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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Program in Visual and Cultural Studies, 2014.
The 1980s in the People’s Republic of Poland (Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa or PRL in
Polish, the name given to the satellite state under Communist rule) witnessed the
flourishing of social resistance with the emergence of the independence movement
Solidarity (Solidarność) as well as its subsequent repression with the imposition of
Martial Law from 1981-1983. These years also saw the prolific rise of artist collectives in
the country’s underground exhibition circuit. Polish art historians and cultural critics have
characterized this emergence as either a pragmatic strategy to shelter the individual from
persecution in a period of renewed state repression, or a logical outcome of sociality
between artists of the younger generation. This dissertation takes this collectivization to
be an aesthetic strategy engaging the question of collectivity as an artistic and political
form by concentrating on the organization of artistic grouphood and the art objects
produced by four 1980s Polish artist collectives: Gruppa, Neue Bierimiennost, Koło
Klipsa, and the Wyspa circle.
Along with the choice to produce and exhibit art collectively, the Polish artist
collectives that I examine equally engaged the human body in pursuit of a collective
aesthetic experience. However, the body that these groups represent and address is an
inchoate one: a painterly body that is disfigured, a sculptural body that is fused with
animal forms, and a spectatorial body whose sensorial confusion is enacted by
disorienting installations. In this dissertation I further argue that, through their twinned
engagements with collectivity and the corporeal, these Polish artist practices disrupted
Soviet models of collective and individual identification not by opposing their bio-political
operations, but by establishing an alternative affective model within them: namely an affect
of alienation. This occurred, I argue, through the common formal dedication of these artist
collectives to disfiguring representations of the body and its sensorium that have served as
the basis for collective aesthetic representation in official Soviet cultural production. This
process might analogously deform the coherent body image and bodily logic that also has
served as the basis and target of collective and political organization or more generally
through what Giorgio Agamben has called the “anthropological machine” of modern political
orders.
