When the center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw was preparing the exhibition of Andres Serrano's works, the censorship occurred already at the moment of agreeing upon the list of exhibits with the artist. It was decided that his "Piss Christ" should not be shown, although the work would go to another exhibition in Lubljana via Warsaw. The Director of the center for Art acted to defend not only his own position but also the institution itself which had previously often been attacked for various controversial works shown there.
The fears were caused by the fact that the predominant part of Polish society is catholic. In this context, it was thought, "Piss Christ" could not receive a rational reception. Certainly, this does not mean that other Serrano's works exhibited in Poland did not raise violent reactions. Moreover, the artist was attacked because of "Piss Christ" anyway by some adversaries of his art. Thus, some works provoked controversy even by their absence.
The debate ran on two tracks. On the one hand people attacked the fact of exhibiting the works of an artist whose art is contradictory to the sensitivity and the system of values of an average citizen; on the other, the censorship itself was also criticized. The administrator of art was denied the right to perform the censor's function.
Three years ago, Grzegorz Klaman presented the work in which he used human organ preparations for the first time at his exhibition in the State Gallery of Art in Sopot. A huge metal box contained three glass vessels with a liver, brain and intestine.
Klaman uses organic preparations and places them within the monumental frame. This is one of the ways in which the artists express the issues of the individual body entangled in the power system. He is interested in the cross-roads of discourses. In the case of his exhibition it was the discourse of knowledge and the discourse art. The artist obtained the organs legally, according to the agreement of hire with the Medical Academy. The ethicist working at the Academy agreed to that. The artist treated the organs with necessary respect. However, a part of art critics did not approve of this kind of his artistic activity.
Conservative press and journalists attacked the artist many times. An author writing for the Res Publica monthly called his art "Activities not only of the border of art but [...] of the criminal code". What is significant, is that the critics speaking about his work as immoral or non-ethical used the words like "insides" and "guts" which the artists himself did not use. Thus a negative attitude to man's carnal aspect was revealed, along with our reluctance to admit that we carry "this" inside us. No-one hesitated to call the artists "a criminal" and the author of the introduction to his catalogue "his moral partner". One should add here that Grzegorz Klaman has been known as an artist in Poland for over ten years. Whoever follows the artistic scene can easily notice the way which led the artist to his present activities, and find how strongly justified they were. However, the adversaries were only interested in the questions "what" the artist did, instead of "why" and "what comes from that".
It is astonishing that the outrage of some critics because of the public display of the parts of a dead body did not reach other cases in the cultural sphere in which this taboo was violated, too. We can watch embalmed or dried remains of people whose eternal peace was also violated in archaeological museums and nobody is indignant at this. It may seem that we would excuse the curiosity of the viewer and the openness of the exhibition in the latter case because the deaths are fare more distant in time. They belong to times and cultures from the remote past which we, perhaps subconsciously, treat as "worse".
In churches and museums we can watch reliquaries with the relics of saints. However, a form of the contemporary reliquary is treated as a transgression. We allow scientists to slice dead bodies in the name of progress in medicine. We accept organ transplantation to save human life. Yet, exhibiting an organ as an artifact turns out to be the transgression of a norm. The artists, who apply means considered radical in the public perception, are accused of the desire to shock and appall the public. This conflict seems to reveal that the culture is still in need of niches in which the inevitable can happen, yet outside the reach of the citizen's eyes.
Three years ago public opinion was affronted by the sculptural diploma work at the Warsaw's Academy of Fine Arts. Katarzyna Kozyra made her "Pyramid of Animals" after Grimm brother's "Four Singers of Bremen" and the iconographic motif connected with this literary source. She used stuffed animals in her work. And this would be nothing shocking (a year later Maurizio Catellan constructed a similar form) unless the animals were killed on her order. The fact that she made her choice from among the specimens already fated to death, in the slaughterhouse or by "putting them to sleep", did not change anything.
Similarly to Klaman, she made a shift; in Klaman's case it was the dissection room, in hers - the slaughter house and the vet's room that were projected into the exhibition room. Moreover, she revealed the entire process of preparation and her conscious participation in it. Despite contradictory opinions, the artist was finally granted her diploma.
Moreover, Kozyra was later provoked in her interview for one of the critics to say things which were more radical than her original intention. She floundered so far that, it seems, there was nothing left for her but strengthening her image created by the media. This provokes the question about how far-fetching consequences can the relation between an artist and a critic have, even if the critic takes side of the artist.
