Counter-History in the Work of Rafał Jakubowicz
Izabela Kowalczyk*
Rafał Jakubowicz’s works ask about the significance of traces of the Holocaust for our imagination. They provoke reflection on which images from the past our imagination preserves. Above all, however, the artist asks through his art how the past impresses itself upon the present. His works do not speak directly about the Holocaust; they merely suggest, setting an entire chain of associations in motion. The artist reaches into the deep strata of our consciousness. He shows us images of the contemporary reality around us in which we ourselves relate individual elements to history. The concern, then, is our collective imagination, which underwent a decisive transformation after Auschwitz. As Eleonora Jedlińska writes, ‘railway tracks will never again mean only “railway tracks”’1. The same applies to freight wagons, barbed wire, closely arranged bunks, vertical stripes on clothing and so forth.
One of Jakubowicz’s best-known works is Arbeitsdisziplin (lightbox, postcards and video, 2002). The photograph shows the Volkswagen factory in Antoninek near Poznań against a partly cloudy sky illuminated by the setting sun. A tall, narrow tower bearing the corporation’s enormous logo dominates the factory; the whole complex is surrounded by a wall topped with barbed wire. The sky occupies most of the photograph and may be associated with beautiful vistas or Romantic landscapes. Yet the representation has nothing in common with an idyllic landscape. Its atmosphere is ominous and sombre, owing to the phallic tower that dominates the whole—its shape symbolically refers to the exercise of power, here strictly defined by the enormous VW logo. The sight of barbed wire in the foreground intensifies the ominous effect. There is no longer barbed wire around the factory site; it was probably removed because of the loud echo of the controversy surrounding Jakubowicz’s work and its censorship by the director of the Municipal Arsenał Gallery in Poznań following intervention by the corporation’s management and the city’s mayor.
It should be stressed that, in the photograph under discussion, the artist did not intervene in the industrial landscape in any way. He simply photographed what was there. At the same time, the work reveals that there is no such thing as photographic transparency. The very act of framing the image so that the barbed wire occupies the foreground, together with the use of the natural light of the setting sky—which simultaneously darkens the photographed subject—sets an entire chain of associations in motion. An association with concentration camps is inevitable, reinforced by the aforementioned tower, which resembles a chimney2.
The video shows a security guard watching over the factory grounds in Antoninek. It was filmed from concealment, although the guard clearly suspected the presence of an intruder, for he occasionally glances towards the camera. He wears a thick hat and keeps his hands inside his jacket sleeves, while his breath turns to vapour. With a certain boredom, he walks around the factory grounds—a black-and-white image of the walking guard was also placed on the reverse of the postcard.
The title Arbeitsdisziplin means work discipline, which in turn refers to the inscriptions placed above the gates of concentration camps, Arbeit Macht Frei, meaning work sets you free3. The inscription on the gates corresponded with another slogan implemented by the Nazis in the camps: ‘Arbeitsdisziplin’—work discipline. At the same time, the term expresses their obsessive fondness for order and discipline and for the value of work—a value placed above human life.
The artist does not intervene in the visual character of the surroundings, but by adding this inscription to the postcards and calling the entire work Arbeitsdisziplin, he asks about the present day and the power of major corporations, including those implicated in the machinery of the Holocaust, like Bayer AG, Siemens AG and others that exploited forced labourers, among other things. In the context of this work, questions about the significance and mechanisms of major corporations—including those burdened by a dark history—in today’s free-market economy are justified. These corporations pursue an expansionist economic policy based on relocation, moving jobs because of lower labour and production costs. They rely on cheap labour in the countries where they build their factories. They no longer need forced labourers, but the operating principles—expansion and the exploitation of cheap labour—remain similar.
