A Hole in the Whole: On The Locomotive of History, Art History and Contemporary Institutions

Adam Mazur: What is The Locomotive of History?

Andrzej Turowski: Above all, it is another experience of writing, the pleasure of creation and the necessary critique of a text, as well as a game with the contexts of my own research and publications. A kind of prelude to something else. In my practice, it is a new and questioning look at the history around which I circle as an academic scholar and critic of contemporary art. At the same time, it is a reckoning with the condition of the art historian, who moves among dubious sources, uses defective tools, investigates uncertain meanings, tracks elusive facts, draws knowledge of reality from illusion and places events within discourses. It is also a small work that revolves around the ‘hunger for reality’ that plagued the great artists of the former avant-garde. The locomotive of history is a metaphor for international revolution, a historiosophical vision of a victorious future, a political utopia burnt out on a railway siding in Koluszki. Thus it is also a critique of that tradition.

A.M.: You are an art historian and curator. Could one say that in the case of The Locomotive of History you become not so much a writer as an artist?

A.T.: I have always been interested in the boundary between researcher and curator on the one hand and artist on the other, between historian and writer. The boundary between the pursuit of truth through knowledge, the organisation of imagination and objects when arranging exhibitions, and the exploitation of reality and fiction in artistic creation. In my academic practice (and in life), I have believed that if boundaries serve division, it is above all so that they may be crossed. I left for France when doing so was very difficult. I have written a great deal about this—margins and transgressions, byways and non-places, undefined areas and misty spaces, borderlands—these were and remain the objects of my research. In The Locomotive of History, I do not want to abolish boundaries, but neither do I intend to insist on them. This essay, combined with an installation and a film, does not automatically make me an artist, but it certainly weakens my position in the realm of ‘hard’ knowledge. 

A.M.: What relationship connects The Locomotive of History and Anna Baumgart's Conquerors of the Sun?

A.T.: Above all, an intellectual and imaginative adventure. It is like teasing, finishing one another's thoughts, breaking off in mid-sentence, speaking over each other, shouting each other down, finding threads and abandoning close-ups. A whole range of emotions and constant attempts to agree and communicate with each other. Working together also involves many empty places, long silences and separate paths. The book and the film are not only an exchange, nor only a translation. The book is not the film's screenplay, and the film is not a motif for the book. We wanted them together to create a kind of mental installation whose space is heterogeneous. The book and film can appear together and exist within the same presentation, project or exhibition. They are issued and distributed in a common wrapper and move within a similar subject, yet, in accordance with their different titles, they are governed by different logics and place their emphases differently. They do not illustrate one another; rather, they create tensions. They can therefore be read and viewed separately and confronted from a certain distance. In short, it is a relationship of attraction and repulsion. Exceptionally unstable—and that is its fundamental value.

A.M.: Your research on Polish Constructivism was a turning point in art history. Are you not concerned that The Locomotive of History might diminish its significance?

A.T.: A turning point that produces no particular consequences is of little use. It is the efficacy rather than the significance (performance in place of paradigm) of a breakthrough that testifies to its depth and extent. Following the terminology of road workers, I prefer to speak of breakthroughs as potholes after the spring thaw. They cannot be avoided, and falling into one entails a critical shift. In principle, a breakthrough is a transitional state. Its discomfort is felt, so one cannot remain stuck in the hole. So it is with ‘my Constructivism’. If it was indeed a turning point, it is precisely for that reason that I continue to grapple with it. The Locomotive of History is certainly one consequence of that breakthrough (it reveals a hole in the whole). For art history to be a living discipline, it must occasionally be plunged into crisis; potholes must be found in the road. These are breakthrough moments and processes attended by great danger. I have no intention of avoiding them. On the contrary, I believe that only breakthroughs understood in this way are creative in both knowledge and art. The Locomotive of History reflects the language of my academic statements and the logic of the historical meaning carried by that language in a distorting mirror. It undermines nothing, but by shifting the point of view it considers what things will look like when I once again fall into a hole with ‘my Constructivism’. 

