Łódź Kaliska and the Shroud of Łódź

Łódź Kaliska has travelled through two eras. Its activity during the past dozen or so years of the Third Polish Republic has overshadowed the decade preceding 1989: the group’s heroic period, when throughout the 1980s it challenged the cultural, artistic, ideological and political status quo with critical intensity and a charge of irony and wit that won it as many admirers as opponents. For several decades Łódź, as a centre of culture, occupied an exceptional place on Poland’s artistic map. Yet the achievement of the “Kaliszans”, as members of ŁK were affectionately known, was to inject extraordinary energy into the difficult 1980s through actions, festivals and open-air workshops, the publication Tango, and dozens of artistic and community events initiated for their own sake. Without this activity, we would have entered the new political order far poorer, less well equipped with tools for shaping our own culture — and creative attitudes.

The richness with which art saturated that austere decade of the Polish People’s Republic’s slow disintegration — a state kept alive by an apparatus of coercion and an economic system rationing scarce consumer goods — naturally grew through the activity of a larger circle of individuals and artistic groups. Alongside the Łódź milieus associated with the Film Form Workshop, Construction in Process and the Artists’ Museum, under martial law and in the years that followed almost every major Polish city had its own art brigades. To name only a few: Luxus and Orange Alternative in Wrocław; Totart, Praffdata and Wyspa Gallery in the Tricity; Gruppa, Neue Bieremiennost and Dziekanka Gallery in Warsaw; Koło Klipsa in Poznań; and numerous artists and venues forming a network for the alternative circulation of art.

Within this archipelago — detached from discredited state institutions and generally avoiding the centres of patriotic and religious opposition culture — Łódź Kaliska and the other participants in Pitch-In Culture, among whom Jacek Kryszkowski must be mentioned, stood out for their iconoclastic attitude and distinctive approach to artistic production itself. Unlike most other groups of the period, ŁK’s animators did not make paintings or sculptures; their output comprised installations and objects but, above all, photographs, publications, film records, photomontages and collages.¹ Numerous manifestos and declarations accompanied them, leading critics eagerly to label ŁK’s activity Neo-Dadaist and even — for reasons difficult to fathom — Surrealist. Some of ŁK’s countercultural practices at the time may indeed have recalled Situationism, itself related to Surrealism, while in reality lying closer to the tradition of Fluxus and related phenomena. Yet it is difficult to attribute even the broadest left-wing provenance to the Łódź dissenters. In any case, it is difficult to speak of a more mature form of artistic critique of capitalism in an economically impoverished country that had been without a free market — including an art market — for several decades.

Scepticism towards left-wing ideologies and prescriptions for solving social problems, formed on an anti-Communist foundation, was shared by a large part of the East-Central European counterculture generation: its artists, punk musicians and writers. This perhaps explains the phenomenon of ŁK’s second phase, which has now continued for more than two decades. It was based on ironic games with national myths and phobias² and a frivolous flirtation with mass culture, together with attempts to harness its economic and distributive potential for the group’s own ends. A significant portion of this activity was documented in the catalogue New Pop (2004) and has received considerable attention, so this time I should like to focus only on several issues that — in my view and at this moment — are the most important.

In this unequal contest with the forces of marketing and advertising, ŁK employs its tried and tested weapon: irony, a means of distancing itself from the ubiquitous language of media that absorbs everything and is especially eager to seize upon scandalous artistic proposals. Alongside various visual, spatial and urban projects, ŁK, as ever, accompanies its activity with manifestos, multiplying them at every turn until the desired moment of self-ridicule is reached. Appearing under the name Muzeum Łódź Kaliska, the artists wrote in the 2000 New Pop — Annulment Manifesto:

“1. On 6 February 2000, we annulled the boundaries that had hitherto existed between advertising and High Art.
2. Advertising is artificial and High Art is Artificial.
3. It is good to create High Art that is advertising.” […]

The text goes on to describe the benefits of establishing such a relationship between art and advertising, measured in money, access to women and beautiful breasts. The fetishes of new objects, money and the market, together with sexuality as a commodity, would recur in subsequent manifestos over the following years. As Jolanta Ciesielska observed, “the manifestos of Łódź Kaliska have always been intended to eliminate, or at least reduce, the possibility of failure […]. This is how successive manifestos arose: of Embarrassing Art, Necessary Art, Art without Meaning and, finally, New Pop.”³

Challenging the social and political status quo of the 1980s was relatively straightforward when it came to choosing aesthetic means, for the adversary used brutal violence and operated through primitive propaganda founded upon lies that defied common sense. The same was true of the pompousness of cultural life in the Polish People’s Republic in its impoverished form, stripped of splendour and the trappings of power. Satirical strategies directed at the language of capitalist and consumerist propaganda, whose syntax appeals to myths, temptations and desires, did not necessarily prove as effective. Thus, in Sketch for an Anthropological Tale of New Pop, Ewa Nowina-Sroczyńska wrote: “The fundamental category through which New Pop describes and interprets the contemporary world is the grotesque — though not Mikhail Bakhtin’s grotesque realism […], but the term in its contemporary sense. The grotesque reveals complications and the ‘other sides of phenomena’; it is never apologetic, but a manifestation of social criticism and independence. Its structural characteristic is to reveal the unreliability of the categories through which we orient ourselves. […] It flourishes in times of crisis, transition and the incoherence of ideological and aesthetic systems: the grotesque is a ‘poetics of transience’.”⁴