The word ‘Arbeitsdisziplin’ was written in a plain typeface, as though on an old German typewriter. Jakubowicz used the same typeface for the inscription in another work, namely Seuchensperrgebiet (Epidemic Area, 2002—a billboard presented as part of the Novart festival in Kraków, and a postcard). In this case, the artist added no visual elements to the work itself. A blurred, indistinct inscription, generally incomprehensible to a Polish audience, was placed against a white background. It is a compound characteristic of German, in which several words form a single noun. ‘In the rhythm of the city, it is almost impossible to read it from its first element, Seuchen… to its last …gebiet’4. In this case, the artist draws on the methods of artists associated with a postmodernism of resistance, above all the work of Jenny Holzer, who placed mysterious and ambiguous inscriptions referring to power, the media, gender relations and so forth in public places usually occupied by advertising. These interventions have something of urban guerrilla warfare about them on the one hand, and of riddles on the other. They disturb viewers because their meanings cannot be deciphered: the slogans are usually incomprehensible and, in Holzer’s case, even contradict themselves. The viewer is left with these ambiguous slogans, encountered, moreover, in places where messages are usually simple and unambiguous5. In Jakubowicz’s work, the inscription enters the viewer’s imagination and, through the absence of any image, simultaneously refers to the reality outside the billboard, marking it. During the war, signs bearing this inscription designated epidemic zones in Jewish ghettos; it is therefore another term burdened by a dark history, derived from the official language of the Third Reich. Yet ‘Seuchensperrgebiet’ has a more ambiguous meaning, evoking the metaphors of dirt, disease and germs used by the Nazis to describe everyone and everything designated for elimination. ‘Jews, lice, typhus’ is a cluster of words taken from one of the Nazi posters disseminated in Poland.
The largely incomprehensible inscription and indistinct typeface refer to everything old and past, but placing the poster in the context of a contemporary Polish city compels those who decipher the riddle to ask about present-day mechanisms of segregation and the metaphors of disease or contagion used today. What from the criminal past has remained in the contemporary collective imagination? We can still encounter examples of so-called ‘hate speech’6 describing so-called ‘others’—today, above all, homosexual people—through bodily and physiological metaphors: dirt, illness, deformity or degeneration. There is also a continuing drive to remove ‘others’ from the field of visibility. In Jakubowicz’s work, the white background might be synonymous with that field—an empty space and a threatening inscription ordering one to stay away, not to cross the line affected by ‘contagion’. On the basis of similar premises, Eleonora Jedlińska reads Rafał Jakubowicz’s art, like the works of other artists addressing the Holocaust, in the context of the struggle for the right to difference7.
Associations connected with the Holocaust are also activated by Jakubowicz’s project Swimming Pool (בריכת-שחייה, pronounced ‘berechat sechija’; projection8, video, postcard, 2003). It consisted of projecting the Hebrew inscription בריכת-שחייה (‘swimming pool’) onto the façade of a former synagogue in Poznań that the Nazis converted into a swimming pool, a function it continues to serve today. The artist carried out the intervention on the sixty-third anniversary of the day the Germans began converting the building.
For most viewers, the Hebrew inscription projected onto the former synagogue was incomprehensible. By placing ambiguous inscriptions in public space, the artist also draws attention to the visual character of words written in particular languages—German or Hebrew—languages that are charged with meanings in themselves and activate particular associations: German is associated, especially by older people, with violence; Hebrew evokes tragic associations connected with the Holocaust9. On the postcard we see the building of the former synagogue with the Hebrew inscription ‘Swimming Pool’, and on its obverse, boys bathing.
