Alina Szapocznikow: Sculpture Undone

If we talk about art creativity in Eastern Europe, which until recently was relatively isolated from the world, as being a separate phenomenon, we risk pushing it even further into the world of otherness. …But we would be risking more if we simply forgot about its otherness and presented ourselves-in the spirit of the newly united Europe-as being equal…

Zadenka Badovinac (1)

By Jennie Klein

Diaspora, war, improved transportation, the need for cheap manufactured goods, the Internet and Facebook have all resulted in a world view that is global and transnational, a post-nation state world in which borders and identities are seen as increasingly arbitrary. And yet, as the Slovenian curator Badovinac wrote in 1994, there still exist certain artists who have not always been part of Europe proper, and whose work remains other to the Western canon of art history. Eastern European artists, who came of age in socialist countries that permitted varying degrees of intellectual and artistic freedom, often had very different access to training, exhibitions and information than their Western European colleagues. The recent democratization of Eastern Europe has made this art work available to the rest of the world as evidenced by textbooks such as that by Terry Smith and exhibitions such as “Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art” (Brooklyn Museum, 2007) (2).

The Polish artist Alina Szapocznikow is one such artist who has benefited, posthumously, from the new transnational approach to art and exhibitions. An artist who divided her time between Poland and Paris, Szapocznikow, who died of breast cancer in 1973, made work that is simultaneously “other” to Western Europe and yet influenced by the object-based aesthetics of Nouveau Réalisme (New Realism) and her close friendship with the critic Pierre Restany, the leader of the New Realists (3). In her native Poland, Szapocnikow enjoyed great success during her lifetime, receiving commissions for major public monuments and representing Poland at the Venice Biennale in 1962. Szapocnikow spent the last 10 years of her life in Paris. A posthumously organized Paris retrospective, co-curated by Pierre Restany and her second husband Roman Cieślewicz, was not well received. Szapocnikow quickly faded into obscurity, forgotten in all but her native Poland (4).

Alina Szapocznikow, Illuminated Woman, 1966–1967, plaster, colored polyester resin, electrical wiring, 61” x 22 7/16” x 15 11/16”. Collection Alexandre Stanislawski. © The Estate of Alina Szapocznikow / Piotr Stanislawski / 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Fabrice Gousset. Courtesy Piotr Stanislawski and Galerie Gisela Capitain GmbH, Cologne.

“Alina Szapocznikow: Sculpture Undone, 1955-1972,” the traveling exhibition of Szapocnikow’s work, thus makes available to U.S. viewers an astonishing body of work that references pop art, eccentric sculpture, industrial materials, and surrealism. (5) Trained as a social realist sculptor, Szapocznikow began working with traditional materials and an even more traditional, social realist style. The present retrospective begins with Szapocznikow’s expressionist sculptures from the fifties, a group of elongated and manipulated figures (primarily female) that eventually morphed into Le Voyage (Journey) 1967, an alien figure that bore little resemblance to the female body from whence it came. By the sixties, Szapocznikow was working in polyester resin, plastic cement, and polyurethane foam as her work became more and more experimental. Of particular note are the pieces that she made in the final 10 years of her life while living in Paris, many of them cast from body parts of the artist, her friends, and her adopted son with her first husband, Piotr Stanislawski. Fetishes gone awry, “Sculpture Undone” includes body parts, particularly breasts and lips, that melt into abject fleshy piles, single legs (cast from the artist’s leg) that lie uselessly on their side, and body parts embedded in oozing black polyurethane foam. Particularly uncanny are the series of “Bachelor’s Ashtrays,” in which breasts and female mouths are the receptacles of crushed cigarettes. Equally abject and fetishistic are Szapocnikow’s Belly Cushions from 1968, polyurethane foam cushions in bright colors made from a caste of a friend’s stomach. The belly form reappeared in other work, including Grande Plage/Big Beach 1968, a floor piece in which brown bellies are embedded in oozing black slime from which single index fingers emerge. Using colored polyester resin and electrical wiring, Szapocznikow made a series of “lamps” that were illuminated breasts and mouths cast from the body of the artist and placed atop a fragile, gooseneck lamp.

Alina Szapocznikow, Fragments of lip casts, c. 1966. © The Estate of Alina Szapocznikow / Piotr Stanislawski / 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Fabrice Gousset. Courtesy Sabine Stanislawski and Galerie Gisela Capitain GmbH, Cologne.

