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Since Katarzyna Kozyra’s 1993 diploma work, Pyramid of Animals, her name has been synonymous with controversy. Here, as in every subsequent project, she mines society’s social fabric and selects some of the most unsavory themes for dissection and presentation. Often her own body is her subject, as, for example, in its cancer-ravaged state in Olympia or, more recently, in the guise of Lou Salomé accompanied by the dog-like personages of Friedrich Nietzsche and Rainer Maria Rilke (Appearance as Lou Salomé). |
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Katarzyna Kozyra’s Punishment and Crime – Paulina Pobocha
Since Katarzyna Kozyra’s 1993 diploma work, Pyramid of Animals, her name has been synonymous with controversy. Here, as in every subsequent project, she mines society’s social fabric and selects some of the most unsavory themes for dissection and presentation. Often her own body is her subject, as, for example, in its cancer-ravaged state in Olympia or, more recently, in the guise of Lou Salomé accompanied by the dog-like personages of Friedrich Nietzsche and Rainer Maria Rilke (Appearance as Lou Salomé). Just as often, she relies on the bodies of others, like the unknowing male and female nudes she clandestinely filmed for Men’s Bathhouse and The Bathhouse, respectively, or the geriatric models that become dancers in The Rite of Spring. In all her work, she forces us into direct confrontation with the pulp of a less than pleasant reality. Punishment and Crime is no exception.
The video installation, presented on one large screen and seven additional video monitors, documents Kozyra and a group of men as they engage in paramilitary activities on a shooting range just outside of Warsaw. Using enormous quantities of homemade explosives as well as a wide range of weaponry (MG42s, flame throwers, rocket propelled grenades, bazookas, etc.), the actors blow up and destroy objects that they have either constructed themselves, such as a rickety wooden shack, or brought to the site, like rusty cars that had already been slated for demolition. A peculiar pastime, the only goals for these war and weapons enthusiasts are the explosions and destructions themselves. And, their actions are entirely illegal. To protect their identities, Kozyra asks them to wear cheap masks with pin-up features and wigs of long, bountiful hair. The end product, the video installation, is a dizzying and seductive montage of explosion upon explosion perpetrated by cartoonish, puppet-like players whose gender is confused, if not concealed. And, whereas the crime is copiously illustrated, the punishment is eclipsed.
The title of the video, Punishment and Crime, is an inversion of the title of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s famous novel Crime and Punishment. Dostoyevsky tells the tale of a man who commits murder and is then haunted by its memory and his own growing sense of guilt. Viewing Kozyra’s video, we can be certain that a similar fate is not in store for her protagonists. They are, of course, not hurting anyone and putting only their own lives and safety in jeopardy. Absent of any ideological motivation, the gratuitous violence is a nonsensical end in itself that speaks to a particular primal obsession, which begins in youth. But, unlike innocent war games that children, most often boys, play, the dangers here are very real. In fact, in an interview, Kozyra mentions a friend of hers who had to be “scraped from the wall with a spatula” after he was blown apart by an errant explosive. This very real threat of bodily harm can, of course, be interpreted as the punishment. But, Kozyra is rarely this literal and narrow in her address. Moreover, the punishment, as her title suggests, is not a consequence of the crime, as in Dostoyevsky’s novel. Here, the punishment precedes the crime.
And so, we must imagine that these war enthusiasts have already been punished. Like in so many of Kozyra’s works, the subject of Punishment and Crime is only partially that which we see projected on the screen. Outside of our field of vision, but integral to the piece is the context that gave birth to this strange (or not so strange) behavior: the society that cultivates this insatiable need for violence. The crime, which follows, is a possible, and perhaps inevitable, outcome, one which these men are consumed by and destined to enact over and over again.
Paulina Pobocha is an art historian and writer based in New York. She is currently a PhD candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, writing her dissertation on the Polish painter and theater director Tadeusz Kantor, and a teaching fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
