What is Political Performance? clothespins, fingerprints and burning straws
Anna Kerrigan
Even when deformed by the multitude of clothespins fastened to the flesh of his face, or masked by a flaming paper bag over his head, it is evident that Wladyslaw Kazmierczak knows what he’s doing.
A performance artist himself and director of the Baltic Gallery of Contemporary Art, the Polish Kazmierczak is the curator of The Castle of Imagination, one of the few annual international performance art festivals. While the Festival, created in 1993, originally had the broader intention of showcasing installations, sound art, and text as well as performance, the focus was narrowed to performance art in 1996.
And what is performance art? The man has been asked the question a million times, and he is still somewhat hesitant to respond. Influenced as much by "the strong political and social tension in Poland" as the "artistic pieces by internationally artists," Kazmierczak describes his relationship to art and performance as "a very specific, creative and obsessive thing."
Kazmierczak prioritizes the ability to react to the world without getting yourself in the way. Kazmierczak and his partner in crime (or, performance), Ewa Rybska, always dress in the same elegant uniform, a suit with white gloves. In this way they signature their work and create a recognizable brand that we grow comfortable enough with to let sink away into the background (think the Coca Cola insignia in Times Square). Though they remain deadpan through their performances, they embue their pieces with a childish curiosity–climbing on tables, dumping stuff on the floor, staring into lights, pinching their faces with clothespins, employing the use of stuffed animals and let’s not forget, fulfilling every kid’s dream by playing in a real-life castle. In their actions, they break every parent’s rule; in the content of their work, they present the adult world as threatened by harsh systems of prescriptions, where rules oppress and kill and starve. Performance, which Kazmierczak views as an "open" discipline, provides the freedom to play. It is this quality that convinced Kazmierczak "it was absolutely my art, my form of expression, my attitude, my way of thinking."
From 1993 through 1999, the performers made use of the historical Polish castle in Bytow. The party quit the castle in 2000, opting for a nomadic event, presenting performances in cinemas, galleries and other spaces in five Polish cities. Since then, the festival has continued to gypsy from one city to another. 2003 marked the 12th Castle of Imagination. The festival began in the Polish cities of Ustka and Gdansk and then crossed the Atlantic to America with performances in Providence, New York and Boston for a special project entitled "Juliett 484." Performances were hosted in a variety of spaces: an old cinema in Ustka, galleries, the Gdansk shipyard, a Russian submarine in Providence, School of Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Anderson Auditorium, BPM Performance Space and Chashama in New York City.
The Castle of Imagination generally invites between 20 and 30 international artists, including Wladyslaw Kazmierczak and his collaborator Ewa Rybska, to perform each year. While the performers’ specific use of forms and space differ greatly, the mission of the festival is to explore the human condition through the individual’s physicalized response to the social, political and ecological state of the world.
In one such performance Magda Sowierszenko of Poland examined the robotic-Stepfordism expected of women–performing housework duties, cooking, cleaning, reading women’s magazines–by interacting with the familiar, domestic objects that serve as a woman’s company.
Jose Torres Tama of New Orleans and Ecuador, performed a straight-forward monologue entitled "$CASINOAMERICA$" which criticizes the hypocrisy of American capitalists. A performer who is apparently quite popular with the audiences, Tama clenched his jaw as he burned a cross of straws, kneeled before a fire holding the American flag behind his top hat: a grotesque and utterly frightening horror-film Uncle Sam.
The Kazmierczak-Rybska collaborations are not self-evidently political but provocative when accompanied by explanation. Their work Warning was meant to "remind us of the world which is both parallel to ours and at the same time forgotten." The two artists disoriented themselves by staring into bright spotlights making it particularly difficult for them to perform the tasks that followed. More significantly, the lights made it impossible for the presenters themselves to actually see what they were doing. Kazmierczak, armed with a magnifying glass, video camera and video projector presented distressing photos of the war in to the audience in such a way that abstracted the images beyond recognition. This act, says the collaborators was meant to "indicate how our moral ‘awareness,’ our familiarity with poverty and unhappiness is shifted into the area of ignorance." Later in the piece, fingerprints were collected from members of the audience to evoke the "American policy of…treating each individual as a potential criminal." In Quiet, the couple performed a series of actions that were predictably silent–they poured flour, threw tissues, and squirted shaving gel–followed by actions that should have made noise but didn’t–blew soundless trumpets, pretended to bang on pot lids. The performance ended with the letters N.O,A,N,S,W,E,R being glued to the wall. The piece was meant to evoke "silence and uncertainty [as] the essence of discourse in [a space which] used to be a Jewish synagogue."
A particularly bizarre performance, which claimed to be political, but only seemed to mock the urge to assign a mission statement to a group of diverse artists in the first place, was that of Barcelona-based Joan Casellas. Casellas presented a series of images, beginning with a postcard of a sailboat, and then gave a kiss on the cheek to each audience member; next, Casellas hung himself upside down from the ceiling, played with his shoelaces and jumped around on one leg. The piece claimed to embody "the displacement of Spaniards carrying the burden of both Americas."
And then there were those performances that seemed to make up for their seeming lack of political intention with their playful zeal.
In The Next Hero, Artur Grabowski dressed himself as a tasty super hero in eight loaves of bread–evoking for many of us Maurice Sendak fans, memories of In the Night Kitchen.
Karolina Stepniowska of Poland in her untitled performance represented the Olympic games using eager audience members as participants. While the contestants hoolah-hooped with one of five Olympic rings, Stepniowska undressed, mixed different types of soil together, layed down in the soil and mixed the dirt with pieces of meat. She then assaulted the audience by tossing dirt and meat at them at which point one audience member allegedly got irritated. If you can’t handle dirty giblets being tossed into your lap, maybe you’re the one with the problem.
And of course, there were the token performance artists who seem to think that the best solution is to get naked. When at a loss for words, I often do the same thing.
In researching the article, it became glaringly obvious that it is somewhat ridiculous to write about performance art based solely on still photographed documentation and brief deliberate responses from the artists involved. Though sometimes my own exhaustion or curiosity may seem to make the performance artists wink or wave to me from my laptop screen, the experience of web scrolling lacks the interactive nature between audience and performer that is inherent in this form. As Kazmierczak phrases it, performance has an "anti-media character," "the recorded picture of the performance is a major obstruction in relaying an emotional and intellectual message." And this, he argues, is why in the age of electronic communication we shouldn’t allow the direct contact of performance to ride complacently in the backseat.
Though the mission statement of Kazmierczak’s festival may not in itself be particularly innovative, the fact that The Castle Imagination exists is monumental.
Kazmierczak writes, performance art in the 70s was rebellious because it "was a response to formalized modernistic and conceptual art [and was indifferent] to political issues." When I asked him about the influence of these seminal performance events and happenings, he admitted, "I was very much skeptical of simple concepts, even radical ones. As a young artist at that time I felt restricted by vanguard groups–many vanguard groups have totally different programs and they fight one another–and [I felt restricted] by the totalitarian political system." Performance art became an outlet, a way to "break down the rules." With this year’s Castle of Imagination, Kazmierczak continues play with rules and, perhaps even more importantly, provides other artists with the venue and freedom to do the same.
