Krytyka Polityczna,
Critical Art and Crisis of Criticism in Poland

44th AICA Congress, Asunción, Paraguay, 18.10.11

Five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, at an International Congress on Culture of the Time of Transformation in Poznań, Polish art critic Dorota Jarecka observed: “Nowadays you can hear everywhere: “there is no criticism”, “there is no place to write”, “there has been no true criticism in Poland for forty years, and there will be none in the future”.i Under socialism, she explained: “criticism in Poland […] adopted a rather slavish tone [in which] reviews turn into flattery”.ii But the post-transition state of critical impasse to which she referred was also, she argued, a symptom of a general over-investment in the idea of a new, true, criticism in the wake of 1989. Excessive expectations, she reasoned, were producing a vicious circle and inducing “a state of torpidity”, according to the logic that “there will never be any “true” critics, if there are no true periodicals and true art market, and the latter will not come to be since there is no “true” capitalism etc.”.iii She argued that this sort of defeatism was motivated by a deep-seated dual historical fear grounded, on the one hand, in a tendency to dismiss criticism as simply pseudo – the legacy of communist-era “newspeak”, and, on the other hand, anxiety about Western postmodernism with its “tolerance” and “difference” and its ideology of “provisional, rhizomatic and nomadic” thought.iv Polish criticism, post-transition, was caught between “Polish emptiness” and “the emptiness of pluralism”.v How to break out of this vicious circle? How to recover from the usurping of criticism by Communist newspeak without slavishly emulating Western critical trends? Such questions remain highly relevant today, as we continue to our search for a critical language adequate to the challenges of the present European crisis of populism, nationalism and xenophobia, recently aggravated by the global economic downturn. In what follows, I address how these questions relate to the critical activities of “Political Critique”, one of the strongest voices to emerge on the Polish scene in recent years.

The Political Critique Review was established as a quarterly periodical by a group of left-wing students from Warsaw University in 2002, and has grown exponentially Krytyka Polityczna, composed of journalists, scientists, writers, critics of art, film and literature, playwrights, artists, activists and students, claim to be “working on behalf of nearly 2,000 activists in Poland and abroad”, and describe themselves as a “left-wing think-tank and as a “critical university’”, comprising “Poland’s biggest intellectual magazine and team of regular social commentators who write for and appear in mainstream Polish media” as well as “a high-profile group of artists working in the visual arts, theatre, film, literature and music”.vi They collaborate with cultural foundations, museums, galleries, biennials, the press and other media, in a concerted effort to instigate public debate in actual and virtual space. Krytyka Polityczna now boasts a high traffic website (www.krytykapolityczna.pl), a network of clubs and cultural centres in cities throughout Poland, the most important of these being the Wonderful New World Club in central Warsaw, new branches in Kiev and London, and a major publishing house. The founding of a their publishing house, in 2007, has been warmly welcomed by a generation of young leftists in Poland, eager to fill their bookshelves with affordable, attractively packaged, critical literature. In addition to works of journalism, political philosophy, sociology, literature and literary criticism by Polish authors, the organization has translated and published work by writers and intellectuals such as Judith Butler, Jürgen Habermas, Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, Wiktor Pielewin and Slavoj Žižek.

The core members of the group, of whom Slawomir Sierakowski is perhaps the most prominent, describe themselves as reformist social democrats. Their stated aim? To revive the long-standing Polish tradition of oppositional writing and journalism that had played a key role in the rebirth of Polish civil society in the decades prior to the events of 1989. Krytyka Polityczna repeatedly declare their commitment to reinvigorating the Polish tradition of the engaged intelligentsia, arguing that the Polish socialist heritage “represented all the best things about Polish tradition: the ideals of democracy, social justice, freedom and civil rights, pluralism and tolerance, and finally, independence”.vii Deploying the full range of tools that have become available since 1989, they ultimately hope to overhaul the Polish intellectual landscape and “to produce new kinds of behaviour”.viii Uniting social science, culture, and politics around a common goal, Krytyka Polityczna’s goal is to impact social reality: “to prepare and introduce into the public sphere a project of struggle against economic and social exclusion” and to “spread the idea of deep European Integration”.ix How then, do these aims relate to the vicious circle Jarecka complained of in 1994? The short answer, I think, is that they refuse the binary terms of the dichotomy she outlined. Krytyka Polityczna refuse to dismiss all communist criticism as ‘newspeak’ and they refuse to label all western criticism ‘empty pluralism’. Instead, they seek to excavate an alternative critical tradition from between the fault lines of East and West. By seeking to reinvigorate leftist debate in a country where leftism has been discredited by the mainstream, the group appear to reinvest in the possibility of parallel cultural activity as a mode of political praxis, testing the viability of the working methods of former dissidents in relation to the specificities of the post-socialist situation. This, I think, is their primary accomplishment – their desire to work with past models and to adapt them to the present situation, introducing a new generation of political activists to the accomplishments of their predecessors, and to re-link a local history of activism with the global theoretical return to the left in the wake of the continued crisis of neo-liberalism.

