The 1982 Exchange between Łódź and Los Angeles
Agnieszka Pindera, ed., The 1982 Exchange between Łódź and Los Angeles (Łódź: Muzeum Sztuki w Łodzi, 2024) 447 pp.
With refreshing frankness, The 1982 Cultural Exchange between Łódź and Los Angeles announces its subject with its title. In the early 1980s, artists working in Poland and the United States exchanged artworks to become part of the collections of the Museum of Art in Łódź (Muzeum Sztuki) and the newly opened Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), respectively. Fourteen artists primarily based in Warsaw and associated with the Foksal Gallery represented Poland by sending works to the newly opened Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; thirty-five working in the United States sent works to the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź.
Featuring the collective expertise of scholars from both Europe and the United States, this volume situates the exchanged artworks and the project at large in both their local and historical contexts. Across the fault lines of postwar cultural politics, art and artist are set into generative and occasionally surprising transnational and trans-ideological dialogue. The volume presents essays by eleven authors whose topics range from histories of Polish and American institutions in the 1970s and ’80s to accounts of the artistic and curatorial practices of specific actors involved.(Eight of the eleven texts are adapted from the papers addressing American art in the collection of the Muzeum Sztuki w Łodzi presented at a conference held at that museum in October 2022. Three additional essays by Katarzyna Łabowicz-Dymanus, Patryk Tomaszewski, and David Crowley round out the volume by addressing the Polish participants and organizers.)
An appendix follows the contributed texts, offering short biographical sketches of participating artists as well as color photographs of their submitted works. The achievements of this publication lie both in the range of works and artists covered by the individual essays and—when taken as a whole—in its capacity to surface the shifting artistic and institutional agendas at work among the exchange’s participants as they adapt to the whiplash political transformations of the early 1980s.
The public face of the exchange between MOCA and the Muzeum Sztuki took form in an exhibition that opened in France before traveling to venues in Northern Ireland and Ireland. Échange entre artistes 1931–1982: une expérience muséographique was first mounted at the Musée d’Art Modern de la Ville de Paris (June 25–September 6, 1982) before moving on to the Ulster Museum in Belfast (January 20–February 20) and the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin (opened March 25, 1983), where it was presented with the English title An Artistic Conversation 1931–1982: Poland/USA. The works then traveled onward to their promised destinations, with Łódź acquiring its portion in 1983, and MOCA accepting its gift only in 1987 after an initial rejection in 1984. The cast of characters involved is large, international, and most of its members are likely unfamiliar to a contemporary readership. They include, among others, Pontus Hultén of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Lynn Kienholz of the California/International Arts Foundation, Suzanne Pagé of Musée d’Art Moderne, Anka Ptaszkowska of Foksal, Ryszard Stanisławski of the Muzeum Sztuki, and Henryk Stażewski, doyen of the Polish art world and, at age eighty-six, the oldest participant artist in the exhibition.
It was Stażewski who first presented the idea of exchange to the team at MOCA in 1979, pitching it as the revival of an international network of artistic contact and exchange in which he himself had been a key participant over fifty years earlier. Alongside the artists Katarzyna Kobro and Władysław Strzemiński, Stażewski established the grupa a.r. (artiści rewolucyjni, “revolutionary artists,” or awangard rzeczywista, “the real avant-garde”) in 1929. This critical and curatorial enterprise solicited the art and writing of artists working throughout interwar Europe to present their work to Polish audiences through an ambitious publication and exhibition program. By situating this exchange within the legacy of European modernism’s prewar utopian internationalism, Stażewski dreamed of new artistic forms occasioned by cultural cross-pollination, to be sure, but just as ambitiously of new “channels for direct communication between contemporary artists.”
Already, the single year in the publication’s title belies the longer and less discrete period over which this exchange occurred. Rather than an account of one year in the history of art, its scope dilates beyond 1982 into a longer account of slow-burning creative ideation and protracted bureaucratic negotiations that undergird institutional collaborations of this sort. The book smartly uses the inaugural 1982 exhibition in Paris as a metonym for the exchange at large, which took place over several years from concept to realization. Prominently featured in each of the publication’s texts, the Échange entre artistes 1931–1982 serves in many ways as a shared case study through which to assess the administrative postures of Polish and American institutions as they shifted in the early 1980s and to present the works of art involved in their respective local and historical contexts.
