Concupiscentia oculorum

It is difficult to name what Marzena Kawalerowicz has been painting ‘for more than twenty years’. It invariably unfolds between people. Sometimes there is a self-absorbed loner, more often a couple, occasionally a small flock. Kawalerowicz certainly does not paint agape. It is more a matter of §ροως, τ φροδίσια, ¦πιhυμια, voluptas, concupiscentia, libido, luxuria. Better to name it immediately by reaching for Vorberg’s Glossarium eroticum than to spell it out in language accessible to secondary-school pupils: mimeta as a framing theme in contemporary art, the thoroughly un-Pythagorean symbolism of 69, 696 and 6969, giving a blowjob as an existential motif. Better, because a reasonably honest description of the artist’s work should preserve the proportion, visible in the paintings, between literalness and understatement.

Frankly, putting what Kawalerowicz paints into words is a poor idea. Her chosen range of subjects overlaps more with the sphere of sighs and cries, smacks and gurgles than with articulate speech. If there is a language there, it is entirely absorbed in an activity wholly different from the semantic and linguistic. If looking alone is not enough for someone, it would be better to make appreciative noises, groan or perhaps pant in front of these works than force what usually exceeds the registers of everyday language back into its narrow channel. Not always, and not everything human, should be expressed in words.

The artist declares that she is ‘not very engaged’. Even without that declaration, her indifference towards successive fashions and causes can be seen in a consistent, years-long return to the individual. To similar configurations of figures, actions and gestures. To limiting herself to observing what the body can do: the body understood literally and physically, far removed from metaphorical generalisation. It is therefore misguided to search for connections between this work and Michel Foucault, patron of innumerable contemporary arts, with his vision of the body as a social body torn and tormented by conflicts of interest, and sexuality subordinated to the primacy of power and politics. Kawalerowicz’s works are as carefree and unaware of such convictions as the bodies of secondary-school pupils in their first rapture. This may partly explain their appeal to viewers continually instructed through endless critical droning that sexuality is not a matter of personal choice but of oppression and domination, and that their body is a terrain of political struggle and a manifestation of stereotypes.

If one must seek a contemporary patron, the essence of these works seems intertwined with the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. With the conviction that only through the ‘bodily mass’ can we learn something about ourselves, about the I of consciousness. Kawalerowicz’s practice, invariably centred on the I, seems subject to Merleau-Ponty’s same belief that the body possesses hidden knowledge of the world. More than that: that the world is projected by the body. In her pictures, bodies woven into backgrounds in assorted ways participate in the ‘mysterious exchange between world and body’ in which Merleau-Ponty saw ‘primordial perception’—the only cognition free from error. And cognition, ‘the immediate image of reality, is the ultimate dream in the realm of technology’, as Walter Benjamin observed. This is one reason for the fascination with body and sexuality that grew from the nineteenth century onwards—the age of steam and iron. The layers Kawalerowicz laboriously applies to the painted I recall sensory synaesthesia, the overlapping of sensory fields about which Merleau-Ponty wrote with microscopic precision.

The wretchedness of the present lies in its inability to omit details, its helplessness before the onrush of everything, its panicked fear of simplifying or passing over anything. Something of this onrush, this interweaving of everything with everything else, can be seen in these works. We become mired in a thicket of relations and references that congeal into physiological sauces, obscuring what we want to see so effectively that once again, as far as the horizon—or rather the ‘shop window’—we see ourselves. There is no reason to disbelieve Marzena Kawalerowicz when she says that she tries to approach what she does ‘with seriousness and purity’, and that her choice of subject was a challenge to ‘her mental and artistic abilities’. If so, somewhere at the bottom, beneath the layers of paint, beneath today’s packaged and commodified eroticism, the epiphany of one of the three Erotes should shine through. Presumably Eros Anteros, who, before turning into a cretinous cupid with a slingshot, was the god of requited love. Perceiving the deity, seeing an epiphany with one’s own eyes, demands a perspective extending back to the Archaic age. One that allows us—like narrowing our eyes—to disentangle ourselves momentarily from present constraints and reach the source. Ad fontes—against the current—this, among other things, is what art is for. If Eros the god existed, then even more than the Christians’ God he deserved the name deus absconditus. A hidden god, a god who cannot be spotted, an absent god. Perhaps that is why I cannot see Eros in Kawalerowicz’s pictures. They are too contemporary; the today that so appeals to their maker fits them too well. The heavy, industrial rap beat that accompanies her while working vibrates too strongly within them. The rhythm of erotic gymnastics, erotic ballet, strenuous erotic diligence—not an epiphany of Eros. Jacek Woźniakowski wrote about an eighteenth-century transformation in the expression of valour and heroism, when variously allegorised constancy and spiritual steadfastness began to be displaced by images in which heroes demonstrated their heroism through athletic and acrobatic contortions. From there, the road leads directly to the heroes of action films who preside over the present. In contemporary eroticism, a similar process has replaced what was originally an internal, motionless tension—a static, concealed potency—with the dynamism of acrobatic, competitive configurations. The inability to perceive an epiphany is not an accusation. Today, painting godless pictures well is no sin. It merely allows us to recognise the entirely contemporary character of these works, which refers solely to the present.