In 2005, the group set up the
Stanisław Brzozowski Association
to oversee Krytyka Polityczna’s activities, adopting as their patron a key Polish philosopher, writer, literary and theatre critic and historian, credited with having introduced Marxism to Polish thought at the turn of the century, and strongly committed to engaging artists in the shaping of society. Active in the Polish independence movement, Brzozowski found himself incarcerated in a Tsarist prison, where he contracted typhoid, of which he would die, aged 33. Among Poland’s leading intellectuals, those he inspired include Czesław Miłosz, Andrzej Walicki, Maria Janion, Leszek Kołakowski, Adam Michnik. Adopting him as their patron, and republishing several of his key works, Krytyka Polityczna hope that he will inspire a new generation of socially engaged intellectuals. Following in Brzozowski’s footsteps, Krytyka Polityczna are committed to forging a new solidarity between journalism and critical art. The periodical’s artistic directors are Yael Bartana and Artur Żmijewski, two artists who have produced key works exploring the specificities of the Polish political and ethical landscape. Bartana and Zmijewski engage in a range of collaborations with other Polish and international artists, thus bringing them into the fold of the Krytyka Polityczna project. With their help, the periodical regularly includes photo-essays by well known artists such as Tania Bruguera, Olga Chernysheva, Sanja Iveković and Santiago Sierra.

The founding text for Krytyka Polityczna’s stance vis-à-vis art’s political potential is Artur Żmijewski’s ‘Applied Social Arts’ (2007), in which the video artist, sculptor and curator of the forthcoming 7th Berlin Biennale (2012), set out his arguments for critical art. x He identified the hidden enemy standing in the way of art’s “desire to be an active agent creating the social and political environment” as shame, recalling that artists’ historical complicity with totalitarian regimes has “compromised the very possibility of art becoming an instrument of politics”.xi “Shame”, he wrote, “has set in motion the mechanisms of repression and denial. Instead of drawing enjoyment from the outcome of their actions, the visual and performing arts are content merely to dream of such outcomes: fantasy has supplanted reality”.xii Żmijewski argued that, all too often, the political consequences of Polish “Critical Art” of the 1990s, were not the intended ones. Among others, he cites the example of “players from the realm of politics ‘learning’ how to use subversive strategies that had once been proper to art”, recalling the incident when “right-wing deputies to the Polish parliament Witold Tomczak and Halina Nowina-Konopczyna removed the stone (meteor) from the prone figure of Pope John Paul II in Maurizio Cattelan’s La Nona Ora during an exhibition curated by Harald Szeeman at Warsaw’s Zachęta gallery in December 2000”.xiii These sorts of “scandals breaking out over the topics art proposed to introduce into public debate” have generally failed to contribute positively to the development of critical discourse, says Żmijewski. In many ways, they have been counterproductive.xiv If “the continuing brutalisation of public debate has been attributed (by Gazeta Wyborcza journalist Anna Zawadzka) to the violent language used by art in the 1990s and the resulting media backlash”, then it now seems clear that “violating one set of taboos leads to the emergence of other taboos”.xv

Żmijewski blames art critics rather than artists for the alienation of critical artists within contemporary Polish society. He argues that the artist must wrest back power from the critic, for what really prevents art from serving as an instrument of knowledge, science, and politics, is “the archaic, circular mode of communication where critics mediate between the artist and the viewer”, and “lack of knowledge on the part of critics ‘forces’ artists to simplify their message. (…) For what the critic cannot understand cannot be expressed and never makes it into the circuit of knowledge”.xvi He says that artists need to speak out, rather than leaving commentary to the reviewers, thus abandoning autonomy and running the risk of “dependence on other discourses: politics and science”. He concedes that this may “lead to an ideological reduction of content to what is useful from the standpoint of a group’s political interests”, but thinks the risk worth running if art is to become socially useful, and begin “producing useful tools: tools for the implementation of power and of knowledge”.xvii These are ambitious claims. To what extent have they been proved feasible by Krytyka Polityczna’s artistic collaborators, to date?

