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This article was downloaded by: [The University of Manchester Library]On: 15 October 2014, At: 23:02Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
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The Identity Paradox? Reflections onFluid Identity of Female ArtistKatarzyna Kosmala aa Heriot‐Watt University , School of Management and Languages ,Edinburgh, EH14 4AS, UKPublished online: 16 Mar 2007.
To cite this article: Katarzyna Kosmala (2007) The Identity Paradox? Reflections on Fluid Identity ofFemale Artist, Culture and Organization, 13:1, 37-53, DOI: 10.1080/14759550601167271
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Culture and Organization, March 2007, Vol. 13(1), pp. 37–53
ISSN 1475-9551 print; ISSN 1477-2760 online © 2007 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/14759550601167271
The Identity Paradox? Reflections on Fluid Identity of Female ArtistKATARZYNA KOSMALA*
Heriot-Watt University, School of Management and Languages, Edinburgh EH14 4AS, UKTaylor and Francis LtdGSCO_A_216654.sgm10.1080/14759550601167271Culture and Organization1475-9551 (print)/1477-2760 (online)Original Article2007Taylor & [email protected]
The aim of this paper is to explore the paradoxes in the evolving identity of a professional artist, contributingto theorisation of identity formation and performance. I use an example of a Warsaw-based female artist ofthe 1970s’ generation, who has engaged her life experiences in critical practice, Zofia Kulik.
Kulik’s identity formation encompasses the process of privately infused professionalism. Her story providesan alternative account of organising identity and professional practice from the local perspective, contribut-ing to the problem of ‘difference’ in work and offers insights into how female professionals, here in theoccupation of an artist, can challenge disadvantage and discrimination created by the work context, the artworld. The story reveals that contextual factors infuse fluidity in the evolution of creative careers and occu-pational identities. I conclude that identity construction is an open-ended process, embracing temporaldiscontinuities.
Key words: Identity; visual artist; gender; work; fluidity
I used to think that the artist and the artworks are needed in our society. Today, I believe that the artist hasbecome yet another citizen. Art doesn’t seem to have any mission anymore. Democratic majority roles, andthis majority prefers record-seeking sports than arts (Zofia Kulik1)
ON THE FRINGES OF THE EUROPEAN ARTS
Identities can only temporarily point at the attachment to the subjects position, a process of‘chaining’ of the subject to the flow of discourse (Hall, 2000: 19). Indeed, the (artistic) iden-tity in the CEE region is in a flux of ‘negotiations’ with the past and belonging to a newEurope.2 Socially constructed ‘problems’ such as traditionalisms, historical myths andnationalisms, and traditional models and roles all appear significant in the reconstruction ofartists’ own self-images (Cvijetic, 1999). More than temporal attachment to identity can beproblematic given that we simultaneously occupy different positions in the world. Thesepositions reflect ‘units’ of identities, constructed within the play of power and exclusion. Themultiple nature of the self, thus, can reinforce ambiguity and insecurity about the self(Collinson, 2003: 534). This insecurity is even more prominent in the context of the arts, inthe occupational identity of the artist, where the status is ambiguous and individuals oftencreate in isolation, in largely unregulated contexts.
In contemporary arts, there is no rigidly defined system of rules and artistic labour; itscreative and critical insights are generally undervalued. Identity, thus, is interwoven with
*Email: [email protected]; Tel: +44 (0)131 451 3551; Fax: +44 (0)131 451 3296
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open, subjective stylistic means, forming aspects of an articulation of the self and self-repre-sentation in the art world. Bain (2005) argues that often envisaged as informal nature, anartistic occupational identity can render the professional artist as an empty signifier. In thelack of recognition of artistic labour as ‘real’ work, where the creative process is oftenperformed in a private sphere, the status of the artist comes from drawing on a repertoire ofshared myths in a construction of professional identity and communicating it to others. Shealso points at several myths of artistic identity attributes, such as socio-economic and culturalmarginalisation, alienation, outsider status and creative autonomy. These myths becomecatalysts for temporal identity construction and perseverance of a professional status for theartist, while being on the fringes of society. These myths engender action and sense-making,simultaneously reproducing cultural order within which they occur (Bain, 2005: 25–6).Indeed, societal ambivalence, cultural production and private desolation make the occupa-tional identity of the artist fluid. The self becomes in part a symbolic project that one recre-ates, refashions and re-fabricates, juxtapositioning what is private and public, personal andpolitical, individual and historical (Elliot, 2001: 6). I argue that the self, although constructedin a socially and historically localised moment, cannot be explored in isolation frominterpretations of the individual experiences and thier specificity for a subject (a person)(Taylor, 1992).
The aim of this paper is to explore the evolving occupational identity of the professionalartist. I use an example of the Warsaw-based female artist of the 1970s’ generation, whohas engaged in critical practice, Zofia Kulik. In particular, I explore how she has engagedher life experiences (artistic practice) in identity construction and identity management.Kulik explained her particular geo-political location and temporality of the identity as her‘Polish hunch-back’, which evokes a certain helplessness. ‘It is not the lack of intelligenceor talents; it is the lack of rational, efficient and proper functioning of everything and thelack of the normal attitude to everything, without cynicism, without all those ambiguities,without the ‘pissed-off’ approach. This, obviously, has an impact on art, and also ourbehaviour and feelings with others’ (Kulik, in Sitkowska, 1986–1995). Her story revealsthat contextual factors influence fluidity in the evolution of creative careers and occupa-tional identities.
