[spectre] LAT: A Tree Grows on Warsaw

[geert lovink]

   www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-
                                           
  November 17, 2003

  A Tree Grows on Warsaw

   An artificial palm has enlivened the bleak Polish skyline for a year.
   With the artwork's days numbered, its fans and detractors speak out.

   By Jeffrey Fleishman
   Times Staff Writer

WARSAW - The Warsaw winter lurks. The days have shrunk; the nights are  
endless and cold. It is a dour, surly time of drizzle, wool caps,  
galoshes and something rather extraordinary: a 40-foot-tall palm tree  
rising in whimsical defiance of the elements in the shadow of the old  
Communist Party headquarters.

It is not a real palm tree, yet from a distance, its fiberglass fronds  
scratching the Slavic air, it looks as if a sprig of Tahiti has sprung  
from the hard Polish earth.

Things, however, may not bode well for this palm. The yearlong  
agreement allowing the artwork to preside over the Charles de Gaulle  
traffic circle ends in December. The city, concerned in recent months  
that such exoticism might be too distracting for drivers, may then  
loosen its bolts, yank out its trunk and haul it away.

"We have to be concerned with traffic congestion," said Urszula Nelken,  
a spokeswoman for the city roads department. "We are now studying if  
the palm tree has caused more accidents. I, personally, have nothing  
against the palm. It makes me think of the Mediterranean and vacations.  
But why here in this roundabout?"

The nation's biggest newspaper is campaigning to save the palm, the  
$28,500 creation of artist Joanna Rajkowska. One intellectual argues  
that the epoxy-resin tree is redefining public art in "one of the  
ugliest cities in Europe." Cafes are filled with palm-inspired musings  
on aesthetics and soliloquies on postmodern sensibilities.

"It's ravishing in its absurdity and beauty," Krystyna Janda, one of  
Poland's leading actresses, opined in the celebrity pages.

For less lofty Poles, their faces pressed gloomily against the windows  
of buses and trolleys, the palm is a happy sentinel, conjuring  
daydreams and escapist fantasies at the bleak threshold of winter.

"It appeared one year ago," Katarzyna Blonska, an office worker bundled  
in a long blue coat, said as she hurried past the palm the other day.  
"I don't know what the artist had in mind. I think it's original. It  
gives you a nice feeling. It suits me."

As Blonska crossed the intersection, another sidewalk critic, Jaroslaw  
Pilawa, leaning on a wall and bracing against the cold, said: "You  
know, we need to get balloons shaped like bananas and coconuts so they  
can float up beside the palm. They could have a dialogue with the tree  
.. In the beginning, I was skeptical. But I like it now. It's  
provocative art."

Not everyone is so pleased. There is, for example, the matter of  
Christmas, no small holiday in a country that's 95% Roman Catholic and  
counts Pope John Paul II as a native son. The palm tree is occupying  
the spot where a Christmas tree usually stands. That was OK last year.  
A novelty, after all, is entitled to a bit of leeway.

But some Poles want the tannenbaum returned, noting that one can only  
hang so much tinsel on a palm. Not to mention gingerbread men and candy  
canes.

Then there are the taxi drivers.

The palm annoys them.

They mutter about the indignity of it all.

"It ridicules our city," scoffed one.

"I haven't met a taxi driver yet who likes it," said Jacek Kurczewski,  
a cultural anthropologist and former deputy speaker of the Polish  
Parliament. "Maybe they are very serious people.

"In Warsaw,we thought the beauty of postmodern architecture would come.  
It hasn't. There's a fear of radical aesthetic elements. So we need to  
look at the ugliness and see places of fun. This makes the place more  
human. That's why I love this controversy over the palm. It makes you  
focus on what your town can look like."

The Warsaw skyline is an uneven canvas. Much of the city was destroyed  
in World War II. The tourist district of Old Town was rebuilt in  
classicist styles spanning the 15th and 18th centuries, but the rest is  
a graying stone and cubist hodgepodge of Communist social realism and  
the occasional glint of some shiny stab at the new millennium. Many  
statues are blocky, as if still entombed in rock and bronze; they peek  
through the dusk like lost giants.

