphere, indicating the possibilities of free artistic action in a system steeped in ideology. Andrzej Turowski describes

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Piotrowski 2005, p. 288. Piotrowski refers to Miklós Haraszti’s notion of a “velvet prison”. See Haraszti, Miklós:The Velvet Prison: Artists Under State Socialism, New York: Basic Books, 1987. Piotrowski 2009, p. 290. Piotrowski writes: “There was no ethos of the (politically) independent artist who engaged in a systematic and uncompromised critique of the regime. The Polish tradition of seeing artists as perpetual outsiders, self-absorbed in the problems of formal autonomy […] played a role here.” See Piotrowski 2009, p. 291.

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this condition as an “ideologically filled space of ideas and systems [...] where individual choices appear against the context of dominating political strategies.”74 He emphasizes the ability of the system to appropriate and hijack artistic gestures, transporting them to within the orbit of its own ideology. This situation was reversed by Partum: by deploying certain elements of the language used by authorities, the artist produced an independent content. Her artistic gestures, in the context of the omnipotence of the system, managed to escape any form of ideological appropriation. Claude Lefort has described Eastern European totalitarianism as a ruin of democracy, which is regulated by the basic desire to fill the void of power created as an effect of democratic revolution.75 Totalitarianism tends to abolish all forms of uncertainty and vagueness of the social and aims at the restitution of the coherent social substance. The system equips “the people” with a basic, fundamental identity defined by Lefort as an essential oneness – something the totalitarian state identifies itself with and, therefore, it closes the public sphere.76 From this perspective, the empty space discussed in Partum’s manifesto can be interpreted as an attempt to recreate a democratic void of power, the rupture described by Lefort. The Legality of Space installation was open to an aleatory reception and interpretation understood as an exchange, constructed from fragments of interactions creating a public sphere that was an alternative to the hegemonic one. The hegemonic public sphere in socialist Poland was dominated by socialist discourse in an a priori and monistic form, which ossified the public sphere and unified it. But of course, not all forms of social life were penetrated by this discourse, effectively leading to a sharp distinction between the public and private spheres. Reading Partum’s work in the perspective of the critical theory of the public sphere, we can also say that she was establishing a “counter-public” (Gegenöffentlichkeit) in the sense of the word given by Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge in their concept of the proletarian public sphere. Miriam Hansen proposes to read the anachronism “proletarian” as a nostalgic expression that generates the continuity of the Marxism tradition rather than in a descriptive way. (“It may be that the epithet ‘proletarian’ in Negt and Kluge’s conceptualization of the counterpublic sphere was a slightly quaint, nostalgic effort to assert the continuity of Marxist thought.”77 ) 74 75 76 77

Turowski 1987, p. 31. Lefort, Claude: The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986. See also Deutsche 1992. Negt, Oskar/ Kluge, Alexander: Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere (1972), Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,1993. The authors themselves write about the inadequacy of the word “proletarian” and about the exhaustion of the vocabulary and/or linguistic resources of the social theory of workers’ movements.

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Proletarian, in this case, means the majority of people prevented from shaping hegemonic discourse.78 Negt and Kluge described the liberal public space as idealistic and utopian, grounding their concept of the public sphere in the material conditions of life by problematizing the issue of everyday experience. They theorized plural, post-bourgeois public spheres complemented with spheres of production. The relevant aspect of this theory is the fact that it proposes a public sphere that can function simultaneously as public and as oppositional towards the hegemonic public sphere, though it is neither a sphere of protest nor an equivalent to real politics. Rather, this proletarian, alternative public sphere is created in an act of reconstruction as a strictly discursive space. It is constituted from remnants, leftovers and fragments: “The proletarian public sphere is rather to be conceived of as the excluded, vague, unarticulated impulses of resistance or resentment.”79 The concept of a proletarian public sphere, Hansen argues, “could be constructed discursively from its systematic negation – that is, from hegemonic efforts to suppress, fragment, delegitimize or assimilate any public formation that suggests an alternative autonomous organization of experience.”80 The Legality of Space functioned according to similar predicaments: in the confines of the public space, it provided a possibility of the existence of an alternative discursive field constructed from the negation of unity and produced through individual heterogenic experiences. I do not propose that The Legality of Space was an artistic representation of a Gegenöffentlichkeit, a public sphere existing as if, or in between. I would instead like to suggest that reading Partum’s work through the categories developed by Negt and Kluge enables us to perceive its critical potential, which consists of combining the notion of opposition with the notion of fragmented but not necessarily idealized and positive experience, which differs from the “experience” provided within the contemporary culture industry via participatory artworks realized according to ideals of a new “social turn” in arts.81 Miriam Hansen writes that “Die Erfahrung,” in the Negt/Kluge concept, “is seen as the matrix that mediates individual perception and social horizons of meaning, including the collective experience of alienation, isolation and privatization.”82 She continues, writing that “the very dimensions of 78

79 80 81 82

Negt and Kluge’s book Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung. Zur Organisationsanalyse von bürgerlicher und proletarischer Öffentlichkeit was published in 1972 in West Germany and is considered the first German-language revision of Jürgen Habermas’s theory of the public sphere. Hansen, Miriam: “Foreword” to the English edition of Negt, Oskar/ Kluge, Alexander: Public Sphere and Experience, 1993, pp. ix–xxxli, p. xxxii. Ibid. Bishop, Claire: Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, London: Verso, 2012. Hansen 1993, pp. xvii–xviii. Defining the concept of experience in Negt/Kluge, Hansen recalls the distinction between Erfahrung and Erlebnis as elaborated within the critical theory

The Spaces of the Political: Ewa Partum’s Works in the Public Space

Erfahrung that Negt and Kluge were to stress in their attempt to reconceptualize the public from the perspective of experience [were] openness, inclusiveness, multiplicity, heterogeneity, unpredictability, conflict, contradiction and difference.”83 This ambivalent optic – critical and affirmative towards individual experiencing – was explored by Partum in her work. Thus, it is interesting to ask how The Legality of Space actually functioned in the public space. The Legality of Space, as an ephemeral work of art, was available to a limited number of people (the first audience) during the three days of its presentation.84 It was also well documented, which made it possible to present the work to a secondary audience. Partum sent invitations for the opening of the installation and published a catalogue (150 copies) that included a map of Poland and a plan of the site. The opening, organized by the artist, was combined with the performative action. During the remaining days of the installation, the work functioned in a neutralized context – as a situation on the margin of everyday experience. According to Partum, people who encountered the installation were interested and confused at the same time; some responded immediately to signs such as “No Smoking” by putting out cigarettes, only to realize at the same moment that there was no possibility of obeying all the requests.85 In the photographs, we can see people indifferently passing by and others who enter the site and read the signs. Apart from the relatively enigmatic artistic manifesto attached to the wall, there was no information about what the presented collection of signs represented. Due to the installation’s exceptional form, the general public was not able to perceive it as art. It was an urban spatial experience that, on the one hand, seemed familiar but, on the other, represented something completely different: something that could confuse but could also help to produce reflection or awaken critical perception.