In the 1970s, critical art movements spread world wide and critical artists both challengedand transcended traditional means of art production and ideologically infused representation.Art rhetoric located some of these artists in the opposition to the mainstream and to the powerof art institutions. This was the ‘Western rebellion’. At that time, however, on the fringes ofthe European arts, in the CEE region under communist regime, state funding was cut formore alternative arts. The state ideology enveloped in a communist interpretation of social-ism promised a more homogeneous society, where differences in gender, class and culturewere somewhat dispersed. There was also a kind of political censorship in the visual arts, andnot financing the artists who engaged in a critique of the political system (Truszkowski,1999), simultaneously silencing critical and feminist art practices across the CEE region.Some artists, however, continued to locate their practice outside the mainstream ideology, ina space that was recognised as the counter-culture (Andreas, 1999) Identification with thestate, through formal art practice and state commissioning was looked down upon.3 Theseunderground political movements challenged the communist regime by questioning the roleof dominant systems in the construction of identity and difference, to the extent that this waspossible, that is, without attracting repression (Polit, 2000).
The female artists of these underground movements, such as Kulik, were in a particularlydifficult position. The occupation of professional artist is associated with the myths ofpredominantly male notions, such as a ‘grand maestro’ or genius (Parker and Pollock, 1981).Indeed, being an artist has been seen as a male occupation, a male ‘thing’. Women in the
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same occupational community, in the arts, need to assert their position and their professional-ism in this occupational field and become what Gherardi (1996) labelled ‘travellers in themale world’, where social structures set up expectations and social obligations, positioninggender relations in this professional context. But to become a critical female artist in 1970s’Poland further complicated a sense of the self.
The personality of the artist, in particular a critical artist, reinforces the idea that creativeindividuals exhibit attributes of challenge, arrogance, societal interference and hostility,which often translates into a rebellious nature towards established norms (Csikszentimihalyi,1990). Kulik belongs to that group as she questions the established order and its dominantpowers and challenges the limits of what is perceived as acceptable through her critical prac-tice. A complex layering and interpretation of conflicting elements of her own (private) iden-tity formation, echoed in her practice, derives both from her inner history (a private personworking from home) and from the external social environment (the art world, in the CEEcontext, its institutions and politics).
A version of socialism in 1970s’ Poland and its welfare policies did cut back gender-basedsocial and economic discriminations across the CEE (Kowalczyk, 1999). Instead, the stateappropriated the women’s question, diminishing gender inequality to an economic issue.Women became objects of social and political manipulation, particularly in professionalpractices, including art practice. The tendency of women to take an active role in the labourmarket in the 1950s and 1960s occurred as the government responded to a deficit of employ-ment, especially in the services sector. Despite women’s equality of rights, a rhetoric propa-gated by the communist government, women in professional and executive roles weredisprivileged (Kowalczyk, 1999). Further, in the 1970s, the Polish government invoked thepropaganda of a woman’s primary role as a mother. This socially constructed (dis)placementand a constructed picture of womanhood was echoed in the professional context. This is whythe tenets of Western versions of feminism in that time appeared somewhat different in theCEE (Kowalczyk, 2002). In the art practice milieu, female professional artists who engagedin critical practice could to some extent benefit from state policies and simultaneouslybecame members of the opposition, through their involvement in the alternative and under-ground artistic movements. Managing the socio-political and emotional dynamics of thecritical practice required the non-acceptance of one’s position (here, also the gender concernsof being an artist in the male world) and pursuit of one’s definition of being an artist, but in asomewhat contested position through the transformation from a ‘nice girl to nice bitch’(Katila and Merilainen, 2002).
Feminist literature emphasises the importance of multiple subjectivities and the frag-mented, discontinued nature of the self, fluid, ‘crafted’, performed selves (e.g., Eckert, 1985;Kondo, 1990). Performing identity reflects a repository of roles of gender norms, like playinga game of temporal engaging and disengaging with the social world and enacting certainideals of femininity and masculinity (Butler, 1993). This links with Fournier’s (2002) notionof playing a game of disconnecting. Indeed, performing identity, a reflexive process ofconstituting and individualising, can form a source of meanings in life and ways of experi-encing the world (Ecker, 1985). Kulik’s otherness does not point at a lack of confidence orassertiveness but is a particular way of engaging with world, through a performing of herevolving identity. Her fluid identity replaces a more traditional role, based on the fixed cate-gories of being a women and being an artist. It is a means of entering into the relationship tothe self, an ability to transform the self and to achieve praxis. This is how Kulik reflectsherself and fuels her intrinsic motivation to create, through identity performance in artisticoccupational life and professional practice.
Drawing from cultural and visual studies, I also argue that the idea of identity is consti-tuted through the power of discourse and enacted through the subject’s temporal positionings
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made in the wider cultural codes (Hall, 1996). Hence, identities are constituted in andthrough difference and subsequently are inherently dislocated (Du Guy, 2000), that is, fluidand dependent upon the outside world which both denies them and provides the conditions oftheir possibility. The story of Kulik provides an alternative account of organising identity andprofessional practice from the local perspective, contributing to the ‘problem of difference’in work (Czarniawska and Hopfl, 2002). This paper reveals the paradoxes of identityconstruction, its inconsistency in terms of what Linstead and Thomas (2002) referred to asthe conjunction of reflecting on past and future experiences of the self.
Inevitably, as from the perspective of the subject, there are tensions between thecreative and destructive possibilities in the processes of identity construction and manage-ment (Jeffcutt, 1993). It could be argued that artists embedded in ‘the other’ (here theCEE) context, here considered as their historically informed traditions (the reality ofunderground opposition to the totalitarian system) and culturally constructed notions (theformal art establishments and the institutionalised market) reproduce and re-create them inthe present. The paper offers reflections on complexity and ambivalence in the construc-tion of identity and its organisation emphasising ‘the other’ and m(other) (Hopfl andKostera, 2003), here exemplified by the case of a female artist engaged in criticalpractice.