As her cancer progressed, Szapocznikow made a number of pieces that referenced her impending death as well as what was probably the most profoundly unsettling event in her life-her interment in the Pabianice and Lódź Ghettos, followed by a transfer to Bergen-Belson, where Szapocznikow helped her mother in the camp hospital. Szapocznikow made very little reference to this time in her life, although the Herbarium pieces, castes made from her body and those of her son and friends, look like flayed skin and recall the images of piled and tattooed bodies that surfaced at the end of WWII. In Souvenir I (1971), Szapocznikow encased in fiberglass a photo collage of herself as a young girl with an image of a dead woman from a concentration camp. By far the most fragile and haunting piece is Szapoczikow’s polyester resin statue of her son, Piotr Stanislawski. Life-sized and naked, with exaggerated genitals, hands, and feet, Piotr (1972) depicts a Christ-like figure that echoes the earlier sculptures of falling women made by the artist. That this is her son renders the sculpture all the more poignant. Piotr is the Christ-martyr to the maternal Szapoczikow, who barely outlived the casting of the piece and cannot hold him aloft as does the Virgin Mary in Michelangelo’s Pieta. In Tumeurs personnifiées (Tumors personified) from 1971, the artist created an installation of misshapen lumps, all with human faces that had been caste from the faces of her friends. L’Enterrement d”Alina (Alina’s Funeral) from 1970 was comprised of photographs, gauze, the artist’s clothing, and glass wool, all encased in a layer of sticky fiberglass and mounted on the wall. Unappealing and putty colored, the sculpture seems to suggest (presciently, as it turned out) that Szapocznikow would soon be forgotten, reduced to these strange and disturbing bits of her life, encased in a gooey, viscous substance.

Kirsty Bell has written that “one of the problems that an artist’s early death presents, apart from the obviously tragic abbreviation of a productive life, is the telescoping effect it has on the work it left behind, which seems to lead towards an inevitable telos” (Bell 86). Although most writers, including Bell, rehearse the details of Szapocznikow’s life, they are careful not to perform a reductive reading of Szapocznikow’s work based on her biography. Thus Cornelia Butler, in her catalogue essay for “Sculpture Undone,” is at great pains to situate Szapocnikow vis-à-vis Pop Art, European women artists such as Nikki Saint Phalle and Annette Messenger (a friend of the artist), the surrealists, and contemporary Polish artists such as Magdalena Abakanowicz and Teresa Pągowska (6). On the other hand, Szapocnikow was inordinately interested in producing her own image-arranging for photographs of herself with her work, posing models next to her work, and even going so far as to allow herself to be photographed-laughing-while recovering in the oncology unit after surgery (7). Szapocznikow’s production of her own image, the indexical relationship of her work to her body, and her intrusive biography all suggest her “otherness” to the Western European tradition. And while it is important, at least from an art historical perspective, to place Szapocznikow within a canonical list of contemporary art works in the hopes that this placement will legitimize her work, it is also important to maintain Szapocznikow’s radical otherness, an otherness that is the result of not always being part-of Europe, of the surrealists, of the Pop Artists, or even of feminism.

WORKS CITED

• Kirsty Bell, “Bodily Presence,” Art in America April 2012, 86.

NOTES

1. Excerpt from Badovinac, Zadenka. “Body and the East,” Body and the East: From the 1960s to the Present. Ljubljana, Slovenia: Moderna galerija Ljubljana and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998, p.9.

2. See, Terry Smith, Contemporary Art: World Currents. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2011. The exhibition “Global Feminisms” (March 23-July 1, 2007) was curated by Maura Reilly and Linda Nochlin for the Brooklyn Museum of Art. It was accompanied by a catalogue.

3. Artists included in the Nouveau Réalisme included Yves Klein, Arman, Francois Dufrêne, Raymond Hains, Pierre Restany, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely and Jacques de la Villeglé. In1961 César, Mimmo Rotella, then Niki de Saint Phalle and Gerard Deschamps joined the group.

4. For a discussion of the reception of Szapocnikow’s work, see Joanna Mytkowska, “From Sculptures to Awkward Objects: A Short History of the Changing Reception of the Work of Alina Szapocznikow,” in Alina Szapocznikow Sculpture Undone 1955-1972, Elena Filipovic and Joanna Mytkowska, ed. New York and Brussels: The Museum of Modern Art and Mercatorfonds, 2011, 122-135. The exhibition, “Alina Szapocznikow, Tumeurs, herbier” took place at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1973.

5. The exhibition, curated by Elena Filipovic and Joanna Mytkowska, was originated at WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels, and has travelled to the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, The Wexner Center in Columbus OH, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York where is on view through January 28^th, 2013.

6. See, Cornelia Butler, “Soft Body/Soft Sculpture: The Gendered Surrealism of Alina Szapocznikow,” Sculpture Undone, 32-45.

7. This photograph is reproduced in the catalogue.

Jennie Klein is an associate professor of art history at Ohio University. She is the co-editor with Myrel Chernick of The M Word: Real Mothers in Contemporary Art (Demeter Press, 2011) and the co-curator, along with Chernick, of the exhibition “Maternal Metaphors II” (2007). She is currently editing books on the work of Marilyn Arsem and the Love Art Laboratory—the brainchild of Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens.