‘Conquerors of the Sun in the Locomotive of History’: A Dialogue between Anna Baumgart and Andrzej Turowski

Scholars of contemporary artistic practices consistently—and entirely justifiably—locate Anna Baumgart’s work within the context of critical art. Appearing on the Polish art scene in the mid-1990s, Baumgart almost naturally entered directly into the framework of this dynamically developing radical strand of the latest Polish art. I should add that by the term critical art, as I have formulated it elsewhere, I mean a sphere of deconstructive artistic practices which do not refer directly and polemically to the phenomena they challenge, but instead attempt to uncover the tensions and conflicts hidden beneath the surface of generally accepted views: practices that reveal the merely historical and conventional character of so-called certainties and obvious truths. In this understanding I refer, of course, to Michel Foucault’s conception. He emphasised that ‘critique does not consist in saying that things are not right as they are. It consists in seeing on what types of assumptions, of familiar notions, of established and unexamined ways of thinking the accepted practices are based (…) and in making what is taken for granted no longer taken for granted. To practise criticism is to make harder those acts which are now too easy.’

The critical artists who made their debuts or gained visibility in the field of art during the final decade of the last century—it is worth noting that this very fact only then led to the formation of the concept of critical art itself—adopted and creatively continued, though not always entirely consciously, critical positions that Andrzej Partum, Leszek Przyjemski, Anastazy Wiśniewski and Akademia Ruchu had begun to construct more than two decades earlier, still without the support of theoretical discourses. In the decade immediately preceding their emergence, such positions were also developed by Zbigniew Libera, further afield by Krzysztof Wodiczko and, to some extent, by Zofia Kulik and Przemysław Kwiek (KwieKulik). In their works, contemporary critical artists addressed the new social situation then taking shape in Poland, tracking emerging or reactivated oppressive orders, subversively deconstructing developing systems for marginalising and excluding minority groups and worldviews, and making visible the ideological systems appropriating cultural space.

Anna Baumgart quickly established her position within the milieu of (re)activated critical art. Having addressed questions of social ecology in her first projects, in subsequent works the artist focused on the cultural position of women in patriarchal society. The transition between these two spheres was, in fact, very fluid. Baumgart’s ecological works—Timshel (1995) and Trophies (1996)—advocated the rejection of attitudes aimed at conquering and consequently dominating nature, proposing instead a dialogue with it: not necessarily a harmonious dialogue, nor one necessarily leading to harmony, often extremely difficult and demanding a profound intellectual reconstruction, but always offering hope of preserving the part of every person’s identity that invariably remains part of nature. Baumgart presented the relationships most common throughout human history between people and nature, and between culture and nature, as a conflictual game of domination and subordination, power and enslavement, autonomy, appropriation and disenfranchisement. Yet the artist also perceives the same relationships between the world of men and that of women. Her analysis of patriarchal reality, and of the histories of women taking shape within it, is therefore in fact a continuation of ecological discourses on another plane.

This sphere of problems—the world of women and its relations with an oppressive environment—became Anna Baumgart’s enduring artistic choice. The decision also meant that her work found a place within the context of feminist art. It is commonly perceived in precisely this dual way, including from today’s perspective: as art combining the characteristics of both critical and feminist positions, developing at the intersection of those tendencies and constituting their shared territory. Although I have no intention of questioning this diagnosis, and although Anna Baumgart’s work has indeed been and remains significantly connected with precisely these circles of issues, I believe—as I shall argue later—that such interpretations do not exhaust the full richness of her work or present it entirely adequately.

In the initial period when her position was taking shape, Baumgart expressed herself primarily through video. Although other forms of artistic expression would play an increasingly important role in later phases of her practice, video has retained great significance in her work to this day—as the latest work, Conquerors of the Sun (2012), emphatically demonstrates. In a series of video works begun in 1997 and later called Films about Love, the artist analyses the social and cultural rules by which sexual differences are formatted. She examines roles assigned to women by patriarchal order, roles accepted and supervised by women themselves as they seek confirmation of their value in an approving male gaze; she also considers relations between parents and children. Together, all these works reveal numerous cultural mechanisms that subordinate the individual to social conventions.

Elsewhere, I analyse selected works from this series in greater detail and note that the issues they address in fact have a threefold significance: they directly engage with questions of identity, ‘substitute life’, and marginalisation or exclusion from public space.