The true subject of Marzena Kawalerowicz’s pictures is urban life—vita urbana. An existence whose essence can be characterised at the intersection of two fundamental qualities: an almost complete indifference towards the problem of direct agricultural subsidies and an ineradicable interest in eroticism. Both moments recur invariably in K.’s work. The most important categories comprising K.’s works are simultaneously foundations of the great-city stereotype: visual density and the superimposition of successive images. Diversity describing the city as a meeting place for all the orders and elements dispersed beyond its walls. Unceasing activity independent of the hour of day or night. The close, almost intimate contact of homini urbani with the fauna of gadgets, toys and costumes growing around them, and an almost equally easy contact with another person. The density so typical of the city’s compressed, crowded space, crossed cyclically—usually in a weekly rhythm—by groups of individuals driven by assorted insatiable appetites. Often dressed as someone else, practically jumping out of their skin in order briefly to lose their own form and finally gain relief. Similar figures, impelled by similar motives, move from one painting to the next.

The city is not a good place for archaeological excavations. It is not easy to break through here to archaic sources, to reach strata where the presence of a deity left traces. Living Cities move in the opposite direction, always towards the new, at a speed the sources cannot match. One can hardly object to the absence of this layer in the pictures when they move towards the new even faster than the rest of the city. Like eroticism itself, after all, they are the crème de la crème of the urban way of life.

Let us reach for Jan Kott’s Short Treatise on Eroticism, written long ago, before he left Poland, to see how closely the languages describing eroticism, the city and Kawalerowicz’s practice resemble one another. ‘The erotic imagination never creates a complete situation or a complete person. The erotic partner of imagination and desire is created or given only in fragments. Like a shattered sculpture whose parts we find or view one after another. These are separate objects: torso, arms, legs, head, belly.’ Cities and their lives are similarly discovered in fragments and layers; similar fragments construct Kawalerowicz’s works.

A Short Treatise on Eroticism explains why Eros cannot be discerned in K.’s pictures. ‘Eroticism is always a pushing into darkness, even if it occurs in full light […].’ The ‘metaphorical darkness’ detected by Kott is the only place where Eros reveals himself. His epiphany is an epiphany of darkness lying beyond the eyes’ horizon. We usually reach it by closing our eyelids. It cannot be painted. Marzena Kawalerowicz is perfectly aware of this incommensurability between her aim and her means: ‘How am I supposed to show it? If I could write, I would write.’ She succeeds in showing an astonishing amount, approaching the boundary of absolute darkness where the laws of optics differ from the everyday. ‘During the act, sight, like touch, becomes incomplete. It concentrates on a fragment: on the eyes, lips or forehead, on the nape of the neck or belly […].’ A precise statistical survey would be required, but eyes almost certainly appear most often in K.’s works, followed by mouths, foreheads and ‘broad napes’. The frequency with which body parts occur in her pictures is the same as that described by Kott. ‘The fragments of the body taken in by sight during the act are, like touch, incoherent and disordered. Eyes close, eyes open; a fragment of the body given in enormous enlargement has already shifted.’ When we look at these pictures, their fragmentary, multilayered structure allows us to see as we do during the ‘act’. Marzena Kawalerowicz realistically shows not an object invisible in light, but a mode of sensation.

In Kott one can read an answer to why ‘flat things suddenly ceased to be enough’ for K., as she says herself, and she began making torsos, heads and ‘backsides’, always in fragments. ‘In darkness the body is divided into parts. They are separate objects. They exist for themselves. Touch draws them forth into existence for me […]. The erotic “space” of touch is not the three-dimensional space of sight, nor is it a sculpture that can be known by running a finger over it. It is the space of many senses or subsenses at once, perhaps closest to the “spaces” created by taste and smell, far denser than visual space. The body becomes a glove turned inside out. It is experienced and known from within.’ From within—this is precisely how the hollow shells of hips and thighs that Kawalerowicz pastes one over another accumulate.

The merging and intensification of the senses, and ultimately their confusion, which Kott describes and which constitute the essence of both the sexual act and K.’s works, are accompanied by a sensation of excess, a bewilderment at the quantity of stimuli. A similar sensation strikes those entering large shopping galleries, multiplexes and the countless public spaces of the city whose names begin with hyper-, super- or mega- and sound like advertisements in the personal columns. As with eroticism, this can intimidate and stop us briefly in our tracks, only later, once we decide to enter more deeply, to produce a sense of contentment and discreet satisfaction that makes shopping and fucking resemble one another in the Western world. Touch—usually the support of an escalator handrail—allows us to penetrate safely into a space in which sight sees only fragments.

A Short Treatise on Eroticism directs us towards a fundamental question: are Marzena Kawalerowicz’s pictures populated by actual lovers or invented partners? ‘In fact, four people go to bed: a pair of actual lovers and a pair of invented partners; two bodies and two partners of imagination and desire mutually created by one another. Eroticism is a test of that invented partner, created by oneself. In this test, the final instance and ultimate appeal is the body. One’s own body and the partner’s body.’ The final sentence of this quotation—written long before the first pictures were made—is their precise description. One’s own body and the partner’s body. But which body? What exactly are we looking at? Despite all the explanations about the role of drawing from the model and ‘using photography’, explanations demonstrating that we are moving in an area important and fundamental to the artist, we still do not know. The test about which Kott writes is nothing other than a question of truth—of the truth of the body, as in Merleau-Ponty. Truth is an attribute of divinity. An epiphany is the perception of truth, yet at the same time the question about truth is a mocking one. A rhetorical question, posed ironically time and again by the Sophists. In the dialogue between the Visitor and Theaetetus reported by Plato in the Sophist, a fundamental division appears that allows us to distinguish two pairs among the ‘four people’. It is a division of ‘the art of making likenesses’ (τέχ<η εÆδωλοποίίκ­) into the ‘art of making images’ (είκαστικZ—eikastike) and the ‘art of creating deceptive appearances’ (φανταστικZ—fantastike). Kawalerowicz is unquestionably capable of both. What, then, does she paint? Often all ‘four people’, but the order in which the picture accumulates is important. Beginning with reliably recorded ‘images’, by adding successive layers and ‘toys’ she usually arrives at fantastike.

Later in the Sophist, the subject of the conversation is repeatedly folded in half and braided like a plait, like the paper ‘toys’ protruding from the torsos and backsides made by Kawalerowicz. Finally, the Visitor (in the rap version, the bloke) admits defeat: ‘In fact, my friend, we have fallen into an inquiry that is difficult in every respect. For that something should look and seem to be something, while not being it, and that one should be able to say something, but not the truth—all this has always been full of difficulty, both in the past and now’ (236e). To look and seem like something while not being it—this sensation accompanies me when I look at K.’s pictures. These works are necessarily Sophistic, referring to fantastike and deceiving us. Necessarily, because it is impossible to make an image of ‘a space far denser than visual space’. The requirement that art be something more than imitation is one from which art has been generally exempted in the Western world. It is an extravagant whim, like demanding that a lover become love. The discord between seeming and being in Marzena Kawalerowicz’s practice can be perceived because eroticism has been superimposed upon art, augmenting the shortcomings of the intellect used to judge art with instinct.

This is, of course, exclusively my own conclusion, reached ‘by appealing’ to my body. It cannot be generalised in any way. The possibility that feelings towards eroticism and art could be standardised and reconciled through social procedures would be truly ghastly.

Kott is wrong about one thing. Or rather, he writes as if he wanted to be wrong, as if he wanted to believe what he writes: ‘Eroticism is always cognition.’ Yes, but only from a participant’s perspective. From the perspective of an observer sketching what has been seen, it is not. Eroticism is cognition and tautology at the same time. The cognitive acts constantly being fulfilled—the monstrous seven tonnes of semen per minute worldwide calculated by Lem—are simultaneously a biological hiccup. At times, it is difficult to decide where Kawalerowicz places the emphasis in her work. Eroticism is cognition and, simultaneously, the fulfilment of an instinct to become alike. It incorporates participants into an immutable ritual of touches, glances and sighs. How does one draw a sigh? Precisely as Marzena Kawalerowicz does: as a detail, an exaggerated detail. A detail breaking out of the overall composition, escaping like the involuntary moan accompanying the touch of another person. Another fold of skin that is erotic rather than anatomical, a seventh finger added solely to stimulate our eye until it begins to sigh. Whether this detail is made with a forceful line or delicate tint does not matter—everyone sighs a little differently.