This paper evolves around a story (Gabriel, 1995) about a woman who has managed heroccupational identity of being an artist, which emerged through a series of discussions,unstructured interviews with the artist and my observations of her life-space (home) and herwork. Evidence is also drawn from the analysis of visual material, documentary researchand critical writings about the artist and her practice. The study, in a sense participatory innature, highlights the dialectic between private and professional lifeworlds in the construc-tion of identity. In a discussion of Kulik’s story, I acknowledge the historical and culturalcontingency and fluidity in her identity construction. Subsequently, I argue for not abstract-ing particular forms of personhood from the specific cultural milieus in which they havebeen formed and contested (here, the local milieu of the CEE). Kulik’s artistic identityformation constituted: firstly, her involvement in underground and sublime art, in particularher critical performances with Przemyslaw Kwiek under communism, that is the ‘perform-ing life’ and living art of KwieKulik; secondly, the era of the political and personal (profes-sional) transformation in the 1980s; and thirdly, her most recent individual practice as avisual female artist in the context of New Europe. Kulik’s reception is placed in the contextof the new generation artists. I also point out the instances of the discriminating and censor-ing of artists, especially female artists who engage in more critical practice. The paperprovides insights into how female professionals—here, in the occupation of artist—canchallenge disadvantage and discrimination crated by the work context, illustrated here bythe art world.
A FLUID ‘PERSONAE’ OF KWIEKULIK
In Poland, after 1956, a quasi-liberalisation of the arts and a degree of state tolerance allowedfor some freedom of expression in alternative artistic realms. This was, however, minimal incomparison to the level of state subsidies given for projects supporting systemic propaganda.Kulik emerged as an artist in a small group that circumvented official institutional routes andstate gallery spaces, disseminating their works via authors’ galleries, artists’ houses, studios,and other informal working spaces.
In her artistic practice under the communist regime, she questioned the gendered construc-tion of identity. Her diploma work consisted of two parts: one was a copy of Michelangelo
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Buonarotti’s sculpture Moses made of hardened, coloured rags; and ‘the other’ consisted ofthe simultaneous projection of five hundred slides onto three screens surrounding the viewer.The slides shown during these projections entitled Open Form 1971, constituted a kind ofKulik’s visual memoirs—incidents and events of her life, both artistic and personal. Someslides represented a naked female with a red scarf, a symbolic representation of the female inthe communist milieu, ‘a sign of official [state] celebrations’ (Wilson, 2001). Kulik’s workswere informed by Hansen’s idea of the open form, which as she explained facilitated a free-dom of her artistic expression and a focus on the context. She explained that the results of theartists’ work should be used by the recipients as information possibly explaining currentproblems and relations of reality. Kulik wanted the context to speak for itself, in its ownlanguage.4 Revealing the complexity of the form evokes questions about the social, func-tional and cultural mechanisms of subordination: ‘This spirit of documenting, in a way that isadequate to the work, as well as the consciousness accompanying you during your workingthat whatever you do, you can have it documented, so you can more freely ‘transform’ yourwork, this spirit comes from Hansen’ (Kulik, in Sitlowska, 1986–1995). Kulik explained that:
Open Form is the art of creating the background for unique things. To present it suitably to Hansen’s profes-sional field, it would be an art of constructing architecture which makes a man and contrasts with him, it getsinto service-like, informative and functional interactions with him and, concurrently, it does not overwhelmthe viewer with its form. The form can function politically, despite everything. It can simply be seen a tool ofpower, e.g., a typical closed form like the Place of Culture in Warsaw [a symbol of soc-real architecture].(Kulik, in Sitkowska, 1986–1995)
Across the CEE region, post-war traumas and the mechanism of systemic subordination gaverise to the absurd and the ironic in visual culture. Performances provided a perfect arena for acritique of totalitarianism, often focusing artistic discourse of critique on the body (Sobota,1996). In their final student years, Zofia Kulik and Przemyslaw Kwiek started to createcollaboratively in the field of performance art. In the years 1970–1987, Kulik worked under apublic persona ‘KwieKulik’, where the capital K in the artistic acronym emphasised both theprofessional collaboration as artists in an occupation of the artists and simultaneously mutualemotional dependence (Michalak, 1999).
Performance works of KwieKulik could be compared to the artistic duet of MarinaAbramovic and Uwe Laysiepen or Abramovic/Ulay (Michalak, 1999). For female-male artis-tic partnerships, the decision to be involved in body art challenged a notion of professionalidentity construction, the codes for masculinity and femininity, domination and subordina-tion. The scripts for their performances were often based on spontaneous actions. Being moreinterested in the processes of artistic realisation, in initialising and analysis rather than inproducing traditional objective works of art, the artist prompted participatory aesthetics andan attitude of transgressing inter-artistic borders (Ronduda, 2004), also those separating artfrom life.
The team emphasised the co-operation where more stress was put on communication andcognition than on presentation. KwieKulik performances were comments on the cultural andpolitical subordination of the self. Through focus on the context and the form, the artistscreated certain cognitive representations of situations, trying to define the character of thereality in which they lived and worked (i.e. the control apparatus of communism regime). Forinstance, at the body performance Activity with the Head in 1978 in Lublin, KwieKulikcaricatured state interrogations used by political authorities. This performance alsocommented upon how brutality from the public sphere (political system) can creep into theprivate domain, into the domain of relating and of relationships. Kwiek thrusted Kulik’s headinto a washbasin, poured water into the basin until Kulik could barely breathe and thenwashed the upper parts of his body in this water. Aside from commenting on identity, bothartists explored the limits and fears of the relationships, of relating to each other. Both artists
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challenged their gendered identities as the action ended with the image of their heads beingcovered in buckets of rubbish (Wilson, 2001).
