Zofia nierodzińska
FROM THE OPEN UNIVERSITY TO THE MONSTROUS MUSEUM, OR HOW TO BUILD ALLIED INSTITUTIONS

Il. Alicja Pakosz

It is 2014. I have arrived in the Białowieża Forest with a group of students from a newly launched PhD programme.¹ This is part of the external Returning to Białowieża project.² We are accommodated in a large wooden building, the Jan Józef Lipski Open University in Teremiski.³ Erected in the late 1970s, it originally served as a school and was bought in the 1990s by Adam Wajrak, a journalist and naturalist. A great deal of effort, as well as funds provided by Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska, went into renovating the house so that it could be turned into an establishment for experimental education. The University operated throughout the noughties. Regrettably, it then had to discontinue teaching due to lack of funding.

Our group is welcomed by Danuta Kuroń, a co-initiator of the University with Jacek Kuroń. She is soon joined by her son Paweł Winiarski and his wife Katarzyna who have started a theatre there, now celebrating its tenth anniversary. Danuta Kuroń tells us the Open University was a response to the systemic transformation, the challenges it presented especially for little towns of which there are many in the Podlasie region. The Kurońs’ initiative continued the tradition of open universities,⁴ or schools for rural youth with limited access to formal education. It was to create equal opportunities and encourage active participation in the shaping of a democratic system in post-transformation Poland. It was intended to counteract increasing social stratification between enterprising urban elites and people living in the country’s borderlands who were not carried by the wind of change, for whom it never rained but it poured. The University curriculum was primarily aimed at people from places located in the former State Agricultural Farms. The five-year study programme covered such areas as knowledge of the past, understanding the present, participation in culture, social economy, human attitudes towards nature, and foreign languages.

The programme of the Open University⁵ suggests that it took upon itself to prepare people for leading independent lives in places with reduced employment opportunities. The objective was to develop a model of non-formal education that, on the one hand, was to open up educational opportunities for those who could not afford to study and, on the other, to build cultural and social capital in places far from the centre. The educators in Teremiski believed that their alumni would stimulate the development of their villages, towns and housing estates, and be active in social (association, foundation or cooperative) or administrative structures. The educational team was charged with the task of creating space for cooperation.⁶

Open universities of leftist and Catholic provenance constitute a tradition kept alive in Poland. The first type implements Ignacy Solarz’s ideas, the other those promoted by the Reverend Antoni Ludwiczak. Open universities worked towards the goal of emancipatory subjectification of peasants, while their Catholic version pursued educational objectives that were rooted in religious dogmas and nationalism. Drawing on the tradition established by Solarz, the University in Teremiski aimed to put into effect the ideas of ​​the “new left,” including a programme based on social justice and self-government, and provided training to future local activists. The goals that the Teremiski University set out to achieve can be compared to the educational reform undertaken by Paulo Freire, another famous educator and activist, the originator of emancipatory pedagogy. Similarly to the Brazilian pedagogue, the educational team working in Podlasie laid a heavy emphasis on cooperation rather than competition, on protecting common interest rather than privatising resources. Freire’s flagship work Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970)⁷ advocates rejection of the “banking model of education” based on the unquestionable authority of a teacher in favour of dialogue to foster critical thinking and create an environment conducive to social emancipation. In contrast to Freire’s pedagogy, the University in Teremiski employed people with a high degree of cultural capital as tutors. Despite the school’s critical attitude to institutionalised education, it failed to overturn the hierarchy of knowledge that was passed on from people of urban academic socialisation to those living in the sticks.

When I last went to Teremiski in 2020, after a series of bans had been imposed during the state of emergency⁸ declared by the then Law and Justice government, the house was a site of self-organisation, a university of direct action in which knowledge was transferred organically from the more experienced to the newly arrived. It morphed into a space⁹ for developing grassroots civic structures that resist the authorities.

The Open University and the Public Museum

It was Kuba Szreder’s essay Szklane muzea. Instytucje sztuki na przedwiośniu demokracji,¹⁰ and specifically the concept of the Public Museum, also known as an institution of common goods, a place accessible to most, that rekindled the Open University in my memory. In his text written just after a change of government in Poland, Szreder poses the question of how to introduce real, as opposed to apparent, democratisation of institutions to which he then offers an answer: “Museums and art centres have a choice: they can either reproduce extractivist institutional models based on the exploitation of (…) labour and common goods, or engage in building more interdependent, socially orientated and non-discriminatory artistic economies.”¹¹ He defines common goods as resources situated at the intersection of the private and the public; they should be developed jointly and distributed fairly. Instead of privatisation of goods, the author proposes the creation a public-common partnership to “update the same ideas for universal access to art or even – in a broader perspective – social transformation.”¹² Such partnerships, he continues, “can be established between public institutions and social entities – whether external to the field of art, such as self-organising collectives, social movements, associations and networks – or internal, such as trade unions, creative associations, artistic collectives, artist or post-artist networks.”¹³ Such relationships can be referred to as alliances forged by an art institution in order to use its resources in support of informal activities.

