The work of Ania Molska is unmistakably based on a visual idiom passed down from twentieth-century avant-garde tradition in which the worker and the athlete play a leading role. Only, it's unclear whether history is repeating itself as a tragedy or farce.
Wandering among the bushes, fragments of wall, fences and pieces presented at the 5. berlin biennale, in a place known as Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum, a non-place that remains after the infamous border zone stretching along the no longer existent wall, one might have encountered a rusted structure. It was a several-metre-tall scaffolding of sorts, resembling the Superman sign turned upside down. Its author is Ania Molska, the youngest participant of the biennial, who at the time had been studying sculpture at the Academy. The object exhibited ‘under the Berlin sky’, is not, however, a sculpture. It is not even an independent piece. It is an element of a more complex structure, the material remnant of a process, the scaffolding that supported the action of a video film. Because Ania Molska usually works with a digital camera and a computer. The video was presented at the Kunst-Werke Berlin. It is, at the same time, a metaphorical structure that builds successive levels of historical references.
The two-channel video consisted of the films: P = W / t (Power) and W = F * s (Work). In the first one, we see a squash court, white walls and floor, red lines. Balls painted white. The way in which the image is composed, often upside down – once symmetrically, then diagonally, zig-zagging shots of red lines on a white background – all this, combined with the titles written in the form of an equation defining a physical value, may evoke an echo of the tensions with which the Russian avant-garde was wrought in the early 20th century. Tensions induced, on the one hand, by changes in the cognition of reality, which resulted from discoveries in mathematics and physics for which the equation expressing mass-energy equivalence became a symbol, and on the other hand, the growing socio-political pressure that exploded with the February revolution and the Bolshevik reprise in October 1918. A distant flashback may appear here: Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, by El Lissitzky, who used references to mathematical formulas, and who was fascinated with Minkovsky’s concept of the fourth dimension of space and the soviet revolution he himself was engaged in.
The balls fall into the frame – one at a time, in groups – but we do not see the source of the power behind their movements. At one point, the sound of the bouncing balls begins to increase alarmingly. Upon close-up, we see the cracked surface, resembling the features of a face picked up out of the crowd.
All this happens in a certain connection with the images and sounds appearing in the parallel screening. A tractor enters the frame, pulling behind it a trailer, in which a few workers sit. They do not mince words in their conversation, cursing with a simple ribaldry. A muddy plane appears in the frame. The workers unhurriedly erect a wobbly, iron structure in the grey slush of a dried-up pond. The camera captures various combinations of working people — order and disorder. After throwing the structure together, obviously having been ordered to do so, they climb up the rungs and arrange themselves on the uncertainly attached planks. These arrangements, perfunctory and clumsily posed, repeated in successive shots, evoke ironic associations with dynamic avant-garde photomontages consisting of images of the perfect bodies of athletes, or the poses struck by udarniks on socialist realist propaganda posters. Close-ups of the faces follow. The gentlemen each introduce themselves by name. They cease to be anonymous, ‘typical’ workers, becoming specific, individual human beings. It can plainly be seen that they have spent a greater part of their lives in a reality, in which the illusion of the centrally-planned achievement of a communist paradise turned out to be a time of moral collapse and a life stuck in the mud.
The structure is a direct reference to the ‘human pyramid’ scaffoldings erected during communist marches, parades, and propaganda sporting events. The first examples of such ‘pyramids’ may be found in the photographs of Alexander Rodchenko. These photographs were taken in the mid 30’s, when Stalin was in the process of claiming complete power over Russia. Browsing more of his pictures from this period, we see Young Pioneers, athletes from the Dynamo club, as well as shots of naked, shaven, flexed men marching in ranks, bringing to mind the Stalinist methods of shaping the ‘new man’ – e.g. the orphans of murdered political prisoners were ‘shaped’ to be ruthless NKVD officers. Pictures of NKVD sports parades depict young men proudly carrying a portrait of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the personification of terror in revolutionary and post-revolutionary Russia, while others show the practical implementation of ‘paradise on earth’ — the building of the White Sea-Baltic Sea Canal, which was a planned mass extermination of thousands of gulag prisoners by means of grueling labour.
Boris Groys treats the Stalinist system as a Gesamtkunstwerk. To simplify, one might say that through a series of operations (nationalisation of property, collectivisation, deportation, etc.) a classless, pliable mass was to be created, one that could be shaped at will. Instead of the “new man” however, the 'Homo Sovieticus' was created.
‘A metaphor coined by Joseph Stalin, who compared human beings to “cog wheels”’, Konstantin Akinsha writes, ‘was a perfect description of the new role of the individual in the social pyramid of society, as well as the human pyramid constructed on the parade grounds. … Human bodies were treated simply as good material for construction. Hierarchical human pyramids became a tradition, decorating the Red Square at every parade.’ Some scholars made a comparison of the ‘human pyramids’ and the monumental Stalinist palaces that resembled them, to a satirical drawing, published in the American union paper The Industrial Worker, depicting the class structure of capitalist society. ‘However’, Akinsha adds, ‘the new stratification of Soviet society was more reminiscent of the ‘Celestial Hierarchy’ of Dionysius the Areopagite than the relatively uncomplicated structure of capitalist exploitation. After WWII, human pyramids continued to exist in the communist world, which day by day was becoming more rusty and outdated.’[1]
The Black Square
At the beginning of the Tanagram video (2006–2007), the title appears written in Cyrillic (black letters on a red background). Tanagram is an ancient Chinese game in which new geometric figures are created using a few elements of a defined shape. Molska has carried this game into the third dimension. Two young men of perfect physical build appear in a white room. They are wearing nothing but black protective cups over their crotches and black helmets with weird nose protectors, seemingly repeating the shape the cups. Music appears in the background. A few sentences are spoken in Russian, taken from an old language learning tape – ‘Ilya, what do you do now? I write poetry. What else? I make these small scale models. I also make small figurines out of clay. That is very interesting.’ The young ‘gods’ are cheerful. They begin to rearrange the black, geometric solids. Chirping voices begin to sing. The demiurges have arranged their first shape – from above, we see a black square on a white background. They have ‘punctured the slip of the sky’, abandoned ‘images of reality’, and reached the ‘feeling of non-objectiveness’, to which the creator of suprematism, Kasimir Malevich, strived in the second decade of the 20th century.
