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. [S. Kozakiewicz, quoted from: J. Dehnel, op. cit, p. 172, own translation] The exhibition was shocking. The surviving head of the monument to Mickiewicz, decapitated by bomb; mutilated works of art; empty frames; shattered artefact storage chests; burned manuscripts, documents, books. To Nazis, art was a valuable medium of projecting their own ideology as well as a dangerous tool of propaganda cru- sades. Pursuant to a decree of June 30th 1937, new president of the Reich Chamber for the Visual Arts Adolf Ziegler was authorised:

[…] to select and secure for an exhibition works of German degenerate art since 1910, both painting and sculpture, which are now in collections owned by the German Reich, individual regions, or local communities […] [J. Goebbels, June 30, 1937 decree issued to all German museums, cited in S. Barron, ‘1937: Modern Art and Politics in Prewar Germany’, in: “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, ed. S. Barron, 1991, p. 19] Sixteen thousand works of art were sold or destroyed. In 1937, an exhibition of degenerate art was organised in Mu- nich, pieces on display representing cubism, dadaism, primitivism, post-impressionism, fauvism, part of the surreal- ism, expressionism, abstractionism, and the Bauhaus. The exhibition was originally named Entartete Kunst. Marek Sobczyk would begin exploring the label in 2006. Having visited Mussolini, Hitler was inspired to establish a museum founded on breathtaking thievery, selecting his home town of Linz as its seat, designed to embody the ideological vision of the Third Reich’s future triumph. The Nazis were planning to transform the Polish capital into a similar model city. The planned assembly of the new order has re- mained a never-realised architectonic phantasmagoria of a new Warsaw (portrayed in Aleksandra Polisiewicz’ Wartopia I). Matters of theft and destruction have become the focus of hazy complications in the painting practice of Edward Dwurnik. To quote from an interview with the artist: We engaged in an experiment once. Joanna [Mieszko – author’s comment] painted the entire piece. A client walked in, concluded that what he was looking at was a typical Dwurnik, and bought it. Great. (laughs) Well, I did sign the painting anyway. And which painting was that? Mine. All of them are mine, signed front and back. This only happened once? It didn’t just happen, it’s happening all the time. (laughs) I do ask for help from time to time. I once asked Rafał Olbiński to paint clouds for me. I thought he would, because had he asked me, I would have painted whatever he wanted. But he took offence. So I painted my own clouds – identical ones. I also tend to buy paintings by other art- ists, just to have an undercoat: the most difficult thing for a painter is to face blank white canvas and start paint- ing. It becomes easier once you can paint over something already there. This is how I painted over Wróblewski, Sasnal, Korolkiewicz, just to mention a few. Some Turkish guy bought my Sasnal; the Wróblewski went to Andrzej Starmach; the first thing he said was that he would remove my layer of paint. I splattered the Korolkiewicz so horri- bly that I began to feel bad about it myself, and ordered the conservator to remove my paint. I am planning to hold an exhibition of works I painted over in the past. [‘Fabryka Dwurnika’ (Dwurnik’s Factory), Kamil Broszko and Marzena Tataj in conversation with Edward Dwurnik, Teraz Polska, https://magazynterazpolska.pl/pl/a/ fabryka-dwurnika-kopia-cf5469 (accessed on February 18th 2020), own translation] The artist’s daughter Pola Dwurnik wrote to me in a private letter: Artists he added to or painted over: Sasnal (“Mościce”), Materka (painting in the MOCAK collection), Wyspiański’s prints, myself (my banknote), Marek Firek (painting showing the famous Ładnie Group), Korolkiewicz (when in conservation, a project that began in dad’s lifetime), Matecki (I have no idea where it is), and two old paintings: one socialist realism piece, and one from the interwar period, a portrait of a soldier, but neither mum nor I can re- call the artists’ names. there was one other socialist realism piece, by Krajewski… But I don’t know where it is That soldier was by Wlastimil Hofman But dad’s paintjob was rather terrible, maybe it’s better we don’t find the piece… And I would also like to confirm that Dwurnik over Wróblewski is a myth Also, dad would never touch Wróblewski’s work – he valued him greatly. Dwurnik obscures the boundaries of artwork authorship, amusing himself with its aura. All that remains is to ask the following question: Is It Important Who’s Hiding Behind the Painting? In his Portraits of Well-Known People series, Machciński morphs into iconic images which had suffered recurrent as- sault. In stealing the identities of