Szreder concludes his essay by compiling a list of demands that can be satisfied instantly, including remuneration for artistic work no lower than that negotiated ten years ago (sic!) by the Civic Forum for Contemporary Art (OFSW),¹⁴ unionisation of employees in cultural institutions, social insurance for freelancers, participation in more diversified art economies, for instance, combining education with artistic activity or work for nature using (strange) art tools instead of supporting art markets for the 1%. Szreder suggests the incorporation of care into institution programmes and catering for the needs of dependent people. In his perspective, art institutions are active participants in social life.

Even if I do agree with the main theses in Szreder’s text, I believe that it lacks the post-socialist context while, as the author admits, putting the museum for the 1% in question and claiming that it should be replaced by the Museum of the Commons sounds too general, like cultural import from the West.

Building institutions; contemporaneity and repetition

Zdenka Badovinac, a curator and long-serving director of the Moderna galerija in Ljubljana, Slovenia, puts forward the concept of institution-building¹⁵ to replace Western institutional critique. She claims that institutions in post-socialist countries had to rethink and recreate themselves from scratch during the systemic transition. They lacked a solid foundation that could be subject to criticism, unlike Western institutions based on centuries of colonisation and enjoying the support of state and private capital. The curator first discussed her concept of institution-building in 2015, when preparing a retrospective of collectives associated with the NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst) movement: “NSK differed from Western appropriation art in that it appropriated, with its events, the state itself and state institutions; it differed from the familiar paradigms of institutional critique in that it arrived at the conclusion that there was actually nothing to criticize, since both the state and the institutions first needed to be constructed.”¹⁶ In the curatorial essay, Badovinac points out that due to the absence of institutions and commercial circulation of art, artists of different generations – such as, for instance, the members of the Croatian group Gorgona active in the first half of the 1960s, the members of the Slovenian group OHO working in the second half of the same decade, and the Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) movement of the 1980s – attempted to organise their field of operation through their activities. In a way, their engagement substituted for institutions and the artists were able to change the material conditions of their work. Badovinac uses the term self-historicisation for the attempts to create space for oneself in the artistic economy and, simultaneously, in history;¹⁷ in it the narrator’s voice remains audible, has a specific location and biography. For the curator, these parallel stories relating a tale about a complex reality – former Yugoslavia undergoing transformation in the case of NSK – are acts of resistance to hegemonic narratives which treat the art of post-socialist countries as a less successful imitation of the Western original, an attempt to enter the international art world on their own terms.

Sustainable Museum

In the Glossary of common knowledge,¹⁸ a dictionary of terms explained by various authors, Badovinac introduces the idea of ​​a sustainable museum.¹⁹ As described by the curator, the institution is supposed to strengthen its impact in a local environment not by affirming national narratives but by neighbourly day-to-day interactions with its surroundings. Its objective is not to build a counter-narrative to the dominant (Western) canon, but to create space for the emergence of many parallel stories. Unlike a universal museum, common in the 19th and 20th centuries, and contemporary global museums centred around collecting artworks, the methods deployed by a sustainable museum include the recycling of ideas and recurrence. A sustainable museum does not assemble objects, viewing “the rest of the world as a colony;”²⁰ on the contrary: it counteracts accumulation through “self-reflection, contextualisation and repetition.”²¹

Badovinac believes that it is in repetition that radical transformation is to be sought. Not in innovations within the existing fields of art, but in supplementing the differences between disciplines and between the present and the past: “repeating something from the past not because there is nothing new to tell, or because only what already exits is relevant, but because there is an urgent need to retain a difference between what was selected and what was omitted.”²² Like Gilles Deleuze, she claims that what is repeated is never identical with what has been selected from the past. What is repeated is the very difference, and introducing that difference prevents the emergence of hegemony.

The Moderna galerija, directed by Badovinac from 1993 to 2020 until she was dismissed under Janez Janša’s right-wing government, staged a series of nine exhibitions putting on display the museum’s collection, The present and presence. Repetition>²³ (2012–2015); each show offered a different view of the collection and focused on a different theme. According to Badovinac, repetition is resistance to the logic of commercial art circulation which forces new things to be constantly created. Repetition then becomes a pragmatic strategy for dealing with shortage and crisis which constitute a permanent state for Eastern European art systems, constantly facing underfunding and overwork. It is a method of problematising the trauma associated with ​​Eastern European art: the trauma that results from the lack of an established cultural system and the trauma caused by the emancipatory ideals espoused by communism that were never achieved.