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in the 1920s and 1930s. She writes: “What seems significant about this concern, with Erfahrung, especially in the writings of Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer (which were being rediscovered in the 1970s), is that the concept oscillates between an emphatic and an empirical pole: on the one hand, it refers to the capacities of having and reflecting upon experience, of seeing connections and relations, of juggling reality and fantasy, of remembering the past and imagining a different future; on the other, it entails the historical disintegration and transformation of these very capacities with the onslaught of industrialization, urbanization, and a modern culture of consumption. With a dialectical twist, then, experience in the emphatic sense comes to include the ability to register and negotiate the effects of historical fragmentation and loss, of rupture and change.” Ibid., p. xvii. Hansen 1993, p. xviii. Ewa Partum’s long-time collaborator and translator Marek Żychski, who was a student at the time, remembers that he accidentally saw the installation before meeting the artist. It was immediately clear to him that he was dealing with an artistic intervention. He spoke about his astonishment and the need to meet the author of the work. This was the reason for his initiating a cooperation with Partum. Interview with Marek Żychski, 13.02.2018 (Berlin). Interview with Ewa Partum, 14.07.2016 (Berlin).

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Referring to Slavoj Žižek’s description of the function of ideology in a socialist state,86 Piotrowski argued that in the context of opportunistic conformism, creating reflection and awakening critical views could have been more important than the most resolute contestation of the system. “Under such conditions,” he argued, “any apparent or rhetorical breach of the implicit understandings could destabilise the precarious arrangement.”87 It can be concluded that in her work, without undermining the discourse of the autonomy of art, Partum used art to create an experience-based counter-public sphere that enabled her to temporarily destabilize “the precarious arrangement” that governed the communication between the authorities and citizens. Although the installation was photographically documented and filmed by the local branch of public television, it was only in 2001 that the redistribution of this work started assuming a variety of forms, such as its documentation being presented in the framework of individual and group exhibitions, repetitions and reenactments.88 In 2006, during her first Polish retrospective, at the Wyspa Institute of Art in Gdańsk, Ewa Partum realized a new site-specific version of the work using signs related to the shipyard character of the area (“No swimming!” “No fishing!”), combining them with those used in 1971. Partum recreated the work to adjust it to the new context, opening it to the audience’s experiences in the new location. In May 2009, Partum was invited by the curator of Galeria Manhattan in Łódź, Krystyna Potocka-Suwalska, to take part in the action Museum: The Legality of Space. Marking the Place, Łódź 1971–2009, aimed at creating a conceptual museum of Ewa Partum’s works and ideas in the city where the artist lived and worked in the 1970s. Marking the urban space was used as a means of preservation of Partum’s practice in public memory. A subsequent action, The Legalization of Space, organized by Muzeum Sztuki and the local branch of the left-wing political think tank Krytyka Polityczna in Łódź on 18 July 2012, was a modification of The Legality of Space that involved changes to the work’s status, context, formal features and authorship. The Legalization of Space was not a critical re-enactment or appropriation, but rather a performative interpretation of the “first player of history”,89 not necessarily aimed at the presentation, recuperation or conservation of this work but, rather, at redefining and actualizing

86 87 88 89

Žižek, Slavoj:The Plague of Fantasies, London: Verso, 1997. See in particular the chapter “Love Thy Neighbour? No, Thanks”, pp. 45–85. Piotrowski 2009, p. 291. Documentation from The Legality of Space was also shown in 1983 at Galerie Wewerka. An expression used by RoseLee Goldberg in conversation with Babette Mangolte (November 2003) quoted in: Deepwell, Katy: “Re.act Feminism: Feminist, Gender-Critical and TransGender Performance Art: Katy Deepwell Interviews Bettina Knaup and Beatrice E. Stammer” in n.paradoxa vol. 30, July 2012, pp. 77–82, p. 80.

The Spaces of the Political: Ewa Partum’s Works in the Public Space

its political potential within a completely different field of references. The Legalization of Space was an attempt to reactivate the emancipatory potential of the historical work through the employment of an aesthetics of participation. This performative interpretation made use of the same spatial context, Liberty Square in Łódź, and aimed to translate the political potential contained in the original event into a contemporary artistic language defining the public space as an area for socially engaged art. The aleatory interaction was replaced by planned and managed participation, which had linguistic and actual consequences; the Legality was replaced by Legalization: an action that spectacularizes social mobilization. The rhetoric of the texts that accompanied the event employed the vocabulary of social practices emphasizing the collective character of the project: We are encouraging everybody who is actively participating in the city life of Łódź to collaborate in the action The Legalization of Space. In order to take part, you first have to think about all sorts of constraints, limitations, divisions or illegalities (visible, symbolic or immaterial) experienced on an everyday basis that prompt your biggest objections. Each person chooses only one, related to his/her problem. The next step is to reverse the limitation and create a positive, affirmative message – for instance “Compulsory Cycling, Public Area: Please Enter”, “The Luncheon on the Grass”. Together with the organizers, we will design and build the signs based on this completely new content. On the 18th of July, we will present them together for 20 min. in different sites in Liberty Square and create a friendly and inclusive public space. With this simple gesture, we will legalize our dreams.90 The ultimate goal of the action was the creation of an inclusive temporary public sphere achieved through social mobilization and the articulation of needs and dreams. The organizers provided a place and the means for participants to produce signs with their chosen slogans with affirmative statements – as opposed to the prohibition signs used by Partum in The Legality of Space. Two other artists also participated in the event with individual projects designed as a part of the affirmative public space: Angelika Fojtuch conducted a survey asking passers-by whether they were for or against the legalization of space, and Anka Leśniak hung a banner on a balcony overlooking the square with the neologism wolniniewinni, which merged the two Polish words “free” (wolni) and “innocent” (niewinni) in a way that suggested the conflation of a lack of freedom with guilt. These works dialoguing with the historical Legality of Space were also autonomous artistic fragments of The Legalization of Space. The action was accompanied by a discussion organized in the local office of Krytyka Polityczna. 90

Text published on-line in Dziennik Łódzki, 12 July 2012, http://www.dzienniklodzki.pl/artykul/ 616661,ewa-partum-i-legalizacja-przestrzeni-lodzi-zdjecia,id,t.html.

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To capture the meaning of Legalization, it is important to consider what has been repeated, who has repeated it and for whom has it been repeated. Sven Lütticken points out that many contemporary artists consciously or unconsciously repeat gestures of neo-avant-garde artists, emphasizing that those gestures were far less popular and mainstream in the 1960s and 1970s. Lütticken places this problem in the broader context of the conceptualization of history as a process of constant ruptures and repetitions, quoting Hal Foster’s definition of history as a “continual process of protension and retention, a complex relay of anticipated futures and reconstructed pasts”.91 Lütticken describes two modes of repeating neo-avant-garde gestures: the first relates to the reactivation of avant-garde impulses and the second to recycling forms and formulas accomplished on the level of nostalgia, bringing it close to Fredric Jameson’s category of pastiche.92 Thus, on the one hand, we have an active reading and, on the other, a passive consumerist reception. The most common form, however, is a combination of both registers – a matrix of critical and nostalgic viewpoints. In The Legalization of Space, the organizers/curators transferred the artistic event into the field of social action. At the same time, the organizers problematized the notion of authorship by reassigning it to participants who became not just collaborators but rather the authors of the work. Thus, the problem of the subordination of volunteers to the will of the artist, criticized by Claire Bishop with respect to participatory art projects, was resolved.93 This relocation of authorship is an interesting suspension of the anachronistic question: “Is it art?” This is undoubtedly not a nostalgic but a critical level of The Legalization; indeed, it is a successful reactivation of many impulses present in Partum’s work. However, other features of the artistic event remain close to the notion of pastiche. A repetition of an artistic gesture in new political, cultural and social circumstances always produces new meanings and introduces changes to the functioning of any work of art. In this case, the organizers performed a rewriting of The Legality of Space into another performative idiom, creating a work about urban-social relations in neoliberalism. Rosalyn Deutsche has argued that artistic works that provide support for the social urban movement defend the concept of the social space formulated in opposition to all aspects of the privatization and bureaucratization of cities. They are articulations of protest against accepted, legalized ways

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Foster 1996, p. 29. Lütticken, Sven: “Secrecy and Publicity: Reactivating the Avant-Garde” in New Left Review, no. 17, September–October 2002, https://newleftreview.org/II/17/sven-lutticken-secrecy-and-pub licity. Bishop, Claire: Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, London: Verso, 2012.