others, he develops his own – fluid and multi-incarnational, reflected in the mirror mosaic of culturally fixed images. The artist proceeds to provoke, seduce, or throw us off the trail – or can it be that he is mirroring our own fantasies, wherein we unconsciously self-redefine under the spell of his (alien) perception? An oligarch’s bedroom. In all probability, this is where Venus and Cupid by Lucas Cranach the Elder could be found. Lena Morska, a Cold War diva of the stage and intelligence services recruited by the Soviets, her story traced and doc- umented by Olga Dziubak, played a major role in the process of shipping the painting embezzled during World War Two. The diptych by the Revision group projects a similar mood. Acts of iconoclasm take place in a mysterious collec- tor’s den. Dominika Święcicka shows a mock-up of a dream park, home to toppled monuments to Lenin, Saddam Hussein busts shattered to smithereens by hammers, WTC tower debris, paintings removed from exhibitions because of the controversy they triggered, stolen artefacts, and remnants of Palmyrene sculptures. In 1959, Gustav Metzger proclaimed his Auto-Destructive Art manifesto. The artist purposely targeted his own works with destruction (e.g. by spraying them with acid), discovering a deeply creative form of contemplation and contestation in such aesthetic expression. Power momentarily triumphed over obliteration, In 1960, Jean Tinguely showed his Hom- age to New York: A self-constructing and self-destroying work of art. Wanda Czełkowska sawed the head of one of her sculptures in half, revealing the raw frame of the scaffolding, a flagrant beautiful void staring across from the object. Czełkowska’s Head steps ahead of natural destruction, engaging in a much more perverse game with damage. Jacek Sempoliński was another artist prone to destroying his own canvases, an act he interpreted as a consistent extension of the conceptual practice of the slowly declining status of monochromatism. Suffice to mention The Skull, for example. Violence committed by authorities against the body – through its normalisation or breakdown – remains a theme of performative studies explored not only by Viennese actionists, who – by engaging in brutal auto-interference against their own bodies – proceeded to play out and de-stigmatise trauma – but also by the Destruction in Art Symposium movement (1966). Yoko Ono revolutionised and constructively distorted the artist-spectator relation in her perfor- mance Cut Piece (1964). In 1971, Chris Burden was purposely shot by his assistant, an act which became quite the rad- ical cognitive scandal among viewers, who in all probability proceeded to impassively switch between TV channels choc a bloc full of gunfire, wartime gunfire included, the moment they got home from the gallery. Auto-aggression and self-attack, mutilating one’s own form may be an alarming act of liberation from oppressive authorities, intent on projecting and controlling the human body. In Pavlensky’s actions, performance has broken out from safe gallery con- text and begun manifesting in direct confrontation with the powers that be. Jakub Gliński explores the boundaries of his own corporeality, commanding spectators to reflect on the aesthetic comfort of viewing another’s pain. The BURDEN blouse, which you can try on at our store, is an excellent example of how we combine our two biggest passions: theft and trashiness – declares the Fashion House Limanka. The collective’s fashion collection which makes use of pieces owned by the Museum of Art in Łódź, transforms and appropriates the sacral idea of an artwork aura (notably, modern-day history of art accounts for the existence of the appropriation art movement). A vital force of mystification and irony, plagia- rism is magnificently revealed in Oskar Dawicki’s Master Thesis. Piotr Łakomy’s sculpture hovers on the antipodes of the Fashion House Limanka practice: he has breathed aura into scrap metal (footnote: attempts were made to scrap a piece by Richard Nonas in Łódź, the act ultimately resulting in a court case). In his Masters, Zbigniew Libera shows how to pilfer monopoly for the truth and knowledge of an information medium. Robert Kuśmirowski, who started out as a brilliant copyist of objects, is perfect at falsifying hoax documents. Similar fraudulent papers were frequently used to bestow credibility upon counterfeit works, and sell them as genuine items on the black market. At the end of the course, we held a rather extraordinary exhibition (Crap Shoot), one big demolition at de Appel, with a variety of eccentric works, [...] Maurizio Cattelan stole another artist’s display from the Bloom Gallery managed by Annet Gelink and Diana Stigter. We had to organise a delivery van for him to transport the trophy – Crap Shoot co-curator Adam Szymczyk confessed to Dwutygodnik. On