In Anna Baumgart’s works from the period discussed above, woman is characterised not only as marginalised and deprived of her own voice, but also—paradoxically—as actively accepting that status. The later sculpture I Got It from My Mother (2002) alludes to this strand in a certain sense, emphasising, among other things, the transfer of attitudes and duties imposed by the patriarchal system: from the mother who guards law and order to the daughter formatted in an ideology of obedience. Yet this vision was already beginning to change slowly. A transitional phase in the process is represented by the 2004 video Ecstatics, Hysterics and Other Saints, in which the artist addressed women’s self-aggressive behaviour. On the one hand, such behaviour reveals the repressive suppression, restrictions and censorship to which women are subjected in the patriarchal system; on the other, however, it expresses a distinctive rebellion, an expressiveness on a scale the system does not envisage for women. As Baumgart herself puts it: ‘Self-aggression is a kind of denunciation of the culture in which we were raised. This excessive expressiveness in women is what men fear, because it is irrational and may take control of them. It is femininity in a socially unacceptable form, since a woman is supposed to be gentle, meek, calm and content, not screaming, ecstatic and hysterical.’

The full new vision of women’s situation in contemporary, invariably patriarchal culture is offered by another sculpture from 2004, Bomber. Although we still find signs of marginalisation and rejection in this figure—the pig mask—we also discover, instead of signals accepting enslavement, clear symptoms of rebellion, dissent and a growing awareness of her own power, which, as critical texts about the work emphasise, is ready to transform into aggression. One might wonder whether this new vision marks Baumgart’s response to a changing social situation—women are appearing more frequently in public space because they have rejected the roles assigned to them and instead adopted characteristics hitherto reserved exclusively for men—or whether it reflects a change in the spectrum of the artist’s interests and a reconfiguration of the issues she had addressed until then.

Other works from the latest period of Anna Baumgart’s practice likewise display a clear shift of emphasis. Even sculptures presenting female figures—Natascha Kampusch and, above all, Weronika AP, both from 2006—clearly show a differently organised concern with violence coming to the fore, drawing attention to media aggression and a terror of which anyone may become the victim. This is demonstrated by another untitled work made two years earlier, depicting a man in a ballet skirt whose face is concealed by a rat mask. The sculpture was based on a photograph of prisoners humiliated and tortured at Abu Ghraib. What these last three works share is violence, terror and the figure of a victim whose status derives not from gender but from weakness and helplessness. Just as Anna Baumgart’s work had earlier transformed fluidly from critical-ecological into critical-feminist art without abandoning its essential determinants, so now, with equal gentleness and almost imperceptibly, it broadened the spectrum of issues addressed while constructing the works’ semantics differently. All this occurred without any need to abandon her established position or relinquish her fundamental ideological principles. Against the outline of Anna Baumgart’s practice sketched above, the present exhibition—the outcome of her dialogue with Andrzej Turowski, built on the foundation of two works, Baumgart’s video Conquerors of the Sun and Turowski’s literary work The Locomotive of History—appears to possess entirely different qualities, incompatible with that image. In fact, however, the opposite is true. In analysing Anna Baumgart’s art, I have so far omitted certain important determinants, seemingly less significant to her critical-feminist image but crucial to a complete picture of the work and a characterisation of its maker’s artistic position. I now wish to address precisely these. I locate all of them within the broad field of meta-artistic reflection. They vary in character, but together construct a highly coherent artistic programme developed from the earliest works onwards. These properties enter Baumgart’s works through several strategies she employs.

The first strategy appeared as early as the previously mentioned video works from the Films about Love series. In these works we find a montage of assorted images drawn from many different sources—Baumgart uses, among other things, material broadcast in television programmes. The method refers to historical practices of photomontage, found-footage film and video scratch, in which artists used the results of other people’s artistic labour for new creative purposes of their own. Today this strategy also belongs to the context of remix culture: art is created entirely from previously existing works.

The second strategy is found in the same material described above. In successive video works (tapes), alongside the consistently preserved heterogeneity and multiplicity of audiovisual material—qualities resulting from montage strategies—Baumgart introduces another, exceptionally important factor: active protagonists. Her works cease to be ironic meditations on the world of interpersonal relations, which despite their diverse materials inevitably tend towards a monologue structure. Instead, they assume the form of a distinctive, multilayered dialogue in which female protagonists (and sometimes male ones) speak about the problems troubling them and answer Baumgart’s questions, while the artist participates in the conversation not only by shaping the work’s structure (filming, editing, composition and so on), but also—what is important to us here—both directly, on the verbal level, and through arranging the situation of contact/conversation.