The KwieKulik duet often criticised the dominant political system and its authority inidentity formation with a use of irony and ridicule. Their performances represented how theidea of power, as the invisible control of human action, operates in social contexts. Forinstance, in 1986 in their work entitled, Arcady, they used a chain as a metaphor of mentalhuman repression. Arcady, the symbolic land of perfect happiness, was depicted as a placewhere invisible power (represented by a paper-made hand) limited human rights—thefreedom of individual movement and speech. KwieKulik also used political and systemicinsignia for their performances as a means of critiquing the ideology. For instance, in 1985 inA Hammer, a Head, a Sickle, a Hook, a Shadow, they played with the Soviet symbols andmetaphors of shadow theatre play and in the Semantic Monster in 1984, they deconstructedthe national symbols in the Polish flag (Wilson, 1999).
The Polish duet, similar to Abramovic/Ulay’s works, did not treat their professional lifeindependently from their private life. KwieKulik involved their son Dobromierz in executingtheir art projects (i.e. Activities with Dobromierz, a series of photographic works from 1972–1974) (Truszkowski, 1999). This is an instance where by an extrapolation of creative inputs tothe family dynamics, parenthood and the associated domestic activities of childcare, the workbecame home and ways of being, while home became work and even at times housework (seeFig. 1).Figure 1. Zofia Kulik’s home and workplace in Lomianki near Warsaw, with the projected fragment of her installation From Syberia to Cyberia, 2004.KwieKulik’s critical practice was risky and at times dangerous. In the years 1975–1979,both artists were imprisoned for a short period and had their passports withheld. Theartists were excluded from exhibiting both nationally and internationally.5 Paradoxically, atthat time, their practice became even more underground. In the 1978 performance entitled,Monument without Passports, the artists satirised their professional isolation as artistswithin the alternative art scene and mocked the ways in which their individual practicewas supported by producing ‘state-friendly’ commissions for money. During the perfor-mance, Kulik held in her hands a document of the Unrealised Projects whilst her feetwere encased in solidifying plaster. She reflected upon the fixation of her own artisticposition (Sobota, 1996), on her professional identity as a female artist in communistPoland.
How did Kulik manage her occupational identity and professional practice in those days?The ideological thrusts of KwieKulik’s performances were simultaneously lived workingexperiences for Kulik, experiences of emotional distress. She was a young, relatively inexpe-rienced yet professional female artist involved in the heavily loaded critique of the politicalsystem through critical performance. This is partly why there was deep emotional depen-dence and personal bonding for the KwieKulik duo. Kulik explained, ‘I was [then] so silent, Icould not speak. I needed someone (Kwiek) to be between the world and me’ (Kulik, inWilson, 2001). The identity of the artist was somewhat constructed of two persons, theprofessional competence and creative input comprised of him and her, somewhat intense,somewhat indistinguishable, and therefore, safer to manage for the inner and outer realities ofthe then Eastern Block and of ‘a surrounding fog which also you have in you’ (Kulik, ibid.).In their constructed occupational identity, there was no Kulik in those years— there wasKwieKulik instead.
POLITICAL AND PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION
In the mid-1980s, Kulik started to question her professional identity under the personae ofKwieKulik. She said, ‘I rejected one thing that I discovered in one of my parents; the
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helplessness of a person who has good intentions but is not able to do things well. Is not ableto, yet persists in doing things which are beyond this person. And sometimes this personspoils everything. I reject this now, both in my art and in our life’ (Kulik, in Sitkowska,1986–1995). Kulik re-examined her personal and artistic dependence in the professionalcontext and subsequently, the process, like the quality of the produced and performed works.It was as if she started to speak again in her own occupational voice. She said, ‘Finally, thedialogue in a duo becomes a thing in itself. A realisation of work, communicating to othersyour own ideas, lost importance. I felt bad. I felt a need for a silent consideration more andmore strongly, indeed for self-surprises with my non-verbal decisions, an immediate dialoguewith my works. The work call gave me a hint what to do next by its own private response’(Kulik, in Sitkowska, 1986–1995).
In 1987, Kulik broke collaboration with her life partner and artist collaborator PrzemyslawKwiek.6 The moment of their separation coincided with the collapse of communism in theCEE. A process of regaining socio-political freedom for Kulik also involved a process ofregaining her professional autonomy as an artist (Truszkowski, 1999).
Kulik (in Sitkowska, 1986–1995) explained:
For about 17 years I have been working in a duo. I have participated in the realisation of common things,common objectives. After many attempts I stopped believing in their sense and the conflict-free, group-basedprojects’ realisations. And, simply, I have started to deal with myself. Now, I am looking for something else,not a partnership in common working initiatives. I am interested in those I feel a big accumulation of psycho-logical tensions, some cracks in their personality, I am interested in those who try to take certain ‘shortcuts’ toexpress themselves. I am also searching for wider cultural plots in my work. I do not want to limit myself tomy own, individual context and environmental conditioning.
Kulik needed to start anew. She needed a working space located ‘outside’ the socialorder. She has found such solitude at her home. The term ‘home’ is perceived heresymbolically (a local context) and physically as Kulik has been producing and continuesto produce her works in her house. A home environment facilitates more positive
Figure 1. Zofia Kulik’s home and workplace in Lomianki near Warsaw, with the projected fragment of herinstallation From Syberia to Cyberia, 2004.
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emotional display of her work role and creates a distance from the art institutions. Theboundaries for her home become also the boundaries of her workplace, a sort of protec-tive enclave. Home has become the place where Kulik is ‘casting a difference’ at work-place (Czarniawska and Hopfl, 2002) in her professional identity. In largely unregulatedcontexts, such as the arts, there seems to be an intrinsic relationship between the self,creative self-realisation and the workplace. Often, management of the professional roleincorporates management of spaces between home and work. Artists often physicallywithdraw into their occupational solitude, to their studios. Kulik, however, has withdrawninto her home space for the sake of praxis.
