[spectre] Fwd: REPORT: Jakub Gawkowski on the rise of paranoia and populism in Poland

[heath bunting]

great report and reflections !

my understanding is that most positions within a collapsing system (The 
West, EU, USA Empire) are co-opted, contaminated and confused.

the rest of the world offer some chance of authenticity, purity and 
clarity.

good luck to poland - seems it is the next candidate for the meat/ mind 
grinder after ukraine.


On Wed, 14 Dec 2022, Andreas Broeckmann wrote:

> 
> Betreff:
> REPORT: Jakub Gawkowski on the rise of paranoia and populism in Poland
> Datum:
> Sun, 04 Dec 2022 15:01:18 +0000
> Von:
> art-agenda <art-agenda at mailer.e-flux.com>
> What if a contemporary art center, a space usually conceived as a laboratory for progressive ideas, …
> —REPORTS
>                               This Machine is Broken: the Making of Populist Contemporary Art in Warsaw
>                                                           by Jakub Gawkowski
> 
> What if a contemporary art center, a space usually conceived as a laboratory for progressive ideas, became the opposite: a tool for
> promoting xenophobia, exclusion, and far-right propaganda? Under director Piotr Bernatowicz, the once-renowned Ujazdowski Castle CCA
> in Warsaw has pivoted to align with the values of the governing, populist Law and Justice Party that appointed him. Its latest show,
> “The Influencing Machine,” curated by Aaron Moulton and featuring regional and international artists from Chris Burden to Constant
> Dullaart, claims to tell the story of how the Soros Centers for Contemporary Art (SCCA) that sprang up across Eastern Europe in the
> 1990s were instruments of propaganda. More than anything, however, it shines a light on Polish nationalist populism and its
> conflicted, contradictory cultural-political mindset.
> 
> Since becoming director of Ujazdowski in 2020, Bernatowicz’s controversial program has sought to prove that contemporary art can be a
> place for conservative and nationalist values, and that an avant-garde might look back to the past, instead of forward to the future.
> The role of an experienced curatorial team in developing the program has been taken by loyal collaborators who not only lacked their
> expertise but even took to warning the public of the deleterious effects of contemporary art.(1) Thus, at the beginning of his tenure,
> Ujazdowski invited the Hungarian nationalist band Hungarica to play and cancelled planned events with the grassroots initiative
> “Anti-fascist year” while the non-conforming performative, discursive, and queer programming of previous directors has been replaced
> by debates with titles such as “Antifa against freedom” and “Culture in the European Union: a space of freedom or a tool for social
> engineering?”(2) Recent acquisitions include a neon by Polish artist Jacek Adamas (Tonfa, 2018) that, as the deputy director
> explained, alludes to the “dangers of LGBT ideology.”(3) Recent programming has given platforms to the Swedish artist Dan Park, who
> has previously been jailed for hate speech, and Uwe Max Jensen, who at the opening performed a parody of George Floyd’s murder in
> blackface accompanied by the Confederate flag (Between the world and me, 2021). This in a politically divided country in which women’s
> and LGBTQ rights are constantly being violated, and where a racist border regime leaves people to die in the forest.(4) In light of
> this, “The Influencing Machine”—with its international artist list and white-cube aesthetic—looks like a decorative way to legitimize
> the rest of the program.
> 
> The institution’s new and illiberal agenda has led to unexpected dialogues and alliances with the Western art world, including with
> Moulton, a Los Angeles-born former Berlin gallery owner with an interest in occultism. “The Influencing Machine”—a first iteration of
> which was presented at Nicodim Gallery in Bucharest in 2019—promises a critical reevaluation of cultural politics in the region after
> the fall of the Berlin Wall and the role of art as instrument of soft power. It’s true that the influence of George Soros’s Open
> Society Foundation and other Western funders in shaping post-Communist Eastern Europe requires deep and critical examination.(5) Such
> a re-evaluation could initiate important reflections on the advent of neoliberalism in the region, the construction of new social and
> political hierarchies, and the distribution of economic privilege. But by focusing on George Soros as a figure rather than on the
