Emptiness in a Pleated Dress

Have you ever seen ‘in the flesh’ the white marble sculptures by the Italian masters of the chisel – Monti, Corradini or Strazza – depicting veiled figures or busts of women? Unfortunately, I have never encountered them in my travels, but images of them have fascinated me for a long time… an uncanny beauty, isolated from the world by the sensuous touch of a shroud, sending the shiver of unease characteristic of an encounter with the fantasy of a concealed ideal. What terrifies us more – their lifelike lifelessness, or our fear of what kind of interior is really hidden by the intricate exterior enveloping them? An object that reveals itself through the presence of a veil automatically places all reality at a disadvantage… 

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How shocking! Look at that woman! Beneath her dress she’s stark naked…¹ – this was the title of the text I wrote several years ago for Łódź Kaliska’s book Lomicje. It referred to the heated debate then raging around one of the group’s many famous works that leave no room for the imagination where the female body is concerned. Why do I invoke it now? Because while, on the one hand, those admirers of Łódź Kaliska who are counting on further ‘scandalous’ games involving naked women at the latest exhibition may be disappointed, they may at the same time notice the new and surprising establishment here of a boundary of the-imagined. The figure of the veil appears, of that ‘dress’ which is often the most sophisticated fetish. 

As I have stressed many times, human beings do not need art in order to convey clear content. For that they have other, more or less unreliable means of so-called communication.  Regardless of the medium, or intermedia, employed by an artist, art’s raison d’être is not its ‘subject’, but the decision to choose, the creative process and the situation in which a particular ‘form’ comes into being within a context that is always unique. The reception of such a proposal is invariably subjective and conditioned on multiple levels, and the result is a collision between two individual experiences, generating sensations that are unique in every instance. This is why I find the perennial question ‘can art change the world?’ (or, conversely, ‘can a proposal for change be art?’) troublesome. I would ask instead that we acknowledge the practical role of intuition: can sensations change the existing structure (of things)? If a particular proposition can inspire us to dislodge the solid mass of our accustomed way of thinking about the world, perhaps the solid mass of the world itself will follow… I therefore propose that, during this visit to the gallery, we step away for a moment from analysing the relationship between political transformations and the dynamics of urban change, and instead ask ourselves what is hidden beneath the white draperies we find in one of the rooms. In light of the exhibition Trembling Machines’ intention to convey a clear, serious, even solemn message, the choice of precisely this form – whose creation involved a complex, multistage process – seems most interesting to me, and all the more perverse because it opposes the titular trembling, the ‘trembling body’ of the human artefact, with the white lifelessness of shrouds.   

As with the sculptures mentioned at the beginning, the sight of a form concealed by fabric arouses an indefinite fear – one exploited with such enthusiasm in horror films – of what may appear when an edge is lifted: unused furniture and objects protected from dust according to bourgeois custom, ‘haunted’ by their own abandonment, accumulating their immobility and the absence of life around them?  Or strange, motionless shapes that suddenly come alive as an awakened monster when touched?  Finally – and this is perhaps the most terrifying option – the revelation of an emptiness that only a moment ago possessed a material form. A ghost. As in the familiar magic trick: cover it, hocus-pocus – now you see it… now you don’t! 

‘You have nothing, he has nothing, I have nothing… so together we have just enough to build a factory’ – this quotation from Reymont’s The Promised Land, as famous as many others and also used as the soundtrack to the second, ‘educational’ part of the exhibition, is a manifesto of unshakeable faith in success, but also a metaphor for a colossus with feet of clay, a ghost city born of speculation and unsecured capital, built equally on creative energy and on greed, exploitation and social division, which is now experiencing the consequences of the failure to continue its myths (which, moreover, were always young). The idea behind the creation of great cities is usually an assumption of permanence that includes plans for transforming whatever loses its original function. And although – on a global scale – no one at the threshold of the Industrial Revolution foresaw the dizzying pace of civilisational change brought by the twentieth century, the particular circumstances of the equally unexpected political transformations that visited our part of Europe first in its middle and then towards its end undoubtedly plunged such an ‘American’ city into a decidedly un-American dream. One consequence is that the textiles used to make the exhibition, once produced on those very machines, most probably bear a ‘Made in China’ label today. 

