Betreff:
REPORT: Jakub Gawkowski on the rise of paranoia and populism in Poland
Datum:
Sun, 04 Dec 2022 15:01:18 +0000
Von:
art-agenda <art-age...@mailer.e-flux.com>
What if a contemporary art center, a space usually conceived as a laboratory
for progressive ideas, …
—REPORTS
This Machine is Broken: the Making of Populist
Contemporary Art in Warsaw
by Jakub Gawkowski
What if a contemporary art center, a space usually conceived as a laboratory
for progressive ideas, became the opposite: a tool for
promoting xenophobia, exclusion, and far-right propaganda? Under director Piotr
Bernatowicz, the once-renowned Ujazdowski Castle CCA
in Warsaw has pivoted to align with the values of the governing, populist Law
and Justice Party that appointed him. Its latest show,
“The Influencing Machine,” curated by Aaron Moulton and featuring regional and
international artists from Chris Burden to Constant
Dullaart, claims to tell the story of how the Soros Centers for Contemporary
Art (SCCA) that sprang up across Eastern Europe in the
1990s were instruments of propaganda. More than anything, however, it shines a
light on Polish nationalist populism and its
conflicted, contradictory cultural-political mindset.
Since becoming director of Ujazdowski in 2020, Bernatowicz’s controversial
program has sought to prove that contemporary art can be a
place for conservative and nationalist values, and that an avant-garde might
look back to the past, instead of forward to the future.
The role of an experienced curatorial team in developing the program has been
taken by loyal collaborators who not only lacked their
expertise but even took to warning the public of the deleterious effects of
contemporary art.(1) Thus, at the beginning of his tenure,
Ujazdowski invited the Hungarian nationalist band Hungarica to play and
cancelled planned events with the grassroots initiative
“Anti-fascist year” while the non-conforming performative, discursive, and
queer programming of previous directors has been replaced
by debates with titles such as “Antifa against freedom” and “Culture in the
European Union: a space of freedom or a tool for social
engineering?”(2) Recent acquisitions include a neon by Polish artist Jacek
Adamas (Tonfa, 2018) that, as the deputy director
explained, alludes to the “dangers of LGBT ideology.”(3) Recent programming has
given platforms to the Swedish artist Dan Park, who
has previously been jailed for hate speech, and Uwe Max Jensen, who at the
opening performed a parody of George Floyd’s murder in
blackface accompanied by the Confederate flag (Between the world and me, 2021).
This in a politically divided country in which women’s
and LGBTQ rights are constantly being violated, and where a racist border
regime leaves people to die in the forest.(4) In light of
this, “The Influencing Machine”—with its international artist list and
white-cube aesthetic—looks like a decorative way to legitimize
the rest of the program.
The institution’s new and illiberal agenda has led to unexpected dialogues and
alliances with the Western art world, including with
Moulton, a Los Angeles-born former Berlin gallery owner with an interest in
occultism. “The Influencing Machine”—a first iteration of
which was presented at Nicodim Gallery in Bucharest in 2019—promises a critical
reevaluation of cultural politics in the region after
the fall of the Berlin Wall and the role of art as instrument of soft power.
It’s true that the influence of George Soros’s Open
Society Foundation and other Western funders in shaping post-Communist Eastern
Europe requires deep and critical examination.(5) Such
a re-evaluation could initiate important reflections on the advent of
neoliberalism in the region, the construction of new social and
political hierarchies, and the distribution of economic privilege. But by
focusing on George Soros as a figure rather than on the
political and economic system of which his centers were part, or on the
institutional ecology which they produced in the region, the
exhibition becomes little more than a pawn in the culture wars and an attempt
to position the reactionary politics of Ujazdowski’s
program in an international intellectual context.
Through works from the 1990s to the present that touch upon the relations
between art, economy, and politics, as well as a few pieces
directly connected to the history of SCCA and a handful of archival materials
and interviews, the exhibition balances a critical
analysis of the mission of “the SCCA Network” with a deep-dive into the
conspiratorial thinking that today surrounds it. It tries to
be witty and postmodern by relativizing notions of truth and power—“all
exhibitions are propaganda,” the text reads—and then goes on
to conflate Soros’s inspiration by Karl Popper’s vision of an “open society”
with the caricature of him as a great manipulator who by
promoting diversity and multiculturalism seeks to annihilate traditional
society.(6)
The exhibition’s main problem is that those positions are neither symmetrical
nor in good faith. The supposedly politically neutral
curatorial position—arguing that art is always “used to control society,”
without saying to what end this particular exhibition is
working—the fascination with New Age aesthetics and network theory, and a
collection of portraits of Soros displayed at the center of
the show, might have made for a relatively harmless provocation somewhere else.
But not in the Ujazdowski and not now, as the Polish
government curtails the rights of women and the LGBTQ+ community. One wonders
whether participating artists such as Christian
Jankowski and Eva and Franco Mattes are aware of the context in which their
work is displayed (next, for example, to the antisemitic
conspiracy theorist David Dees). While some of the Western artists might
conceivably be ignorant of the situation in Poland and the
toxicity of this project, the presence of artists from the region such as János
Brückner, Anetta Mona Chisa and Lucia Tkacova, and
Ciprian Mureșan is more troubling.