> political and economic system of which his centers were part, or on the institutional ecology which they produced in the region, the
> exhibition becomes little more than a pawn in the culture wars and an attempt to position the reactionary politics of Ujazdowski’s
> program in an international intellectual context.
> 
> Through works from the 1990s to the present that touch upon the relations between art, economy, and politics, as well as a few pieces
> directly connected to the history of SCCA and a handful of archival materials and interviews, the exhibition balances a critical
> analysis of the mission of “the SCCA Network” with a deep-dive into the conspiratorial thinking that today surrounds it. It tries to
> be witty and postmodern by relativizing notions of truth and power—“all exhibitions are propaganda,” the text reads—and then goes on
> to conflate Soros’s inspiration by Karl Popper’s vision of an “open society” with the caricature of him as a great manipulator who by
> promoting diversity and multiculturalism seeks to annihilate traditional society.(6)
> 
> The exhibition’s main problem is that those positions are neither symmetrical nor in good faith. The supposedly politically neutral
> curatorial position—arguing that art is always “used to control society,” without saying to what end this particular exhibition is
> working—the fascination with New Age aesthetics and network theory, and a collection of portraits of Soros displayed at the center of
> the show, might have made for a relatively harmless provocation somewhere else. But not in the Ujazdowski and not now, as the Polish
> government curtails the rights of women and the LGBTQ+ community. One wonders whether participating artists such as Christian
> Jankowski and Eva and Franco Mattes are aware of the context in which their work is displayed (next, for example, to the antisemitic
> conspiracy theorist David Dees). While some of the Western artists might conceivably be ignorant of the situation in Poland and the
> toxicity of this project, the presence of artists from the region such as János Brückner, Anetta Mona Chisa and Lucia Tkacova, and
> Ciprian Mureșan is more troubling.
> 
> The show makes a connection between the socially engaged artistic practices nourished by the SCCA and the neoliberal market, in which
> the former created the space for the latter. The curator refers to the exhibition’s mission in terms of decolonization, but it is he
> who comes with colonial assumptions: contemporary art existed in the region before SCCA funding enabled a generation of artists and
> curators to develop their own projects and ideas in context-specific ways, from Budapest to Almaty. To claim that a generation of
> Eastern Europeans has been manipulated to serve a foreign agenda to facilitate economic transformation, and not because of their own
> historical experiences, convictions, and practices—such as the local histories of unofficial art which SCCA researched—is to treat
> these cultural workers as if they had no agency over their own destinies. It’s especially strange to present this in Poland, where the
> Soros-funded Foundation for Contemporary Art existed only for two years without realizing any substantial projects: most of the
> country’s radical art after the economic transformation was presented either by grassroots initiatives or in public, state-funded
> institutions, including the Ujazdowski.
> 
> While Soros’s influence in the region, as with every philanthropic Western presence, can and should be analyzed in relation to forms
> of neoliberal soft power—and I write this as an alumnus of the Soros-funded Central European University in Budapest—the materials
> gathered here are not substantial enough to do so. The exhibition proudly claims to include “a large archive about the entire SCCA
> network that allows first-time research,” but much more thorough research on the subject already exists; some of these books are even
> displayed next to the “archive.” Some things seem directly to contradict the show’s thesis. An interview in which Suzy Meszoly,
> executive director of the Soros Foundation turned spiritual healer, talks about her relationship with Soros goes little way towards
> helping viewers understand the economic context of his network. More than that, her suggestion that it was she who convinced Soros of
> the importance of contemporary art, thus initiating the creation of the SCCAs, undermines the assertion that the network is the
> expression of some grand propagandizing masterplan by the Hungarian-American businessman. The exhibition seems led by cynicism and
> prejudice rather than research.
> 
