I perceive it as a vicarious narration, erasing responsibility and dangerously equating different types of victims and their experiences. My aim is to de-nationalize and to de-traumatize art history in Poland, since victimization and traumatization of art and artists by the communist power system is a dominant narration in art history in Poland today. In my larger project which I provisionally call affective art history, I look for an alternative chronology and alternative histories of art history in Poland, using the general framework of affect theories such as guilt, shame, fear, despair, joy, regret, mourning, etc. From my point of view, perhaps it is not only the sphere of overwhelming authoritarian ideology that stripped the artworks of their innocence (autonomy), but a much deeper and shattering experience which I connect to the "night of Polish consciousness" - to the Shoah. I would like to shift this statement a little bit. ![]() Īs Andrzej Turowski stated, due to the context and logic of the totalitarian power system - none of the artworks could be innocent. "Day history of Poles, saturated with poisoning martyrological clichés, will not weaken until the nocturnal history is revealed" wrote Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, and Elżbieta Janicka concluded: "the obstacle in critical analysis and working through the past on the social scale is not the lack of knowledge 'on the nocturnal history', but the system of intellectual and moral organization of that knowledge". However, there were the studies of the researchers from the Polish Center for Holocaust Research in Warsaw whose work on Polish complicity in the Holocaust made me conscious of the burning need to adapt the effects of their research to the reflection on art history in Poland, which should cause its radical reorganization. However, art history in Poland still lacks the general reorganization and in-depth critique such as that presented by Grzegorz Niziołek in the field of theater history which, in treating the event of Shoah as its main focus, exposed the exclusions and limitations of the history of culture in Poland, destabilizing its identity and looking for alternative models of narration. ![]() ![]() Recently the number of studies of individual artists and works pertaining to the Holocaust in Poland has grown and my paper owes very much to this expanding field of knowledge. It also determined what problems were excluded and eclipsed or relegated to the sphere of metaphor. It impacted on existential, ideological and artistic decisions, positions and attitudes in a conscious and unconscious way, impinging on what was possible and not possible to think, to feel and to represent. And yet the Shoah forms the very nucleus of Polish culture. ![]() In art history narrations from the 1970s and '80s the Shoah is absent and in more contemporary art histories either it does not have a central place but is merely a distant point of reference, or it is relegated to the sphere of specialized studies. The attention of modern art histories in Poland is rarely given to the 1939-1945 period, and when it is - it focuses on art and artists facing World War II and the German occupation rather than the Holocaust. Socialist realism (1949-1955) is treated as its traumatic moment. In my paper I will focus on two works: the untitled, unofficial album from Łódź (Litzmannstadt) Ghetto (1943) by Arie Ben Menachem and Mendel Grossman and on "To my Friends the Jews" (1945-1947) series of collages by Władysław Strzemiński in an attempt to question the general paradigm of modern art history in Poland.Īrt in Poland is historized as "post-war" or "after 1945".
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