Arguably, the loudest artistic collaboration by Krytyka Polityczna and the artistic establishment to date has been the making and screening of Yael Bartana’s Trilogy of films ‘And Europe will be Stunned…’ for the Polish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale this year. Bartana is the first non-Pole ever to have been offered the pavilion – a gesture designed to suggest a fresh wave of openness to new dialogues in artistic circles, challenging Polish self-identity, and striking at the roots of Poland’s current ethnic homogeneity. Krytyka Polityczna collaborated closely to make the three films, “Nightmares”, “Wall and Tower”, and “Assassination”. Sierakowski plays a key role in the first and third parts, among others from the circle. In Nightmares he delivers a carefully scripted “call for the return of three million Jews to Poland” in an empty stadium, surrounded by adoring young Pioneers. In Wall and Tower, the artist Wilhelm Sasnal and a group of enthusiastic Jewish settlers construct a kibbutz on the territory of the former Warsaw ghetto, to the consternation of local residents, taking the first steps to realise the ambitions of what they call the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland. In Assassination, Sierakowski becomes the martyr of the JRMP movement, and people flock first to the Palace of Culture in Warsaw to pay their respects at his open coffin, and then pay tribute to him in the portentously vast square in which John Paul II delivered a landmark address to the Polish people in 1979 galvanising social cohesion in the run up to the formation of the Solidarity movement.

The films are committed to pluralism, while admitting that there are no easy solutions. The ambiguities riddling the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland’s story include the following: Sierakowski’s call for the return of the Jewish people to Poland is delivered to an orderly group of young pioneers, who hang on his every word in the least discursive manner imaginable; the kibbutz constructed by the new Jewish settlers in Warsaw resembles a concentration camp, alienating local residents with its Hebrew signage; a cult of personality develops around the head of the movement, following his assassination. Possibly in an effort to undermine the didacticism of their message, the trilogy compulsively anticipates and stages all the things that might go wrong. The nail in the coffin comes as part of Israeli journalist Yaron London’s address to the impossible multicultural crowd bearing English language banners at Sierakowski’s mock-funeral. London explains that Israel and its armed forces are the only guarantors that there can never be another holocaust, that Israel is the only fatherland of the Jews that can secure their future, and that it cannot be in the Jewish people’s interests to return. Strangely, these self-critical measures are delivered in such euphoric and solemn tones that it becomes difficult to distinguish between send-up and political fantasy. The trilogy’s narrative and aesthetic excesses become those of a bad propaganda film, as a result of which, I think, the political message, if there really is one, is lost.

For all its noble intentions, it seems that Bartana’s material is so contradictory, its themes so sensitive, its history so unresolved, that it threatens to stifle rather than to inspire debate. After all, what educated leftist would disagree that Polish anti-Semitism is a scandal and that Poland should do so much more to tackle it? Surely, Bartana and Krytyka Polityczna are just preaching to the converted, mobilising internal inconsistencies to thwart the possibility of external criticism. What concerns me is that the ‘shame’ associated with assuming a didactic position, here manifested in a series of internal deconstructions, continues to cloud the trilogy’s potential to be taken seriously as an activist work, not least because of its excessive theatricality. It seems to me that Sierakowski, as head of Krytyka Polityczna. Has been the loser in this particular collaboration. The critic has been co-opted as an actor in an artistic project. Rather than assuming the traditional role of the critic, stepping back from Bartana’s project and assessing its applied social potential, Sierakowski has dived in head-first, hoping to deliver his own message via art. The collaboration, and its contradictions, in the end, tells us more about recent changes in the relation between art and criticism, than it does about the potential to deliver the ambitions of the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland, with the Trilogy itself sliding into a troubling parody of wish-fulfilment – an apocalyptic vision of becoming a martyred leader in an English speaking, united colours of Benetton Poland, with little hope of actively bringing this utopia any closer.