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of using the city space.94 In the projects from the 1990s mentioned by Deutsche in her analysis, social problems were also constitutive for the existence of particular artworks within the public space. In case of The Legalization of Space, however, this dialectical tension did not exist; rather, the organizers exploited the potential of the site, the physical presence of the artist and the historical memory of the work created by Partum to reanimate the idea of the social importance of art. In other words, the reconfiguration of the political and artistic dimensions has been performed by recycling the artistic and redefining the political. The Legalization of Space thus becomes an illustration of political art understood as the articulation of dissent.95 It has simulated a stage or an agon that has allowed the public to form “us”, a group that is a projection of the others, fulfilling the scenario of agonistic democracy. Chantal Mouffe has defined agonism as a form of permanent social conflict that produces the public sphere. Mouffe writes that “according to the agonistic approach, critical art is art that forms dissent – that makes visible what the dominant consensus tends to obscure and obliterate.”96 In this case, a public sphere of dissent was arranged in a form that ossified the idealistic vision of the coherent public sphere in which the real interests of different groups clash. The intention to unmask reality and empower participants by giving them a platform ended up as the fetishization of the idea of political mobilization and the spectacularization of participation. Referring to the vocabulary and the perspective proposed by Negt and Kluge, we can say that the public sphere, addressed as a common inclusive space and legalized by participants, was in fact the hegemonic public sphere that represented the interests of the organizers (the museum and the political think tank), effectively serving those who already have the power to form public discourse. In the name of the spectacle of agonism, which refers to the utopian vision of society as a pluralistic multiplicity, The Legalization voiced an idealistic vision of the public sphere. By contrast, The Legality of Space did not create a public space of consensus or dissent but appealed to the impossibility of such a multiplicity. The Legality of Space showed that between the articulated public spheres there are fragments, moments, remnants and experiences that can retroactively be cohered to form a Gegenöffentlichkeit. For the notion of Gegenöffentlichkeit, close to the Foucauldian “heterotopia” or Donna Haraway’s “partial perspective”, is defined rather as a field of discursive connections and not as a common stage. When analysing The Legality of Space, art historians refer to the legacy of France’s May 1968, and especially Guy Debord’s analysis of a centralized spectacle and

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Deutsche 1992. Mouffe, Chantal: Hegemony, Radical Democracy, and the Political, London: Routledge, 2013. Mouffe, Chantal: “Artistic Activism and Agonistic Politics” in Zbyněk Baladrán, Vít Havránek (eds.), Atlas of Transformation, Prague: Tranzit, 2010.

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his appeal to the redemptive realness of experience; some mention artworks and texts produced within the Fluxus movement, especially the works of Wolf Vostell and Dick Higgins.97 In terms of its artistic genealogy, Partum’s work could also be placed into Kaprow’s commitment to working directly with the everyday by arranging pre-existing elements in the world. However, as Klara Kemp-Welch pointed out, “if Kaprow advocated embracing the bustle of street life in order to reject the inherited conventions of high art and its institutional framework, the late socialist context […] provided a different set of challenges.”98 What seems to be more relevant, then, is the lack of any tradition of this kind of public political art in Partum’s contemporary surroundings: both in Poland and in the Socialist Bloc in general. The similar projects realized in Hungary that were mentioned earlier did not engage the public/audience in the same way. Instead, they were restricted to individual actions and refrained from any form of interaction. Therefore, The Legality of Space can be perceived rather as a symbolic beginning of a certain tradition, a symptom of the forthcoming “agoraphilia” that developed, according to Piotrowski, only after 1989 and that characterizes the post-socialist condition. To conclude, I would like to mention yet another possibility of actualizing the political potential of The Legality of Space. Rancière defines the contemporary form of power/government as the means of appropriation of public sensibility, a sphere of senses that remains close to the formula of police traffic signs – forbidding access to certain areas of reality through means such as “don’t look”, ”disperse”, “stop”, “silence”, or “do not enter”.99 Contemporary forms of power, according to Rancière, consist of imposing a vision of order as something natural and neutral. Partum’s work, in that respect, can be read as a reminder of the historicity and contingency of any form of order.

Private Performance (1985) Private Performance (fig. 70) is a work of art that attained the status of a legal act. The work can be perceived as the manifestation of Partum’s continuous interest in the problem of legality and the bureaucratic and administrative procedures of power. In West Berlin, the bureaucratic operation of the city-state affected Partum’s life and practice in a different way than in socialist Poland. The problem of legality did not refer to the total appropriation of the public space by official doctrine, but

97 98 99

See Szyłak et al. (eds.) 2012/13, p. 46. Kemp-Welch 2014, p. 23. Rockhill, Gabriel/ Watts, Phil (eds.): Jacques Rancière: History, Politics, Aesthetics, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Also includes an afterword by Rancière, Jacques: “The Method of Equality: An Answer to Some Questions.”

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rather to Partum’s status, redefined as a non-citizen, i.e. as a political refugee. In Private Performance, Partum explored her body as a substitute for a public space, and its legality became not the subject of this work but an effect of it. Partum realized her group performance at the Gallery Registry Office in Berlin Wilmersdorf on 11 April 1985. The event can be reconstructed based on a series of photographs, a slide show, the artist’s memory, the recollections of other participants100 and the legal document, a wedding certificate. Prior to the event, Partum sent invitations to the guests/members of the audience inviting them to a “performance by Ewa Partum and Rolf Werner”, proving that it was not a spontaneous action but a carefully choreographed event. On the other hand, sending an invitation is a casual procedure when contrasted with organizing the typical wedding. The dialectical structure of the performance consisted precisely of such transfers, realized by reappropriating and rewriting particular elements of a wedding ceremony and celebration into an artistic event. Partum created a durational palimpsest making visible both registers: the realm of administrative proceedings and her own artistic scenario. The majority of the guests/members of the audience remained confused about the character of the event and did not expect that they would be participating in an actual wedding ceremony.101 Both of the wedding witnesses, Partum’s long-time collaborator Marek Żychski and the German artist Rolf Julius, were informed about the scenario and took part in the performance as assistants. Ewa Partum turned up at the Registry Office dressed in a wedding dress, as in her previous marriagethemed performances, a hat with a veil and the black high heels that she used in her other performances. Partum’s bride figure was wrapped in a transparent plastic film that covered her face and arms. At the beginning of the performance/ceremony, the bridegroom cut Partum out of the wrapping, repeating the gesture performed by Partum in her wedding performances. After that, the ceremony was conducted in the manner of a usual wedding, with several alterations introduced by Partum’s score. She used as a prop her work Autobiography (1971/74) – the banner with her name constructed from the names of male cultural producers who had influenced her consciousness and cultural education, and which she then amended by adding the name of her daughter. This banner was spread on the floor of the Registry Office by Partum’s daughter and her future husband, and after the ceremony, it was placed on the steps to the entrance doors. During the ceremony, Partum’s new husband put a gold ring on her finger, and she painted a ring on his finger using gold paint. The work had its roots in two seemingly separate traditions: it combined a conceptual interest in the aesthetic of administration, which often manifested itself in 100 Interview with Berenika Partum, 25.07.2016 (Berlin). 101 Interview with Ewa Partum, 22.11.2017 (Berlin).