However, because she revealed her activities in public and admitted a "conscious murder" a great fuss arose along with attempts to annul her diploma because, according to the opponents, any activity which violates ethical norms cannot be the subject of a diploma. Yet, it was not the artist's work itself but her verbal declarations that caused the outrage. Marek Godziewski, writing about her work, notices that the work itself is aesthetic. It is the way of its production that evokes repulsion. He interprets the repulsion as the subject of this work and concludes "it is not only the activity itself that can become the subject of repulsion, it can be the acting person as well".(1)
Last year emotions simmered again. It was during the "Anti-bodies" exhibition at the center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw. The exhibition was a pretty large presentation of the phenomena in Polish art which deal with the issues of the body: sexual functions, physiology, disease and death. The exhibition instigated a fierce discussion between its advocates and opponents. The content of the discussion was mostly the incapability of interpretation. It revealed the incapability of reading and the lack of common language between critics, accustomed to a more conventional language of art, and artists, who try - more or less successfully - to find other forms of expression. Additionally the artists were accused of incompetence as they dealt with installations and used electronic media or built objects because they were not able to paint, draw and sculpt. Their works of art were labeled as "offenses".
On the two sides of the barricade stand artists and critics and accuse each other of the lack of knowledge, non-professionalism and no self-identity. The discussion has little to do with art; more often it deals with morality and the artist's right to transgress; which, after all, is not a new discussion.
It also tackles the critic's right to make a thorough description of a work and violate something which might seem to be a certain aesthetic canon; although, our century seems to have rejected not only all canons but also any sense of their existence. The debate on morality in art, quite unexpectedly, became the debate on the art criticism.
The conflict around a new art in Poland is actually more of a debate on words than on works. A work of art, having been deeply interpreted, becomes a familiar work. From then on it is not only the artist who stands behind it but also the renown of a critic or a publisher. It enters verbal circulation which continues to make intellectual judgments. The word is still the main way of cultural assimilation and official appointment into the area of high culture. Acknowledgment or degradation in visual arts is still the domain of intellectuals.
Certainly, we are talking about some artificial cultural formation here, namely the feedback reaction between an, actually small, milieu of artists and intellectuals. Perhaps no-one cares about that? No, it is not so. Attempts to withdraw Kozyra's diploma, the engagement of one's influences to block the "Antibodies" exhibition and postponing its travel abroad, along with the refusal of financial support by a famous foundation all prove that there are measurable social consequences of the pressure of the media on artists.
Artistic experiments and all radical activities in the communist reality occurred at the marginal, alternative and illegal places of art. Now, the attempts at introducing the activities of artistic risk into public galleries made artists and curators face a new problem of "spending the taxpayers' money" and, consequently, the fact of limiting the freedom of expression. The above-described debate deals with both outstanding and mediocre works. Transgressing any untouchable norm, whether customary, religious, aesthetic or ethical, is the criterion of joining all the works into the one condemn-able whole. However, does this mean that these works are immoral? Or is it that the outrage is the true description of reality? The appearance of art which uses media adequate to the surrounding reality caused the shift in the prestigious exhibiting halls and on the pages of some magazines. The artists dealing with objects, installations, video art, performance and photography replaced the older generation who dealt with more traditional forms of art.
There are two directions of attack onto some phenomena in the art of the '90s. It is the artists who are attacked for their extreme gestures, and it is also the critics who, against the rest of artists and critics, interpret their works. In fact, the works themselves do not provoke controversy but their acknowledgment by a renown critic. Defenders of the "irrevocable pictorial values" ferociously fight for survival. They accuse new phenomena in art of evil and the transgression of moral norms.
Last year the entire April issue of a catholic monthly "Znak" was prepared with the leading thought "Art and morality". From one of the articles we can precisely learn when art is immoral:
" - when it ignores the rules and quality of artistic form and despises human dignity",
- "when it deprecates itself as a from of cognition and iconologic message",
- "when it puts on a mask of science or ideology and devotes itself to the service of utopia; while the artist creating it slights the past and the tradition of art",
- "when it ignores rules and its artistic quality slights the past and the tradition of art",
and finally: - "when art is immoral and when it separates the aesthetic from the ethical". (2)
It is easy to notice that the author of the article does not even apply modernist categories, because the criteria of "morality" which he quotes would call a halt to any progress. In his words he manifests his delight in such concepts of art in which art, beauty and good were the same. His entire argument lacks almost any exemplification, so it is difficult to estimate what his words that "art deprecates itself as a form of cognition" mean or why slighting the tradition would be immoral.
