The period of the genocide carried out by Nazi Germany will forever remain symbolic. Its realness was so overwhelming that for the successive generations of thinking people it will always stand as a turning point, a landmark, something at once mysterious and hopelessly obvious. The horrifying truth about what Germans were capable of in the middle of the 20th century in the very centre of Europe is subject to all processes possible in and known to our culture, including banalising erosion. Is it still possible to say or write anything about Auschwitz? Who can or should speak or write about it, and to whom? These questions seem to be paralysing in their directness. Did not all those who managed to survive the tragedy want to forget about it as soon as possible? Do those who managed not to find themselves in Auschwitz at the time, not to be Jews then, deserve to be shared the tragedy with, will they understand? And what about those whose tragedy remains unspoken?
These great issues of humanity, of our history, the humanities, art and science, are conveyed by the second half of the 20th century. Maria Stangret’s art writes itself into the most important current of contemporary art, a current exploring issues fundamental for our identity and history. Expressing herself in the form of paintings, for close to twenty years now created in a ‘homage’ formula, the artist has been able to take advantage of the best traditions of art and the humanities of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Maria Stangret knew Wiesław Kielar personally, knew his wife, knew people they knew. It was shocking for her that even years later, during social gatherings, Wiesław Kielar and his Auschwitz friends remained in the shadow of memories from the camp. They remembered every minute of their stigmatised life there. Expecting the former prisoners of German concentration camps to forget about the evil they had experienced there, just as we try to forget about our daily distresses and tribulations, seems so natural. They say that time heals all wounds, that it is the best doctor, but there are wounds that will not heal, wounds that are worse than death.
The dilemmas faced by intellectualists are solved by the human need to speak up, to bear witness, this is beyond the proving procedure, beyond the methodology of intellectual competence, beyond any search for form. For many, and Wiesław Kielar writes about it, bearing witness, speaking about the crime, was a life-giving source of hope and strength for survival, survival in spite of everything. The idea of bearing testimony, of conveying the truth about Auschwitz, was for the former prisoners a source of solidarity and mutual support. As Walter Benjamin wrote,
The authentic image of the past appears only in a flash. An image that springs up, only to be eclipsed forever in the very next moment. The motionless truth that merely keeps the researcher waiting does not correspond in any way to the concept of truth in the subject of history. Rather, it relies on Dante’s lines, which say: it is another, unique and irreplaceable image of the past that fades with each present that has failed to recognise itself as its aim’.
The past, like the future needs to be fought for. It is necessary to try, again and again, to capture the fleeting image. Life after Auschwitz is about learning to speak and write, to communicate one’s thoughts with the hope that one will be understood. Although I know that I am unable to say and write everything I feel and think, I still hope that I will be heard and understood. That, despite everything, someone will share with me the memory of fear, pain, horror, helplessness, loss of everything, including to ability to decide about oneself. How to do it for someone to be willing to share this nightmare? We share knowledge, it is confirmed, in a way; but can you share a nightmare? And how to find out whether it has been understood? Answering the famous question about whether poetry is possible after Auschwitz, the successive decades said it was necessary. Another thought of a great German poet proved true. As Giorgio Agamben writes, Hölderlin’s idea that ‘poets establish that which endures’ should not be construed in the trivial sense that a poet’s work is permanent, that it endures in time. Rather, it means that the poet’s word is a word that situates itself every time vis-à-vis the rest and can thus bear witness. Poets – witnesses – establish language as something that remains, which lasts longer in an act than the possibility – or impossibility – of speaking.
Wiesław Kielar bore witness about Auschwitz for us. We owe him gratitude and memory for that. Maria Stangret finds access to the existential experience with her paintings, in the form of a dedication for him, prisoner no. 290. As Georges Didi-Huberman wrote,
Let us not invoke the unimaginable. Let us not shelter ourselves by saying that we cannot, that we could not by any means, imagine it to the very end. It is a response that we must offer, as a debt to the words and images that certain prisoners snatched, for us, from the harrowing Real of their experience’.