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works that utilized office spaces, and a feminist interest in the ritual of marriage. Moreover, retrospectively, we can also position Partum’s work on a trajectory between second-wave feminism’s interest in identity (as a woman) and contemporary biopolitical art that deals with the immediacy of life (as a woman). The office-like spaces utilized in conceptual projects as a location for art, as a place for its presentation and distribution, were not merely yet another unconventional site for a public encounter with art. They provided an integral part of the aesthetic that constituted the discourse on art administration perceived as modus of art’s existence.102 Office space was utilized, for instance, in Seth Siegelaub’s January Show of 1969 and in Michael Asher’s 1974 installation at the Claire Copley Gallery in Los Angeles, the classic work of institutional critique that revealed the office as the backstage of the white cube. In Poland, in response to the post-totalitarian condition of the bureaucratic regime, the poet and visual artist Andrzej Partum, Ewa Partum’s husband, operated from within an office of poetry: the Poetry Bureau. The first event organized at the Bureau was Ewa Partum’s installation An Area under Poetic Licence (1971). Visitors, who became participants in this delegated performance, spread the cardboard letters around the public space via the soles of their shoes, marking the external space, as licensed by Ewa Partum’s intervention, as a “poetic area”. In this work, Partum did not refer to the system of economic reproduction, as many of her Western peers might have done; instead, she utilized the “aesthetics of administration” to reveal the condition of life in the centralized system of bureaucratic appropriation. If, within the conceptual art discourse, a work of art was revealed as subject to administrative logic in Private Performance, it was the artist’s life that was revealed as a subject of administration. In this work, Partum focused her attention on a bureaucratic ritual, a marriage, a subject that was often thematized in the subversive feminist practices in the 1960 and 1970s. Partum herself conducted her counter-marriage pedagogy when working in Poland at the beginning of the 1980s. In Private Performance, Partum shifted her interest from the vision of marriage as a constitutive element of the patriarchal order to the question of privacy and administration. She was not “referring to” marriage in her work, but she was performing it. Partum replaced her verbal criticism (Women, Marriage Is Against You) with a representation of herself saying I do. Marriage was revealed not merely as a patriarchal ritual, a practice of controlling and limiting women’s choices and roles in society, but also as a practice of state control that takes place in the public space. To borrow language from Ursula Biemann, Partum’s geobody103 was transformed through the ritual of mar-

102 Alberro 2003. 103 See the Urusla Biemann project Geobodies at https://www.geobodies.org/.

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riage from the “body outside the state”104 to the body within the state. In East–West Shadow, realized a year earlier (1984), Partum’s naked body was represented in the liminal space of the Berlin Wall as stretched between West and East, past and present. It became a screen for the projection of geographical and political borders. In Private Performance, Partum’s geobody transgressed this border; she has become a legalized subject entitled to travel freely and cross the borders between the East and the West. Dressed in the traditional wedding attire but covered in plastic film, she was unwrapped by her future husband like an object, a gift. In her highly evocative text, Ursula Biemann writes about the historically cultivated phantasm of a woman’s body that encapsulates the desire for conquest.105 Partum recalls this fantasy by amplifying and making evident the symbolism of a white wedding dress and a veil on the bride’s face – signs of a woman as terra incognita. Adorned and beautiful, Partum becomes a wife, but at the same time, she performs a counter-ritual. In that way, she neutralizes the public ritual of marriage by merging it with her own artistic practice, i.e. within the discourse in which her body was conceptually established as an artistic tool of dissent. “Overall […] the artist opted to call art actions and processes that occurred in her real life and that defined and regulated her remit of possibilities as a socialized, gendered human being.”106 This quotation from an essay by Andrea Dimitrakaki refers to Tanja Ostojić’s Crossing Borders series and especially to her participatory web project Looking for a Husband with an EU Passport (2000–05). Reading Private Performance alongside Ostojić’s work as interpreted by Dimitrakaki enables us to historicize Partum’s work as located on a trajectory that leads from the postmodern strategies of second-wave feminism to contemporary feminist art concerned with the economic imperative of global capital. Dimitrakaki writes about a historical development that has taken place within recent years – namely a move from the artist’s body (performance art) towards the artist’s life (biopolitical art). She describes this as a process of displacing the distance between the embodied self and the site of social critique.107 This development has relied on a shift within artistic strategies from the realm of signification towards the realm of experience. Within Partum’s practice, this process took place in the pluralized public space of West Berlin where her personal experience became a site from which she launched her counter-politics.

104 May, Joseph: “Bodies outside the State: Black British Women Playwrights and the Limits of Citizenship” in Phelan, Peggy/ Lane, Jill (eds.): The Ends of Performance, New York: New York University Press, 1998, pp. 197–213. 105 Biemann 2002. 106 Dimitrakaki 2013, p. 81. 107 Ibid., p. 76.

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Dimitrakaki argues that the current artistic practices that face the contemporary regime of global capitalism produce a proliferation of primarily inter-spatial positions as the testing ground for contemporary re-articulations of gendered subjectivity. […] These are positions constructed in the course of establishing or, in some instances, unveiling connections across spaces ranging from the stereotypically private to the stereotypically public.108 Partum’s Private Performance can be seen as a prefiguration of these developments, as a work of art that constructs an inter-spatial position establishing anew the connection between private and public. In Partum’s Private Performance, the biopolitical dimension of her work is not yet explicitly formulated; it is located within the effects of the performance: the change of Partum’s marital status. Within Private Performance, Partum also reconsiders the medium of performance and its relation to reality. She utilizes a medium to produce a work imbricated with her personal life and legal procedures, but at the same time, she indicates the reality as performative. By exposing the performative utterance I do, Partum reveals the performativity of “the legality” itself. Her work is not a fantasy of transgression, or a copy of Situationist détournement, rather it is another layer of reality imposed and directed by the artist. This relationship between the actual event and the artistic scenario is very well reflected in the documentation from the performance, which took the form of a series of wedding photographs arranged as a slide show. The 7’34” sequence of fifty-one black-and-white images, made and arranged by Susanna Fels,109 were arranged in three similarly sized groupings of photographs. The initial sequence presents the ceremony chronologically. Its first image shows the couple still at home, looking at each other, Partum already wrapped in film. Other photographs depict the couple entering and leaving the Registry Office and during the ceremony. This sequence merges elements of counter-ritual with casual moments of the marriage ceremony: images of the groom kneeling in front of the bride and cutting her out of the wrapping, and images of Partum signing documents. The second sequence shows the married couple at home, posing with Partum’s works poem by ewa and Drawing TV visible in the background. The last sequence consists of images of Partum posing for the camera – a series of closeups of her face. Most of the images in this sequence are repeated more than once. The screen switches between bright yellow, blue and green. The final slide, an image that shows the artist looking intensely into the camera and returning the 108 Ibid., p. 81. 109 Susanna Fels, born in 1937 in Wrocław (then Breslau), has lived in Berlin since 1960. She works as a photographer, painter and multimedia artist.