The projection was an intervention revealing the incompatibility of two realities: the former synagogue and the present swimming pool, and was intended to provoke discussion about the meaning of the place. This incompatibility was revealed only temporarily, for a short time—one evening. The notion of temporariness can also be applied to the swimming pool itself. It might seem that the pool built by the Nazis inside the former house of prayer should be something ‘temporary’, yet Poles prove eager to use this ‘gift’. The temporary form of Jakubowicz’s intervention is also reminiscent of Krzysztof Wodiczko’s public projections, whose task is to ‘reveal’ and ‘expose’ relations of power, hidden violence and the suffering of individuals. As can be seen, the artist consistently refers to the methods of artists associated with a postmodernism of resistance, tracing relations between power, production and communication, and exposing concealed power relations10. Jakubowicz’s art seems closer to these artists than to such creators as Mirosław Bałka or Luc Tuymans, whom the artist himself cites as inspirations. The inspiration of Tuymans is more evident in Jakubowicz’s paintings, such as Zugzwang (2003) and The Cabinet (2006).
As in the earlier works, the aforementioned inscription בריכת-שחייה once again activates associations connected with history. In a sense, the inscription was used tautologically, since it confirms the building’s actual condition and present function. The artist’s intervention was reduced to a minimum, which, as in the works discussed above, directed attention towards the visual character of the surroundings. Perversely, by placing the word ‘swimming pool’ on the building, but in Hebrew, the artist makes us look at the building as a synagogue. Paradoxically, then, while on the lexical level the inscription refers to the building’s present function, on the semiotic level—the Hebrew letters referring to Jewish culture and possessing a sacred value in themselves11—it points back to its original function. The inscription thereby fills a void—the void connected with the erasure of the place’s history and the absence of any reference to its original function; the only such reference is a commemorative plaque placed by the entrance to the former synagogue.
Jakubowicz also searches for traces of the building’s original function and its history—the so-called memory of place—through the video entitled Swimming Pool. Here the artist enters with a camera and meticulously records everything in the interior. His journey through the former synagogue follows the rhythm of using a swimming pool: first, the artist and camera pass through the lobby, then enter the changing room and film the showers. Their metal fittings, like the tiled walls, arouse ominous associations12. We then move with the camera’s gaze towards the pool, where, like real swimmers, we remain for longer. The artist shoots a monotonous, static film showing the pool, while the camera simultaneously records the building’s entire décor. It reveals the structure of an edifice intended to serve sacred functions. We see water reflecting the walls, windows and vault. Suddenly, in the viewer’s imagination, the water assumes the sacred functions of the place13. In the reflections of light on its surface, we perceive something extraordinary and mysterious. We then leave the pool, passing beneath a BOSCH neon sign suspended above the door—once again, a company implicated in the Holocaust—and, on our way out, stop at gaming machines where a fictional war is being fought and shots are fired. Finally, we leave the building, looking at its façades.
Writing about the associations evoked by Rafał Jakubowicz’s film, Eleonora Jedlińska observes that, although the present municipal swimming pool in Poznań was never a site where Jews were murdered, the images recorded by the artist nevertheless refer us to the Holocaust: ‘The film’s meaning nonetheless seems to refer unequivocally to the memory of a place that, in its original purpose, was sacred, and to the memory of the destruction of the Jewish people’14. Piotr Kowalik, meanwhile, in the text ‘Rafał Jakubowicz—in the Service of Memory and Health’, reflects on how readily such associations occur to viewers. He argues that this testifies to the power of images. But it also testifies to the significance of visual associations that appear before particular problems are verbalised. History functions in our imagination in the form of certain iconic images—a similar problem was addressed by Zbigniew Libera in the series Positives, 2004. This also concerns the history of the Holocaust—a history that, as Katarzyna Bojarska writes, dissolves into an increasingly undifferentiated stream of images and signs ‘through which people communicate with one another’15. One might also say that historical events, including the most tragic, such as the Holocaust, are surrounded by meanings, continually rewritten, supplemented and corrected. Although the Holocaust is described as something unimaginable and impossible to express, it simultaneously continues to accrete meanings defined within external discourses that thus ‘frame’ it—that is, endow it with meaning in the intertextualist account16. These discourses include the spheres of scholarship, politics, literature, poetry, feature film, the visual arts and so forth. As a result, every statement about the Holocaust refers back to what we already know about it and to the images of the Holocaust functioning in our imagination.