He wrote that looking at four photographs taken in the camp, in its very ‘heart’, in the Sonderkommando. The place where people were gassed by their thousands, where human corpses were burnt in the ovens, the most damned place of the whole death camp. This is the Real for him, these four photographs taken at deadly risk to the photographer’s life and the life of all those around him, photographs documenting events that were to be unimaginable and thus unreal. A testimony was given. It is difficult for us today to orient ourselves to its obviousness, literalness and shocking truth. It has become a symbol of German genocide. And even if there was nothing else, if there were no testimonies left by Wiesław Kielar, Primo Levi and hundreds of other survivors, if there were no barracks and crematoria at Auschwitz, no bones and ashes, we would still have to, because we ought to, lean over these four photographs – an image of Auschwitz.
Gerard Wajcman seemed horrified by the prospect of this testimony becoming part of the cultural circuit, convinced that the existing ways of remembering Auschwitz affronted the victims. He wrote,
There simply cannot be any image of [the] horror […]. One cannot reason any further, if there is horror, it tears all images, and when there is an image, then there is less horror. Horror has no image, it is in this way without any double, unique. The image on the other hand, is a double.
We must appreciate the dispute between Didi-Huberman and Wajcman, for the image, though it has the unique dimension of remaining in a relationship with the object, is never identical with it, has a different existential status, cannot replace the object in the full sense of the word. It can summon the reality it refers to, can make it present, but only as a certain sub-reality. Immense is the power of art, sometimes we experience its representations more deeply and more powerfully than real events, but it is always limited by illusion, which cannot replace the thing itself and cannot be a reference for truth. Truth shines through images. We must clutch with all the strength we have at the words of Wiesław Kielar and Primo Levi. Read attentively what Giorgio Agamben, inspired by them, wrote. We must remain doubtful if we are ever able to bring ourselves closer to the unimaginable. But we must never stop trying. We must also keep returning to the work of Tadeusz Kantor, because it teaches us an indispensable lesson of sensitivity, so necessary in a world dominated by the language of politics. Krzysztof Pleśniarowicz writes that,
a fundamental feature of Kantor’s Theatre of Death is an inability, demonstrated obsessively by the actors of Cricot 2, to materialise in the present the spectacle’s defunct pre-existence, to resurrect figures that once existed in history or literature – together with their experiences.
So how to remember the truth about Auschwitz, how to convey it? Imre Kertesz writes angrily that,
Many more are those who steal the Holocaust from its guardians only to make cheap junk of it. […] A Holocaust conformism was formed, as well as a sentimentalism, a Holocaust canon, a system of taboos and its ritual language, Holocaust products for the consumption of the Holocaust.
It is in this spirit that Zbigniew Libera spoke some years ago in one of his works.
After the lecture – the artist remembers, in a conversation with Łukasz Gorczyca and Artur Żmijewski, his appearance at a 1997 seminar organised by the Auschwitz Foundation in Brussels – a very heated debate ensued, that, on the one hand, art is too weak to express the Holocaust, while, on the other, how could you use such powerful means of expression. The whole fuss about my Lego concentration camp broke out when the Berlin Holocaust memorial was being discussed. There were voices in Germany that the piece could be that memorial, that when produced in mass quantities, it could serve that purpose. Because there is the problem of how to preserve memory. The human hair at Auschwitz is deteriorating, there is less and less of it. It is, after all, decomposing matter. So I know they keep buying more hair and adding it to the heap. And what to do with these camps, renovate them every now and then or not? How to carry out the memory campaign about them? And that one is needed particularly in Poland is obvious, with 70 percent of the public being anti-Semitic.
And so we stand in front of Maria Stangret’s twelve paintings dedicated to Wiesław Kielar. With all the thoughts and emotions that we are unable to suppress and able to evoke. We stand in front of them thinking about the image, maintaining all the expectations tied to it. Georges Didi-Huberman wrote,
Where ‘all words stop and all categories fail’ – where theses, refutable or not, are literally stunned – that is where the image can suddenly appear. Not a veil-image of the fetish, but the tear-image from which a fragment of the real escapes.
And then,
And it is not because the image gives what Walter Benjamin called a flash rather than the substance that we must exclude it from our inadequate means of broaching the terrible history in question.
