Yes and No

Elżbieta Jabłońska is a well-known figure on the Polish art scene. She has created a field of action for collaboration, community-building and cooperation with successive groups, curators, homeless people or an unemployed individual. These encounters are characterised not by diagnosis, but by establishing contact, good humour, a gesture, sometimes enjoyable play, and acts of kindness. Her most spectacular work became Supermother, a series of photographs of the artist and her son dressed in costumes familiar from mass culture, posed against the background of their home kitchen. From postcards in Poland to the cover of the Parisian Magazine des Beaux-Arts, the images were used to exhaustion for several years. The appeal of popular-culture costumes — Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, the colourful heroes of the collective imagination — was appropriated by the artist for the performance of her own role in the everyday reality of the kitchen. The collision of two clichés, one drawn from film and comics and the other the stereotype of woman-as-mother, gave its protagonist great visibility and media success. The entertainment industry is doing well; the position of women in Poland less so. Over the past dozen years, neither the left nor the right has been able to address it. By colliding images from these two imagined worlds, Elżbieta Jabłońska manipulates the clichés of the unreal superman logo and the ordinary woman in the corner of the kitchen. The result is eloquent, universally intelligible and alluring. Playing with stereotypes is historically associated with Pop art, though not in Polish art history, because past conditions here were different. There was no seduction, packaging or advertising; there was no product. There was no abundance — the only paintings by the British Pop artists Pauline Boty and Derek Boshier in Poland are held by the Museum of Art. A moment in the artist’s life certainly mattered: time devoted to raising her son, his world of play and the toys available to him. Yet so did the entire Polish social and cultural context. The issue is not only the public battles waged in Poland’s almost exclusively male parliament over whether, for the duration of a victorious party’s term, the Polish woman should be installed permanently in the kitchen for ideological and economic reasons. We must recognise a regression in how women are discussed, while their financial status has not improved — work in a feminised profession entails impoverishment. If women’s rights are doing well in the United States, why not turn the Polish kitchen into an American spectacle? With the right pose, lighting and costume, and, most importantly, using a language of the collective imagination understood around the world. A directed fate flares into successive roles behind masks of artificiality, but within the artist’s own reality and on her own terms. In subsequent works — The Way to the Heart Is through the Stomach, the Helping actions and a series of events in The Kitchen — the artist has consistently pursued her play with stereotypes of woman, mother, image and space. In the future, we will see one more detail thematically connected to a similar visual environment, entitled Strainers and, naturally, located in a kitchen sink. The meetings in the Helping series are unconditional: positive encounters and good deeds performed for curators in Ustka or homeless men in Kraków, with whom the artist worked ahead of 8 March, formerly associated in Poland with Women’s Day. The holiday was officially abolished — in Łódź, 8 March Street was renamed after a distinguished priest — and the feminist demonstrations known as Manifa, held on that day, now carry greater meaning and visibility. The artist forged old rituals and new games into one. What could be more stereotypical than giving a flower on that day? Yet Elżbieta Jabłońska worked with a group of entirely marginalised men, making paper flowers together over two days using origami techniques. On 8 March, the men presented them to women in Kraków. The undertaking combined therapy, play and paid work, for which they received a fee. For a moment in public space, an excluded group assumed the role of full members of society. I believe the artist herself has great fun, as when an action involved the art crowd that, years ago, dashed around Kraków’s Piękny Pies pub to chance upon a tangible prize. Small treats had been hidden, but the hunting instinct always awakens, regardless of the value of the gift. Even respectable company — a Jagiellonian University professor and a seasoned gallerist — jointly searched around and beneath a table. The phrase The Way to the Heart Is through the Stomach smacks of grandmotherly tradition, but in its new edition it may become almost a kitchen Kama Sutra: a little book of positions for physical exercises, allowing one to eat without consequence and precisely convert calories into time spent — an illustrated edition. The artist has repeatedly tested the giving and preparing of food, the laying of a table and the satisfying of her audience’s hunger in Poland, Vilnius and Berlin. The further east she travelled, the faster the food disappeared; in the West, nothing changed and restraint was greater. A new element organising a new, dominant space first appeared in the exhibition White Mazurka — ladies ask gentlemen to dance, and therefore only women artists took part. The proportions were disrupted and an enlarged kitchen emerged, as large as a factory. Larger still was the wailing wall, with its overwhelming set for the artist’s theatre of strange movements: standing with her back to the German public and preparing food during the opening. The element of isolation was intensified — the woman’s world outside and at the margins, beyond the salon, with a woman additionally working off the books for a time in Berlin. The ritual of preparing food was to be repeated each week by a hired Polish woman, but Germans, including those in the art world, cannot break their regulations. Confirming the stereotype that Ordnung ist Ordnung, they cited a prohibition imposed by the local equivalent of the health inspectorate. Games with space that gently disrupted the interiors of the Museum of the History of the City of Łódź also took place two years ago during the Art Biennale. Breaking the principle that museum interiors must remain untouched — by disturbing their order, rearranging things and making an ordinary mess — “domesticated” them for visitors. The cloakroom by name, with a garment discarded on the floor, became a cloakroom in fact. In the small salon where a banquet was held for the former Uniontex workforce, a table overturned. Unfortunately, only part of the factory’s staff accepted the artist’s invitation: those who had managed to find work elsewhere in time. Directing people, interiors and objects may be empathetic and supportive of a situation; at other times, it becomes ironic laughter and a performance of intolerable absurdity.

While remaining within the circulation of galleries and art venues, Elżbieta Jabłońska brings together situations that ordinarily do not fit and seeks a way out into the street, a cultural centre or a pub. The Pop-art spirit and visual character of Jabłońska’s work often allow her to function both as a participant in the game and outside the situation as a commentator. This simultaneous Yes and No both distances her from one group, accustomed to direct participation in the art circuit, and seeks contact with people who are currently excluded. An exchange, a reversal of roles, may follow — as at Manhattan Gallery, where a wall hanging was displayed with a hand-embroidered notice from a single mother desperately seeking work. The artist did not attend the opening, and used her fee to pay the woman who made the embroidery. Mixing techniques, proportions, roles, expectations and habits changes the meaning of the situations Jabłońska finds, co-creates and comments upon. The exhibition at Atlas Sztuki begins with the alert presence of almost a hundred waiters, to the still greater delight of its opening-night guests. Yet there may also be some turbulence of mood: something may crunch underfoot, and a strange wind may suddenly run wild, repeatedly slamming a nearby door. Only the light, abruptly entering the gallery through the windows from outside, will complete the cinematic situation’s final point. The suspense lies in how the viewer will find their place in the gallery.

Maria Morzuch is an art historian and curator at the Museum of Art in Łódź.