a related note, Cattelan was caught in the act and detained. A group of men in balaclavas entered a gallery as part of a performative action, destroying one of the art installations with baseball bats. The theft and demolition at de Appel made headlines. Kazimir Malevich made one of the most radical gestures in the history of art. By reducing representation to a black square on a field of white, he negated the primacy of representation in visual culture. Variations on the gesture, in themselves an emancipation-based appropriation of suprematism – have been proposed by Anna Molska, Agnieszka Brzeżańska and Ewa Partum. All artists remain in dialogue with the black square. Alexander Brener disregarded the mystic potential of such art, reducing Malevich’s oeuvre to the market category of capital. He was jailed for a term of five months for spraying a dollar sign in green on the White Cross on a white background, part of the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum collection. The act begs a question: what is thievery, or was it destruction? Erasing Willem de Kooning’s drawing is the other iconic act of iconoclasm, committed by Robert Rauschenberg; he went down to the eminent artist’s studio with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, bragging that he can erase any painting. De Kooning promptly went through his portfolio, choosing a drawing he would miss, crayon, pencil, ink and charcoal on paper, difficult to erase. Rauschenberg succeeded in removing the sketch in two months; his work, framed, and in- scribed with a mimeographed caption (by another artist, Jasper Johns) reading ERASED de KOONING DRAWING ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG 1953, caused considerable ferment in the New York avant-garde community. Mirosław Bałka offered his sculpture (white dog) to fellow artist Stefan Ficner. Upon visiting him some time later at his Poznań flat, he found Ficner to be keeping the sculpture in the aquarium. Falling in love with the concept, Bałka secured his Pure Dog in a glass showcase; while imprisoning the animal, the cabinet will in all probability future conservators a lot of work, setting a perfectly sterile scene for the object to boot (footnote: having left Ficner’s flat, the dog was trans- ferred to the Arsenal Gallery collection). In the wake of last year’s auction of a work by Banksy, a shredder the artist mounted in the frame of the object activating in the finale, Janek Simon’s 2006 Paper Shredder requires no explanation. Yet let us emphasise that contemporaneity generates and legitimises the technology of destruction. In an astonishing auto-iconoclastic gesture, Julia Poziomecka consciously erased herself from exhibition space. New York has its own Salvage Art Institute, designed to monitor total damage and collect damaged objects – de-aura- tised former artworks. And yet does it not thus bestow a new aura upon them, if only one derived from institutional context? And it is not intriguing – how much care and attention is given at the Institute to very few objects, selected to specific criteria from a mass of destruction? Value lives a spectral life: it is very much at home in a world filled with images. However destructive, also attempts at escaping commercialisation are rarely efficient. Art turns out to be a place where telling the difference between an artist and a thief may occasionally become difficult. It also serves as re- membrance of destruction we will never discover. ★ The Theft and Destruction exhibition intends to analyse the status of a work of art: its force, aura, equity power, trans- formation, and destruction. Sophisticated thieves, ingenious copyists, mysterious millionaires purchasing master- pieces on the black market have all been heroes of tabloid scandals, and of Hollywood films and myths feeding off the symbolic and economic aura of artworks. Works displayed at the exhibition showcase the transformation behind the concept of artwork theft itself. More can be stolen than a material item as such: ideas, concepts, actions, and symbolic meanings can all fall victim to theft – also in a potential act of emancipation, as images wield power. The power of image may also be destroyed in acts of vandalism, terrorism, or madness, or by the element of psychotic force. Works have their own energy – political, sacral, iconoclastic, liberating – each attack or destruction an effort to deprive them of it. the destruction of an object is absorbed by the market, misplaced and attempting to find itself in an incessant transformation of the status of a work of art: potentially an ephemeral activity, an act of wounding the body, of taking over an archive, of seeking justice, of struggle.

English translation from the Polish language by Aleksandra Sobczak-Kövesi

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