Art Is a Kind of Politics Conducted by Other Means: On Janek Simon’s Polish Year in Madagascar Project

Janek Simon’s creative attitude can most aptly be characterised as that of the “artist as cultural producer” (to paraphrase Walter Benjamin’s famous phrase), since it consists in the continual processing, problematisation, redistribution and recreation, in different contexts, of the vast resources of knowledge (as well as the apparatuses of its production) generated by contemporary late-modern information culture. The artist’s work forms part of a process described by Lev Manovich. He argues that while the artistic strategies and methodologies of the first avant-garde and (to some extent) the neo-avant-garde were ways of showing reality anew and relating to it afresh (reality outside the media), the activity of contemporary artists “signals a new stage in media history […] the meta-media society. The enormous accumulation of media records by this point, together with the shift from an industrial society concerned with the production of goods (the processing of matter) to an information society concerned with the processing of data […] changes the rules of the game. Finding effective and efficient ways of dealing with the mass of media already collected becomes more important than recording more, or recording anew”¹. Based on the distinctive meta-media “foraging” through resources of knowledge and information described above, the artist’s work is also a response to the close connection now emerging between activity in the cultural sphere and economic activity; between the disinterested production of interpersonal relations, lifestyles and feelings (associated with life, culture or art), and the continuous capitalisation of these qualities within the present, “immaterial” stage of capitalism. Simon’s work is made in the context of the ever more complete culturalisation of the economy and the simultaneous economisation of culture, and seeks to expose these processes.

From the perspective of Simon’s work, the internet becomes a Benjaminian apparatus, tool and archive; it becomes a place where knowledge is open and accessible, where we can find instructions for building an electronic watch, a calculator, or indeed a bomb. The artist’s work is permeated by both fascination and terror connected with the experience of the peculiar informational inertia and ecstasy now taking place. He works in the shadow of the ultimate discrediting of Benjamin’s demand that the artist’s function be transformed from that of a provider of aesthetic information into that of a producer who changes the tools of utterance and expression, striving to draw the greatest possible number of people into the sphere of creativity and subversive creative activity. Simon’s pyrotechnic-anarchic artistic practice, founded on the subversive use of readily available knowledge (through the internet, for instance), makes us realise that Benjamin’s propositions have now been fully realised both in contemporary terrorism and in the quasi-artistic overproduction of amateurs, whose anarchic scale obscures, deconstructs and deprives of potential such liberating Benjaminian categories as self-representation, self-organisation, and so forth.

“The Explorer”

Adopting an anarchic-pragmatic attitude towards a contemporary reality founded on the overproduction of knowledge, Simon seeks new connections between the immense resources of information to which the new media (or, rather, their inertia) give him access. It should be added that he seeks non-functional connections: he encourages us to use knowledge in ways other than the dominant one, which is subordinated to reinforcing mainstream consumer culture and the economy. In doing so, the artist seems not to believe in any emancipatory potential in his activity of the kind envisaged by utopian left-wing thinkers such as Benjamin (even though his work seems to realise Benjamin’s propositions): a potential that would lead us to modernise our social relations, to enlightenment, to final socio-cultural maturity. Rather, he prepares us for life in the reality awaiting us after annihilation, after the global catastrophe towards which we are inexorably heading (most of his works are filled with distinctive fantasies of the coming catastrophe).