The Spaces of the Political: Ewa Partum’s Works in the Public Space

viewer’s gaze, is repeated many times. When looking at this series of photographs performed by Ewa Partum and taken by a fellow artist, we can think of Barthes’s statement about the relationship between photography and the private and public spheres: artification is a tool for the “publicity of the private”, i.e. the way in which the images of private life are projected into the public realm.110 This dual documentation of a casual wedding and a performance records a considerable asymmetry, starting with the fact that there is no image of Partum’s husband signing the marriage certificate. The slideshow remains visually related more to the documentation of Partum’s wedding performances, where the presence of a groom is reduced to the function of an assistant. In other words, the slide show does not aim to render the reality of the wedding – its symmetrical choreography with both parties participating in the ceremony and repeating the same gestures. Moreover, the documentation includes a series of Partum’s works (Autobiography, poem by ewa, Drawing TV) that define her identity as an artist whereas there is no visual information that could individuate the groom and separate him from the role of Partum’s assistant. We can conclude that the artification of reality was achieved by shifting Partum’s position to the centre of the event, by resembling the authorial position that she occupied in her performative works. Also in 1985 the artist realized Kunst Demonstration, a work which consisted of two photo collages that simulated accessing an actual urban public space. Partum used photographs of the city space and “intervened” in them. In this case, Partum altered images of street protest: she erased the demands from the protesters’ banners, inscribing them instead with the word KUNST. Partum was therefore not demanding social or political rights for herself or for others but instead she was referring to the discourse of art. This work recalls her early conceptual interventions, in which art was a tool to produce a free space within a homogeneous public sphere. This work also reveals Partum’s continuous interest in accessing the public space with her artistic messages – her fantasy of “agoraphilia”. In West Berlin, Partum could easily organize a similar protest and appear in the public space with the banner KUNST. Artistic actions in the public space were licensed and legalized. Therefore, when working in the actual public space in West Berlin, Partum was committed to choosing politicized places, be it the surroundings of the Berlin Wall or the Registry Office, where she could thematize a set of complex relationships between private and public by developing a critical counterpublic sphere rather than performing a retroactive attack on the system of political power. Her strategy was aimed at reinstating the heterogeneous, fragmented and conflictual public sphere through rearranging the conditions for experiencing the public space differently. 110

Barthes, Roland: Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, New York: Hill and Wang, 1981, p. 98.

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Conclusion To conclude, I would like to point out the ways in which the conditions of Partum’s work in the public space of socialist Poland and of West Berlin paralleled each other. Apart from the obvious structural differences related to the public sphere in a stable post-totalitarian socialism versus that in a transitioning democratic capitalism (moving from a bourgeois to information society), there were also certain similarities related to the meaning of the public space for Partum in both locations. For various reasons, both in Poland in the 1970s and in West Berlin in the 1980s Partum did not have access to the state/municipal infrastructure of promotion and publicity that allows open deliberation. She was excluded from the system of art institutions that could accommodate her work; in both locations, Partum essentially functioned on the margin of the official existing networks. Therefore, in both Poland and West Berlin, the public space offered an additional possibility to practice art. The second similarity relates to Partum’s approach to the audience: in both locales, her approach remained indebted to the avant-garde strategy of shock and disruption. In other words, the artist never took care of the public but rather antagonized it. By provoking the audience and presenting it with conflicting and often confusing situations she opened up a space for deliberation.

Instead of Conclusion: Distribution Map “For a dialectical historian concerned with works of art, these works integrate their fore-history (Vorgeschichte) as well as their after-history (Nachgeschichte); and it is by virtue of their after-history that their fore-history is recognizable as involved in a continuous process of change.” – Walter Benjamin1

In this book, I have tried to articulate both the historical alterity of Ewa Partum’s works in their various locales and the specificity of the locales from which Partum’s art has been interpreted and distributed. I have indicated significant moments in the process of the local and global redistribution of this artistic practice and mapped trajectories of the circulation of works, documentation and knowledges about Partum’s art. I have read Partum’s art practice as constantly moving between opposing vectors: from poetry to politics, from text to performance, from the past to the present, from the so-called East to the Former West, from the cultural subject of postmodernity to the economic subject of globalization and finally, from the documentation to the archive. I this final chapter I would like to conclude this analysis with some further remarks about the contemporary return of this practice, its actualization within social practices and its incorporation into (vertical) art history and its global canon. This is a step towards completing the atlas of Partum’s artistic practice. Since I am working here within an open, horizontal and non-linear structure, rather than offering final re-evaluation, I propose a series of “opening remarks” that focus on the present and future uses and distributions of Partum’s pratice. In this context, the term “opening” simply refers to the process of making something accessible and attainable.     1

Benjamin, Walter: “Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian” (1937) in: Eiland, Howard/ Jennings, Michael W. (eds.): Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 3, 1935–1938, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, pp. 260–302, p. 283.

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There are three modes of circulation of Partum’s works. The first relates to the circulation of objects, images and knowledges within the art world; the second relates to the repetition of Partum’s time-based/process-based works in new contexts for new audiences in the framework of conservation or re-enactment; and the third relates to the circulation of images within the virtual iconosphere.2 Before deliberating on the return of Partum’s art within the professional art field, I would like to briefly consider its actualization outside of the art institution and art discourses. Although Partum’s photographic works and documentation from her performances and their rearrangements have been introduced to contemporary visual culture through historical exhibitions, they have also entered new stages of existence in current online culture. Today, the photographic images made by Partum in the 1970s and 1980s function independently from her performative works within the cycle of permanent reproduction and as a source of new images. In this case, their documentary function is compromised and the relationship between documentation and actual event is rendered irrelevant. Within the exhibitions, these images functioned as indexical traces, but once they escape their art-historical ramifications, they start recirculating as iconic signs. Amelia Jones has argued that “the circuits through which images of self-display travel (currently) are vastly different from those active in the seventies and whatever friction remained in the seventies when women wilfully adopted the structures of fetishism to implode them from within has now disappeared in the frenzied circulation of images in capitalism.3 However, the appropriation of images produced by Partum within her artistic practice is often not reductive or contrary to the artist’s motivations – rather it is an extension of Partum’s feminist politics into the broader field of social activism and academic feminism. Decontextualized photographs function today as images of feminine agency and performative femininity – as active images that deal with the production of fetishes and phantasmatic femininity through technology. For that reason, in recent years Ewa Partum’s art has become a visual resource for feminist politics and activism in Poland. Documentation of Ewa Partum’s works, and especially frames from Tautological Cinema showing the artist’s face with a sealed mouth returning the viewer’s gaze, have been appropriated as images of female agency at the pro-choice feminist protests. Echoes of the iconography created by Partum have reappeared in posters created to visualize the contemporary “problem

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The circulation of Partum’s works within the art market, “a site that competes with feminist discourse in investing women artists’ production with meaning”(Dimitrakaki 2013, p. 35.) is relatively limited and for that reason will not be considered here. Jones 2007, p. 308.