We want to believe that the image is more honest, that, being beyond words, it will convey more and better. Even if we close our eyes against it, it squeezes underneath our eyelids, and when we reject it, it returns with double strength.
The Anus Mundi series consists of twelve paintings. They are of different sizes and colour schemes, with white, blue and black dominating. In most of them we will find, like a signature, a background in the form of a lined page, as if torn from a notebook, a journal. There is something very private, very personal in this stylistic figure, something that harmonises perfectly with the ‘homage’ formula. While usurping nothing, Maria Stangret-Kantor exercises her right to memory and gratitude.
The two largest paintings (170 x 120 cm) allude to the Auschwitz entry gate with its Arbeit macht frei inscription. One, with diffused black and some orange showing from underneath it in the central part of the picture, has the words Anus mundi at the bottom. The other, in shades of white and blue, with only the frei remaining. In the exhibition, a tray has been placed under the two paintings, a gesture often used by the artist, as a fragment of reality emphasising the metaphoricalness of the picture. Next we find three ‘sprinkled’ paintings in whites and blues, their formats smallest in the series (92 x 73 cm, 100 x 73 cm, 100 x 70 cm). To two of them metal sinks have been fixed, as if on a piece of paper, spattered on one with blue and black pigment, with red and black on the other (130 x 100 cm). A white lined notebook page, sprinkled with black from the left, another one in the same format, spattered, as it were, with black, ultramarine and grey (150 x 100 cm), and three smaller-size (100 x 70 cm) paintings lined and spattered with black and ultramarine. These splashes of paint are a response to that which is unimaginable and indescribable, impossible to preserve on paper, that which refuses to be put into words organised according to rational principles and rules. These are not images of Auschwitz. These are images devoted to the memory of Auschwitz. They emphasise the absoluteness of its truth.
Maria Stangret is an author of paintings that are recognised by several generations of viewers. She is an actress of Cricot 2 theatre, an important attribute of which was to react directly to the audience’s reception and consider it as an important aspect of the creation. Maria Stangret’s practice is thus not limited to painting or acting; it is a practice of artistic culture, a culture conscious of its tradition and contemporary challenges. It is a reaction to the tasks and possibilities faced by painting in a world experiencing tragic revaluations, on the one hand, and a relishing madly in civilisational development, on the other. From an inability to reconcile oneself with the world, its insolent duration, as if nothing had happened, to a memento, a homage series, enchanting memory in the work and through the work as the only possibility in a world after Auschwitz. The artist’s position is to challenge decoration, illusion and anecdote, the pillars of bourgeois aesthetics. In her own way, but in an ideological alliance with Tadeusz Kantor, Maria Stangret attacks phenomenality, ‘in order to activate imagination as an attempt to annex reality’.
When Tadeusz Kantor wrote about illusion, he also meant all that had been culturally digested, culture as a whole. Culture gravitates towards illusiveness because it lives its own, social or historical, as you will, life, independent of our individual thoughts, and thus keeps changing the picture of reality so that our notions seem to be incompatible with it. Truth perishes in the everyday humdrum, in habit, routine, stereotypes, the conviction that one has learned it once and for all.
I know of few artists – Mieczysław Porębski stressed – for whom creating and at the same time disarming, eradicating all spatial illusion, playing a game with spaces, constantly created anew, of various dimensions and kinds, would be as exclusive and consciously chosen a task as is the case in Kantor’s work. […] This path explains itself only as a process, only in its continual, diverse and constant becoming.
Maria Stangret’s and Tadeusz Kantor’s strategy is a game against ordinariness and habit, against the aesthetisation of a tragic past, against gravity pulling the art and drama of history down to level of daily politics. Scholars, artists, theologians will keep confronting Auschwitz over and over again. The dispute will bring important, authentic statements that will enable us to remember in the most appropriate way we can afford. Maria Stangret’s Homage to Wiesław Kielar is a tribute to Wiesław Kielar and all those who, in the days of contempt, managed to preserve the value of human life for us.
Warsaw, May 2009 Stefan Szydłowski