The Zalesie Ball

In civilizations without ships, dreams dry up.
– Michel Foucault1

In June of 1968, a \"Farewell to Spring\" took place in a suburb of Warsaw – a ball organized by artists and critics from the Foksal Gallery. The title refers not only to the infamous Polonaise but, in particular, to the political events in May of 1968, which proved to be dramatic for Polish intellectual circles and was a turning point in many biographies.
The political events in Poland in 1968 were inherently different from the French student riots or the demonstrations on American university campuses. Particular to the Polish situation was that the societal rebellion coincided with a major conflict within the power system.2 On one side of the conflict stood the young demonstrators, liberal intellectuals and political oppositionists, while the other side was formed by the “Partisans” (a group within the Party that was made up of earlier partisans with connections to Mieczys?av Moczar and his nationalist-populist version of Communism) and the young party members, who hoped for quick and easy careers following the cleanup within the Party.3 The direct cause of the student demonstrations was the expulsion of Adam Michnik and Henryk Szlajfer from Warsaw University, and on May 8th the wave of protest engulfed the entire country. The student demands were in accordance with the idealistic view of Socialism: “democratic freedom” as well as “freedom of the press and of assembly.” The protests were struck down through the use of clubs and tear gas, with diverse forms of repression to follow: expulsions, arrests, forced military recruitment, as well as an aggressive anti-intellectual and anti-Semitic campaign. Those who were involved in, or even supported, the student movement, who criticized the Party or who were suspected of having Jewish ancestry, were mishandled by the militia, lost their jobs or were even forced to emigrate. As a result of this ignominious campaign, approx. 15,000 people left Poland between 1968 and 1969. The vast majority of the emigrants were prominent scientists, artists, film directors, doctors, publishing staff and former political representatives.4 For a whole generation who believed in the “thaw” of 1956 as a biographical point of reference, March 1968 turned into a farewell to the illusions of “Socialism with a human face” and destroyed all hopes of progress in the System.

Grotesque Allusions
“Farewell to Spring” was in clear violation of the public assembly ban and positioned itself contra to Polish martyrdom and the widespread feeling of collapse. It is quite possible that in June of 1968 similar festivals were celebrated in locations other than Zalesie. However, this quite specific “farewell,” which was deliberate constructed to denote various meanings, made this event anything but a typical celebration.
The Zalesie Ball featured grotesque scenery, which alluded to two equally fictional, richly contrasting “prototypes”: a famous piece of art and the official propaganda language. The decorations, designed by Edward Krasi?ski, referred to the painting “The Land of Cockaigne” (1567) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. At the same time, mannequins lying under a tree, a wagon full of fruits and vegetables as well as sausages hanging from a tree made reference to the hard times of Gomu?ka\'s era5, in which meat – the most desired product – was strictly rationed. Visually, the scenarios appropriated, exaggerated and exposed the omnipresent propaganda slogans that depicted Socialism as a land of milk and honey as a pure fiction and proclaimed leisure in a land of the \"working masses.\" The entire spectrum of the grotesque and the dimension of the impossible were revealed in the Bar for Giants, built by Zbigniew Gostomski, which, as Pawe? Polit noted6, later served Tadeusz Kantor\'s projects in the 1970s. As Micha? G?owi?ski emphasizes, the grotesque expresses opposition and spiritual independence by portraying \"the other side of reality.\"7 Operating with \"harmonized dissonants,\" the Ball was a special expression of negation. It related itself not only to the artistic traditions, but above all to the prevailing state consciousness. It was an attempt to defeat fear through laughter and to transform concern into a game.
The scene created in Zalesie critically alluded to reality and portrayed it as something even more illusionary than an evening ball in the \"land of felicity.\" On the other hand, the provocative abundance of desirable goods, freedom, fortune and the lightness of being were every bit as \"perfect\" as the everyday shortages, the internal constraints and the lack of perspective. Inasmuch as it was a venue that presented both the illusion and the compensation, the Zalesie Ball could be described as a heterotopical place that both mirrored and obverted reality. As Michel Foucault wrote, a heterotopical space, for which a boat or a mirror are primary examples, is a \"rocking piece of space\" that serves as the critical reference point for the space surrounding it.8 If one applies the expression of heterotopy to the Ball, it can be seen how deeply irrelevant for Polish art of this era the usage of binary contradictions such as \"public\" and \"private\" or \"politically engaged\" and \"indifferent\" are. The line between public and private spheres was a fluid one at the time, a fictional distinction. A private meeting – just a few persons – that took place in an artist’s apartment could be construed as open interference in a public space that had been entirely appropriated by the prevailing ideology, and could thus be terminated by the intruding militia.9 On the other hand, as Rosalyn Deutsch has pointed out, \"public\" is never a given, but rather is created as a space in which debates and the disputation of meanings are possible.10 According to this view, public space is impossible in a totalitarian state that incessantly fills the \"empty space.\" Claude Lefort therefore sees this space as being the foundation of democracy. During the 1960s in Poland, it was unthinkable to undermine the constructs of \"unity\" or \"society\" in any space that was normally associated with the public. However, this could occur in spaces that I will refer to as heterotopical: at the Zalesie Ball, in the Akumulatory 2 Gallery (Pozna?) or in the seminars and symposia organized in the 1970s by Andrzej Matuszewski and others.
The celebratory atmosphere and the dream-like character of the Zalesie Ball bring to mind the psychic reality of a trauma. According to Lacan, Freud\'s famous peek-a-boo game deals with the repetition of the traumatic experience of the mother\'s departure.11 The traumatic experiences that concerned the Zalesie Ball might have been the anti-Semitic campaigns and the hostile campaigns toward intellectuals that resulted in numerous arrests and repercussions following the student demonstrations, as well as the legacy of Socialist Realist art – the danger of the instrumentalization and ideologization of works of art, leading to a reluctance to incorporate art in the process of societal and political transformation. The game, as enlisted in 1968 in Zalesie, has the important function in psychoanalysis of helping the patient to play through and deal with a traumatic experience. A spiral of repetition, though never freeing one entirely from past incidents, at least enables a critical attitude to be taken toward the past – creating a space-generating distance for the distinction between the past and the present. The Zalesie Ball can be interpreted as an attempt to cope with a traumatic experience that resulted both from political events as well as from the unconscious heritage of Socialist Realism. As Dominick LaCapra has said, referring to Adorno, credible art that deals with a traumatic experience is difficult to find.12 In Zalesie it was not art, but rather a game, a party that yielded a touch of lightness, a gesture of independence. For this reason, it appears inappropriate to describe the Zalesie Ball as either politically indifferent or committed. The Ball was a statement of opposition and, simultaneously, also an adjustment to the political and social reality following March 1968 – two contradictory directives resulting from the same imperative of perseverance. Within the scope of a complex stance vis-à-vis the Polish communist system,13 the artistic community was not distinguished by \"engagement\" or \"non-engagement,\" but much more through all of the multiply combinable attitudes of affirmation, conformance, resistance and opposition.