A.M.: Anna Baumgart's film draws heavily on Soviet visual propaganda. It also contains references to the present, such as cutaways to demonstrations in New York (the Occupy Wall Street movement). Do you likewise regard your book as a vehicle of social and political revolution?

A.T.: Although its title contains the word locomotive, my book is not an engine. It is more like a rake of carriages deprived of motive power and shunted onto a siding by various ‘laws’ and accidents of history. Ideologies expressed through propaganda slogans—and there are just as many of these in my book—wear out very quickly. The book speaks of that political exhaustion. But not only that. I do not treat the book as a political manifesto or literature as ideology; nevertheless, every work contains social potential, its own particular politicality. It is an element of anarchist dissent, what I call the capacity to ‘arouse unease’. I would like the book to move in that direction and produce precisely that effect. I do not mean ‘drawing conclusions’ from defeated history, but a decisive critique—and consequently a reformulation of the questions addressed to the modernist past, and on that basis a different definition of the relationship between art and revolution, the avant-garde and utopia, form and propaganda. Looking through my own texts at the experiences of avant-garde artists of the 1920s can serve this purpose well.

A.M.: Does the avant-garde still exist today?

A.T.: Not everything today directs our attention towards the avant-garde, unless we understand the avant-garde itself differently and construct its definition and contemporaneity not on the concept of originality and change but on critical participation. Of course, we shall thereby break the historical connection between artistic experiment and revolutionary society, but draw closer to today's concept of radically disobedient art. Such a reformulation naturally raises many doubts, especially when we wish to speak of the aesthetic in the traditional sense (autonomy) or of the work's ideology as the concept has hitherto been used (engagement). Depending on the interactions in which it participates, the avant-garde in contemporary social space may be its ornament or its critique. As an ornament, it loses its transgressive character and is consumed as a desirable avant-garde. As critique, meanwhile, it retains continuity with the historical avant-garde's concept of engagement, although it need not now call itself avant-garde at all. I prefer to speak of radical art (as I did in Builders of the World), and recently I have used the term ‘particular art that arouses unease’ (I employed this phrase at the Particolare exhibition in Venice in 2011).

A.M.: Let me broaden that question. What does revolution mean to you? And is it still possible in art and social life? 

A.T.: The question goes quite far beyond the book, though the book itself can provide a pretext for speaking on the subject. Notice that the slogan on the propaganda poster reproduced on the cover read: ‘revolution is the locomotive of history’. I omitted the word ‘revolution’ from the title because revolution is not the subject of my reflections, and not only for that reason. Revolution in both art and the public sphere, as a general prospect for renewing the whole of social and/or artistic life, does not today seem to me an interesting prospect ethically, culturally or politically. At any rate, not if its consequences are linked to a particular vision of the world's future. That future, like democracy, is not something closed, established for today or tomorrow; it is neither an unfinished project nor the fluidity or imperfection of past or present reality. It is a social process whose essence is a kind of dialectic between conservative thinking about stability and revolutionary critique, which reveals crisis and calls into question every form of soporific complacency—above all the critique of ideological hypocrisy and the injustices that flow from it. I believe that not revolution but dissent, indignation, disobedience, rebellion and revolt are the fundamental and inalienable values of a democratic society. I do not mean political strategies that consume rebellion, but forms of people's political self-organisation born of indignation and leading to civil disobedience. Art plays a very important role here. Nonconformist artists, manifesting freedom through disrespect for the law, seek through their art to make disobedience an artistic principle and a legal weapon of democracy in crisis. They deconstruct power (its pride and arrogance) and its political manifestations (its dogmatism and populism), because of the threat these pose to the democratic principle of self-realisation arising from the dynamics of social life. Disobedience is not a revolutionary act that changes reality, but a strategy of crisis rooted in the crisis of democracy. These nonconformists stave off the catastrophe of democracy but do not prevent its crisis. Radical art employing its subversive potential is an anarchist component of democratic dispute. What I am speaking of now lies on the margins of The Locomotive of History, but is an important element of a wider debate in which I participate as an exhibition curator and critic of contemporary art.