Details continually appear in these works that compel us to consider seriously once again whether this entire practice is not heading towards a frenetic pansensualism. Whether everything, from the drawings to the increasingly abundant, mannequin-like torsos and backsides, with increasingly abstract constructions in place of genitals, is not moving towards a final hypertrophy. Towards a Gargantuan paroxysm of the body’s triumph, a joyful Baroque catastrophe of abundance separated by nothing from an epiphany—one that is itself an anthropophany, a seeing of the human being. The extraction of the human shape from what is superficial. A final liberation from convention and time. Consider, for example, Kawalerowicz’s erect phalluses. In reality, the artist—who, alone or with a little help from her fiancé, wraps herself in plaster-soaked gauze to make a cast of her ‘lower-rear’ regions with legs spread, then covers the resulting mould in papier-mâché, paints the whole thing however she likes and finally adds enormous erect phalluses—could easily enliven an episode of 13 Posterunek or even Świat według Kiepskich devoted to analysing the problems of contemporary art. And this is a value in itself. In their absurdity and freedom from any function, these erect and dangling paper phalluses are deliciously avant-garde. Modernistically thrust at the entire world, they may provide tangible evidence of the vitality of an art for art’s sake position. Pointed directly at the eyes, they swell as if they were the centre of the world. And perhaps they strike at the heart of the matter. Orgiastic maenads and centaurs could dance in such backsides, adorned with phalluses, vaginas and ‘toys’. Pantagruel could stride through them. There is simply something unpredictable in these paper cocks, something close to magical rapture, something incommensurate with the present day. They are inappropriate, out of place and, who knows, perhaps in poor taste.

Yet here too there is a fracture. The toil and consistency with which Kawalerowicz works are the opposite of Baroque frenzy. The ‘hard work’ in which she believes is closer to the Enlightenment labours of de Sade, who explored the secrets of human nature equally methodically, beginning with the natural openings in the body’s covering.

Remaining within the same circle of subjects makes K.’s practice resemble the scientistic achievements of nineteenth-century heroines. Her indifference to the rest of the world and absorption in her own work, which will not change regardless of circumstances, explain the artist’s fascination with Maria Skłodowska-Curie.

When searching for examples confirming the universal character of the relationship between urban life and eroticism, one cannot forget James Joyce’s stream of consciousness.

One can easily imagine that during his peregrinations, stimulated by an erotic rhythm, one of the protagonists of Joyce’s urban Odyssey (1904) encounters Marzena Kawalerowicz’s pictures. An attempt to introduce those pictures into the world of Edward Redliński’s Konopielka (1973), seventy years later—a world identical with the village of Taplary, without electricity and surrounded by marshes—would have caused a shock that sent the voyeuristic narrator Kaziuk falling from his tree once again.

The sequence of words loosely arranging themselves into the whole concocted by Joyce in Ulysses corresponds perfectly with the sequence of forms, textures and figures in the pictures.

The drawings and sketches in the exhibition, notes made on small sheets filled with dozens of simultaneous scenes, motifs and details, form a vast floodplain of ideas composed in a manner resembling Molly Bloom’s monologue, which ends Bloom’s Dublin day and inaugurates the fierce modern eroticism of art ruthlessly stripped of punctuation: ‘I had it open for him his last day he had on a rather transparent shirt I could see his pink breast he wanted to touch mine with his for a while but I would not let him he was very downcast chiefly from fear because you never know consumption or he might leave me with a child embarazada that old servant Ines told me that even one little drop if it got inside you after all after I tried it with a Banana but I was afraid it would break and get lost somewhere inside me yes because once they took something like that out of a woman that had been there for years encrusted with lime salts they all go mad to get back where they came from you would think they can never get far enough up and then in a way they break with you until the next time yes because there is a wonderful feeling there all the time so gentle when we finished yes O yes I let him finish in my handkerchief pretending I was not excited but I spread my legs I would not let him touch me under my petticoat I had a skirt opening at the side I tortured him until he nearly died first I tickled him I loved exciting that dog in the hotel rrrrsst Bowwowwowwowwow his eyes were closed and a bird flew below us he was a little shy but I liked him for that like that morning when I made him blush a little when I got on top of him yes and unbuttoned him and took it out and pulled back the skin it had something like an eye at the end all men have nothing but Buttons in the middle on the wrong side Molly darling he called me what was his name Jack Joe Harry Mulvey yes I think he was a lieutenant rather fair-haired had such a laughing kind of voice so I was at whatsitsname everything was whatsitsname he had a little moustache and said he would come back God it seems just like yesterday and if I got married he would do it with me and I promised him yes honestly that I would let him fuck me at once perhaps he is dead by now or was killed or is a Captain or an admiral it is almost 20 years […]’. The same immediately recognisable current, despite its meanders, submerging everything in what we began with and what is difficult to name, has pulsated ‘for more than twenty years’ in Marzena Kawalerowicz’s work. The stream has flooded the source.

PS

One may regret that neither Bloom nor his wife Molly saw Kawalerowicz’s pictures then—on 16 June in Dublin. Perhaps they will manage it… in Łódź. Atlas Sztuki has, of course, sent them invitations, just as it has everyone else.