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Tania Bruguera
Consummated Revolution, performance, 2008, photo: Jan Smaga
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idea of introducing a great change in Poles’ life through art. It sends
a message that exactly the opposite – there’s nothing exceptional in
the fact that a modern state erects a modern art museum in a modern
city. Could we have been offended more?”
IV. Between Traumatophobia and Traumatophilia
From the moment Christian Kerez’s design was announced as victorious,
a long and painful process began of negotiation, dispute, and
media debate on both the building and the programme of the
Museum itself, its collections and development strategies. The project
started to be criticised ever more openly, as allegedly too “competitive”
and “powerful” towards existing art institutions. In June
2007, however, a new director was appointed – Joanna Mytkowska,
one of the founders in the late 1990s of the Foksal Gallery Foundation,
and the Museum was presented with a temporary residence in a former
furniture store on Pan’ska street, very close to the future
Museum’s location. To the surprise of observers, who had started
to doubt whether the project would continue at all, Kerez and the
Warsaw authorities signed an agreement in April 2008, which
seemed to ultimately end the conflict over the building’s philosophy
and its passive stance towards the Palace of Culture. After a couple
of months, the architect presented a new, improved version of the
design: one storey disappears, the roof changes, now punctured
with round skylights. “The experience of the Museum’s architecture
will be similar to that of the natural landscape. This will be ensured
by the building’s horizontality, its sheer size, and the monumentality
of the adopted solutions”, explains the author. Unexpectedly, the
project is rejected by the city hall, as is the next version, which,
in fact, is a return to the original one. The Museum’s future is called
into question again. The decision to develop the historically encumbered
city centre seems too difficult, almost impossible to make.
In the summer of 2008, meanwhile, in the Museum’s temporary
building, a seminar takes place on the legacy of the years 1968 and
1989 and their significance for artistic theories and practices in
Europe. Piotr Piotrowski delivers a lecture on two attitudes – traumatophobia
and traumatophilia – that characterise Eastern Europe’s
newly founded art institutions. He concludes that the future Warsaw
museum represents a separate case and does not easily fit either
of the categories: “It reveals a soft passage from communism to
post-communism in Poland. Since communism for the Poles was
not so much traumatic, at least not in the same way as to the other
people from the Eastern bloc, the collective memory of the past in
this country, to which a history of art belongs, is not traumatic, either.
If we can speak on the trauma here, it is rather the trauma of the
’big change’, or the trauma of the ’transitional period’, with a huge
wave of poverty and unemployment emerged as a result of the neoliberal
policy of the 1990s.”
One of the aptest commentaries on the deadlock and the historicalpolitical
background accompanying it is provided by a performance
by the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera, called Consummated Revolution,
which takes place during the seminar, near the Palace of Culture
building. A group of vision-impaired persons, dressed up in military
uniforms, strolled around Plac Defilad, “armed” solely with white
canes. Unaware of the building’s scale, or, not entirely at least, of
the context in which they had found themselves, they blurred in with
the Palace’s ornamental façade. Their silent presence seemed as surprising
and unobvious as the planned “revelation” of an art museum
building that would be supposed to compete with the immense, ideologically
tainted architectural implant towering over the city centre
for over half a century now.
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