The palm tree, like the willows adored by Polish composer Frederic  
Chopin, offers frivolity against this gritty landscape.

Inspiration for the palm came after Rajkowska returned from a trip to  
Israel in 2001.

An artist with a penchant for public statements and sweeping tableaux,  
Rajkowska's projects include Diary of Dreams, an exhibition held in a  
Warsaw gallery in which 250 people slept side by side on two large  
mattresses and recorded their experiences in notebooks.

How to portray Israel was far more vexing than communal snoozing, and  
Rajkowska, 35, contemplated a way to articulate the brutal religious  
divisions of the Middle East.

"I wanted to say something about it," said Rajkowska, wearing a  
camouflage T-shirt and dreadlocks. "The word 'palm' in Polish means  
something foolish, incomprehensible. That's how I felt about Israel and  
what was happening there. This is the language I wanted to transfer  
into reality. The palm tree fit that meaning.. It was also a social  
experiment to see how people would react to something so alien to their  
culture."

A real palm wouldn't survive the dark Warsaw winter. A part-synthetic,  
part-natural creation was needed.

Forever Preserved of Escondido, which manufactures palms for hotels and  
shopping malls, constructed the 40-foot trunk out of palm bark grafted  
onto a PVC pipe and coated with a resin-like material.

The trunk was raised Dec. 13. Two other companies made the fronds, and,  
according to Rajkowska's technical collaborator, Michal Rudnicki, they  
were delivered late and lacked a certain humor.

"That's the bad part of the story," he said. "The fronds were stiff and  
badly made. In a windstorm they could have blown off and cut someone's  
head off.

"We had to replace them, but we were running out of money. That's when  
Joanna and some friends made them out of fiberglass and resin. The tree  
looks real. People climb on it. They urinate on it and pick pieces off  
as souvenirs."

Last month, the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza praised the palm for being  
"Total Honolulu. Surreal. Poetry. Polish Folly." But the newspaper also  
sketched a grim future:

"The days of the palm are numbered. The city authorities don't want the  
tree. We already know that the palm tree, one year after its birth .  
with back rent unpaid will be pulled and taken to the garbage dump."

The question of back rent cannot be ignored. Technically, according to  
a Communist-era law, the palm can be considered a form of  
advertisement, such as a cigarette billboard, and be held liable for  
monthly fees calculated on a per-square-foot basis. It's confusing, but  
basically the palm owes the city 5,800 zlotys, or about $1,450. The  
tree's guardian - the Institute for Art Promotion - can't afford that  
sum and argues that the palm should be deemed tax-exempt art.

The city has so far waived the fee, but the lease to occupy the traffic  
circle expires Dec. 13, and a vote on the issue could come anytime.

"We didn't want to be seen as this narrow-minded government agency,"  
said Nelken, the road department spokeswoman, who would rather  
contemplate potholes than abstract questions about palm trees as art.  
"We have to follow the law, and a work of art is not mentioned in the  
law.

"For me, it's just a plastic tree, but I'm no expert.. All I know is  
nothing should distract a driver in a roundabout."

Sitting in cafe candlelight, rain rattling the windows, Rajkowska  
senses other forces against the palm. "The current politicians are  
afraid of this," she said. "They are rightists and conservatives.  
They'd rather see a cross or a Christmas tree in that place.. I was  
pretty much alone with this project. Its language is outside [Warsaw's]  
art community."

Down the street, his long yellow hat resembling an elf's cap with a  
ball dangling at the end, Jacek Majchrowski gazed past the old  
Communist Party headquarters toward the traffic circle and the palm,  
its fronds lifting in a raw breeze.

"The palm is satire," he said, as he sold newspapers on the sidewalk.

"If you feel down and you're having a rotten day and you see this palm,  
you get a smile on your face. I don't think it's a work of art. It's  
plastic. It's artificial, a copy of reality. But it's satire, and we  
need satire to live."