ŁK cannot win the unequal game played against the “marketing-media complex”, which possesses an inexhaustible capacity to absorb every proposal and opposition, together with an endless range of styles and pastiches — from the most primitive and vulgar to the brilliant and sophisticated. Choosing the first of the artist’s two roles defined by Bazon Brock — jester and priest — Łódź Kaliska has in fact directed the bittersweet tone of its grotesque most forcefully towards the artistic practices of its time. While other artists engaged in critiquing consumerism and new structures of ideological violence on the billboards of Poland’s largest outdoor advertising company, ŁK reinforced the advertising message through absurd undertakings. Its presentations — Triumph at the Festival of Dialogue of Four Cultures (2002); magazine covers ranging from Playboy (2004), with a mocking emblem, to Arteon and Łazienka (2004); ostentatiously sexist actions; and staged photographs in which the principal roles are played by “commodities” — women — satirise the practices and strategies of critical and public art proposed by the group’s peers and by artists of the younger generation. Abolishing the boundary between art and advertising violated one of the fundamental taboos of art in recent years, art often produced with the same technologies and employing strategies similar to advertising. The process culminated in an installation in the lavatory of Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, opened in 2004 under the slogan Pure Public Art.⁵ At the same time, the Łódź artists pastiched a work by Poland’s most celebrated artist to employ Pop styling, Piotr Uklański. They transformed his striking photomontage Skull (2000), which appeared on the cover of Flash Art in 2004, into an analogous composition of the naked bodies of ŁK’s artists and women, entitled The World according to Łódź Kaliska on the Cover of Foto Magazine (2003).

Łódź Kaliska’s latest production, organised at Atlas Sztuki, bears the same title as a film made by the group in collaboration with Józef Robakowski and Witold Krymarys twenty-seven years earlier.⁶ It represents a highly intriguing turn in ŁK’s work. The title reaches back to the group’s heroic period and refers to a film documenting the inexhaustible yet unruly creative energies that surged through the now legendary Strych in Łódź in the mid-1980s. The exhibition itself comprises two principal parts: a group of sculptures, empty forms covering absent production machines, and photomontages showing a photographic map of the “Kaliszans’” native city, gradually cleansed and emptied of successive industrial quarters.

The deindustrialisation of Łódź — another European industrial city undergoing an enormous crisis as a result of the globalisation of production and the migration of stateless capital, against which local administrations are unable to defend themselves — is a painful experience for residents of this exceptional Polish metropolis. Viewers from outside Łódź should especially be reminded that Łódź Kaliska has been involved in the city’s regeneration since the very beginning of the political transformation. For many years Marek Janiak was president of the Piotrkowska Street Foundation; as an architect he also participated in rebuilding the character of the city’s principal thoroughfare. The group lent its name to a popular bar that — like the entire artistic ensemble before it — became legendary. Łódź Kaliska transformed from a group of artistic troublemakers into a significant urban brand, as did Wrocław’s Orange Alternative and Legendary Luxus.

It should be added that Janiak has served as City Architect of Łódź for the past two years. The jokes are over: the challenges are enormous, and the stakes include restoring life to the city centre and dozens of other issues, among them finding a solution for the architectural fabric of a nineteenth-century industrial metropolis exceptional in Poland. In his description of the concept for the Atlas Sztuki exhibition, Janiak wrote: “Trembling Machines is a story of nostalgia, endurance and dying. It is also a story of a myth’s departure. Of the drama that occurs when its place is occupied not by a new, more vital, contemporary or dynamic myth, but by nothingness — emptiness. Trembling Machines is a quiet and humble story about the absence of respect for the past, about the folly of failing to use its energy. […] Trembling Machines is also a story of a race against time that the city, devoured by negligence and neglect, is losing. A story of children who destroy their parents’ achievements instead of multiplying them.”

On the montage of aerial photographs of the city, proud and enormous factories disappear: the behemoths of capitalism’s first waves that made Łódź a power. The sculptures on display are shells around emptiness, reproducing the forms of idle machines and complex instruments of production. There is a sad lightness in this. Humour and irony have evaporated, just as the new middle class’s uncritical acceptance of capitalism and its promises has vanished; other forces and dynamics are beginning to fill the void created by this loss of faith.

The sculptures’ diaphanous forms resemble shrouds more than covers placed over furniture in the palaces and homes of oligarchs. The beautiful-sounding Polish word całun — shroud — is apparently related to szalunek, formwork, which derives from German. We can only wait to see what content will fill it next.

Dr Piotr Rypson is an art critic, historian of literature and visual culture, writer and expert in electronic education. He is the author of seven books, including Against All Odds: Polish Graphic Design 1919–1949 (2011), Pyramids, Suns, Labyrinths (2002), Books and Pages: The Polish Avant-Garde and Artist’s Book in the Twentieth Century (2000) and The Image of the Word: A History of Visual Poetry (1989), as well as more than 150 articles, essays, reviews and catalogue texts published in Poland and abroad. Deputy Director for Research at the National Museum in Warsaw.

1. This period was documented in Kultura zrzuty [Pitch-In Culture], Warsaw 1989, edited by Marek Janiak and the present author, and in Bóg zazdrości nam pomyłek [God Envies Us Our Mistakes], published ten years later (Łódź, Muzeum Łódź Kaliska, 1999).
2. See Łódź Kaliska, Lomicje, vol. 3, Łódź 2009.

3. Jolanta Ciesielska, Popi kultury [The Popes of Culture], in New Pop, Łódź, Łódź Kaliska Art Association, 2004.
4. Ewa Nowina-Sroczyńska, Szkic do antropologicznej opowieści o New Pop [Sketch for an Anthropological Tale of New Pop], in New Pop, Łódź, Łódź Kaliska Art Association, 2004.
5. Łazienka [Bathroom] (2004).

6. Trembling Machines (1986), created by Józef Robakowski, Witold Krymarys and Łódź Kaliska.