Free-standing
Eulalia Domanowska

Stages of Public Art in Poland
Public art in Poland has only really started to develop again in the last ten years. During a time when the country’s democ­ra­ti­sation and polit­ical trans­for­mation allowed such activ­ities, the regional admin­is­tra­tions saw them as a way to revi­talise the cities, facil­itate social inte­gration, make the envi­ronment more aesthet­i­cally pleasing, create a local iden­tity and stim­ulate social dialogue.
Artists like Joanna Rajkowska and Jarosław Koza­kiewicz began working at the end of the 1990s and were later joined by younger artists like Maciej Kurak and Jakub Szczęsny. As sculp­tors and archi­tects, they work inter­na­tionally and present contex­tual art in public space. Murals and graf­fiti have become very popular in Poland over the last ten years. Polish munic­ipal and cultural insti­tu­tions soon became more inter­ested in such activ­ities. The polit­ical changes made it possible for Poland to return to a demo­c­ratic Europe and to partic­ipate in the inter­na­tional art scene and culture exchange, for example with its Western neigh­bours. In an era of freedom of travel and with rapid advances in commu­ni­cation systems, the distance between coun­tries became much shorter. Now it was possible to travel from Warsaw to Berlin in just six hours. This made it possible for people to get to know each other more quickly and exchange expe­ri­ences. However, Poland is still not an attrac­tive art market and has not become a country in which foreign artists would be keen to exhibit their work. Artists who do come to our country cannot expect to be adequately remu­nerated for their efforts. It is rather their curiosity and the quest for new expe­ri­ences that make them come to Poland.

But Poland is far from being a no man’s land when it comes to art in public space. In the 1960s, Polish Modernists already began to produce contex­tual art. One attempt to promote art in public space was the Elbląg Bien­nale of spatial forms, which was organ­ised in 1965 by the EL gallery in collab­o­ration with a local company, Zamech, a producer of turbines, gear drives and heavy ship­building elements. The bien­nale took place five times, with the last in 1973. The result of the co-oper­a­tion between artists and workers was a large number of mostly abstract sculp­tures and objects. The idea tied in with the Construc­tivist tradi­tion which cham­pioned a rapproche­ment between art and tech­nology, artists and workers, as well as between works of art and recip­ients. The inten­tion was to organise urban space by creating abstract scrap metal sculp­tures with the help of factory workers. The bien­nale served the inter­ests of Polish commu­nists, who promoted such “frater­ni­sation” with the working class and saw art as a harm­less outlet for the “reining in” of the intel­li­gentsia. Never­theless, in this context a large number of objects and sculp­tures were created which belong to the earliest exam­ples of Polish art in public space. Apart from the social concern, the bien­nale also had an educa­tional one-the honing of people’s taste in art by imme­diate contact with sophis­ti­cated art. The Bien­nale for Metal Sculp­ture which took place in Warsaw in co-oper­a­tion with the Kasprzak radio manu­fac­turers had similar aims. Sixty spatial compo­si­tions were produced, of which some can still be seen in the Wola area of the Polish capital. Involved in these projects were members of the Polish avant-garde who quickly became inspired by Concep­tual Art. Talks, mani­festos, actions, photog­raphy and video art all became popular forms of artistic output. At the begin­ning of the 1970s art forms such as perfor­mance art and street theatre also gained in popu­larity. Despite the strained polit­ical situ­ation, the 1980s saw several big inter­na­tional events which also comprised projects in public space. In 1981, just before the intro­duction of martial law, the “construc­tion in process” took place in Lodz. The wave of enthu­siasm for the Soli­darność move­ment made artists team up with workers again, but this time against those in power. Artists like Richard Nonas or Sol LeWitt wist­fully remember those halcyon days. In the second half of the 1980s, it became possible to organise two inter­na­tional art semi­nars in Warsaw with the coop­er­ation of the Fluxus artist Emmett Williams. This entailed the creation of the Centre for Contem­porary Art in Warsaw’s Ujaz­dowski Castle, which is one of the largest cultural centres in Poland.
The polit­ical upheaval in Poland after 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall brought about a more inten­sive exchange between Polish and inter­na­tional artists. One of the most unusual artists I have come across in this context is Thorsten Gold­berg from Berlin, who in 2000 partic­i­pated in the inter­na­tional exhi­bition project Intrigue and Provo­cation in Kaunas, Lithuania. On that occa­sion the artist showed a kinetic instal­lation enti­tled Detached House. A monitor attached to a trolley runs along a track installed under the ceiling of the gallery space, hits the wall, then  continues with this steady move­ment in the oppo­site direc­tion, returning to the point of depar­ture. A static video image shows a detached house in the German provinces. The video shows what happens in this place in real-time. Apart from the odd car going past, a cyclist, a grey cat and a black cat, a postman and the move­ment of the clouds in the sky, nothing much happens. It is boring and dull. The artist livens up this monotony by making the monitor collide mechan­i­cally with the wall. Its course, however, remains predictable and unavoid­able just like the impact of the monitor. The art there­fore has hardly any effect apart from a few dents in the gallery wall. At the same time, this instal­lation is a socially rele­vant contri­bution to the discus­sion on the power and power­lessness of art. And although it is intended for presen­tation in exhi­bition spaces, it is also an example of art in public space.
Since 2000, Gold­berg has shown his works several times in Poland, amongst other places in the Amfi­lada Gallery, in the National Museum in Szczecin, in the Arsenal Gallery in Białystok and in the XXI Gallery in Warsaw. His instal­lation 3 Chinesen is a piece of visual poetry which consists of multi­coloured pieces of toast that have been bitten into letter shapes and are covered in Nutella, jam and slices of German sausage. Together they spell out the words of a popular German nursery rhyme. These pieces of toast on the street and on the floor of the exhi­bition hall enraged a number of Polish visi­tors. They demanded that bread be treated respect­fully and even put it in a sacral context, i.e. relating it to the Eucharist in Catholic mass. The instal­lation was meant to be ironic, but unex­pectedly provoked reac­tions to do with the cultural context of Catholic Poland.

