The pretext for this short set of observations is a visit to the newly opened exhibit Poland: Land of Folklore? at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw. The compelling, beautifully installed exhibit showcases the Communist-era “branding” of Poland as a modern yet deep-rooted land, a colourful vision of a united, forward-looking Polish peoplehood inspired by tradition. The image was at once ideologically appropriate, nationally celebratory, and globally exportable. From the performance of Poland at international youth gatherings through song and dance, to the patronage, mentoring, and marketing of its handicrafts and design via the institution of a state-run network of Cepelia stores at home and abroad, the exhibit takes a critical look at the whole-cloth invention of a new national imaginary in the early years of Poland’s People’s Republic (PRL). [...]
Fascinating and true though this view may be, the introductory text enables the exhibition to answer a broader set of questions – among them how the “people’s” government used folklore, and how its status changed when it moved into museums and galleries in the first decades of the PRL. It also states that the exhibit inquires about the “place of the folk artist – the other – in the art world.” But the breadth of both the exhibition’s exploration of the state’s use of folklore and its inquiry into “otherness” is curiously lacking, in ways that replicate some of the very silences it seeks to critique. Indeed, the curatorial gaze brought to bear on the PRL’s production of “the folk” in Zachęta’s gallery shares some of the same blind spots with the “countryside as seen by ethnographers” that is the partial subject of the exhibition. [...]
The best ethnography from the era captures humorous descriptions of rural woodcarvers trying to grasp precisely how to be “folk” enough to please the elites who encouraged and might purchase their works – a bottom up process of “self-folklorisation” catalysed by the state’s top-down version. Where are their voices? It is almost a truism that the new crafts encouraged by the state, and the new forms of artistic production like “design collectives” and academic-rural collaborations, not only imposed on, but also served those entrained to produce the desired “culture.” But how did they do this, and by how much? Beyond potential money or a modicum of fame, what did the new creative language and new aesthetic horizons for expression produce in existential terms? Even in authoritarian settings craftspeople put their personal stamp on what they produce – they make their worlds, even if not under conditions of their choosing. The process by which many peasants became and thrived as folk artists due to state encouragement is perhaps too anxiously close to the PRL’s own celebratory narrative to garner attention in this show. (A small photograph of the original 1966 “Others” exhibit partially replicated in the current exhibit, shows the central place given to the makers of the art on display – however instrumental – in form of life-size photo-banners. The one, fascinating nod in the present exhibit in the direction of acknowledging the artists as actors is the curator’s description of women weavers from Janów, who saw the new, specially-commissioned works they produced for city buyers as “folk”, while they continued to produce items for local use to their own taste).
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