24
in this show was also
fundamentally tied to history, to a recovery of traces of the past, and
a reinvigoration of issues around remembrance.
The third and final chapter looks at a new wave of young Polish photographers working
in the 1960s, especially artists associated with the student group Zero 61. Artists
discussed in previous chapters had experienced the war directly as primary witnesses or
survivors. This chapter introduces a younger generation who were born in the aftermath,
who did not experience the war in the same way, but who bear the traumas of previous
generations. The chapter begins with the 1968
exhibition Fotografia Subiektywna
[Subjective Photography], organised in Kraków by Zbigniew Dłubak, which took its
name from Otto Steinert’s concept of
Subjektive Fotografie [Subjective Photography].
The works produced under this banner blurred the boundaries between artistic mediums
and prioritised the centrality of the artist-photographer in the creative process. The
montages of Andrzej Różycki are particularly interesting for the way that the past of the
Polish nation appears to haunt its present landscape. The montages bring together
collective memory and family snapshots, intertwining Różycki’s personal histories with
those of the nation. Marianne Hirsch’s theory of postmemory guides my analysis here.
Hirsch suggests that the past of one generation inhabits the
psychological present of the
children that follow, who are haunted by the presence of a past that they do not know.
Hirsch suggests that this directs the young towards fantasy and imagination, an
assessment supported by the work of the Zero 61 photographers.
In 1969 a small exhibition was staged by the Zero 61 group in an abandoned blacksmith’s
forge in Torun. This remarkable show is the focus of the second section of the third
chapter and traces the change from highly stylised exhibitions of art photography to an
exhibition where photography was not just degraded but humiliated. Images were taken
off the walls and scattered on the floor, pinned to the ceiling, glued
to doors, or thrown on
top of piles of rubble. Objects found on site were exhibited as ready-mades, or assembled
into strange configurations. Works by Józef Robakowski and Wojciech Bruszewski
foregrounded an indexical approach to artmaking. The
Kuźnia [Forge] exhibition
demonstrated a shift from taking photographs of traces (as pursued by Lewczyński in the
1950s) to using casts, imprints and moulds to create their own traces. Iversen has
suggested that forms of art making that involve a physical imprint emphasise the initial
25
wounding moment of trauma, the imprinting of an indelible trace on the psyche.
44
This
chapter explores how traces of trauma do not just present themselves on the surface of a
photograph, but are communicated through photographic or other
indexical processes of
making.
Reflecting on these three decades makes evident how certain historical events recur,
notably repeated episodes of anti-Semitism and persecution of Jewish citizens, in the late
1950s and again in the late 1960s. This repetition suggests that the magnitude of the
horror embodied by the Second World War remained unprocessed in the collective
psyche and made numerous unwanted and compulsive traumatic returns in the following
years. In
Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Caruth suggested that the traumatised “carry
an
impossible history within them, or they become themselves the symptom of a history
that they cannot entirely possess.”
45
Caruth suggests that what is being repeated is not the
trauma, but the lack of preparedness: “The shock of the mind’s relation to the threat of
death is thus not the experience of the threat, but precisely the
missing of this experience,
the fact that,
not being experienced in time, it has not yet been fully known.”
46
Repetition
compulsion, according to Freud, rehearses the traumatic event in order to develop anxiety
retrospectively.
47
The repetitious nature of Polish history in these years also suggests that
the denial of events in official narratives of history locked the nation into a cycle of
repeated return of unprocessed memories.
The art made in these decades also serves to reinforce this sense of repetition. In the
following chapters, artists can be seen to gravitate towards certain themes and subject
matter: abstraction; traces and mnemonic objects; entropy and destruction. The tendency
towards
abstraction, for example, emerges after the war, only to be suppressed in the
years of Socialist Realism, and make repeated returns in the 1950s and 1960s. Why does
abstraction re-emerge at these particular times? What function does abstraction serve at
different historical moments? Repetition allows me to trace the evolution of these forms
over time,
from photographic abstractions, produced using only the properties inherent to
the medium – framing, focus, depth of field – which evolve into abstractions made by
working directly on the photosensitive material – spraying, dripping, tearing, burning.
The interest in traces and mnemonic objects also evolves, and demonstrates a shift in the
44
See Margaret Iversen,
Photography, Trace, and Trauma, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2017).
45
Caruth,
Trauma, 5.
46
Caruth,
Unclaimed Experience, 62.
47
Sigmund Freud,
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (New York: Bantam Books, 1967), 60.