The first essay by the volume’s editor, Agnieszka Pindera, takes on the most challenging but also most critical task of presenting the facts of the exchange, the network of actors involved, its origin, and its realization—itself an ordeal complicated by the institution of martial law in Poland in December 1981, just six months before the exhibition was to open in Paris. Pindera admirably presents a wealth of historical detail and contextual scaffolding that anchors the subsequent essays. Her introduction also situates the Polish-American exchange within a broader constellation of international artistic, cultural, and intellectual cooperation in which the People’s Republic of Poland was involved. Though Pindera’s introductory essay is among the longest in the book, the publication successfully balances its authors’ contributions and Pindera’s editorial gambit. A reader could easily imagine an alternative approach, in which Pindera’s critical acumen and rigorous archival research expand into a far longer editorial statement that would crowd the volume’s forceful and tightly focused essays. One useful addition to this publication—or to future collaboratively authored volumes on monographic subjects—would have been a chronology. Complementing the volume’s immensely useful biographical appendix, a chronology would have relieved the editor of some of the burden of historical exposition by compiling the brute facts of the affair and its principal figures in one place. It could serve as a reference for all essays and open the space for Pindera to pursue her own critical agenda.
Łabowicz-Dymanus’s essay follows as a pendant to Pindera’s and addresses the political stakes inflecting the project’s realization from the Polish side. Her account complicates well-established narratives of artistic innovation in the face of state repression by examining the surprising political use of this exchange by Poland under martial law. Her contribution mobilizes rigorous archival research to demonstrate how the cultural administration of the People’s Republic of Poland, despite a lockdown on political expression, used the exchange as an opportunity to project an image of openness to artistic experimentation and freedom offered by the socialist state, carefully choreographing the release of information and cultural production through what György Péteri’s termed “the nylon curtain” of Eastern Bloc socialism.
The next two essays by Patryk Tomaszewski and David Crowley investigate the generational dynamics at play among the included artists. Through the biographical appendix at the end of the publication, we see that the vast majority (both on the Polish and American sides) were born shortly before, during, or immediately after the Second World War, with two key exceptions. Tomaszewski examines the first, Tadeusz Kantor, born in 1915, who by the early 1980s had become primarily associated with his work in the Polish theater as well as his experimental, para-institutional performances. Though the exchange had initially planned to stage Kantor’s Wielopole, Wielopole—an autobiographical play titled after his hometown that was to be performed by the artist’s Cricot 2 ensemble—his participation ultimately took the form of the 1982 painting Monsieur On Sait Qui. Tomaszewski presents the legacy of Kantor’s informel painting, largely underexamined in the critical literature, and relates it to the artist’s theatrical production. Crowley’s essay follows to reflect on Stażewski, the other exception and most senior participant in the exchange, and his status as metonymic proxy for the interwar avant-garde at large. In contrast to the class-conscious internationalism of Warsaw Pact socialism, Crowley traces the interwar cosmopolitan internationalism proposed by Stażewski’s grupa a.r. to its resurfacing in the Łódź-Los Angeles exchange.
The remaining texts continue to focus on specific contributions to the show. Forming a loose thematic trio, Paweł Polit, Filip Lipiński, and Małgorzata Jędrzejczyk examine shared preoccupations across juxtapositions of Polish and American works featured in the exchange. Polit’s essay presents several case studies pairing conceptual practices associated with Foksal’s stable of artists with works by their American counterparts. These duets include Robert Flick’s and Zygmunt Targowski’s photographic installations, for example, and Stanisław Drożdż’s and Paul Vangelisti’s text-based contributions. Lipiński examines many of the same artists to present what he terms a “cinematic impulse” unifying a range of works, both Polish and American, throughout the exhibition. These not only involve the explicit use of moving images and cinematic devices and instruments, but also a general concern with technical mediation and temporal situation. Jędrzejczyk expands her ongoing research into the sculpture and theory of Katarzyna Kobro (1898–1951)—on which she has already published extensively—by examining the correspondences between her theoretization of space as the fundamental unit of sculpture and the works of Eric Orr produced over three decades after Kobro’s death.
The concluding three essays similarly proceed from the examination of specific contributions to the show but forego an explicitly transnational comparative approach. Michael Leja examines the American contributions by figures such as Alexis Smith in terms of American film noir and popular literature—directly framing his contribution as “supplementary context” intended for a contemporary Polish audience lacking the intimate familiarity with American culture of the 1970s presumed by the artists who participated in the exchange. Agnieszka Rejniak-Majewski, whose scholarly expertise focuses on the art and theory of the Polish avant-garde as well as its philosophical contexts, turns to the Light and Space artists of 1970s California to frame their work within the broader historical legacy of the Lichtspiel (or light play), as explored by artists like László Moholy-Nagy. Mirroring the approach of the volume as a whole, a final essay by Wojciech Szymański isolates a single work, Chris Burden’s Delux Photo Book 1971–73, and presents it as a prism through which to understand the development of the artist book as an artistic form.
As is evident from the scope of topics addressed by the volume’s essays, the relevance of the 1982 exchange extends far beyond the three museums in Poland, France, and the United States most prominently featured in the volume—a fact that did not escape the project’s contemporaries. In a 1983 issue of Circa, a journal of contemporary art and artistic practice founded in Belfast just two years prior, Micky Donnelly reviewed the Ulster Museum’s iteration of the exchange’s exhibition and observed suggestive parallels between the situation of Poles working under martial law and Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland. Just as Poland was facing martial law, the Troubles, the ethno-religious conflict in Northern Ireland, had reached a flash point in 1981 with the deaths of ten Irish republican prisoners who had staged a hunger strike protesting the withdrawal of Special Category Status for paramilitary dissenters (a conflict addressed repeatedly throughout the pages of Circa’s early issues).
Donnelly ends his review by reflecting on Drożdż’s 1977 Między (meaning “between”), a central feature of Polit’s essay on shared conceptual practices among Polish and American artists. Drożdż’s installation presents a simple, rectangular white room in which the word między repeats in aleatory, crisscross formation across the space’s ceiling, walls, and floor. Między—unique in its referential function beyond itself—dissolves into gibberish just as soon as it coheres as legible language. By analogizing the ad hoc configurations of words and letters within an environment experienced in time by a moving viewer, Drożdż restages (more than merely allegorizes) the ever-composing and recomposing process of subject-formation. For the artist, this process is marked by the lived situation—by the gravitational pulls of whatever stands on either end of the “betweens” that pull and shape a viewer caught in their fields. Donnelly found the work inscrutable and yet saw this inscrutability operating on two distinct registers: the foreign-language illegibility of the Polish text on the one hand, and on the other, the oblique or coded manifestations of the ideological positions of Polish artists forced to comport their creative expressions to the demands of the state facilitating their practice and its dissemination. In this regard, Donnelly reflects, the Poles are not unique: “Poland, like N[orthern] Ireland, seems continually to be caught, politically and culturally, ’tween the devil and deep blue sea.”(Micky Donnelly, “An Artistic Conversation: 1931–1982: Poland/USA,” Circa 9 (March–April 1983), 23.)
The Belfast and Dublin venues of the exchange’s exhibition ultimately go unaddressed by the volume, as does the lingering question of MOCA’s initial rejection of the Polish gift in 1984. Though the publication does not present itself as in any way comprehensive, extending its scope to examine these aspects of the exchange would only broaden its critical horizons. One hopes that these studies—or others like them—will soon contribute to a larger body of literature concerned with the cultural-diplomatic function of artistic and curatorial projects in moments of extreme political tension, the relevance of which continues to resurface with troubling frequency. It is a testament to this book’s breadth and perspicacity that such avenues of inquiry are now opened to audiences to whom they were previously unavailable. Rather than a blanket celebration of the political sincerity and anti-authoritarian tenacity of participant artists, the volume’s essays exemplify a more considered approach to analyzing the myriad interests and strategies employed by the exchange’s participants. Indeed, beyond the content its essays offer, they also work as models of intellectual approach.