> It was the ruthless free-market neoliberalism fueled by the West in the 1990s, and the frustration of those it left behind, that
> allowed populists to gain power across the region, and the world, in the 2010s. But this show does not even attempt critically to
> revise this history. Instead, we are confronted with multiple portrayals of Soros by, among others, Adrian Ghenie, Şerban Savu,
> Hortensia Mi Kafchin and Jon McNaughton, making him and his appearance—and not his financial or political agenda—the focus. It is not
> irrelevant that Soros, who is Jewish, is presented as financier mastermind of some vast conspiracy in a country troubled by historical
> and contemporary antisemitism. While in Hungary Viktor Orbán’s government has set up Soros as a hate figure (playing on antisemitic
> sentiment), he is not particularly well-known in Poland, so it’s tempting to conclude that the show in Ujazdowski has nothing to do
> with revisiting the past or even the present, but rather with creating a narrative. Populism feeds on a fundamental opposition between
> “good people” and a demonized “elite,” and that’s why both conspiracy and New Age spirituality fit into the picture here—the world
> reduced to a cosmic struggle between good and evil.
> 
> In the Polish art community, discussion of this weak and confused exhibition has been almost nonexistent due to the widespread
> unwillingness to give any attention to Bernatowicz’s program. Not only that, but with the war in Ukraine, humanitarian crisis on the
> Polish-Belarusian border, and the accelerating economic crisis, another lousy attack on the ideas of Open Society and George Soros
> feels outdated regardless of what side of the culture war you are on. The façade of Ujazdowski displays a Polish flag above the
> entrance, and two huge prints on its sides that refer to the invasion of Poland by Germany and Russia in 1939. Playing on historical
> sentiment and adopting the role of victim are common strategies for the nationalist right in Poland, which likes to insist that it is
> threatened by both Moscow and Berlin (or, rather, Brussels). And yet the commitment of these seemingly anti-Putinist figures to
> fighting the “moral corruption” of the West, and its use of conspiratorial arguments to justify its illiberal, xenophobic, and
> anti-LGBTQ position, only aligns them with the views of the Kremlin.
> 
> 
> (1) Curator Krystyna Różańska-Gorgolewska speaking on Telewizja wPolsce as part of a discussion entitled "Modern Art. How does it
> affect young people?" in November 2020 https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=464&v=sflAvS8kTjM&feature=emb_title
> (2) Hungarica’s concert was boycotted and cancelled after a backlash. For the statement from “The Anti-fascist year” see: “Open letter
> of The Anti-fascist Year regarding censorship at the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle,” L'Internationale Online (March
> 2020),https://www.internationaleonline.org/opinions/1009_open_letter_of_the_anti_fascist_year_regarding_censorship_at_the_centre_for_contem
> porary_art_ujazdowski_castle/.
> (3) “In Poland Museum Director’s Anti-gay Acquisition, Critics Find Ominous Portent,” Artforum (September 2020),
> https://www.artforum.com/news/in-poland-museum-director-s-antigay-acquisition-critics-find-ominous-portent-83916.
> (4) “Poland starts building wall through protected forest at Belarus border,” The Guardian (January 2022),
> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/27/poland-starts-building-wall-through-protected-forest-at-belarus-border.
> (5) Open Society Foundations (OSF) was created as Open Society Institute in 1993 by George Soros to support his foundations in Central
> and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in advancing justice, education, public health, and independent media. Today, OSF is a
> grantmaking network active in more than 120 countries around the world. The group's name was inspired by Karl Popper's 1945 book The
> Open Society and Its Enemies. See: “The Open Society Foundations and George Soros,” Open Society Foundations (December 2020),
> https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/newsroom/open-society-foundations-and-george-soros.
> (6) “The Influencing Machine,” Ujazdowski, https://u-jazdowski.pl/en/programme/exhibitions/maszyna-wplywu.
>  
> 
> Jakub Gawkowski is a curator and art historian who works at the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź.
> 
> RECENT FEATURES Arrow Right
> 
> MORE FROM JAKUB GAWKOWSKI Arrow Right
> 
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