This activation of visual associations is characteristic of our capacity for projection, described by Ernst H. Gombrich in the book ‘Art and Illusion’17. What is meant is that we fit the images we see to schemas already known to us, for understanding, as Gombrich stresses, takes precedence over perception. In a sense, therefore, we see what we want to see. And that is why, in the case of the Poznań Swimming Pool, we see traces of the Holocaust. Gombrich calls this ‘guided projection’, which causes us to see or hear what memory supplies. We do not realise how much our perception depends on the knowledge and attitudes we already possess. All art is a game with our imagination and memory18. Yet it is also worth observing that our imagination is deceptive: it produces or supplies certain images and situations that we did not see and in which we did not participate, but which fit a particular schema. These images enter our imagination from popular culture, art and history. This points to the problem that truth always interlocks with fiction. In this and Jakubowicz’s other works, the aim is therefore not, as most commentators on his art would have it, to construct a project for rescuing memory, but rather to understand the significance of the traces of the Holocaust in our collective imaginary.
Rafał Jakubowicz frequently refers to ready-made images; he isolates a fragment of the past and places it in a contemporary context while also pointing to the history concealed within that context. One such work is the ‘EB’ neon sign (2006), which appeared in Poznań’s Imperial Castle during the exhibition Internal State19. According to Przemysław Jędrowski, the exhibition’s curator, each participating artist was to confront the Castle’s powerful totalitarian structure—a building intended to serve as Hitler’s principal headquarters in the so-called Wartheland and whose décor consequently began to be altered as early as 1939 under the personal supervision of Albert Speer20. Rafał Jakubowicz suspended an ‘EB’ neon sign resembling a four-leaf clover or butterfly above one of the staircases. It was a monogram designed by Albert Speer for Eva Braun and embroidered, among other things, on tablecloths. In this case, reading the work’s meanings depends on our knowledge and familiarity with history, or on the possibility of learning it from the artist himself. Otherwise, we are condemned to ignorance and may think that the artist tried to transform a neon advertisement, of which there are many in the city, into a carefree sign—a symbol of good fortune. We do not know that this carefree sign conceals a dark history that the artist simultaneously uses to mark the site of his intervention. Interestingly, within the cold walls of the immense Castle, this cloverleaf seemed to convey a positive message on the visual level. Yet the work also speaks about how easily, in our ignorance, we may fall into the trap of glorifying a particular power or merely multiplying its symbols or meanings without awareness.
Jakubowicz also employed the method of isolating fragments of the past in the work Banner (2006). It was one of two works he presented as part of the exhibition Próżna Street21, which addressed the memory of the Warsaw Ghetto22. A banner bearing the inscription ‘Down with Jewish Art’ was positioned in the stairwell of the tenement building where the presentation took place. It was a repetition of a banner carried during a demonstration in Warsaw between the wars, documented in a surviving photograph.
With regard to this work, as well as those discussed earlier, it is worth pointing out that the artist is also interested in the problem of historical sources—how we use them to reconstruct history, which sources we attend to and which we overlook. In her book Unconventional Histories, Ewa Domańska points to the critique of the concept of the ‘historical source’, a relic of positivism that suggests, among other things, ‘the possibility of reaching “basic facts” in which historical truth awaits discovery’, and also ‘evokes associations with the purity and transparency of remnants of the past recognised as sources, which are like a pane of glass separating us from the past, through which we are able to see it as it was—undistorted’23. Yet with traditional thinking about sources undermined, we are left with the question of how to define and study the remains of the past. Domańska proposes the ‘trace of the past’—a concept that draws attention, among other things, to the ambiguous status of the past as such, its ‘trace’ presence. It is precisely such ‘traces’ of the past that Jakubowicz addresses in his art, attempting to track and follow them in search of their meanings. Yet he points not only to what traces mean, but also to how they lose their meanings—the incomprehensible phrases the artist uses or the symbols he draws upon, such as ‘EB’. For a trace also signifies the absence of that which left it. Writing about the bodies of people who disappeared during Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’ (1976–1983), Ewa Domańska points to the category of the non-absent past—‘a past whose absence manifests itself’. ‘By focusing on it, we avoid the desire to make the past present, to re-present it, and turn towards a past that is somehow still present, that refuses to leave—or rather cannot be got rid of’24. Despite the entirely different yet likewise traumatic subject matter addressed by Jakubowicz in his art, one can say that he succeeds in revealing precisely this ‘past whose absence manifests itself’. In this way, the artist’s method approaches deconstruction, which asks about absence and lack, about what is unspoken, silenced or forgotten. Jakubowicz also introduces the viewer into a similar state of disorientation, following traces and losing the trail—indeed, the association with tracking game comes to mind.