An important instance of the power effects in Foucault’s sense is a division of Westernsociety into the public and the private spheres (Brewis and Sinclair, 2000), where the formeris supposedly dedicated to working and the latter for recuperation (Surman, 2002). In Kulik’sprofessional practice, however, there is no such division. Home is a space where the bound-aries between the private and the public (professional) are blurred in the construction of iden-tity. Hastrup (1987) describes such practice, in the field of anthropology, as a peculiar modeof the self-ethnography, engaging ‘not in the unmediated world of the others but the worldbetween selves and the others’.
The search for possible new ways of reinventing the artistic professional self Kulikrealised through her archivisation processes of ‘the other’. Her working days have often beenlabour intensive, structured and overlapping with the late evenings. She initiated a home-based collection of images, a kind of auto-therapy of the manifestations of reality for identityformation. Kulik’s aim was to take the side of ‘the other’, to question dominant ideologyvisually through collected database—visualia which could have been transformed intospecific cultural utterances and representations (Hornowska, 1999) in an execution of herindividual art projects. Kulik7 said:
Whenever I recall how they tried to ‘bring me up’, at home, at school, in institutions, for a positive, polite andjoyful citizen, I feel deeply distressed. I was never hungry, never cold; I did not suffer any physical discom-forts or hardships. So when I feel distressed it occurs to me that it is my own mental weakness, my own faultin a way. Why am I not a joyful citizen? I have been hammered, we all have been hammered. Hammeringimplies a repetitive driving of a nail into something.
Kulik as an individual practitioner became an observer, taking the side of ‘the other’, thesubordinated, the repressed. Indeed, Kulik’s works from home and through her artistic repre-sentations mediate between what is a person and what is the world. The key aspects of hercritically informed art combine redefinition and an exploration of the self, the questions ofideological subordination and the ways of disciplining the mind and the body. Driven by thenecessity to transform herself from an unassertive individual to an independent artist, Kulikused the matter of images to look for her own way of working, adopting methods of repeti-tion and multitude, arranging her photographs into maps of labyrinths, where one visualimage could have been juxtaposed with another (Hornowska, 1999), forming patterns. Thiscould be how she continued to question the construct of identity, both of herself as a subjectand the interpretations of her individual work.
In Kulik’s artworks created after 1987, the social discourses form the narratives of theaesthetic-ideological, often politicised order in identity construction; that is, she arrangedthese discourses in symmetric photograph-based compositions. For instance, in LargeVanitas Still Life, symmetrical arrangements of a recurrent motif of a human skull arecombined with folk ornaments from the shawls of mourning then (former) Yugoslavwomen. Kulik mixed cultural and societal symbols to emphasise the relativity of power inthe construction of identity. The artist explained that ‘all my works consist of endless gath-ering and archivisation of the images of this world. Its complexity derives from the abun-dance of the archive which I posses…. My archives contain various categories of
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documented reality’ (Kulik, in Turowski, 1999). In Kulik’s art, the poignant emptiness ofimages is accompanied by very specific figural patterns, some mnemosyne. As in GerhardRichter’s Atlas, her collected visualia is rooted in the artist’s psyche and in the historicalexperience of her generation.
Kulik declared, ‘In 1984 I started to speak’ (Kulik, in Wilson, 2001). These wordssummarise a radical decision in the process of her artistic identity formation. At that stage,the younger professional woman becomes the mature woman, autonomous of the petrifyingideological past, liberated from its memories. The professional artist is moving away frompoliticised performances of KwieKulik and patterns and a focus on the body, to a period ofindividual self-realisation as an independent practitioner.
MICROCOSMS OF THE ‘OTHER’ REALITY IN THE WORKS OF ZOFIA KULIK
The fall of the totalitarian regime in the CEE region resulted in a pluralisation of the subject(Piotrowski, 1999), bringing new questions to representations of identity in the visual artpractices. How can we approach our history, as Marx put it, without distorted beliefs andabstractions of any ideology?8 We are constituted as subjects by being addressed by ideologythat encompasses (Althusser, 1977) and affects us.9 After the fall of communism in the CEEregion, female artists who engaged in critical practice, in particular, took on the creativeresponsibility of exposing their (gendered) identities against the dominant cultural fictions.Their efforts were directed at challenging the cultural assumptions of what is masculine andwhat is feminine. Kulik explained that her family ‘participated in the creation of the founda-tions of that system very conscientiously and honestly. Although now I do not consider it myduty to have similar views to my mother, I know that what she did was honest and full ofcommitment. As the years were passing, I started to realise a certain naiveté, some “scout-like” character of her behaviour’ (Kulik, in Sitkowska, 1986–1995).
From the late 1980s onwards, the artist’s relationships to the self, to others and to realityitself, demanding the awareness of different senses, are reflected in her individual practice.The individual practice required embracing the new institutional context (i.e. applications forstate grants, operation within gallery spaces) and the implications of the emergent art market(marketing and promotion through production of catalogues, art writing, art criticism, etc.).Yet, a tendency is to relay temporarily on the projects’ execution and income unpredictabil-ity, infused self-expressiveness, and favouring of the quality of life in more subversive andcultural terms. In such ways of relating to employment, Kulik is freed from its reduction toeconomic security.