In Context — Selected Works by Thorsten Gold­berg
When Thorsten Gold­berg provokes, it is a rather intel­lectual type of provo­cation, which is supposed to encourage the spec­tator to analyse and inves­tigate specific areas of reality. His works can be inter­preted on different visual and semantic levels. They tie in with many different aspects of the surrounding area, the geog­raphy, local history or the group for which they were created. They are more “context-specific” than “site-specific”. A great number of factors may affect a work of art in outside space: social and polit­ical events, the offi­cial language and the type of surround­ings. Gold­berg closely exam­ines this space before he embarks on a project. He wants experts from different disci­plines to work with him in order for his work to be perfectly attuned to the given space and to enable his obser­va­tions and analyses of the loca­tion to be trans­ferred. By using symbols, signs and allu­sions he subtly hints at expe­ri­ences, emotions and sensi­bil­ities. His works, even the openly crit­ical ones, are not intended for super­ficial provo­cation. The artist empha­sises syner­gies and clev­erly draws the spec­tators’ atten­tion to those aspects of reality that are impor­tant to him. He suggests possible solu­tions, calls for harmony and tries to make us dream and some­times even laugh.
Every night on a bridge in Berlin, the Ober­baum­brücke, neon signs light up which Thorsten Gold­berg installed there in December 1997. The bridge, which was built at the end of the 19th century to replace an earlier wooden one, has always been a regional and admin­is­trative border point and still remains one of the city’s most impor­tant traffic hubs. Cars, bicy­cles, pedes­trians, and also trams and under­ground trains convey a contin­uous stream of people across the river. The bridge is a “time docu­ment, for bour­geois as well as impe­rial Berlin, of the antag­onism typical of the late 19th century between the desire for metro­politan moder­nity and a deep-seated conservatism.”(1) During the reign of Friedrich Wilhelm I. the construc­tion, built on logs, was the border between Berlin and Cölln. Its design and deco­ration were unique. Today the Neogothic building, designed by Otto Stahn, connects the Berlin districts of Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain and has become a land­mark of the city whose bridges are said to outnumber those of Venice.
In 1945 Hitler ordered the bridge to be blown up and in the 1950s it under­went makeshift recon­struction. As a result nearly all traffic across the bridge stopped during the Cold War. It became a barrier between East and West Berlin across which “coming from the East was a small trickle of OAPs old enough to be allowed to leave”, who were exchanged on the other side for “an even smaller trickle of people from West Berlin…”.(2) In the 1990s the Spanish archi­tect Santiago Cala­trava restored the bridge and gave it a new centre­piece which added a new quality to its historic shape. The orig­inal elevated railway bridge struc­ture was also refur­bished. Further­more, on both sides of the new centre­piece, Thorsten Goldberg’s light objects were installed which show the move­ments of the well-known children’s game “Rock­paper-scis­sors”. On the span­drels of the steel girders, between the two towers above the central ship­ping lane, powered by random gener­ators, two out of three possible hand gestures light up every six seconds, perma­nently trying to win a game that cannot be won. The objects which are supposed to appear as normal as traffic signs, have become an inte­gral part of the historic bridge.