In the case of the ‘Down with Jewish Art’ banner, the trail ends very quickly. We know only that the photograph of the banner dates from the interwar period, but not the year in which the demonstration took place or precisely what it concerned. Our knowledge of historical facts prompts us to associate the photograph with a demonstration by the National Democrats in Warsaw. Yet we remain in the realm of conjecture. We may also guess what kind of art the banner’s creators had in mind—probably avant-garde art, whose German equivalent was described by the Nazis as ‘degenerate art’.
The photograph of the ‘Down with Jewish Art’ banner was projected onto the stairwell wall beside the physical banner. In this way, the artist demonstrated a continuity between pre-war and contemporary attacks on art and, moreover, that Polish National Democratic antisemitism employed rhetoric similar to German National Socialism, and that the objects hated by both ideologies—Jews, avant-garde art, communists and so forth—were identical. Contemporary attacks on art, meanwhile, reveal the use of the same metaphors employed by ideologues of the Third Reich in relation to ‘degenerate art’: art as disease, artists as degenerates, calls for artists to undergo treatment and so forth25. Art is seen as something dangerous; it threatens power and compels thought, and therefore continues to be subjected to overt and covert acts of censorship, attacks and attempts to restrict its availability to a broader public. But have any conclusions been drawn from this? In a country where monuments to Dmowski are now being erected, is there room for reflection on the history of Polish antisemitism, or is ‘antisemitism’ still something silenced, unspoken and swept under the carpet?
The problems that preoccupy the artist are connected above all with what is happening today. He is interested in the present; he seems to wonder why so few people perceive the horror of contemporary attacks on art, why we are indifferent to present-day ‘hate speech’ and why we fail to notice its dark references. How is it possible that, although the Holocaust has become such an important symbolic event of the past, and although we speak about it almost exclusively in solemn tones, we do not analyse the mechanisms that led to it or attempt to guard against everything that may lead to another Holocaust? Perhaps this is because we treat the Holocaust as a unique and unrepeatable event, secure in the reassuring belief that it does not concern us. After all, we condemn the perpetrators and sympathise with the victims—and treat this as justification and an exemption from thinking…
The works of Rafał Jakubowicz discussed here may be read in the context of Michel Foucault’s proposed ‘counter-history’, which, according to the philosopher, derives from the struggle of races and the struggle of the oppressed for representation. An author who repeatedly wrote about knowledge as a discourse of power treats history similarly: in his view, it serves to create a justification for power and reinforce it. ‘History, like rituals, anointings, solemn funerals, ceremonies and legendary narratives, is an operator, an intensifier of power,’ Foucault said in one of his Paris lectures26. He therefore proposes a counter-history that destroys the continuity of glory. ‘It shows that splendour—that famous, dazzling splendour of power—is not something that petrifies, binds together and immobilises the whole social body, thereby maintaining order within it; rather, it is in fact a light that divides, that illuminates one side while leaving the other side of the social body in shadow or casting it into darkness’27. Counter-history speaks precisely of this shadow side, revealing what was concealed in darkness and silenced, what had been skilfully masked.