In this new context, Kulik continued to work from home. The notion of working fromhome became for Kulik a protective territory for professional survival, especially in thecontext of a male-dominated art world. Working from home for artists as Kulik whotranscend stereotypical representations of femininity and engage in the systemic politicalcritique through their practice, the home and the work from home (her studio-basedpractice, her office work and her archives) offer a way to relearn the social self, includingthe professional self. The inside-outside boundaries of home and work, identified in Kulik’spractice, put into question the way we understand them, which during the past few decadeshas attracted considerable interest in critical studies and organisational theory (e.g., seeThanem, 2003; Cooper, 1990). Also, Kulik’s ways of working takes a particular spin on thegender-related problem of the ‘glass ceiling’, that is, the absence of women in particularprofessions and related issues of female visibility in historically male-dominatedprofessions (Gherardi, 1996), here in the visual arts, revealing that invisibility does notmean lack of presence.
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Kulik’s practice continues as critical practice as she exposes the invisible power assump-tions and deconstructs dominant ideologies of cultural subversion. Kulik’s deconstructiveactivities may thus be seen not only as a critical re-examination of the cultural history of theformer system, but also as a self-reflexive process directed at an exploration of her evolvingprofessional artistic identity and geo-location. These processes have been informed andguided by her evolving private/professional relationship with Kwiek, her relationship withher country, its political changes, and the emergent new artistic landscapes, that is, a transfor-mation of the art market, art institutions and subsequently artistic discourse. In that way, theexperiences of being a professional artist can be seen as critically transformational (politicaland at times subversive).
Kulik utilises the means of appropriation and deconstruction as artistic tools in her worksto facilitate an emotional break with her occupational artistic past. Kulik’s works made after1987 are more ambivalent than reactionary and often address the artist’s response to thedisintegration of the communist regime and its symbols (Sobota, 1996). In these works theartist refers to the visual idioms of socialism, utilising the images of totalitarian architecture,soc-real monuments and statues, May-day marches, draperies, etc., for example: Medals(1987–1989), The Inter-National Gothic (1990), Square of Palace (1990), March, March,March (1990), Guards of the Spire (1990), Favourite Balance (1991), All Things Convergein Time and Space; to Disperse, to Converge, to Disperse, and so on (1992), Columns(1992), Petals (1995) are all, different in size, black and white photographic tabloids, made inthe compositions of mosaics, mandalas, Gothic windows and altars, columns and Persiancarpets—representations of collective and personal memory in the context of fading commu-nism. The artist selected these patterns for her compositions in order to reach through them,what she argued, and the essence of reality, and in that way to establish more direct contactthrough these patterns with the viewers (Hornowska, 1999). Through these visual matrixes,her feminine (and feminist) symbolic framing of the identity and compositional aesthetics,Kulik focuses the viewers’ attention on seeing the world as an ordered structure and a systemof power dynamics. She achieves that through her visual matrixes; a mixture of her feminine(and feminist) symbolic framing of the identity and compositional aesthetics with theelements of soc-real utopia.
Some of Kulik’s works from the 1990s are not so much the photomontages of the socialistsymbols, but representations whereby she deconstructs the reality of socialism, in particularthe substance of its imagery. Kulik introduced these socialist discourses into the ornamentalstructures, making them appearing grotesque, resembling the technique adopted in socialrealism. In that way, these socialist realist symbols appear as a masquerade of the imagesoscillating between the multiplicity of the codified symbols and the emptiness of emergingmeanings (Turowski, 1999). In All the Missiles are One Missiles (1993) the flat patterns,despite the accentuated centre, invite the viewer to scan the whole image (the frame) later-ally. In a sense, Kulik situates the old stories of communism in an ironic frame of a‘disordering’ order.
In her latter works, made in the late 1990s and onwards, Kulik focused more on the form ofinternalised power in identity construction through the representations of more static, repeti-tive and harmonious photographic montages. With this aesthetic support, Kulik revealed anartificial and vulnerable character in the social order based on the constructed hierarchies ofpower (Wilson, 1999).
The photographic representations of her male nudes implicitly invoke the systemic culturalsignification, defined through a repertoire of specific signs and poses (Wilson, 1999). In MayDay Mass (1990), Moon Skull (1995), the Monstrance (1995) and the Columns (1995), themale nude is inscribed with a literal signifier or phallic fiction, based on the poses which canbe read as ‘aggressive ethos of masculinity’, creating the idea of the visual order of things
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(through his body) (Lajer-Burchart, 1996). Kulik comments upon how the mechanisms ofpower control both behaviour and an appearance of the self. A man and his body participateboth in constructions of power and in constraining it. Kulik comments on the place of anindividual in these different forms of power systems, representing the instances of individualentanglement in power mechanisms and ‘values’ they create.
Kulik becomes the feminine teller of the systemic tale about identity construction, thewoman in charge of the visual processes of constructing gendered categories. She commentsupon gender construction of societal psycho-sexual dependence and culturally constructedideals of masculinity. A man is represented as both a victim and an oppressor. This feminineperspective on cultural subordination reveals the power mechanism in the formation ofgendered subjectivity (Lajer-Burchart, 1996).
Systemic power through the representations of repetitive and harmonious photographicmontages of the world systems is deconstructed in her recent work From Siberia to Cyberia(2004). Here, memory takes the form of a cultural montage. The image forms a gigantic flowof media-generated black and white images. The wave, which this stream of images seems toform a monstrous zigzag, flows out of the past and from the depth of memory, visual memoryand the memory of the body, into a future which is never a continuation of the past but thenew representation of the present (Kulik and Czubak, 2004) . The artist points out the powerof media culture, power which we consume and internalise in the context of any dominantsystem. The viewer reflects on the consciousness of media culture and aggressive consumer-ism. The artist appears to warn against the systems of power in which there is no privacy(private sphere). She evokes the idea that all dominant systems, either communism or capital-ism, exploit the body and mind (Figs. 2 and 3).Figures 2 and 3. Zofia Kulik, From Syberia to Cyberia, 2004, fragment of the photographic installation and below a detail of Panel 1.Kulik challenges dominant system as she visualises space for feminine that is beyondrepresentation of a woman as a body. She creates her system and her order in the beautifulpatterns. In these patterns, the viewer can find references to the alternative (utopian)construction of the world.
Kulik’s works continue to challenge. Locally, the views of critical art adopted after 1989 inthe art institutions glorified the underground movements of the 1970s, including Kulik’s works.This glorification was, however, short-lived. Kulik’s more radical messages are now juxtaposedwith the current political and moral cultural climax in Poland. Art practice locally has becamemore dependent on private sponsorships, and more controversial arts in the CEE region onceagain was censored as critical visual representations often contradicted the corporate donor’spolitical interests and networks. Furthermore, some critics connected with the more traditionalor Catholic or academic-related journals accuse the new alternative art of being ‘evil and trans-gressing all moral norms of the patriarchal culture constructed there for centuries’ (Kowalczyk,2002). They are also nostalgic for traditional art, challenging the aesthetic value of contempo-rary critical arts and even denying that it should have been given the status of professional art.These nationalistic and conservative discourses evoke instead a ‘universal order of things’(Kowalczyk, 1999), the very order Kulik questions in her tales on the deconstruction of iden-tities. As a consequence, a new obstacle was created, limiting a particular form of expressionand artistic freedom for those artists working within the critical and feminist paradigms.
‘Democracy in Poland is gendered as male. People who dare to say this out loud are coura-geous’, argues Maria Janion, a Polish feminist theorist (quoted in Kowalczyk, 2002).Instances of sexism appear to discredit the artists working with critical and feminism-relatedissues of ‘the other’ and of identity. Kulik was denied to show aspects of her installation ather individual exhibition in the National Museum in Poznan in 1999. The work Kulik madeespecially for this exhibition and for the museum was censored and the effect of this was theemptying of the main space of the museum hall. The work designed for the main entrancehall was entitled, Both Home and a Museum (see Fig. 4). In the central place of the hall,
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Kulik planned to locate the obelisk and on the walls the photographs of close-ups of malegenitals from the classical sculptures of the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. Thesephotographs were envisaged as ‘controversial’ by the museum’s director, so he ordered theguards to remove them without the artist’s knowledge or consent. The director explained expost that ‘this work could have been shocking for visitors’ (Kowalczyk, 1999).Consequently, the artist was forced to dismantle the rest of the works. The installation BothHome and a Museum was supposed to be critical of the institution of the museum in showingit as an institution of ‘phallocentric’ power, where the private is excluded from its notion ofpublic. Kulik depicted how the museum system excludes ‘the other’ and denies or discountsgender, class, and cultural differences a rather forced vision of history. Ironically, themuseum system excluded her works.
Figures 2 and 3. Zofia Kulik, From Syberia to Cyberia, 2004, fragment of the photographic installation andbelow a detail of Panel 1.D
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Figure 4. Zofia Kulik, Home and Museum, photograph, 1999, fragment.How is Kulik received now? Locally, audiences somewhat unreceptive to the problems of thedeconstruction of identity and the questioning of ‘our’ reality do not easily assimilate herworks. Internationally, Kulik’s political messages, her critical attitude, deviations from theformalist creed, deconstruction or demolishing of identity and narrative works have beenreceived as a mixed message of just ‘re-facing’ the past in the CEE or a perpetuating label ofthe soc-real tradition (Kowalczyk, 2002), what is often seen as ‘inherited’ in the visual artsacross the CEE region, through Western art discourse categorisation.
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, I have explored shifting identity in the occupation of the artist in the context ofthe socio-political changes of the CEE. I have discussed the processes of occupationalidentity formation and transformation of one of the most recognised female critical artist ofthe 1970s’ generation in that region, Zofia Kulik.
Kulik’s story reveals itself as a story of subjugation and perseverance. Her works need tobe placed in the context from which she has come, on which she has called, rejected and fromwhich she transcends. Despite Kulik’s international success as a publicly recognised andautonomous professional woman, mostly in the sphere of feminist counter-culture, sheremains excluded by the public sphere, the male-dominated art language and the commodityart market, and thus, from ‘real’ art discourse. Her story reveals that contextual factorsinfluence the fluid evolution of creative careers.
Kulik’s story incorporates the experience of a crisis, in the 1970s. Her experiences ofmarginalisation and of the political context were transformed into creativity. Kulik empha-sised a need for change to achieve praxis, building on the individual strengths in the context
Figure 4. Zofia Kulik, Home and Museum, photograph, 1999, fragment.
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of an uncertain and oppressive environment. While skills and creative input play animportant role in coping with change, perseverance and an aesthetic set of beliefs in challeng-ing the dominant system—here, through critical art practice—significantly influence anenvironment that promotes motivations for self (human) development and possibly, a betterworld. Kulik achieved successful professional transformation using in her practice analyticaland creative skills, aesthetic sense and critique.
In order to manage her artistic identity, Kulik entered a space in which the ‘normal’ soci-etal expectations of an occupational role were suspended, in order to take up the professionalrole; she has been involved in critical practice, simultaneously enacting cultural perfor-mances of the artist in a male world and being a mother and a woman living and working inthe communist context. Kulik is one of the isolated examples of women’s achievement invisual art practice, compelled to create within a male-dominant environment and yet buildingrelationships with men who have been her contemporaries and intellectual companions (suchas Kwiek) and refusing temporally socialisation. Through a series of passages, neitherinstitutionalised nor accompanied by formal routines, Kulik has balanced managing heraccountability to the art world and simultaneously keeping track of her own position andautonomous practice.