The artist’s recent quasi-apocalyptic works (such as EdiblePlantsandAnimalsofLowerSaxony, and the squirrel-trap project), as well as the Polish Year in Madagascar project, attest to this. The idea of an exotic and exciting journey to “wild Africa”, preceded only by reading a handful of books from the 1930s, gives form to the artist’s longing for very simple, direct contact with reality, as well as to a distinctive engagement with the contemporary culture of sensations and experiences stimulated by the mass media. By imaginatively casting himself as a self-reliant explorer, traveller and coloniser from the beginning of the century (that is, from the last period in which we still thought we could truly discover something), the artist reveals today’s widespread longing for a more direct experience of reality, the world and oneself. For today every intellectual experience, and not only intellectual experience, appears to us in the aura of repetition; every piece of land, mental or geographical, is presented as long since discovered, surrounded by a thousand commentaries and interpretations, thoroughly rationalised and transformed into a dense textual palimpsest that buries such notions as mystery, the undiscovered and the unknown. Through a kind of informational regression (the rejection of knowledge, or rather a concentration on the knowledge most basic and essential to survival), Simon’s latest project exposes this contemporary longing for a time when technology was “on a human scale”, when every civilised person could learn and grasp every technology in their surroundings (as late as the beginning of the nineteenth century). Today we can observe only increasing alienation in this regard. Between human beings and their experience of the world and themselves stand ranks of professionals, guardians of knowledge who cultivate and deepen their competence in a given fragment of reality. Paradoxically, in this activity the artist adopts a rather humanistic position (which he disavows in interviews), fully exposing the unpleasant truths that knowledge, intended to protect us from the terror and unpredictability of nature, itself generates these qualities (eliminating some threats only to introduce new ones in their place); and that knowledge, conceived as a tool enabling us to communicate better and better understand the world and ourselves, now stands between us and the world, separating and distancing us from it and from ourselves.

“The Manager”

In his latest project, developing the strand of institutional critique that has remained a constant presence in his work, Simon undertakes to organise a Polish Year in Madagascar. He thereby mocks, or distinctively over-identifies with, official methods of celebrating and promoting national culture abroad. The artist’s project strikes at the expectations of officials and representatives of the state, for whom art, in the age of information societies and a culturalised economy based on processing knowledge and symbols, has become merely a sphere of “politics conducted by other means” (to paraphrase von Clausewitz’s famous phrase). It is, we should add, a highly important sphere, whose militarisation is guarded by the numerous Polish cultural institutes scattered around the world and subordinated—significantly—to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs rather than the Ministry of Culture. The “creativity” associated with art, a certain aura, lifestyle and sophisticated social relations that it generates, is now, in the age of the “creative economy” diagnosed by Richard Florida, the greatest form of capital. Florida’s theory, which many businesspeople take as proof that even the most radical art pays, proclaims: “the key to development is creation, creativity—the post-industrial economy is a creative economy”. Contemporary businesspeople (and other capitalist labourers) must not only be “creative”; they must also enjoy a favourable “microclimate” (a country full of interesting, creative people, for example, and filled with art galleries and cultural activity) in order to intensify their own creativity and that of others: to forge it into new business ideas, patents and concepts from which they can profit, encourage consumption, and so forth. Florida’s neoliberal views have intensified the promotion of regions through art and culture, laying down guidelines for their contemporary instrumentalisation. Through its distinctive over-identification with these tendencies to place cultural promotion in the service of the state and capital, Simon’s project (sponsored by a private gallery) reveals the paradoxical situation of contemporary artistic creativity. It shows that everything ostensibly appears to be in order (Polish artists are generally pleased that the state is finally promoting their work abroad), while simultaneously disclosing the terms of this gift from power. It emphasises that, in the “promotion of Polish culture abroad”, we remain enclosed within a neo-colonial language of economics rather than values, a language of the economy and capital rather than culture and art.

It is worth adding that Simon’s project seems a particularly significant statement in the context of Polish artists’ broader interest in institutional critique and the tendency to incorporate into their own artistic projects a reflection on the mechanisms and nature of institutions concerned with contemporary art in Poland. I believe that art’s former “Cold War” with society has now been replaced by a series of intra-artistic frictions and shifts between artists and institutions, tensions that artists had not previously articulated². This subversive interest—a critical attitude towards one’s own living environment, one’s own ecosystem—so evident in Simon’s work is a sign of certain changes, probably connected with the fact that the contemporary art world in Poland is in the best condition in its history to date. Throughout the twentieth century, this world was condemned to exist in an alternative cultural circuit, laboriously building its own autonomous institutions and defending an ever-threatened discourse. Now, for the first time in its history, it appears relatively stable: it is adapting its structures and procedures to the requirements of the European Union, undertaking new, spectacular investments (such as the Museum of Contemporary Art), taking pride in the first generational success of Polish artists on the international stage and promoting Polish contemporary art abroad with increasing effectiveness. Simon’s project (and many others conceived in this spirit) shows that the time has come for a necessary reconsideration of Poland’s “art world”: its identity, narratives, foundations, mechanisms of operation, promotion, funding, history and various relationships (institution–curator–artist–society). Simon’s project enables us to reflect on what determines the value of a work of art or an artistic strategy, and on the various conditions of contemporary artistic production, which remains in a constant relationship of dependence upon the institutional context in which it arises. This context determines the work’s value through the interaction of forces of many kinds: marketing, promotion, the prestige of the institution exhibiting the work, the gallery representing the artist, fashion, sources of funding and, finally, art criticism.