In this chaos, outstanding works are treated equally with average ones. Artistic form and the artist's philosophy do not count; only his artistic means, separated from the context, matter.
What is noticeable here is the disability to differentiate between a certain radicalness of means which is a necessity and that which is a mere fashion, blatant and annoying fireworks. Joanna Sosnowska is quite right to say "Only by analyzing a work in relation to its author one can estimate whether it was created for artistic reasons, that is the reasons morally neutral; and, the other way round, the artist can be judged by the public only in the relation to his work". At the moment, however, we deal with the confusion of art and the morality of its creator.
Speaking about the artist's right to transgress, Grzegorz Kowalski, under whom Katarzyna Kozyra made her diploma work, wrote: "[...] it happens that a ban is a dead product of social, religious or cultural hypocrisy. What then? Perhaps, it is the norms suppressing human desires and passion which are immoral themselves" Perhaps it is a sin of pride to suppress anyones imagination?" Professor Kowalski transforms his beliefs into actions. He supervises a studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. His classes, based on the method of deep introspection, are to help his students to create beings saturated with their personal truth. Frankly speaking, the works that appear there are not equal as works of art. The range of freedom which the professor gives his students, his openness to their ideas and his lack of fear of any radicalism are an exceptionally rare phenomenon at our academies. His studio has been attacked and provoked commentaries many times and the professor gave many interviews in which he had to excuse himself from his own teaching and educational methods.
Discussions on morality and ethics enter also the area of artistic education. An Academy Professor is constantly perceived as an untiring and meticulous cultivator of form and the arcane teacher of the techniques of the craft. Kowalski is more interested in what his students feel and think, less in what they physically produce. However, he tries to transmit the fundamental rule of one's responsibility of any action to his students. Still, his adversaries claim that "The artistic Academy and the museum should be the guardians of tradition".
The debate on the manifestations of new art in Poland seems to come from the strengthened conviction that there is "some universal order of things" and "unchangeable ethical code". Any trespass against this conviction provokes aggression. Ethics unites the society into a stable being. Breaking its norms, along with acting on their margin is treated as a threat to order which we have used to treat as "natural". However, it is not the point to enthusiastically accept each radical gesture in art; the point is to watch equally carefully both the gesture and one's own reactions. The reactions are also the product of culture.
The quoted words are the testimony of one's spasmodic grasp at hierarchy, unchangeable truths and untouchable sanctities. This yields the critics' usurpation to establish norms and scrutinize the artist's morality. It is easier to say "an evil man" than prove that a work is bad (if it is) and why it is so. A work is bad according to aesthetic, not ethical, criteria. Thus the artist appears as "an alien" here who brings different and new qualities, consequently, he threatens the established order. One interpret this as a quite complicated conflict between a stable and development-oriented modernism and a polymorphous, moving and meandering post-modernity.
In one of his sketches of the postmodern morality, Zygmunt Bauman called the modernity "The Age of Ethics" (3) Morality was its product. The specific feature of that "legislative epoch" was, according to Bauman, the wall of acknowledged dogmas and the priority of norms before practice. It was assumed to be certain that the world without ethics must be the world without morality. Bauman continues his diagnosis, saying that, perhaps, if humankind stopped caring about preserving moral rules, people would face moral autonomy then. Consequently, they will face the indispensable, individual and inevitable responsibility.
He proposes the name of "The Age of Morality" for the coming post-modern epoch. Following this train we can say that the age of ethics is the age of the norm imposed onto a group of people. The age of morality would be the age of the loneliness of an individual in his responsibility. The art of the '90s seems to foreshadow such a change in consciousness, revealing the places which are false and non-continuos in the are of the acknowledged norms and cultural paradigms.
(1) Marek Godziewski: "Przemieszczenie tego, co odrajce" [in:] Czreja, no year and number provided, p. 37
(2) Joanna Sosonowska: "Pubnlicznoaelig; i moralnoaelig;" [in:] Znak, no 479 1995, p.46
(3) Zygmunt Bauman: Dwa szkice o moralnoci postnowoczesnej Warsaw 1994