A.M.: The current discussion of contemporary art in Poland sometimes resembles a conversation between a military commissar and an avant-garde painter. Is The Locomotive of History at times an ironic, critical commentary on these disputes? How do you assess—from the position of an art historian but also an artist—what is happening in Poland today? I have in mind statements by artists such as Artur Żmijewski, Yael Bartana and Wilhelm Sasnal.

A.T.: If the debate looks as you describe it, I do not fit into it very well. In my view, the alternative between the commissar and the painter is fundamentally false today and is justified only within a particular history. Artists' functioning in the contemporary ideosphere is of an entirely different character, because the public space in which it occurs has nothing in common with that of the 1920s. Today's situation, if one can describe it in a single word, resembles a spectacle rather than a battlefield. I have written about this in detail in my articles. For now, I do not see the content of The Locomotive of History within the space of spectacle, although the book as a media object may find itself there. I would have nothing against that. I would not, however, want The Locomotive of History to become a skeleton key opening every gate. If it relates to contemporary Poland and one division or another within that field, it does so through Anka Baumgart's film, which runs parallel to the book. In that sense, the book or film may be a critical participant in disputes unfolding in contemporary public space, but not an external commentary upon them.  

A.M.: Let me put it differently. Continuing the thread of the contemporary context in which The Locomotive of History is read, echoes of the current institutional debate can be heard in your search for the sources of Polish modernity. The book seems to me a time bomb planted beneath the idea of a museum of modern art—an idea extremely resonant today and, as your text suggests, dear to Malevich's heart. What place would you actually assign yourself in the debate about modernity taking place between institutions in Łódź, Warsaw, Kraków and even Wrocław? To put it differently, one scene in Baumgart's film was shot outside the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. Do you too believe that today The Locomotive of History would stop not at Koluszki but at Łomianki?

A.T.: Yes, here I am closer to a problem that has a historical dimension. Institutions, with their bureaucracy, hierarchy and power, live longer and are socially rooted somewhat differently from art. A museum is always ideological and comes into being through commissars. We should have no illusions: Strzemiński's initiative to organise the International Collection of Modern Art found a place and was realised in the Museum only thanks to a favourable socialist majority on Łódź City Council. In my book, the communist commissars, in agreeing to a museum that was the artists' idea, want to achieve their own objectives. The train carrying works of art for the museum and weapons for revolutionaries is a purely political game in which the engaged artists have little say. At a certain point, the works disappear, while the museum continues to be built. New commissars appear. Today, processes of alienation concern institutions more than individuals. The latter integrate themselves into the spectacle and find their identity there. The museum as an institution achieves this exceptionally well—only when it can inscribe itself within the space of the supermarket. Koluszki was a railway siding, while Łomianki lies on the road to the new low-cost airport in Modlin.

A.M.: On the one hand, The Locomotive of History reads like an enthralling crime novel; on the other, one is left not so much dissatisfied as with the unease you mentioned. Did you consider writing a different ending? 

A.T.: No, I saw no possibility of another ending. Fortunately, the book is not a film screenplay, so the producer had no say about the note of pessimism in its content. The ending naturally arouses the unease I wanted to provoke. That is its critical meaning.

A.M.: You mentioned that The Locomotive of History is only the beginning. I find that intriguing in view of the dynamics of your historical writing. In writing Polish Constructivism, you adhered to hard facts and a modernist model of art history, before gradually moving—through publications fundamental to art history such as Builders of the World, Avant-Garde Margins and Malevich in Warsaw—towards late-modernist, not to say postmodernist, positions. The story of the pupils of Julio Jurenito is significant here. Could you conclude by saying what you are working on now? What are your plans? 

A.T.: I continually reread my books and articles through other books, unearthed and unknown archival material, works in artists' studios, and current exhibitions in museums and galleries. I distance myself from theses already expressed, return to abandoned thoughts, exploit unused margins, examine forgotten notes and once again traverse unrecognised roads. I do so with a certain obsession of circling within a contemporaneity understood in this way and not identical with itself, encompassing different spaces and different times. More concretely, I continue writing unfinished books, hang works in exhibitions I have conceived, lecture frequently and discuss with students, and participate in what is called artistic life. Recently I even wrote An Artistic-Political Manifesto of Particular Art.