They are beginning to build more complicated figures. The gentle music and sweet singing is interrupted by a dynamic rhythm, as if the pounding of hooves, horns are heard, as is the brisk song of the Red Army soldiers from the Aleksandrov Choir. The lines from the Russian language tape reappears. ‘I am an adult already. You've still got milk under your nose. I am already eighteen years old. I want to join the Polish Army.’ In 1920, when avant-garde artists were being pulled back down to earth by the harsh concreteness of reality, Marshall Budyonny’s 1st Cavalry Army invaded Poland, in an attempt to forcefully introduce communism in all of Europe, as per Bolshevik doctrine. The victory of the Polish Army near Warsaw stopped the invasion. Nevertheless, twenty-five years later, Stalin occupied half of Europe on the basis of the Yalta Agreement. A gigantic palace/monument built in honour of Stalin still commemorates this in the very center of Warsaw. When the Russian language learning cassette was recorded, Warsaw Pact armies were being rearranged on the great playing field of the game called ‘The Cold War’ by decision-makers in Moscow. The remnants of the Berlin Wall are another souvenir from these times.
Let us return to Ania Molska’s piece presented at the bb5. She defended her diploma in Grzegorz Kowalski’s studio with this work in June of this year. It is the same studio that gave us Paweł Althamer, Katarzyna Kozyra, Artur Żmijewski, to name a few. In the studio the issues of an individual retreating into the private sphere, closing oneself in the safe ‘greenhouse’ of the art world and communicating within a narrow group, or the artist’s involvement in the process of social communication in public space are some of the most important tasks to work on (e.g. ‘Common space, private space’ studio exercise). Sources of Kowalski’s teaching method may be found in Oskar Hansen’s concept of 'Open Form', as well as the progressive, collective practices developed by his students, among them Kowalski. To illustrate the main assumptions of Open Form, Hansen created a visual lecture in the form of a photomontage, depicting, among others, the face of a single person snatched out of a crowd. Hansen, in his humanistic approach, which means that people would be able to rearrange environment according to their individual needs and the objective visual structures, objected to the Stalinist imperative of regarding people in ‘mass’ categories, unified ‘cogs’ in a monumental machine — the centrally managed system of the communist Moloch-state apparatus.
In the 60’s and 70’s, artists in Poland experienced the final flashes of the illusion that the beat-up socialist machine could still be repaired. Kowalski shared this faith. His diploma piece was the project of the Monument to nuclear energy (1965), a gigantic spherical room, around which viewers were to walk using stairs and gangways suspended in space. At the time, artists and art theoreticians began to organize, on their own initiative, collective and participatory events such as the Biennial of Spatial Forms in Elbląg (from 1965 on), or the Symposium of Artists and Scientists in Puławy (1966). The first was intended to involve workers and engineers from Zamech – a factory producing ship propellers, while the second was aimed at workers from the Azoty chemical plant. In Elbląg, Warsaw, and other cities, many sculptures have survived in public space to this day – symbols of a rust-eaten utopia. The rest have been either destroyed or stolen and sold as scrap metal. But the neo-avantgarde artists were already occupied with the ‘dematerialization’ of art. Some, such as Hansen’s students, aimed their critical approach to objects against the communist government-imposed domination of conservative, hierarchical forms of social relations and the methods of communication through which they were expressed, which carried in themselves symbolic violence (e.g. through monuments). There were those who focused on the immaterial, or temporal, dynamic dimension of space. The sculpture was being replaced by a process, interaction, game, the spectacle, film screening, and multimedia installation.
The radical derision of the ‘socially engaged’ attitude, the safe and abstract effects of which the regime could employ to ends of propaganda, as well naïve faith in the repair of the system, may be found in the show given by Włodzimierz Borowski at the Symposium in Puławy. Given official permission, he involved a group of engineers in the realisation of his project, consulting with them the technological details of the production of synthetic fertilizers. Next, during the official presentation of the effects before the gathered management, party apparatus and artists, he climbed up onto a specially illuminated, spectacular factory machine and proclaimed that it was a work of art. After which he sung the national anthem using only one word, urea, unambiguously associated with urine. He insulted all sanctities – those of the nation, the state and those of socialism. He ridiculed the conformity of artists.
Ania Molska is interested in assembling sounds and images, the ‘amateur’ effects of which would embarrass the fans of Chris Cunningham. She expresses grief over the unfinished, interrupted project of the Russian avant-garde and admits to a faint consciousness of her affinity to forgotten neo-avantgarde redefinitions. And even if she fails to ridicule us or move us from our foundations (e.g. ‘Poland’ performance), then maybe out of spite, instead of distancing herself ironically, she will find a ‘Black Square’ of our era or she will try to build some ‘new reality’.
[1] Konstantin Akinsha, ‘Playing with Modernity’, The Way Things Are, cat., Toruń, 2008.
OPENING