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of a woman”. At the same time, strong images created by Partum in her series SelfIdentification have come to embody and visualise non-violent, weak resistance in Ewa Majewska’s writings.4

The Musealization of the East “Today the so-called misbalance between East and West of Europe is not any more a question of opposition as it was in the past, but East of Europe and West of Europe are today in a relation of repetition.” – Marina Gržinić 5   “It is odd how simple and transparent the world looks today: one single concept of (post)history, a single economic system, a single political model, a single art-system. Either you are already in or you strive to get in.” – Boris Buden6 Considering the historicization and redistribution of Partum’s art that takes place within art institutions such as museums, galleries, biennales and international exhibitions, we can distinguish two regimes: material, related to the circulation and production of objects; and immaterial, related to the production of knowledges. In terms of operations with objects, this is often a process of artification: the transfer of documentation or preserved elements (props) from performances from Partum’s private archive to the public art institutions. As already indicated, the moment in history when Partum’s art entered the global stage corresponded to the political processes that generated a need to reframe East–West relations. Within the various channels of transnational/global redistribution, Partum’s art has been interpreted as critical, historicized and progressive – i.e. synchronized with the Western genealogy of the neo-avant-garde and feminist art movements. Partum has been represented as an innovative artist worthy of her place in art history. The redistribution of Partum’s art in Western Europe and the United States that led to the incorporation of her art into museum collections

4 5 6

Majewska 2017. Gržinić 2009. Buden 2012, p. 135.

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followed a trajectory of the post-socialist debate that problematized the inclusion of Eastern European art into global (Western) art history.7 When mapping Partum’s art in public and corporate collections in the United States (Museum of Modern Art, New York), United Kingdom (Tate Modern, London), France (49 Nord 6 Est – Frac Lorraine, Metz), Austria (Generali Foundation and Sammlung Verbund, Vienna), Spain (Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid), Germany (Staatliche Museen, Berlin) it is worth referring to the statement made in 2013 by the Polish art historian and gallerist Monika Branicka, who argued that: The West finally realized that it used to be very selective in its attitude towards the history of art. They overlooked eighty years and half of Europe. At the same time, the countries behind the Iron Curtain developed in interesting directions and this gap in knowledge, and therefore in collections, is quite huge. We need to make up for the lost time.8 Branicka, who is a founder of a Berlin-based art gallery focused on East-Central European neo-avant-garde and contemporary art, perceives the problem of the absence of Eastern European artists in Western art history as the problem of the selective attitude of the West. She proposes working towards rewriting the history of art by transferring objects (and knowledges) from the East to the West, also in the framework of the art market. A similar standpoint can be detected within the feminist discourse on reinventing the canon of art history. For instance, Camille Morineau argues that “[c]ollecting women artists is and will be the strongest way

7

8

An example of such a debate is the collection of essays Art Beyond Borders: Artistic Exchange in Communist Europe 1945–1989 (2016). In his article published in that volume, Piotr Piotrowski refers to the broader spectrum of post-communist studies, proposing a more global perspective. He argues that “There is no doubt that the year 1989 changed a lot, not only in Eastern Europe. I think that the transformation in our part of the continent and the fall of the authoritarian regimes in South America and South Africa have contributed to what I would call the rise of post-totalitarian or post-authoritarian studies, very different from the popular and booming postcolonial ones. In other words, it is an attempt to deal with something more general than the post-communist condition – a condition that could be provisionally called post-authoritarian. Moreover, and this may be a crucial problem, the year 1989 very deeply remodelled the perception of the world, from binary, operating with clear-cut oppositions, to pluralistic and multidimensional.” See Piotrowski, Piotr: “Nationalising Modernism: Exhibitions of Hungarian and Czechoslovakian Avant-Garde in Warsaw” in Bazin et al. (eds.) 2016, pp. 209–223, p. 218. Branicka, Monika: “This Will Not be a Conversation About Money – Paulina Olszewska discusses the presentation of Polish art abroad with Monika Branicka, co-founder of the Żak Branicka Gallery”, interview by Paulina Olszewska, Museum of Contemporary Art in Kraków, MOCAK Forum, no. 1, 2013, https://en.mocak.pl/this-will-not-be-a-conversation-about-money -paulina-olszewska-discusses-the-presentation-of-polish-art-abroad-with-monika-branicka-c o-founder-of-the-zak-branicka-gallery.

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to build a new narrative and reinvent the canon.”9 However, as Boris Groys, following Adorno, reminds us in the context of the West’s “victory” in the Cold War, the victors always, in one way or another, appropriate the art of the vanquished.10 The condition in which this appropriation takes place is the globalization of capital experienced as culture. It is a condition that produces an extremely competitive working environment where artists function like stakes (held by other players) and brands. Entering global circulation means entering the circuit of permanent exchange. Benjamin Buchloh has emphasized the inherent contradictions within the current condition of culture globalization: he points out the dialectic of the dissemination of art that “includes the possibility of new forms of commodification and blockage, as well as new forms of self-constitution and self-representation.”11 Moreover, what is forgotten in the folds of history and “what remains lying by the wayside” is, as Wim van Mulders emphasizes, often “the most interesting because it is not immediately identifiable, recoverable and consumable.”12 This observation can be applied not only in relation to individual artistic oeuvres, but also in relation to the fragments of these oeuvres that do not fit the current theoretical paradigms or market interests. However, the problem of the potential deactivation of Partum’s art through musealization is not exclusively related to the East–West historical divide and the current conditions of globalisation of culture, but also corresponds to the broader phenomenon of the musealization of ephemeral and conceptual art. Concerned with the current recirculation of Partum’s work and considering the problematic legacy of conceptualism, Aneta Szyłak has discussed the challenges related to the reproduction and modification of the original mediums, formats and techniques of conceptual artworks and the current tendency to locate documentation within the field of art. With these issues in mind, Szyłak writes that “thoughts and ideas have become works, the materialization of which, in the museum context, has suddenly become very important.”13 She concludes that the appropriation of conceptual art by the art system exhausts the anti-form potential and goes against the artists’ anti-reception strategies embedded in these works.14 I would like to reflect upon these problems considering Partum’s ephemeral work in progress, Active Poetry, performed by the artist since the early 1970s. The question I would like to pose here is: Are the contemporary realizations of Active 9 10 11 12 13 14

Camille Morineau in the roundtable discussion “Troubling Canons: Curating and Exhibiting Women’s and Feminist Art” in Iskin (ed.) 2016, p. 267. Groys 2008, p. 68. Buchloh, Benjamin in: “Roundtable: The Predicament of Contemporary Art” in Foster et al. (eds.) 2011, pp. 771–782, p. 780. Mulders, Wim van: “Forgotten in the Folds of History” in Höller 2012, pp. 177–179, p. 177. Szyłak et al. (eds.) 2012/13, p. 13. Ibid.

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Poetry the “new forms of commodification and blockage” or rather “forms of selfconstitution and self-representation”? Active Poetry was conceptualized as a durational piece stretched in time and space that refuses institutionalization. In the current insitutional context where we encouter “the performative aspects of conceptual works”, i.e: “how historical conceptual practices have influenced what and how we think about gallery space”,15 Active Poetry perfectly fits within the institutional context of biennales and other international exhibitions. The genealogy of Active Poetry relates to the work realized by Partum in the framework of a public art institution in socialist Poland. Invited by the prominent Museum Sztuki in Łódź in 1972 to present her works during the International Council of Museums Conference (ICOM), Partum realized Metapoetry (fig. 71) an action involving scattering cardboard cut-out letters inside and outside the museum building. Within this gesture, Partum proposed an encounter with an entropy of art, realizing a work that denigrates itself rather than is preserved by the institution of the museum.16 At the time, Partum was also realizing editions of Active Poetry in urban settings, in Warsaw’s underground passages, and in nature (fig. 74) Recently, Active Poetry has frequently been performed by Partum at various biennales and art festivals, and in international museums and galleries (figs.72-73, 75). In these cases, the work is not conceptualized by the artist as a repetition of the originary event documented in films and photographs, but as a consequent and site-specific edition of the work. Each time, Partum selects fragments of various literary texts related to the place and translates them in front of the audience into white paper letters scattered in the space. Thus, the work establishes the continuity of Partum’s practice: as it connects to the past but, also, exists in the present, it is an event in which different times cross. Recent editions of Active Poetry therefore operate in accordance with both historical and contemporary aesthetic logic. Within its trans-temporal structure, Active Poetry becomes a means for Partum’s self-constitution and self-representation as a neo-avant-garde artist working within the aesthetics of dissent and, at the same time, as a contemporary artist who operates within the field of affective practice. In a recent video interview produced by Tate Modern (2017), Partum speaks about her Active Poetry series.17 She recapitulates the history of the work, mentions its sources, inspirations and intentions, and also shows “how it works”. In front of