An especially interesting example of this strategy is the video Mother. The tape confronts two situations: the first is the artist’s conversation with the protagonist, while the second presents the latter’s reaction to watching an already processed recording of that conversation, edited and supplied with numerous internal commentaries. This reaction ultimately becomes another part of the work, transforming it from within. As the dialogue between artist and protagonist becomes a work, it simultaneously becomes an active factor not only on the level of creation but on the existential plane too. For the protagonist, it offers the possibility of understanding the motives of her own behaviour and its potential consequences anew; for the artist, it is another method of hybridising the work, this time by making the heroine-protagonist its material.

The third strategy appeared in video works belonging to the Real? series, in which Baumgart used digital tools to replace the heroines in fragments of selected films with her own image. She thereby initiated a game between her identity and those of the fictional figures, but, as in the previous instance though using different techniques, also constructed her own works from the material of works made by other artists.

The method of appropriation or reenactment, for that is what we are discussing, is not restricted to video in Anna Baumgart’s practice. It also appears among works that are artefacts—sculptures and installations.

The fourth strategy consists in engaging other artists to make her works or parts of them. This was the case, for example, with Baumgart’s contribution to the Scene 2000 exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw. The paintings Baumgart used in her installation were made by another artist, Tomasz Karabowicz, in his own style but according to her design. Baumgart herself appears among the painted figures, but viewers may also use the prepared apertures—a section of the picture bearing a painted face can be tilted away—to incorporate their own faces into the represented world.

The work activates a series of highly important questions concerning both the problems of identity outlined above and the meta-artistic perspective that interests us now. It makes us reflect on processes for recognising identity—our own and other people’s. It prompts the question: to what extent is what we discover in others our own creation? Yet it also requires us to consider: how much of our own work is in fact produced by others? It returns to the question of domination and partnership in relation to another person. Was Karabowicz treated here in the same way as the protagonists in the video tapes and the male and female figures in the films from the Real? series mentioned earlier? Do all of them lend—in varying degrees and dimensions—their personalities in order to become part of the emerging work through this distinctive recycling? What is ultimately problematised here? Only the work’s authorial dimension, or also the character of artistic communication as a whole—its object, meaning and frame of reference?

Baumgart used the same strategy in the already mentioned sculpture I Got It from My Mother.

Other works also mentioned above—the sculptures Natascha Kampusch and Weronika AP, and the untitled work referring to Abu Ghraib—were based on press photographs: the fifth strategy. The Hypothesis of the Stolen Image series (2008) was realised in a similar way. The artist described it in terms directly touching upon the question analysed here: ‘What might hypothetically happen if two stolen gazes met and began to live lives of their own beyond the control of the authors of the original photographs, creating a new hybrid narrative between reality and fiction? This new narrative has not yet been fixed in a photograph, so it becomes a hypothesis of a photograph.’

The project combining Anna Baumgart’s video Conquerors of the Sun with Andrzej Turowski’s literary work The Locomotive of History proposes another, sixth strategy. Like those discussed above, it helps to give the work-project hybrid qualities. It differs, first, because it combines an audiovisual work (video) with a verbal one, a book with a moving image. Because of their mutual positioning, these components cannot absorb one another (as a film devours its screenplay, or—in a slightly different way—a novel absorbs a previously made film). They are therefore condemned either to an eternal dialogue or to separation and distinct existences. An exhibition presenting their coexistence visualises the book, surrounding it with objects of a similarly hybrid status, which for the duration of the display subordinates The Locomotive of History to Conquerors of the Sun. Yet this domination is temporary and, more importantly, occurs not on the plane of the works but on that of the exhibition, which introduces additional relations between them.

The second important distinguishing feature of this strategy is its connection between scholarly and artistic, cognitive and fictional perspectives. Although a dialogue between fiction and document had appeared many times before in Baumgart’s work, this time, inscribed within an artistic-scholarly position, it acquires a different character. In this context, Turowski and Baumgart’s interconnected, shared work becomes an artistic form of research.

The subject of this research is the relationship between art and politics, and the links between the avant-garde and revolution. Conducting the research from the perspective of art, Baumgart and Turowski initiate a cognitive discourse that chiefly brings us closer not to the actual relationships between these two fields of social practice but to a view of the issue from the artists’ perspective, while enabling us to confront it with our own experience. The artists’ genuine lack of knowledge about the political effects art may produce corresponds to our own uncertainty as viewers, caught between fiction and cognition.