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Tomasz Kitlinski and Paweł Leszkowicz

Alina Szapocznikow’s Vulnerable Fetishes of Her Self

Szapocznikow’s Sculptures of the Self

Exhibited at Munich’s Kunstparterre (2010) , the works of Alina Szapocznikow (1926- 1973) are fetishes. The fetish constitutes an important locus in the body-psyche which contributes decidedly to the formation of subjectivity. In Szapocznikow’s oeuvre fetishes are none other than the organizing principle of the materialisation of her sculptures and drawings. Shown at the Kunstparterre, the works Plongée (1968) , Shattered (1960), Bouche en Marche (1968), Seins (1968), Lampe-Bouche I (1966), Grand Tumeur III (1969), Portrait Barbara Kusak (1955) constitute fetishes of human vulnerability.

Fetishes appear in the very title of Szapocznikow’s works. According to a psychoanalyst in France Bela Grunberger, who develops Freud’s Fetishism of 1927, fetishes hark back to childhood; in fact, they equal monuments to the bodily experience of the baby. In the words of Grunberger, the fetish is a monument to childhood jouissance. Let us recall that jouissance is suffering and orgasm at once.

The fetish is a corporeal synecdoche of subjectivity, created in infancy. It haunts the art of Szapocznikow which excels in memory and love. Fetishism aestheticizes and psychologizes Alina’s sculpture and drawing, which determines the power of her art, the crucial heritage of the twentieth century; it is precisely the fetish quality of her works which makes them topical now.

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Alina’s art is based on an aesthetics of fragmentation, characteristic of fetishism. The body, in particular the female body, is transfigured or crushed by both pleasure and pain, subject to extreme sensual and existential experience. The fragmentariness and sensuality of the body in her art indicates a strong connection with the unconscious and the drives of sexuality and destruction. Destruction plays a great role, as suggested by the partial, dismembered nature of the figures. The artist expresses sexuality in the erotic nature of their subjects and in the sensual treatment of the sculptural matter. The works of Szapocznikow depict women torn apart – in a violent orgasm. Her works are not only corporeal, but also highly emotional, representing sensuality and emotion. Through the medium of sculpture, the artist expresses the sexual processes of the unconscious.

The word ‘fetish’ comes from the Latin verb facere, ‘to make’. Alina Szapocznikow makes (illusorily inanimate) objects, animated by inner life, erotically invested and exploring personal and grand histories.

The Ethics of Sculpture

The art of Szapocznikow is about the fragile human. A Jewish-Polish / Warsawian- Parisian artist, Alina Szapocznikow, survivor of ghettoes and concentration camps, archived her subjectivity: her body-soul as monument (or in her own titles: ‘fetish’, ‘herbarium’, ‘biological sculptures’) to survival.1 Hers are archives of suffering and survival, the abject and sublimation, trauma and celebration of life.

Alina’s is art after the Holocaust. Hers is art that reminds us of the art historian - Griselda Pollock’s circonfession: ‘I want to talk about death without too many of my

1 A comprehensive exhibition of Szapocznikow’s sculpture was curated by Anda Rottenberg: Alina Szapocznikow 1926-1973, Zachęta, Warszawa 1998. Cf. also Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius, ‘Paris from Behind the Iron Curtain’, [in:] Paris. Capital of the Arts, 1900-1968, Sarah Wilson et al (ed), (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2002), p. 260. One of us attempt an interpretation of Alina Szapocznikow’s work in a book on the uncanny strangeness in Kristeva: Tomek Kitliński, Obcy jest w nas. Kochac wedlug Julii Kristevej, (Krakow: Aureus, 2001). 3 own metaphorical delusions. I want to talk about it in terms of blood, shit, bloating, gas chambers. I want it to be embodied.’2

The sculpture Shattered (1960), as the title indicates, represents trauma: it is literally distorted, destroyed, maimed. Physically wounded, it wounds affectively. The work could be designated as a psychophysical disaster. Etymologically, the noun ‘disaster’ comes from the cataclysm of stars. Szapocznikow’s sculpture is a cosmic catastrophe in its own microcosm. The affliction here is elemental and mental at once. There is no silence of the disaster, but the sculpture seems to cry out. The shriek follows the Scream (1893) of Edvard Munch which the historian of ideas Nigel Spivey sees as prefiguration of the Holocaust. In turn, the sculpture Shattered epitomizes the Shoah: Alina’s work equals extreme suffering in which she herself participated. The artist survived the ghettos of Pabianice and Lodz, and the camps.

Alina Szapocznikow cares for the divine-human. Hers is ethics? How is ethics possible? For Emmanuel Levinas, Julia Kristeva and Griselda Pollock, ethics is the first philosophy - prote philosophia. Zygmunt Bauman treats of Levinas: his moral world stretches from me to the other. It is in the two that ethics is possible. In the between, in the zwischen, written by Martin Buber.

The vivid colours of the bust of Portrait Barbara Kusak (1955), represent the artist’s hospitality towards the sitter. With emotions and ethics it breaks through the conventions of social realism. There is a rich in-between of the two humans in the sculpture. The spectator encounters a post-war Nefretiti in an all too plain turtle sweater. The pigments on plaster refer to the Egyptian hues and to the fashionable make-up of the 1950s, at the same time. The erotic interest of the public is invested in the maquillage. What is at stake is the universality of intersubjectivity, of human relationships. The sitter-the artist-the perceiver strike up a transhistorical conversation. The hospitable dialogue conquers death.