In Jakubowicz’s works discussed here, many such silenced strands are revealed through artistic interventions. They include Volkswagen’s shameful history and the policies of contemporary corporations that use cheap labour (Arbeitsdisziplin); the problem of ghettoisation and the relegation of minority groups to the sphere of invisibility (Seuchensperrgebiet); and the sluggishness and inability to rid the former Poznań synagogue at Stawna and Żydowska Streets of its Nazi legacy—the swimming pool installed in the building. They also include the history of Polish antisemitism, the National Democrats, the All-Polish Youth and campaigns against avant-garde art, including Banner, and so forth.
The revelation of what remained in darkness and the representation of ‘a past whose absence manifests itself’ are also emphasised through the formal dimension of Jakubowicz’s paintings, such as Zugzwang (2003) and The Cabinet (2006). Here the artist employs the so-called ‘Tuymans effect’, borrowed from the Belgian artist and consisting in mysterious, enigmatic representations, blurred facial features in portraits, hazy shadows and meaningful painting titles28. In the context of this article’s subject, the series Zugzwang seems particularly important. It consisted of ten small paintings referring to published memoirs from concentration camps. As Justyna Kowalska writes: ‘The representations themselves are enigmatic: indistinct outlines of portraits, a red cross, the top of a church tower, a dark-grey image with hazy shadows. The title is crucial to the painting, supplying what cannot be seen’29. The captions are quotations from books such as Miklós Nyiszli’s I Was Doctor Mengele’s Assistant: Memoirs of an Auschwitz Physician and Gitta Sereny’s Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder. The title of the entire series, Zugzwang, denotes in chess the necessity or compulsion to make any move, even though every move will only worsen one’s position. In this series, Jakubowicz shifts attention towards the perpetrators of evil and their helpers, bringing what is most shameful to light. Bosiljka Schendlich, a Croatian who organises therapy in Berlin for perpetrators and victims of war crimes, says that trauma must be worked through by both victims and perpetrators. Failure to work through it causes the curse of trauma to pass from generation to generation. A society bearing a shared trauma should also free itself from it. ‘It would be best if both victims and perpetrators could speak about it publicly, striving not so much for punishment as for understanding’30. In the case of Nazi crimes, of course, the situation seems extraordinarily difficult—is it possible at all to forgive those who committed unforgivable acts?
The Tuymans effect employed by the artist can also be related to another ‘blurring’: the reluctance of members of a nation widely described as a victim of the Nazis to speak about their own guilt. The fact that some members of this nation sided with and helped the Nazis does not fit this schema very well. One example is Henryk Mania, portrayed by Jakubowicz, who ‘as one of eight Polish helpers selected by the Germans, beat people being transported to their deaths with a whip, took their valuables and clothing, and led them into lorries in which the victims were killed with exhaust fumes’31. Nor do events such as pogroms of Jews carried out by Poles fit, including Jedwabne, still shamefully silenced32. Inconvenient events are erased, while others are heroised and idealised. This is how ‘official memory’ is created. Its creation is inevitably connected with controlling the memory of one’s own community. As Mary Douglas argues, every institution—the state, for example—that is to preserve its form requires the memory of its members to be controlled. It therefore attempts to make members of the nation ‘forget events inconsistent with their own noble self-image and orders them to remember only those that support the same self-confirming image’33. Memory is thus appropriated by the discourse of power and itself becomes an instrument of control. Official history—a history of glory and innocence, a history created for the use of power—cannot cope with these facts, and ‘sweeps them under the carpet’ and blurs them.
Returning to Michel Foucault’s lecture, the philosopher announces new tasks for counter-history: its role ‘will be to show that laws are deceptive, that kings wear masks, that power rests upon illusion and that historians lie. It will therefore not be a history of continuity, but a history of deciphering, of unearthing a secret, of recovering distorted or suppressed knowledge’34. Jakubowicz undertakes such deciphering in his works, which is why he uses incomprehensible words and signs. He isolates small fragments of the past and decodes them, revealing their apparent innocence (‘EB’). In this way, he explodes traditional historical discourse by asking difficult questions: was the Holocaust solely the work of German Nazis, or is it also part of a consciousness—and when and under what circumstances was that consciousness shared by Poles? To what extent is this consciousness also present today? And how has what is ominous and shameful been recuperated and domesticated by the present?
