The Weight of Sex

What strikes us on first encountering Marzena Kawalerowicz’s works — and especially her drawings and paintings — is their rich fabric of visual and iconographic signs. Complex, condensed, sometimes summary or even abbreviated, yet never laconic, they cannot be exhausted in a momentary glance, but demand a patient and, as far as possible, penetrating reading. I would like to indicate several immediately apparent associations that may serve as points of orientation.

It would be no great exaggeration to say that Kawalerowicz’s art circles almost obsessively around the subject of human sexuality. Sexual phantasms form the principal terrain of her artistic explorations. While interpreting and giving concrete form, in her own particular way, to certain familiar phantasms, the artist also seeks to combine, accumulate and superimpose them. She seems thereby to wish to create entirely different, individual phantasms — hybrid, pathetic and grotesque.

The phantasm of androgyny plays the leading role in the works shown here. The sex of the human figures created by the artist is at times difficult, if not impossible, to identify. All the figures resemble one another externally: they are powerfully built, with broad shoulders and thighs, expansive chests, low foreheads and prominent noses that continue their line. These “bodybuilder” physiques are sometimes equipped with both male and female genitals; in one painting we even see a vagina opening immediately beneath an erect phallus. As a result, the encounters depicted by Kawalerowicz often cannot be classified unambiguously as heterosexual or homosexual love. Thanks to the androgynous architecture of their bodies, each figure participating in these encounters appears to possess an extended range of sexual experience encompassing the full spectrum of behaviours and sensations associated with the “masculine” and the “feminine”.

Androgyny, which makes the figures engaged in different sexual practices resemble one another, is closely connected in Kawalerowicz’s work to the phantasm of narcissism. Beyond the likeness between the figures, the iconographic concretisation of a narcissistic denial or appropriation of sexual difference and of the other person’s otherness takes the form, on the one hand, of images of autoeroticism and, on the other, of an intriguing motif that recurs in an extraordinary number of the paintings and drawings: the “doubling” of human faces. It appears as though each face has been overlaid, with a slight spatial displacement, by its own mirror image. In the great majority of cases, one of the resulting “aspects” of the face is “male” and the other “female”. It is precisely this androgynous feature that ultimately allows us to treat the iconographic sign as a symbol of one sex’s narcissistic “reflection” in the other. The combination of androgyny and narcissism also opens the possibility, within Kawalerowicz’s phantasmatic world, of a particular form of autoerotic love exploiting the bisexuality of a single body. One emblem of this bisexual autoeroticism appears to be the image of a face whose nose turns into a phallus directed towards vaginal lips. Another may be found in an image where an impossible narcissistic contact — the eyes of a single face gazing into one another — is achieved by means of strange organs growing out of both eye sockets. One has a phallic form resembling a type of vibrator, while the other ends in the vaginal shape of “double lips”.

The artist provokes, or even imposes, such “paranoid” identifications through a systematic appeal to the phantasm of the human body’s sexual “plasticity”. Any part of the bodies she creates may be used as a sexual organ or begin to function as a new erogenous zone, supplementing or substituting for the “proper” genitalia. This is the source of the omnipresence of fellatio (the role of the phallus in this act is sometimes assumed by a foot [05]), of the fetishistic fragmentation of the body, and of the phantasm of using all its orifices, which leads, among other things, to the transformation of certain figures’ heads into veritable conglomerates of sexual organs.

The interweaving of these three phantasms determines the fundamental character of human sexuality in Kawalerowicz’s works. From this perspective, the human being appears predatory and violent, yet at the same time participates quite passively in grotesque and sometimes somewhat repellent acts. Sex here has nothing in common with the model promoted by mass-media culture as light, pleasurable play or entertainment. There is no sign of erotic theatre or artistry. Sexual activity in these works is marked by hardship and effort; it is a kind of labour, an undertaking that is almost cognitive in character, as suggested by the recurring motif of the figures’ watchful, penetrating and self-analytical gaze. Kawalerowicz appears to regard sex as the limit situation that defines the being known as human in the fullest, or at least the most economical, way and makes it possible to draw its portrait (perhaps this clue should be considered decisive in interpreting the paintings where a solitary figure is presented in a manner recalling the conventions of portraiture). In its own way, this portrait affirms the corporeal and physiological, indeed animal, aspects of sexuality, thereby restoring to the human being — undoubtedly with a certain Expressionist surplus — the “dark”, fearfully concealed aspects of existence. These also include a particular infantilism that can emerge in sexual experience, evoked in Kawalerowicz’s work by the discreet yet clearly perceptible presence of small children’s toys. Accompanying the figures, these objects form an ironic counterweight to their monumental pathos.

The overall character of the phantasmatic world in the artist’s drawings and paintings is also marked by a series of sculptural “busts” made in papier-mâché. These works are in fact a travesty of the traditional convention of the sculptural portrait bust: what individualises them is not the figure’s face, but variations in the mask that covers it and in the “accessories” that “adorn” both mask and torso. Kawalerowicz’s busts also recall the conventions of sadomasochistic practice: the figures she “portrays” appear as passive, powerless participants in such acts, covered in their childish remnants, at once somewhat repellent and threatening in their materiality.

A somewhat different set of associations is prompted by the second series of papier-mâché works: “crotches” based on a plaster cast of part of the human body. Their individualisation and overtly demonstrative character allow us to think of them as singular “portraits” presenting sex and sexuality as irreducible components of human identity. At the same time, they may be treated as a kind of “mask” that can be put on and taken off at will, once again evoking the phantasm of androgyny and the desire to explore every available dimension of sexual experience.

Kawalerowicz uses and transforms in various ways two conventions for the visual representation of sexuality. On the one hand, drawing certain elements from the “poetics” of vulgar drawings found on building walls and in public toilets, she introduces blunt simplifications, brutalises colour and line, and resorts to stereotypes in her treatment of the human figure. On the other, she is inspired by erotic and pornographic photography, particularly amateur photographs of sexual intercourse submitted to pornographic magazines by their own “readers”. Unlike the theatricalised, disembodied and often simply desexualised soft-erotic images circulating openly at the centre of mass-media pop culture, these amateur photographs are capable of evoking sex’s physiological dimension, the peculiar corporeal weight of sexual intercourse, as well as its particular awkwardness and natural grotesquerie, undisguised by professional theatricality or erotic artistry. All these aspects can be found in the artist’s small, almost automatic “notebook” sketches, which build up a repertoire of figural arrangements that later return in larger drawings and paintings.

Unlike many other contemporary artworks concerned with sexuality, Kawalerowicz’s pieces do not rely on the direct use of photographic “quotations” from reality. While drawing on the photographs mentioned above and borrowing certain elements from them, the artist subjects them to a far-reaching transformation still governed by a traditional understanding of artistic form in compositional and expressive terms. It is uncertain, however, whether even this unmistakable mark of artistic transformation will suffice to protect her art from the opprobrium and attacks of self-appointed guardians of morality.