The show makes a connection between the socially engaged artistic practices
nourished by the SCCA and the neoliberal market, in which
the former created the space for the latter. The curator refers to the
exhibition’s mission in terms of decolonization, but it is he
who comes with colonial assumptions: contemporary art existed in the region
before SCCA funding enabled a generation of artists and
curators to develop their own projects and ideas in context-specific ways, from
Budapest to Almaty. To claim that a generation of
Eastern Europeans has been manipulated to serve a foreign agenda to facilitate
economic transformation, and not because of their own
historical experiences, convictions, and practices—such as the local histories
of unofficial art which SCCA researched—is to treat
these cultural workers as if they had no agency over their own destinies. It’s
especially strange to present this in Poland, where the
Soros-funded Foundation for Contemporary Art existed only for two years without
realizing any substantial projects: most of the
country’s radical art after the economic transformation was presented either by
grassroots initiatives or in public, state-funded
institutions, including the Ujazdowski.
While Soros’s influence in the region, as with every philanthropic Western
presence, can and should be analyzed in relation to forms
of neoliberal soft power—and I write this as an alumnus of the Soros-funded
Central European University in Budapest—the materials
gathered here are not substantial enough to do so. The exhibition proudly
claims to include “a large archive about the entire SCCA
network that allows first-time research,” but much more thorough research on
the subject already exists; some of these books are even
displayed next to the “archive.” Some things seem directly to contradict the
show’s thesis. An interview in which Suzy Meszoly,
executive director of the Soros Foundation turned spiritual healer, talks about
her relationship with Soros goes little way towards
helping viewers understand the economic context of his network. More than that,
her suggestion that it was she who convinced Soros of
the importance of contemporary art, thus initiating the creation of the SCCAs,
undermines the assertion that the network is the
expression of some grand propagandizing masterplan by the Hungarian-American
businessman. The exhibition seems led by cynicism and
prejudice rather than research.
It was the ruthless free-market neoliberalism fueled by the West in the 1990s,
and the frustration of those it left behind, that
allowed populists to gain power across the region, and the world, in the 2010s.
But this show does not even attempt critically to
revise this history. Instead, we are confronted with multiple portrayals of
Soros by, among others, Adrian Ghenie, Şerban Savu,
Hortensia Mi Kafchin and Jon McNaughton, making him and his appearance—and not
his financial or political agenda—the focus. It is not
irrelevant that Soros, who is Jewish, is presented as financier mastermind of
some vast conspiracy in a country troubled by historical
and contemporary antisemitism. While in Hungary Viktor Orbán’s government has
set up Soros as a hate figure (playing on antisemitic
sentiment), he is not particularly well-known in Poland, so it’s tempting to
conclude that the show in Ujazdowski has nothing to do
with revisiting the past or even the present, but rather with creating a
narrative. Populism feeds on a fundamental opposition between
“good people” and a demonized “elite,” and that’s why both conspiracy and New
Age spirituality fit into the picture here—the world
reduced to a cosmic struggle between good and evil.
In the Polish art community, discussion of this weak and confused exhibition
has been almost nonexistent due to the widespread
unwillingness to give any attention to Bernatowicz’s program. Not only that,
but with the war in Ukraine, humanitarian crisis on the
Polish-Belarusian border, and the accelerating economic crisis, another lousy
attack on the ideas of Open Society and George Soros
feels outdated regardless of what side of the culture war you are on. The
façade of Ujazdowski displays a Polish flag above the
entrance, and two huge prints on its sides that refer to the invasion of Poland
by Germany and Russia in 1939. Playing on historical
sentiment and adopting the role of victim are common strategies for the
nationalist right in Poland, which likes to insist that it is
threatened by both Moscow and Berlin (or, rather, Brussels). And yet the
commitment of these seemingly anti-Putinist figures to
fighting the “moral corruption” of the West, and its use of conspiratorial
arguments to justify its illiberal, xenophobic, and
anti-LGBTQ position, only aligns them with the views of the Kremlin.
(1) Curator Krystyna Różańska-Gorgolewska speaking on Telewizja wPolsce as part of a
discussion entitled "Modern Art. How does it
affect young people?" in November 2020
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=464&v=sflAvS8kTjM&feature=emb_title
(2) Hungarica’s concert was boycotted and cancelled after a backlash. For the
statement from “The Anti-fascist year” see: “Open letter
of The Anti-fascist Year regarding censorship at the Centre for Contemporary
Art Ujazdowski Castle,” L'Internationale Online (March
2020),https://www.internationaleonline.org/opinions/1009_open_letter_of_the_anti_fascist_year_regarding_censorship_at_the_centre_for_contem
porary_art_ujazdowski_castle/.
(3) “In Poland Museum Director’s Anti-gay Acquisition, Critics Find Ominous
Portent,” Artforum (September 2020),
https://www.artforum.com/news/in-poland-museum-director-s-antigay-acquisition-critics-find-ominous-portent-83916.
(4) “Poland starts building wall through protected forest at Belarus border,”
The Guardian (January 2022),
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/27/poland-starts-building-wall-through-protected-forest-at-belarus-border.
(5) Open Society Foundations (OSF) was created as Open Society Institute in
1993 by George Soros to support his foundations in Central
and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in advancing justice, education,
public health, and independent media. Today, OSF is a
grantmaking network active in more than 120 countries around the world. The
group's name was inspired by Karl Popper's 1945 book The
Open Society and Its Enemies. See: “The Open Society Foundations and George
Soros,” Open Society Foundations (December 2020),
https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/newsroom/open-society-foundations-and-george-soros.
(6) “The Influencing Machine,” Ujazdowski,
https://u-jazdowski.pl/en/programme/exhibitions/maszyna-wplywu.
Jakub Gawkowski is a curator and art historian who works at the Muzeum Sztuki
in Łódź.
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