Needless to say, one rarely finds any criticism of work by Krytyka Polityczna’s artists on the pages of the journal. However, in an excellent review, published in the periodical Dwutygodnik Sztuki, the young critic Karol Sienkiewicz has been among the few to take on the trilogy.xviii He observes that the film is uncritical of Zionism, particularly gallingly in view of its dedication to a martyred Palestinian activist. As Sienkiewicz points out, the slogan of the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland – “we will be strong in our weakness” – is a Zionist slogan legitimising the growth of the Israeli military complex. He also challenges the title of the Trilogy: “Why will Europe be stunned? Because it is less liberal than it thinks?”.xix After all, one needs only open a newspaper to discover this – there is no stunning secret. His hardest hitting point, however, concerns the absent ghosts whom Sierakowski addresses in Nightmares. He argues that those most immediately absent from the Warsaw stadium are not the 3 million Polish Jews exterminated or forced into exile by the Holocaust, but rather the immigrant stallholders who have brutally expelled by Polish Police force in recent years. Given the historical proximity of this violence, Sienkiewicz argues that if Krytyka Politycna are really serious about looking for a martyr around whom to rally, then rather than worshipping at the coffin of Sierakowski, they might do better to honour the Nigerian Maxwell Itoya, who was shot by Police at the stadium, highlighting the plight of politically unrepresented immigrants in Poland today. By choosing the empty stadium as a backdrop, without referring to the recent atrocities that took place there, Sienkiewicz implies that Krytyka Polityczna betrayed a tendency to project violence into the past, missing the opportunity to connect this history with the xenophobic policies in neoliberal Poland today. If the Bartana / Sierakowski collaboration represents Krytyka Polityczna in realpolitik mode, what does this tell us about their vision of criticism?

Sierakowski is always well armed with answers: “Everything is spectacle”, he says, “we know that, we knew from the beginning; and that in this spectacle you can never be completely outside it and you cannot act like a virus within it. We want in a sense to build a second circuit within the first one – and this is our strategy for this system”.xx Sierakowski explains: “first you have to earn positive connotations for leftist ideas, build you own means and methods of communication, and then you have to try to instil the ideas of the left with the help of open politics. We are widening public debate in Poland to include the voice of the left, making space and the conditions for the possibility of the existence of a leftist politics in this country”.xxi Whether Krytyka Polityczna can succeed in carving out a space for their voice in the political sphere as they have in the worlds of art and publishing will be interesting to see. Sierakowski recently wrote a widely debated Open Letter to the Party, published in the mainstream newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, declaring that party politics in its current, globalised, neoliberal form, in which artificial cultural debates and ‘public relations’ are fired by the mass media to produce a semblance of ideological difference between parties whose economic policies are identical, is not the pluralism for which people hoped in 1989. Recalling the legacy of Polish solidarity, he asked: “Is populism really the greatest threat to democracy, or is it the virus of cynicism that paralyses all action left of centre right?”.xxii The message is clear – cynicism and refusal to rally behind a cause are the real enemy – not populism. The trouble is that Krytyka Polityczna may, in the end, prove more cynical than populist.

Indeed, I think we would be hard pressed to find a better illustration of the cynicism Żmijewski sought to target in his ‘Applied Social Arts’ (“Instead of drawing enjoyment from the outcome of their actions, the visual and performing arts are content merely to dream of such outcomes: fantasy has supplanted reality”).xxiii The Trilogy breaks certain taboos, but in doing so, produces new ones. Ultimately it addresses the converted crowds of art-goers in Venice, rather than the Polish population. Krytyka Polityczna’s open hostility to the Catholic church is likely to prove a practical impediment to the popularisation of Leftist ideas that forms the core of their fantasy. After all, even the spectacular success of Solidarity in Poland was in part due to its endorsement by John Paul II. But perhaps this anxiety is also a symptom on cynicism, this time on my part. For now, it is interesting to watch Krytyka Polityczna continue to wrestle with leftist newspeak, the fantasy of pluralism, and the trappings of cynicism. If they eventually form a political party, as people have begun to urge them too, it will be interesting to see what their policies will be and whether their spectacular version of leftism can withstand the pressures of globalised neo-liberalism in crisis.

© Klara Kemp-Welch

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