Referring to Foucault’s lectures, Hayden White says that history is fundamentally a science of the present: ‘All the questions I ask of the past concern the present’35. Rafał Jakubowicz’s works also speak about precisely this kind of history—or rather, counter-history.
*Izabela Kowalczyk (born 1971)—art historian and critic, assistant professor at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. Author of the books Art’s Dangerous Relations with the Body (2002) and Body and Power: Critical Art in Poland in the 1990s (2002), and co-editor of collections on popular culture and feminism. Editor of the online journal ‘artmix’ and author of the blog www.strasznasztuka.blox.pl
1 E. Jedlińska, Art after the Holocaust, Łódź 2001, p. 197.
2 Cf. P. Kowalik, Rafał Jakubowicz—in the Service of Memory and Health, [in:] ‘Sekcja’, http://www.sekcja.org/miesiecznik.php?id_artykulu=79
3 This is a German formula derived from a quotation from the Gospel of John (John 8:32) widespread in the Protestant tradition, Wahrheit macht frei (literally, truth sets you free), or—in the Polish Millennium Bible—the truth will set you free). In 1872, the German right-wing writer Lorenz Diefenbach used it as the title of his book; the slogan later became popular in nationalist circles. In the 1930s, it was used by Nazi propaganda in Germany in programmes intended to combat unemployment. On the orders of SS General Theodor Eicke, the slogan was used as an inscription at the entrance gates to several German concentration camps—Auschwitz, Dachau, Gross-Rosen, Sachsenhausen, Theresienstadt and Flossenbürg—which were simultaneously camps of murderous slave labour; after: http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbeit_macht_frei
4 E. Jedlińska, Rafał Jakubowicz’s Keywords, [in:] ‘Magazyn Sztuki’, 2002, online text archive, http://www.magazynsztuki.home.pl/archiwum/teksty_internet_arch_all/archiwum_teksty_online_28.htm
5 Advertising sometimes also exploits this unease among viewers in so-called teaser advertisements (teaser), which attract the audience’s attention, disturb and intrigue before presenting the actual message, but may also irritate and anger. All in accordance with the principle that ‘a good teaser gets in your eyes’. Such an advertisement should provoke a persistent thought in passers-by: ‘What is this about?’ The actual advertisement reveals the answer.
6 S. Kowalski, M. Tulli, Instead of a Trial: A Report on Hate Speech, Warsaw 2003.
7 E. Jedlińska, op. cit..
8 4 April 2003, Poznań.
9 Cf. P. Kowalik, op. cit.
10 Cf. P. Piotrowski, Postmodernism of Resistance, [in:] idem, In Duchamp’s Shadow: New York Notes, Obserwator, Poznań 1996, pp. 73–96.
11 Cf. A. Kamczycki, The Art of Memory, or the Jewish Boltanski, [in:] ‘Artluk’, No. 2(2), 2006, p. 54.
12 Cf. P. Kowalik, op. cit..
13 Water itself has a purifying significance in Judaism. Jews take a ritual bath in a mikveh (mikveh, Hebrew מקווה), where vessels defiled by impurity are also washed. People converting to Judaism also undergo a purifying immersion (tevilah). Hasidim take a similar bath every day before prayer, while all men are obliged to do so before Yom Kippur. Cf. http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mykwa
14 E. Jedlińska, Rafał Jakubowicz, Synagogue/Swimming Pool, text forthcoming in ‘Pro Memoria: Information Bulletin of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum’, typescript supplied by the author.
