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Theft and Destruction

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Theft and Destruction Arsenal Gallery in Białystok February 21 – April 9, 2020 Theft and Destruction Artists: Agnieszka Brzeżańska, Rafał Bujnowski, Wanda Czełkowska, Fashion House Limanka, Edward Dwurnik (The MOCAK Collection), Olga Dziubak, Jakub Gliński, Tomasz Machciński, Petr Pavlensky, Julia Poziomecka, Mariola Przyjemska, Karol Radziszewski, Daniel Rycharski, Dominika Święcicka, Julita Wójcik, Janek Zamoyski and selected works from the Collection II of the Arsenal Gallery: Mirosław Bałka, Oskar Dawicki, Maciej Kurak, Robert Kuśmirowski, Zbigniew Libera, Piotr Łakomy, Anna Molska, Odili Donald Odita, Ewa Partum, Aleksandra Polisiewicz, Rewizja, Jacek Sempoliński, Janek Simon, Marek Sobczyk Curator: Michał Łukaszuk Collaboration on the part of the Gallery: Ewa Chacianowska Curatorial consultation: Ewa Tatar Michał Łukaszuk IMAGES CONDEMNED What do pictures want? W.J.T. Mitchell’s question exposes the hypocrisy of modern-day societies fond of perceiving themselves as rational, yet with an approach to images seemingly suggesting that they continue concealing atavistic traces of animism or totemism (footnote: a culmination of animist fears in popular culture is projected in the film Velvet Buzzsaw – wherein animated artworks murder inhuman collectors and art critics with an inclination for a fetishist and/or capitalist take on their aura). Since images are alive, they can also take action, desire, and tempt. Iconoclasts – whose five types have been listed by Bruno Latour in Iconoclash – surrender to temptation by images. They include iconophiles unable to accept the hegemony of a single image (idolatry), believers in the vital surplus of mobile presentations subject to immortal replication – or those who refrain from negating all images, harming only those close to their adversaries (see The Rainbow). By attacking representations, they render them invisible. I would be inclined to expand Latour’s typology to include another type of iconoclast: the one who believes the life of images is immortal, and resists life thus perceived. Harnessing images may arise from the painful discovery of the absolute disembodiment of alienated authority. Such trauma may be remedied by seeking the body of power in images portraying it, thus rendering it corporeal – and mor- tal, or susceptible to mutilation. The intoxicating aesthetic of the performance of punishing and destroying images may have the power of ritual cleansing, or of creating a new revolutionary order; comprise an irremovable scar of flagrant deficiency, or the gorgeous void of a calamity (see controversies surrounding Karlheinz Stockhausen’s comments re- garding the WTC attack); the force of an empowering gesture – yet also the violence of terror, vandalism, and madness. Instead of leading to therapeutic processing, it carries the radical death of an image within: cold, funereal, and silent. In such context, auto-aggression against one’s own body engaged in by performative artists is a gesture depriving au- thority of all power over corporeal mortality, the body systemically educated and disciplined. Auto-aggression becomes a liberating performance of replaying the trauma, according to personal rules and against one’s own bulk. Thievery is a form of destruction. Having stolen a French politician’s sex tape and made it public (an act he was im- mediately detained for), Petr Pavlensky spread the virus of concealed images across the system. By initiating their circulation, he momentarily froze the system. Authorities have the right to subject us to surveillance, our privacy – to continuous monitoring, with impunity. Once we reverse the gesture, our actions will get us arrested. Data, identities, ideas and media can all be stolen, as can information necessarily kept classified and thus protected against public ex- posure. Visibility can be stolen as well (Google Wikileaks, Snowden, visibility policy). Artworks are stolen as well. But are they the only subject of theft? Let us quote Mitchell: […] art museums are a kind of hybrid form of religious temple and bank in which commodity fetishes are displayed for rituals of public veneration and are designed to produce surplus aesthetic and economic value. [W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images, 2005, p. 33] The museum and gallery context augments the equity of an artwork’s economic value added, fetishising its aura, fall- ing victim to its own acceleration. It generates an object of desire: the image craves being harnesses and possessed (see the notorious theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre). Having lost its sacrosanct artefact, the museum is exposed to ridicule, its authority mutilated, humiliated, castrated. Let us reiterate the question: what do pictures want? In a universe parallel to these deliberations, they may – in con- formity to another hypothesis by Mitchell – expect a grand total of nothing from us. Yet let us attempt a submersion into the desires expressed by some images. ★ In 2013, fire consumed art