Fragmented New Production
The \"Revitalization\" arranged in 2006 by Pave? Althamer and the exhibition \"Farewell to Spring – Reconstruction\" curated by Pave? Polit (Document Gallery, CCA Warsaw) were shown at the 40th anniversary event of the Foksal Gallery. Regardless of whether the celebration of the long existence of the gallery can be seen as an acknowledgement of the currently accepted historical account, the \"Reconstruction\" intervened in this objectified history with a sort of reminder that, at the same time, served as material for the exhibition.
The exhibition and the supporting program referred above all to the specifically chronological aspect of traumatic recollection, dominated by the logic of deferred action – the delay between the immediate reality and the subsequent consciousness thereof. \"The shocking asynchronicity,\" as Agata Bielik-Robson describes the phenomenon of desynchronization, 14 the question of how the past can live again through the future, was one of the main issues of the exhibition.
The 1st floor of the exhibition was characterized by absence – traces of the earlier exhibit and the two incidences in the background of Natalia Svolkien\'s remembrance of the student protests of March 1968. In the \"Reconstruction\" section, the anti-Semitic campaign and the hostile campaigns toward intellectuals as well as the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact countries formed an invisible bracket around the Zalesie Ball. However, the aim was not to view the Ball as a political event, but instead to reflect on the traumatic experiences that have accompanied the history of art in Poland: the political events that did not simply occur separately, but rather were also subjected to internalization, as with ideology.
The 2nd floor of the exhibition was articulated by the voice of the narrator Anka Ptaszkovska, describing the persons and the events shown in a projection. Voices resound mysteriously in the room and seem to be calling Edward Krasi?ski from afar. Collected graphical material, the photographs that document the Ball and its recurrence, dominates the 3rd floor of the exhibition – a sort of \"prosthetic memory,\" an archive, or depot, for facts that can never be experienced again.
On opening night, visitors could look out through an open window and see mannequins laying under a tree that Pave? Althamer had created as reference to the original grotesque figures by Edward Krasi?ski for the 1968 Ball. One could likewise see the people who had gathered around a bonfire between the Bar for Giants, a stage for a pianist and a Trabant parked nearby. There was nothing pretentious about this \"Revitalization\" in the park around the CCA: an elitist ball, turned into a party at which everyone was welcome. All that had been denied in the course of Polish art history had now returned. Questions were raised about events that occurred between the unreality of communist Poland and the reality of artistic practice, illusionary artistic liberties and a political spectacle – the \"today\" penetrating the \"then\" and the past returning from the future.
If I view the Zalesie Ball as an experiment to playfully process the traumatic experiences, then the \"Reconstruction\" can be seen as a never-before-existent attempt at overhauling the history of art through traumatic recollection. As Dominick LaCapra asserts, with the phenomenon of traumatic recollection, the past does not become history, but rather haunts the self and society anew, like the voices that penetrate the exhibition room. To become history or to be remembered, the traumatic recollection needs to be reworked.15 In this case, the excluded rooms, \"swept away by the winds of history\" out of the Foksal Gallery, using Anka Ptaszkovska\'s formulation, likewise belong to traumatic recollection. Ptaszkovska herself represents this repressed history of the gallery, or even its counter- history. Following repeated attempts to introduce subversive \"new rules,\"16 she had a dispute with Tadeusz Kantor and left the gallery. The Foksal Gallery archive is, like any archive, not an arbitrary collection of documents. Its structure is determined by the missing parts. An important alternative reading of the archive is offered by the publication \"Tadeusz Kantor. Z archiwum Galerii Foksal\" (Tadeusz Kantor: From the Gallery Archives), which presents the history of the collaboration between Kantor and the Foksal Gallery, based on polemics and documents.17 A dynamic report on the history of the gallery, full of suspense and controversy, is missing here, as is an alternative interpretation dealing with the structural problems of archiving and exclusion, of experience and recollection, and of requisition and historiography.
The revival of the Zalesie Ball, the fragmented, disrupted narrative and reiteration, should be understood as an unparalleled attempt to deconstruct the history of modern art in Poland and to scrutinize the relationship between history and recollection, between public and private and between \"now\" and \"then.\" \"Reconstruction\" and \"revitalization\" of the Ball referred not only to the special event that occurred nearly 40 years ago. For a short moment, both events marked an interim space: the space of the mirror, of the ship, thrown into the endlessness of the ocean, of movement and displacement, of memory and fantasy. Together they formed a contrary space, where utopia could actually be performed.