15 K. Bojarska, The Presence of the Holocaust in the Work of Polish Artists, Culture.pl portal, Adam Mickiewicz Institute, http://www.culture.pl/pl/culture/artykuly/es_obecnosc_zaglady
16 Cf. M. Bal and N. Bryson, Semiotics and Art History, [in:] ‘Art Bulletin’ 73, 1991, pp. 174–208.
17 E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, translated into Polish by J. Zarański, Warsaw 1981.
18 Op. cit., pp. 182–280.
19 Internal State, CK Zamek, Poznań, 19 May–8 June 2006, curator Przemysław Jędrowski.
20 Cf. I. Kowalczyk, The Ghosts Have Returned Again, http://www.obieg.pl/calendar2006/ik_stan_wewnetrzny.php
21 The exhibition Próżna Street, 6–10 September 2006, was held as part of the third Jewish Culture Festival. On the exhibition: K. Bojarska, Próżna Street—Unobvious Encounters with History, [in:] ‘Obieg’, http://www.obieg.pl/calendar2006/kb_prozna.php
22 Jakubowicz’s second work presented at the exhibition was Sandbox: a video showing a sandbox located within the former Warsaw Ghetto that was transformed into a flower bed several years later, and a postcard. The film projection was accompanied by a quotation from the writings of Janusz Korczak: ‘If you do not believe in the soul, you must nevertheless acknowledge that your body will live on as green grass, as a cloud. You are, after all, water and dust.’
23 E. Domańska, Unconventional Histories: Reflection on the Past in the New Humanities, Poznań 2006, p. 169.
24 Op. cit., pp. 186–187.
25 Cf. I. Kowalczyk, The Rhetoric of Hate: The Ideology of the Kampfbund and Polish Newspaper Criticism, [in:] ‘artmix’, No. 4 (September 2002–February 2003), http://free.art.pl/artmix/archiw_4/0702ik.html
25 Cf. I. Kowalczyk, The Rhetoric of Hate: The Ideology of the Kampfbund and Polish Newspaper Criticism, [in:] ‘artmix’, No. 4 (September 2002–February 2003), http://free.art.pl/artmix/archiw_4/0702ik.html
26 M. Foucault, Lecture of 28 January 1976, [in:] idem, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1976, translated into Polish by Małgorzata Kowalska, Warsaw 1998, p. 72.
27 Op. cit., p. 76.
28 Cf. K. Sienkiewicz, Rafał Jakubowicz (Profile), Culture.pl portal, Adam Mickiewicz Institute, http://www.culture.pl/pl/culture/artykuly/os_jakubowicz_rafal
29 J. Kowalska, Trap and Power, [in:] ‘Obieg’, No. 2(74), 2006, p. 24.
30 War Always Sits with Us at the Table, Claudia Snochowska Gonzales in conversation with Bosiljka Schendlich, [in:] ‘Krytyka Polityczna’, No. 7–8, winter 2005, p. 253.
31 Quoted after J. Kowalska, op. cit.
32 Feliks Tych spoke about the silencing of these sensitive issues in his paper ‘Awareness of the Holocaust in Popular Historical Consciousness in Poland: Remarks and Proposals’ (2 March 2007), delivered at a conference on the Holocaust. He stated that, even before the publication of Jan Tomasz Gross’s book Neighbours, many Polish historians knew about the events in Jedwabne, but they were not discussed. Feliks Tych’s paper at the conference ‘The Holocaust: Contemporary Problems of Understanding and Representation’, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, 1–2 March 2007.
33 M. Douglas, How Institutions Think, Syracuse, NY 1982, p. 112, quoted after Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History, translated into Polish by S. Amsterdamski, Poznań 2000, pp. 114–115.
34 M. Foucault, op. cit., p. 78.
35 Writing a History One Can Live With. Sławomir Sierakowski in conversation with Hayden White, [in:] ‘Krytyka Polityczna’, No. 7/8, winter 2005, p. 228.