I come from Łódź but have not lived there for years, although I visit regularly.  This has allowed me to remember the successive stages of its transformation, not necessarily from the perspective of an attentive observer of the backstage workings of local politics, but as someone who occasionally tries to sense the current atmosphere – who walks, returns to favourite places and shows the city to visitors. These returns are accompanied by an inevitable mixture of feelings: pride in its unique history; slight embarrassment at the materialism that predominates within it; affection for a decaying museum of splendours imported ‘from the world’; and a ‘breaking heart’ at the real poverty of neglected Eclectic tenements and the hopelessness left by the dead machines. These feelings ebb and flow depending on the passing moods prevailing in the city, the season or the weather… rain suits post-industrial Łódź rather well (or perhaps the author simply likes rain…), whereas a walk on a hot day evokes oneiric visions of emptiness from de Chirico’s paintings… At the exhibition in Atlas Sztuki, in summertime, we can find a visualisation of the Łódź that would remain if all those spectral buildings erected before 1945 were absent.

Absence and emptiness – those inseparable experiences of our existence – appear to be the exhibition’s key concepts. In a psychoanalytic interpretation, it is precisely absence that marks the trace of life and drives the emergence of desire. Although in the case of an artwork this is only a metaphorical relation, one that cannot be translated into the actual experience of analysis, we can undoubtedly regard the removal of objects from the places for which they were intended as an apt parallel to the notorious castration, the missing signifier and the resulting sense of anxiety. Regardless of what is hidden, the veil itself, functioning as the Lacanian object a (the object-cause of desire), is already a fantasy suggesting the existence of the traumatic Real. How can absence – something that, by definition, ‘is not’ – be symbolised? The answer is precisely the use of a veil.

Meanwhile, the exhibition’s authors (perhaps, in my view, rather too eagerly) guide us towards the trail of the object’s original presence – the recorded clatter of machinery is unambiguously understood in the context of the emptiness discovered beneath the draperies. Yet for today’s recipient, especially a young one, is it not closer to industrial techno music than to an actual image of a factory floor? (Łódź hosted the Techno Freedom Parade from 1996 to 2002.) The postmodern – and now fashionably posthumanist – idea of the machine reworked by cyberpunk culture appears as an attractive creation symbiotic with humanity rather than as a companion in hard labour, one that on the one hand provided relief and on the other made murderous demands. And this was precisely the work of the people (to a great extent women) who physically built the pre-war power of Łódź and, during the years of the Polish People’s Republic, maintained its position as the textile giant of the ‘People’s Democracies’. Today’s enthusiastic emphasis on the beauty of factories and mythologisation of workers’ labour (‘the spinners like angelic maidens’), linked, for example, with new property-development offers, builds a new PR image for the achievements of industrial civilisation. The enhanced post-factory landscape has become a desirable outfit, a backdrop for an occasional ‘cute pic for Facebook’. The vitality of the community centred on art, built on the genuinely impressive achievements of a progressive artistic movement, and the distinctive grunge glamour of the creative face of contemporary Łódź (‘the hipster of cities’, as a popular fan page proclaims), together with creativity – declined in every grammatical case – introduced in place of the human cog in the machine of mass production, are certainly valuable components of the new image. I do not know, however, to what extent that image can solve the concrete problems of local stagnation. Regeneration for cultural purposes, including regeneration attentive to social, environmental and economic aspects, is represented primarily by two post-industrial sites – Manufaktura and Księży Młyn (here chiefly Łódź Art Center). At the same time, how sad it is to walk along Piotrkowska Street, deserted apart from one section, without even mentioning venturing into the depths of nearby enclaves such as Wschodnia Street… 

And the absent machines – where are they now? What is this symbol of the last century now: described by the Futurists as a work of art, an incomprehensible and adored utopia, rational and sensual, even erotic at once, an anthropomorphised Romantic being that aroused delight and fear? At a time when even the cyborgs populating the imaginations of science-fiction fans are becoming reality, when new technologies blur the familiar boundaries of the visible and invisible and the virtual world is an everyday sphere of life, the machine with its knobs, little springs and cogs has passed into the museum.