At the same time, the light objects, installed 30m above the surface of the water, point to the eight glass mosaic city arms of the Bran­denburg cities of Küstrin, Stendal, Bran­denburg, Potsdam, Pren­zlau, Frank­furt a. O., Salzwedel and Ruppin, which can also be found on the recon­structed post-war bridge. The simple and appar­ently harm­less game of “Rock-paper-scis­sors” repre­sents two people commu­ni­cating with each other without recourse to violence. “The game which combines chance and inevitable deci­sions is a metaphor for the predica­ment of the people of Berlin, who were invol­un­tarily involved in a hope­less situ­ation and enslaved by the borders.”(3) The project on the Ober­baum­brücke, at the former border between East and West, recon­nects both sides, each of which was seen as a symbol of the “other”. Thorsten Gold­berg seems to tell us that the game played contin­u­ously cannot be won by either side.
Another of his works in public space which has, however, not been realised, is Die Pots­damer. The film about a Berlin street, Pots­damer Straße, is a kind of homage to it and its aim is to appre­ciate its history and give a unique oppor­tunity to its resi­dents to see their city in a new way. Pots­damer Straße is normally a loud and busy street. Every­body is always rushing off some­where. “The Pots­damer Straße is no magnif­icent avenue where you show off your new clothes,” says Thorsten Gold­berg. “Mothers and daugh­ters would not walk down it arm in arm for some window shop­ping. Nobody strolls along it and nobody stands around just looking, although there’s a lot to see — nobody stands still here at all. Here every­body has some­thing to do. Resting and relaxing is not part of it. (…) This animated chaos, the nice mixture of shops, the visible pres­ence of resi­dents from all over the world lend it a certain quality which makes it very different from other Berlin thor­ough­fares (like for example Unter den Linden, Kurfürs­tendamm, Frank­furter Allee).”(4) At the same time, the old magic is still alive, dating back to the halcyon days of the street, when it was part of a bridle path leading from the Berlin Stadtschloss to Sanssouci Palace in Potsdam.
The artist suggests stop­ping the traffic on the street for an entire day and wants to film a female rider in full jockey regalia, slowly making her way along the 1.8 km route. During this time the street is cleared, it is peaceful, there is no-one. This event is totally different from the usual daily noise and frenzy. It was planned to involve the street’s resi­dents and give them the oppor­tunity to expe­rience their street without the normal daily buzz. Social cohe­sion would have been achieved by all resi­dents working together in preparing for the project. The street in a state of full expec­tation — this is an unusual situ­ation and the dream of all resi­dents. Once the film was finished, it would be shown on an LED screen mounted high above the street. It is intended as a present to all resi­dents of Berlin who them­selves move about their city like tourists. The petite female rider is a counter-quota­tion to heroic war statues which repre­sent power in coun­tries world­wide, like for example the eques­trian statue of the Roman Emperor Marcus Aure­lius. Tran­quillity wants to be inter­preted as an event. The artist offers us a moment of relax­ation, a break in the middle of all this commo­tion, a reflec­tion on our surround­ings and their history as well as on the reasons for our rushing around. Such projects can be found in contem­porary art more and more. Projects which are based on the desire for a slower pace of life, on breaking the circle of work, consump­tion, fun and rapid impres­sions. They are char­ac­terised by the desire to get the balance right. Thorsten Gold­berg gives us the oppor­tunity to dream about an ideal world whose vision he develops in his art.

(1) Maria and Ludwig Deiters: Berlin baut, no. 18.

(2) Karl Schlögel: Frank­furter Allge­meine Zeitung, 3. 12. 1994.

(3) Anna Krenz: Potencjał pustki. Berlin jako miasto biedne, ale seksowne. Biblioteka wizerunku miasta: miejskie powi­tanie. Warsaw 2007, p. 9.

(4) http://www.potsdamerstrasse.com/files/ort.html, 2012.