By raising the issue of institutional critique, Simon necessarily directs our attention to the place from which he speaks, or rather to the institution that makes his statement possible—Atlas Sztuki. It should be noted that this institution had previously produced one of the most important works (if not the most important to date) in the new current of Polish institutional critique: Zbigniew Libera’s Masters, which attacked numerous institutions and individuals by name. Juxtaposing Libera’s and Simon’s projects, we can discern a certain strategy on the gallery’s part, creating a relatively new situation within the context of the Polish art world: a private (and, moreover, non-commercial) gallery undertakes a series of projects in institutional critique that radically expose, but also redefine, the conditions of the Polish art world. Remaining with Libera’s Masters and attempting to reconstruct the genealogy of Simon’s work, one should mention Jacek Kryszkowski’s most important action from the mid-1980s (Libera dedicated one of the Masters panels to him). Kryszkowski likewise sought to ridicule the state’s methods of instrumentalising art within its international cultural policy. During his legendary journey into the territory of the then USSR (no one is certain whether it actually took place or was only ever meant to exist as a legend), the artist exhumed, pulverised and brought back to Poland Witkacy’s bones, thereby responding to the political pomp with which the communist state was at the same time celebrating the return of this eminent Pole’s remains to the country.

“The Coloniser”, or political correctness àrebours

Simon’s project belongs to the conflict now prevailing between the liberal conception of a civic nation and conservative attempts to institutionalise an ethnic nation (for the first time since the beginning of the era of globalisation, nationalism now seems to be gaining the upper hand). Nevertheless, the most important dimension of Simon’s project is its anarchism and anti-statism. The artist confronts the contemporary discourse of officially promoting Polish art abroad with the pre-war colonial (and antisemitic) rhetoric of certain politicians of the Second Polish Republic, addressing Polish history together with all its traumas, complexes, phobias and obsessions. After the period of emancipation that has predominated in our culture, a period of being the eternal “noble defeated”, we are becoming increasingly aware of the desires for power, rule and domination embedded in Polish history and mentality. Many artists are now exploring these “executioner” strands (including Artur Żmijewski and Tomasz Kozak). By distinctively over-identifying with the discourse of power, Simon enters this debate, taking up the grotesque and terrifying dreams of imperial might entertained by the Second Polish Republic and revealing a new, contemporary formula for colonisation—a new, post-industrial formula for struggles between states in the sphere of culture. With absurdist humour, he deconstructs the neo-colonial ambitions of interwar Poland, while simultaneously compelling us to examine the contemporary dreams of Polish politicians (to say nothing of plans to build a Fourth Polish Republic), who, for example, officially send their troops to Iraq while unofficially forcing tens of thousands of their own citizens to leave the country in search of work. The reverse of Poland’s costly and purely ideological participation in the colonisation of Iraq is the compulsory, desperate “colonisation” of England, Ireland and elsewhere by Poles. Another distinctive negation of the drive for a strong national identity now dominant in Poland—which automatically excludes and “generates the Other”—is Simon’s attempt (successful, in my view) to tell the story of contemporary Polish culture through the work of non-Polish artists (through Others). All these elements show that one of the greatest virtues of the artist’s latest project is its political incorrectness, a process Piotr Rypson defines as “the reversal of a benevolent, globalising linguistic principle whose ultimate aim is to level out and conceal conflict”³.

1. Lev Manovich, The Avant-Garde as Software, in “Kwartalnik Filmowy”, 2001, no. 35–36.
2. For more on this subject, see Łukasz Ronduda, Institutional Critique in the Strategies of Contemporary Polish Artists, www.obieg.pl, October 2005.
3. Piotr Rypson, Anna Niesterowicz, booklet accompanying the exhibition at Galeria Kronika, Bytom, 2004.