studios in the Warsaw’s Praga district. The scale of destruction was brutal, the element completely obliterating Karol Radziszewski’s studio. In 2017, Czułość gallery in the Old Town in Warsaw caught fire. Flames blazing from the electric installation rose to the ceiling. Covered in soot, Janek Zamoyski’s works had to be evacuated along with the gallery; years later, they found a substitute home: the Arsenal Gallery in Białystok. Another venue fell victim to fire in 2019, Rafał Bujnowski’s studio this time round. The inferno broke out at night, gaining such force over a mere several minutes that it took the fire brigade to put it out. While some works could be salvaged, others were scarred. (Footnote: fire consumed Mirosław Bałka’s studio in 1993 as well.) Marek Kijewski brutally assailed Mariola Przyjemska’s works in 1991, stabbing them with a kitchen knife. Julita Wójcik’s Rainbow burned a total of seven times under recurrent attacks. In 2012, Włodzimierz Umaniec, also known as Vladimir Umanets, defaced Mark Rothko’s painting in London, signing it with his own name in ink, and adding a radical yellowism manifesto line. Removing it would remain art conservators’ nightmare over the next 20 months. In the year 2000, Daniel Olbrychski acted out in the spotlight of TV cameras at Piotr Uklański’s exhibition The Nazis held at Warsaw’s Zachęta Gallery, taking a slash with a sabre preserved from the film set of The Deluge. His victim? The image of Karl Kremer, the character portrayed by the actor in Claude Lelouch’s Les Uns et les Autres (1981). That same year, at the same place, deputy Witold Tomczak destroyed Maurizio Cattelan’s sculpture La nona ora, removing a meteorite weighing down the effigy of Pope John Paul II. Four years later, at the Arsenal Gallery in Białystok: [...] a recording of senator Jan Szafraniec’s comment on the current exhibition WWW.KAŁUCKI.FREE.ART.PL was taking place between the hours of 12:00 and 01:00 p.m. Filmed by TV cameras, deputy Andrzej Fedorowicz, who accompanied the senator, scrawled over a part of the realisation titled Wrrr.pl, using a ballpoint pen. Two works [by Radosław Szlaga – author’s comment] were damaged: a painting, and an object depicting an animal cage – as the Notification of Damage to the Exhibition (official memo drafted by a gallery employee) reads. In September 1939, incendiary missiles damaged a part of the roof and a section of the German painting exhibition at the National Museum in Warsaw. German troops and officials, i.a. Alfred Schellenberg, Josef Mühlmann (plunderer of artworks at the behest of Hans Frank) and Dagobert Frey (Austrian art historian who had surveyed the Museum before the war with intent to steal) broke into the building. The Nazis began demolishing the Museum after the out- break of the Warsaw Rising. Museum director Stanisław Lorentz kept a journal of unceremonious plunder and ap- palling destruction; placing his diary in two empty wine bottles, he hid them away in a rubbish dump at the entrance to the building. Selected excerpts follow: August 18th I found Matejko’s Sigismund Bell broken in two, in two different rooms. Trying to arrange the paintings in some sort of order, I collected pieces and picked up scrolls, moving them from entryways [...] Kondracka removed a tap- estry someone put down in the captain’s room as a doormat. In the evening, Dawidziak saw the car chauffeur [...] cut a Saxon Room painting out of the frame, roll it up, and take it away. [...] August 21st [...] at 05:00 a.m., Juszczak, Dawidziak and I began by gathering anything left in Grein’s office in the Church Room, and putting all the piles of ornamental chests in the Saxon Room in order. It turns out, soldiers used to relieve them- selves into the heaps of chests. [...] August 27th In the afternoon, the director concluded that the Krasiński Museum collections had been plundered again, troops having shot arrows from the Armoury bows at Winterhalter’s giant portrait of the Countess Krasińska with her children; they made 31 holes, 11 arrows still protruding from the piece. [...] September 3rd [...] in several other rooms, troops broke ears, arms, etc. off sculptures, drawing and painting on faces and bodies. [...] September 14th [...] The director found one painting – Krzyżanowski’s portrait of a woman with a cat on a sofa – in a pile of hu- man filth, considerably damaged. [...] [S. Lorentz, quoted from: J. Dehnel, Proteusz, czyli o przemianach (Proteus, or on Change), 2015, pp. 154–158, own translation] Three months after Warsaw was liberated, on May 3rd 1945, the exhibition Warsaw Accuses opened at the National Museum. The exhibition was intended to portray German crime against Polish culture, their plundering and destruction of art- works in Warsaw under Nazi occupation in particular. It did not take much to find many artefacts, we simply picked them up from the floor of museum hall floors, of our makeshift storage facilities. We salvaged torn paintings and those ripped apart by bullets, not only those used as window screens, but also ones used by German soldiers as playthings.
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