The apotheosis of Łódź’s former industrial power cannot be straightforward in this light, just as the ethical assessment of the Industrial Revolution is not straightforward… but this is a separate subject for an enormous essay, which, to remain in keeping with the previously mentioned criteria for art’s function, I would place in a sphere of social discourse other than the gallery. 

Nevertheless, it ought to seem that the Łódź Kaliska group making an exhibition about Łódź (in a certain sense Kaliska too – if we recall in this context the beautiful, now vanished old railway-station building) is the most natural of obvious choices. Yet given the group’s existing, now more than 300-year-long achievements in artistic hooliganism, mocking humour and absurdity, it is somehow difficult to accept such a sudden turn towards gravity, or even didacticism. I shall not finish this text unless I find something to remind us why we love Łódź Kaliska. I will not, of course, conjure troops of muses springing from beneath the white draperies, nor will I leap into that pleasant role again (although the exhibition is still running and one never knows…). It is no accident, however, that my first association was with alabaster female figures. The group’s works have repeatedly and gleefully referred to old art. The decision to carry out the symbolic and at the same time tautological gesture of wrapping the exhibition’s titular objects in their own products (textile machine – fabric) is undoubtedly conscious, yet light and uncontrived at the same time.  The result is a form that is surreal in itself and familiar from numerous Surrealist works. It is also worth recalling Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s famous works from the Wrapped series, which enclosed selected objects like presents – at first ordinary and small ones, culminating in monumental buildings and elements of the natural landscape. Their characteristic feature, however, was the preservation of the objects’ legible shape. In the case of Łódź Kaliska’s presumed trembling machines, this relationship is not so obvious. The veil flows freely and arranges itself in folds characteristic of the Baroque aesthetic, yet is arrested in motion and hardened. The result is a strange object – a cast of one potential arrangement of drapery.

Michelangelo already acknowledged that the secret of beauty lies in the alternation of concave and convex lines, whose radius leaps between interior and exterior. Observing a fold is pleasurable because it calls to mind a soft disruption of the classical, ‘smooth’ order. Gilles Deleuze introduced the modern metaphor of the fold’s amorphous ornament as the dispersal of our perception of phenomena and the loss of stable structures in his book The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (Le pli: Leibniz et le baroque, 1988). Separate from the object’s surface, its covering here becomes an autonomous space of representation and begins to lead its own symbolic and kinetic life. The concept of the fold enabled Deleuze to develop a theory of new subjectivity (critical of Leibniz’s earlier model), based on differentiating interior and exterior, surface and depth.  Looking at a fold, we notice that its convexity (exterior) is identical with its concavity (interior) – it is a topological figure like a Möbius strip. The infinite possibilities of undulation constitute an infinite sequence of alternations between the visible and the hidden. Paul Klee and Michel Foucault likewise addressed the theory of the Baroque fold, while a delusional-psychedelic, poetic view of the richness of drapery had earlier inspired Aldous Huxley and his The Doors of Perception (1954). He in turn took the titular term from William Blake’s poem The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793). And I do not know whether this sequence of associations and its final poetic outcome will be regarded as an adequate summary of reflections on the exhibition, but I think it may illustrate precisely the subjective perception of the fold found there, created on the basis of the form of a non-existent object:                                                                                                                         ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite.’

1 How shocking! Look at that woman! Beneath her dress she’s stark naked – source: Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, The Seminar – Book VII, p. 17; translated into Polish by the author. 

Małgorzata Butterwick, performance artist and art theorist, doctoral student in the Intermedia Department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków; creator of numerous artistic actions in Poland and abroad. She is also an active participant in the debate about art through publications and lectures, and as a curator; she has a particular interest in Lacanian psychoanalysis and is a fitness instructor by passion.