15 16

17

Ibid., p. 20. On paradoxical complicity of the creation and destruction of art and vulnerability of the artwork see Caygill, Howard: “The Destruction of Art” in Costello, Diarmuid/ Willsdon, Dominic, (eds.): The Life and Death of Images: Ethics and Aesthetics, London 2008, pp. 162–173. Tate Shots, Ewa Partum – It Is the Obligation of Every Woman to Be a Feminist, Berlin, 2017, https ://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iPGUFOIkzI.

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the camera, the artist scatters cardboard letters all over her apartment. Within this camera action, Partum is not concerned with producing a “work of art” but merely with explaining Active Poetry’s structural logic. “Making” Active Poetry in front of the camera can be compared to the performative presentation of an artistic portfolio during a studio visit. Partum does not fetishize her own presence, gestures, used materials (letters) or Active Poetry’s score. In this camera action Partum reveals that the mystical power Boris Groys attributes to artists – the ability to change objects into art – only works within certain types of connections with art infrastructures.

Operating from a Global Position In the roundtable discussion on contemporary art published in the canon-making publication Art Since 1900, Benjamin Buchloh deliberates on the fact that the neoavant-garde used to be treated seriously in the 1970s. He argues that it was supported, or at least taken seriously, by the state, the museum and the universities.18 This dynamic of recognition was quite the reverse in the context of the Polish neoavant-garde. Neglected as harmless dreamers during socialism, neo-avant-garde artists started to be “treated seriously” by cultural institutions only quite recently. Their practices are and have been institutionalized locally as an effect of the urge to reconstruct the discontinuous history of the present and the efforts to discover and determine the local genealogies of contemporary art. Partum’s practice located outside Poland from 1982 was subject to yet another logic. Initially excluded from the process of historicization that restarted in the 1990s,19 in the following decade it became the object of accelerated canonization after it was “rediscovered” following the retrospective in Karlsruhe in 2001. What helped to establish Partum’s global position as a provider of valuable art-historical objects and narratives was not merely the critical content of her work but also its form, which complies with what Hal Foster defined as the dominant formats of the contemporary art circuit – i.e. “installation art, the projected image/video, the photographic sequence, the chat-room filled with all sorts of texts, documentation, images.”20 How and why Partum’s practice became visible locally and transnationally has been a latent topic of this book, which has conceptualized various exhibitions and

18 19

20

Foster et al. (eds.) 2011, p. 773. Hans Belting points to the fact that “[t]his discussion of a forgotten or lost avant-garde currently serves the reconstruction of the history of modernism, but they were not forgotten; they were rather dismissed in order to keep the picture of modernism clear.” Belting 2009, p. 55. Foster et al. (eds.) 2011, p. 780.

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texts on Partum’s art as agents of this process and questioned the terms and conditions under which Partum’s art was initially excluded and rejected from the dominant local art-historical narratives. Here, I would like to pose a different question and ask about the consequences of the move from the margin to the centre for Partum’s contemporary artistic practice. If the margin is the place of radical resistance,21 what resistance is possible from the centre? In other words, I am interested in how Partum utilizes or mobilizes her new position and location to produce critical and engaged work. To answer this question, I need to refer to more recent events. In the spring of 2017, Ewa Partum was invited to participate in a festival of ephemeral and performance art in Poland. The artist proposed a new work embedded in recent political events. In November 2015, the conservative party won the general election in Poland. The cultural politics of the new government focused on the centralization of art institutions and the subordination of culture to the Catholic-nationalist doctrine. Incidents of censorship became commonplace, as well as personal attacks on cultural producers who did not comply. Major street protests broke out in spring 2017 as the parliament was deliberating on a bill that would criminalize abortion in all cases, including child pregnancy, rape, risk to the mother’s life and lethal defects of the foetus.22 Polish women took to the streets to defend their basic human rights in a gesture of cross-generational solidarity. The symbol of the so-called Black Protest became a black umbrella.23 Due to the large scale of this mass protest, the government temporarily withdrew from working on the legislation, but in the long term, the situation has not been resolved. Partum decided to appropriate the symbol of the Black Protest, a black umbrella, to create an installation at the festival made of a hundred umbrellas in an homage to Polish women. At the same time, the artist performed self-identification with the movement. An integral element of the work consisted of the headline identifying the artist with the protesting women by employing the personal pronoun “we”: Initially, the curator agreed to the proposal, but shortly before the opening of the festival, Partum was urged to withdraw her provocative slogan, which read: “You take away our rights, we will take away your power.” The curator explained that the festival’s organizers were afraid of being “blacklisted” and of indefinitely losing the possibility of public funding. Significantly, the organizers were Partum’s peers and were familiar with the self-censorship that characterized artistic life during

21 22 23

hooks 1989. Polish abortion law is one of the most restrictive in Europe. It forbids abortion in all cases apart from rape, risk to the mother’s life and lethal defects of the foetus. Umbrellas were also used in the protests organized by Polish suffragettes (Emancypantki) in 1918.

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socialism. Piotrowski has argued that it was precisely the centralized financing system in Poland which caused artistic self-censorship that was responsible for the poor quality of the majority of the art produced in the 1970s.24 In her response to the preventive censorship, Partum used her cultural capital, her recognition as a global artist, to enforce the realization of this political work. Partum wrote: Tuesday, 11 of July, 2017 17:21,   > What kind of censorship exists at this festival? > Who is afraid of the authorities’ reaction to my installation that quotes Black Protest and honours the struggle of Polish women for their right to freedom and democracy…? > I was taking my art to the public space as one of the first artists in Poland. > This time, I wanted to incorporate the Polish public space in my art! > I would not have attained such a position in the art world if I was afraid of bureaucrats. > My works realized in the 70s (…) > were also shocking and disturbing for the audience. > If somebody organizes art festivals in order to get the sympathy of authorities – then they should not work with artists with my position. > My works are in the following collections: > MoMA New York, Tate Modern London, Reina Sofia in Madrid, > Museum Vosell, etc. etc. > National Museum and Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź > I have participated in many international exhibitions, to mention just a few: > 18 Sydney Biennale, Australia > La Triennale Paris > Manifesta 7 / Biennale / Trentino, > Le Mouvement / Biennale Switzerland > Currently I’m preparing a work for the 14th Biennale de Lyon [...]25 Partum’s position as a global player enabled her to challenge curatorial authority and, as a consequence, to realize the work that ultimately combined the strategies of criticism and activism. Writing about institutionalization of feminist art history, Amelia Jones argues that “the more one succeeds in infiltrating the system of power, the less radical one’s work can be viewed as being.”26 Ewa Partum, by adjusting her 24 25 26

Piotrowski 1991. Text used with the permission of Ewa Partum. Amelia Jones quoted in Dimitrakaki 2013, p. 26.