Kulik’s flexibility, inclination for innovation and risk taking in her practice all inform theprocess of coping with change and evolving a fluid identity. As the female professional shehas rejected, where possible, the constraints of constructed occupational identity and her‘feminine’ role. As a professional artist, situated in a particular socio-history of the CEEregion, she has rejected the subordinated role of the passive citizen and passive female andassumed responsibility for herself, her work and professional practice. As a creative ‘entre-preneur’, she has managed the processes of transformation of her artistic practice in thecontext of the evolving socio-political milieu—from communist regime, through transitionprocesses of opening market economy, to rhetorical politics of new Europe and its institu-tionalised art world.
There is an emerging organisational literature exploring alternative resisting strategies topatriarchal constructions of professional identity by female professionals. Katila andMerilainen (2002), for instance, explore such resistance in female academics. Resistance intheir instance took the form of writing articles, questioning the gendered discourses andsocial practices of so-called ‘liberal’ profession, which in that case was explored in thecontext of the academic community. Kulik does not write articles; she resists visually, shecreates representations of identity construction, cultural subordination and inequality. Herways of working reflect her political consciousness of sexual difference in art.
Kulik’s creative insights and her ability to challenge the viewer inspire and motivate herworking process. In her works, she somewhat ‘dissolves’ the notion of the self through repre-sentation of mechanisms of subordination. In both her body performances and photographicworks, she has highlighted and resisted the ideological assumptions behind the persistingdichotomy of male-female roles and indeed, behind gender-binding identity construction.This is also how she has resisted patriarchal articulations of her professionalism and heroccupational identity of the female artist. Butler (1993: 22) argues that identities are formedthrough exclusion, through the production of abjected and marginalised subjects, contestedand compelled to give something away, to evolve. Kulik’s works can be viewed as abjectedwork, a response to a threatening reality. Translating these assumptions into the art worldreflects how feminine creativity and cultural achievement lie buried under misleading soci-etal classifications.
For being a professional artist, in particular a female artist in the male world, requires ahigh degree of initiative and perseverance. Men in professional practice, in particular, enacttheir masculinities by being more public, visible and assertive. Women, however, tend to
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adopt a more ‘feminine’ approach in their occupations by being more private and invisible inthe professional milieu (Martin, 1989), possibly working collectively. Kulik found a balancebetween the two by her artistic production from home, from the initiation of an idea, researchand data collection, to execution and management of creative process. Combining the so-called separate categories of work and home, Kulik’s example challenges the notion of the‘glass ceiling’ simply as an explanation of a gender-infused work inequality.
Now, Kulik, as an established professional artist, continues to create in the context ofglobal capitalism and media culture. In global arts and in the art world of the CEE, inparticular, there are not many prerequisites or credentials to validate artistic professionalism.In Kulik’s works, the self seems even more frail, fractured and fragmented. She has beenrejected by the dominant discourses both under communism and now. And despite a highlevel of skills and education, artists such as Kulik continue to be underemployed and areawarded the minimal income in comparison with other professions. In such contexts, ready-made stories of the self, as Bain (2005) argues, provide significant sources of identification.In Kulik’s identity formation, this process refers to a privately infused professionalism. Forher, being an artist is not only an occupational identity transgressing home-work boundaries;it is also a mode of her engagement in the world. A division between the active and creativeself-shaping and passive social determination, in Kulik’s case, can be translated in terms ofcultural constraints, focusing on ‘the status of the social forces and the institutional dynamics,as well as on personal agency, consciousness and desire’ (Elliot, 2001: 2). I conclude that it isimpossible to interpret the political, private and artistic threads separately in Kulik’sprofessional identity construction and management of her practice. Her identity formationcan be envisaged as a fluid, open-ended process that embraces temporal discontinuity.
Kulik’s works continue to challenge, evoking different reactions in viewers, locally andinternationally. Echoes of false ideas of equality, subordination and depravation of individu-ality, engraved during the communist regime, demand re-surfacing in the processes of identitydeconstruction. Now, a new generation of the artists has appeared on the scene. This moretolerant generation, socialised in and after the political transition of a period of Europe ‘with-out walls’, working within the parameters of the global art spirit, have a different approach toquestioning identity, beyond gender categories, perhaps a lighter of political criticism, playfulor purposefully apolitical. In this context, Kulik’s works and their resonance of reality of ‘theother’ are necessary in balancing how identity is locally constituted. Kulik’s works play withour individualised memories, particular memories that we deny but that live in us.
NOTES
1. From the author’s discussion with the artist, Warsaw 2004.2. Despite the images of the Iron Curtain and the Eastern Block which pervaded in the West then (in the 1970s),
there was no homogenous, common cultural identity which could have been summarised under the notion ofthe CEE region. This process has been traceable through Western writing about the CEE artists and artpractice, evoking ‘authoritarian patronisation combined with stereotyping as a substitute for getting to knowthe other’ (Andreas, 1999). It could be argued that, unfortunately, in Western discourse such mentality withregard to the occupation of an artist in the CEE somewhat continues today.
3. From the author’s discussion with the artist.4. The author’s information was obtained from the artist in Warsaw, 2004.5. In the years 1975–1979, the artists were formally denied to show their works both in Poland and abroad and
their passports were blocked by the state authorities. Their performances, however, were getting more acclaiminternationally. For more , see Truszkowski (1999).
6. Kulik and Kwiek still remain close friends (material obtained from Kulik in Warsaw, 2003).7. From the information obtained from the artist, Warsaw, 2004. Also, for more details see Kowalczyk (1999).8. The roots of the idea of socially constituted consciousness derive also from Nietzsche: ‘consciousness is
actually only network for connecting individuals to one another’.9. Althusser (1984) emphasised that the existence of ideology and hailing of individuals as subjects are the same.
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