2 Griselda Pollock, ‘Deadly Tales’, [in:] Looking Back to the Future. Essays on Art, Life and Death, (Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 2001), p. 386. 4

The colours of the Barbara Kusak sculpture are three: red, yellow and blue. Szapocznikow’s fetishistic portrait of Barbara Kusak finds itself in art-historical dialogue with the fetishistic Nefretiti by means of the hospitality of intertextuality. The esoteric fetishism of Egypt converses with the commodity fetishism of the fifties, the limited, but still existing one of real socialism of the then Poland. Likewise, Alina’s Nike (1959), refers back to antiquity: its fetish is ancient mythology and art, soiled by twentieth-century horror.

The Feminine Touch and Body Parts

The sense of touch, or the haptic, plays a crucial role in the sculptures of Szapocznikow that have come into being as a result of the creative touch. The sensual feel of the surface of the works also invites the spectator to touch them. Szapocznikow worked in a material that retained the trace of every single touch. She wrote that she “felt the necessity to deal with the material directly, to crumple it, to touch the matter with my fingers. Such physical contact makes me feel that I am giving myself to the sculpture.”3 In her works, the sculptor make imprints of both the blissful and the painful aspects of her sensual life. Alina Szapocznikow herself stated that her gestures were directed toward the human body, towards the erogenous zones with their elusive sensations.

The sculptures of Alina Szapocznikow provide a good example of the material, sensual idiom of femininity. In the shapes of Szapocznikow's objects, in the partial female faces, mouths and bellies, her fascination with the feminine is evident. Her principal motif is the feminine as both a symbol of life and an object of destruction - a vital force, flowering and dying, which leaves an impression on the cast.4 Szapocznikow writes that she wanted to grasp the fleeting moments of life, its paradoxes and absurdity, through the impressions of the human body. Using organic bitumen and polyester, she wished to capture the touch sense of touch. She believed

3 A. Szapocznikow, „Twarz w ‘Zwierciadle’”, in Alina Szapocznikow 1926-1973 (Warsaw: Galeria Sztuki Współczesnej Zachęta, 1998), 157. 4 J. Waltoś, „Alina Szapocznikow,” Art and Business 1993, no. 9/10: 51. 5 that of all the examples of frailty the human body was the most vulnerable - the sole source of all joy, pain and truth.5

In creating her sculptures of body fragments and fetishes, Szapocznikow prefers the technique of casting which connects sculpture with the touch. Transmitting a somatic quality to the material to be sculpted is like recording the immediacy of the trace - sculpting by touch. In 1967, Szapocznikow made the casts of the stomach of Arianne, the companion of the writer Roland Topor. In the winter of 1967/68 she made many examples of those casts - a series entitled Stomachs, creating stomachs in various arrangements and materials, including stomachs in the form of cushions of soft sponge, and in marble, the material of monumental sculpture. One of the sculptures from the series La Ronde/The Round One (1968), in polyurethane, comprises two brown stomachs placed close together, which emerge from a dark, oval material. The bodily matter emerges from, and also plunges into a primeval mass like in her sculptural feminine masterpiece – Plongée (1968).

This connection of nature, body and matter with femininity is problematic in itself, as it confirms the eternal stereotypes of the female. It is a philosophical tradition that assigns intellect, spirit and will to the male, while the female changes into the submissive matter of the body and nature. As the example of the feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray makes clear, creative women see the subversive value of embodiment and materialization. As Szapocznikow stated: “my entire attitude to art is biological, and I draw a lot on nature.”6 In the 1960s, she practiced an art of organic abstraction, referring in her works to the biological forms of the natural world.

The personal works of Alina Szapocznikow transcendent the tradition of Polish art and opened a new vista. They are part of the international anty-modernist movement of the 60. and 70s championed by women sculptors working with the issue of embodiment. Important here are the biomorphic sculptures of Louis Bourgeois, Eva Hesse and Maria Bartuszova from the 1960s and 1970s . Alina Szapocznikow is

5 A. Szapocznikow, „Korzenie mego dzieła wyrastają z zawodu rzeźbiarza,” in Alina Szapocznikow 1926-1973 (Warsaw: Galeria Sztuki Współczesnej Zachęta, 1998), 162. 6 A. Szapocznikow, „Rzeźby oddychają dopiero w przestrzeni,” in Alina Szapocznikow, op.cit.,156. 6 another female genius of this alternative tradition in 20th century art. In Polish art she inspired and opened the way for such women sculptors as Barbara Falender and Teresa Murak. The artists have assumed control of their identity and femininity by expressing themselves in the very material of their sculptures. Their art is corporeal, erotic, sexual, material, autobiographical and introspective. Starting with Szapocznikow these artists have developed a unique idiom of body sculpture, which allows the viewer to trace not only the psycho history of figuration, but also that of the modern mentality.

Speaking of the feminine or gender in art often provokes protest, yet art is gendered and trying to remove its erotic charge is a form of Puritanism and cold intellectualization. The example of Szapocznikow, whose work is deeply rooted in the female body and sexuality, reveals the value of the feminine in art.

If in the centre of Alina’s work stands the fetish, it is mediated through the feminine embodiment. In our view, the fetish here is confronted with trauma, yet it leads towards life, love for existence (biophilia), hope for revival after death (in Hebrew tikkun). Pain invites creative joy and suffering gives way to the jubilation of sculpting and drawing, as if the artist “choked back her tears to better bite into life”7.

7 Julia Kristeva, Colette, translated by Jane Marie Todd (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 6. 7