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strategies to the new set of rules in the field of art, has managed to escape the logic of depoliticization and “leakage of radicalism” in her art.27 The imperative that organized (and organizes) Partum’s work was and is to agitate against something or someone. That something may be the academy or tradition; that something may be “a master whose teaching and example, whose prestige and authority, are considered wrong or harmful.”28 In Partum’s archive, there are several undated preparatory notes from the late 1970s and early 1980s on different topics in which the word kontestacja (contestation) appears in two different contexts: as “kontestacja systemu oceny sztuki”, (contestation of the system of art evaluation) and as “antypatryjalchalna kontestacja”, (anti-patriarchal contestation). The trajectory of Partum’s practice led from agitating against artistic tradition (she was educated as a painter) and agitating against social conventions (the patriarchy) to agitating against actors in a position of power and power of actors that disseminate and mainstream works of art and their meanings. In this book, I referred on a couple of occasions to portraits of Partum, produced by other artists, that have functioned or could be interpreted as commentaries about the genealogies of this artistic practice and traces of its reception. To conclude, I would like to refer to an image of Partum produced and arranged by the artist herself: a photograph taken in 1984 showing the naked artist with her arms spread in front of the Berlin Wall (East–West Shadow). I would like to focus exclusively on the iconography of the image (fig.76), decontextualizing it from the framework of East–West Shadow’s narrative and recontextualizing it within a broader framework of Western visual culture. I perceive this image as a screen that recalls certain paradigmatic historical iconographic motives, Deleuzian clichés floating images which circulate in the external world, but which also penetrate each one of us and constitute our internal world, so that everyone possesses only psychic clichés by which he thinks and feels, is thought and is felt, being himself a cliché among the others in the world which surrounds him.29 Michael Kramp writes that “clichés function as producing-machines – both in our material reality and in our psyches; like always-ready thought ideas, they secure and stabilize intellectual, artistic or corporeal energies, and also serve to inhibit

27 28 29

Ibid. Poggioli, Renato:The Theory of the Avant-Garde, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1968, pp. 25–26. Deleuze, Gilles:Cinema 1: The Movement Image, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986, pp. 208–9.

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new creative relationships or forces.”30 Visual clichés of exposed bodies that supposedly transgress corporeality to symbolize spirituality or universal rationality materialize in iconographic motives such as the crucified Christ, Saint Sebastian, or Vitruvian Man. In the composition of the East–West Shadow, Partum simultaneously incorporates and transforms these visual clichés by rejecting a central perspective in favour of a lateral viewpoint, representing a gendered body that casts a shadow. It casts a shadow not only on the Wall but also on the visual tradition of the unmarked, disinterested body by denouncing it as an ideological and historical construct.

30

Kramp, Michael: “Unburdening Life, or the Deleuzian Potential of Photography” in Rhizomes, no. 23, 2012, http://www.rhizomes.net/issue23/kramp/.

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Illustrations

Figure 1 Front cover of the catalogue Ewa Partum. Works 1970-1980, Galerie Wewerka, Berlin 1983. Portrait of Ewa Partum by Wolf Vostell Figures 2-6 Ewa Partum, Diploma Work, Warsaw’s Academy of Fine Arts, 1970 Figure 7 Ewa Partum, Active Poetry, Warsaw 1972 Figures 8-10 Ewa Partum, Active Poetry, Sopot 1971 Figure 11 Ewa Partum, performance at the opening of the exhibition SelfIdentification, Galeria Mała PSP-ZPAF, Warsaw 1980 Figure 12 Ewa Partum, performance Women, Marriage Is Against You, Galeria ON Poznań 1980 Figures 13-15 Ewa Partum, A Field Arranged by Imagination, Galeria Współczesna, Warsaw 1970 Figure 16 Ewa Partum, Eiffel Tower. A Presence of the Height, Galeria Adres, Łódź 1972 Figure 17 Ewa Partum, poem by ewa, my touch is a touch of a woman, 1971 Figure 18 Ewa Partum, poem by ewa, with daughter Berenika, 1974 Figure 19 Ewa Partum, poem by ewa, new horizon is a wave, 1972 Figure 20 Ewa Partum, poem by ewa, new horizon is a wave, 2006 Figure 21 Ewa Partum, Thought Concert, West Berlin 1984 Figure 22 Ewa Partum, poem by ewa, my idea is read, 1986 Figures 23-26 Ewa Partum, Conceptual Exercises, 1972 Figures 27-30 Ewa Partum, Conceptual Exercises, 1972 Figures 31-32 Ewa Partum, Presence/Absence, Sopot 1965 Figures 33-35 Ewa Partum, Presence/Absence, Sopot 1965 Figures 36-37 Ewa Partum, The Luncheon on the Grass, after Manet, Elbląg 1971 Figure 38 Ewa Partum, Tautological Cinema, 1971-73 Figures 39-40 Ewa Partum working on Tautological Cinema, Galeria Adres, Łódź 1973 Figure 41 Ewa Partum, Drawing TV, 1976 Figures 42-46 Ewa Partum, Self-Identification, 1980 Figure 47 Ewa Partum, performance at the opening of the exhibition SelfIdentification, Galeria Mała PSP-ZPAF, Warsaw 1980

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Figures 48-50 Ewa Partum, action Change, Galeria Adres, Łódź 1974 Figure 51 Ewa Partum, action Emphatic Posters, Warsaw 1979 Figures 52-53 Ewa Partum, performance Change: My Problem Is a Problem of a Woman, Galeria Na Piętrze, Łódź 1979 Figure 54 Ewa Partum, performance Wedding Attire, Galeria Labirynt, Lublin 1981 Figure 55 Ewa Partum, performance Stupid Woman 2, IX International Artists Meetings BWA, Kraków 1981 Figure 56 Ewa Partum, performance Stupid Women 5, Galerie Wewerka, West Berlin 1983 Figure 57 Ewa Partum, performance Hair Concert, Galerie Wewerka, West Berlin 1983 Figure 58 Ewa Partum, performance Pirouette, Galerie Dialog, West Berlin 1984 Figure 59 Ewa Partum, camera performance Hommage á Leonardo, West Berlin 1986 Figure 60 Ewa Partum, Marriage Disasters, 1987 Figure 61 Ewa Partum, Change, 1974 Figures 62-64 Ewa Partum, performance From Subject to Object of Art, Galerie Gudrun Schulz, West Berlin 1988 Figure 65 Ewa Partum, Sky West, Sky East, West Berlin 1984 Figures 66-67 Ewa Partum, Performance Pearls, Museo Vostell, Malpartida de Cáceres 2006 Figures 68-69 Ewa Partum, The Legality of Space, Łódź 1971 Figure 70 Ewa Partum, Private Performance, West Berlin 1985 Figure 71 Ewa Partum, Metapoetry, Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź 1972 Figure 72 Ewa Partum, Active poetry, 18th Sydney Biennale, Sydney 2012 Figure 73 Ewa Partum, Active poetry, Artist on Vacation Art Residency, Poreč 2015 Figure 74 Ewa Partum, Active poetry, 1971-1973 Figure 75 Ewa Partum, Active poetry, Alternativa, Palermo 2015 Figure 76 Ewa Partum, East-West Shadow, West Berlin 1984   All Images Courtesy of © Ewa Partum, ARTUM Foundation, ewa partum museum

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