Badovinac is intrigued by the fact that a story told is always a matter of choice, that a substantial number of social events slides into oblivion. This absence forms an essential element of working with the collection in a sustainable museum, absence becomes an integral part of its identity: “This means that the contents of the museum should be in a continual process of transformation, hybridisation, composition and recomposition. But this is not only about recomposing already known elements from history, but also about what is present in our memory and what is not…”²⁴

Badovinac understands history and institutions as processes that both create and cancel themselves. It is vital that narratives presented in museums should not claim to be universal, rather they are a possibility for articulating common futures without establishing a hierarchy of values, guided by the principle of horizontal art history.²⁵

Accessibility

Apart from self-historicisation and repetition as ways of bringing difference to hegemonic museum narratives, accessibility is another tool to ensure truly democratic participation in the joint creation of culture.²⁶

The theory and practice of accessibility came to my attention in 2022 when I was working on the exhibition Politics of (in)accessibilities, citizens with disabilities, and their allies²⁷ that took place at the Arsenal Municipal Gallery and the publication put out in the following year.²⁸ I mean accessibility in its broad sense, as a genuinely democratising theory-practice that directs attention to those left out of culture’s major narratives; alongside the work of minority ethnic artists, women, the economically and symbolically underprivileged, these are often people with disabilities. Their share of the art field has been and continues to be reduced on account of the ableist belief that social “norm” is linked with ability, and worth is only proven through competition where power and privilege are the decisive factors as to who gets the right to participate. The legitimation of social Darwinism²⁹ in post-socialist countries came with the emergence of turbo-capitalism³⁰ in the days of the systemic transition and the cessation of institutions and socialist welfare systems it entailed. In Poland, the triumph of social Darwinism was possible largely due to patriarchy strongly backed by the hegemonic Catholic Church which uses its privileged status and favourable regulations³¹ to silence criticism.

I believe that making accessibility part of our thinking about culture and its production may open up the opportunity to change social patterns which, over thirty years after the political transformation, could set the direction for the development of a society in which we, its citizens, fight for survival, in which we want to live and expect the bodies we inhabit to be respected with their possibilities and limitations, without us having to optimise them.

Alliance

During my five-year term at the Arsenal Municipal Gallery, I did my best to follow the principle and methodology of alliance which, to me, signifies active extension³² of the institution and entering into cooperation with individuals, groups and social organisations not necessarily associated with the conventional field of art, such as women after breast cancer surgery, environmental activists, HIV support organisation (Zjednoczenie Pozytywni w Tęczy; European HIV/AIDS Archive), informal queer-feminist collectives, etc.

I derive the concept of allied institution from Jerzy Ludwiński’s idea of ​​the Museum of Current Art and Piotr Piotrowski’s critical museum, amongst others.

The idea of the Museum of Current Art was elucidated in 1966.³³ Ludwiński situates the museum far from the centre, in the Western Territories, where displaced people form a majority. The institution is to adopt an “open structure” with contemporary art as history in process, not another period that came after Art Nouveau and Modernism; Badovinac would possibly use the phenomenological concept of “porosity”³⁴ here, meaning malleability. According to Ludwiński, a museum should take risks and swiftly respond to social phenomena; to do this, it would not need a collection, unlike a sustainable museum proposed half a century later, but space and willingness to generate “ongoing artistic events.”³⁵ The author describes the institution as a “catalyst” and “sensitive seismograph”³⁶ that records social movements; as a result, it is more like an art studio or a workshop.

I do have some reservations regarding ​​the acceleration of artistic production and a ten-year perspective imposed upon a collection, but I did try to implement many of Ludwiński’s ideas when co-organising exhibitions-events in the city art gallery and being part of the editorial team for the platform on art and activism Magazyn RTV.³⁷

From Piotr Piotrowski’s concept of critical museum, conceived as a result of his fifteen-month experience as the director of the National Museum in Warsaw, I take the idea of a forum museum that does not shy away from confrontation or dispute-driven processes, as well as the self-critical function of an institution revising its foundations, and challenging its own authority and the canon it has shaped.

In his 2011 book,³⁸ Piotrowski references some texts on new museology, including Douglas Crimp’s On the museum’s ruins, Eileen Hooper-Greenhill’s Museums and the shaping of knowledge, or Tony Bennett’s concept of the exhibitionary complex, to use them as the basis for his concept and practice of critical institution.³⁹ The critical museum was articulated predominantly in its programme, for instance, in the famous exhibition Ars homo erotica⁴⁰ curated by Paweł Leszkowicz in 2010, but not so much in the improvement of its employees’ material situation. A progressive programme re-evaluating the underpinnings of the museum as an instrument of exercising power unfortunately failed to gain the approval of the team and decision-makers and Piotrowski’s one-year contract was not renewed. Yet the story gave him material for his book.

A similar publication devoted to a project never carried out is Karen Archey’s After institutions;⁴¹ the curator gives an account of her research, conversations and interviews with artists which she conducted in preparation for an exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam which, however, materialised only in the printed form due to lack of funds.

In a sense, every institution is a process of situating utopia; it is what we – as a society – agree on, what is achievable at a given moment. The institution is tasked with stabilising social processes, while being a guarantor of the safeguarding of rights already won. In its ideal form, it is a place that provides support, a reference point in a time of crisis or escalating violence when minorities feel threatened, an establishment acting on the basis of social and historical justice. However, institutions carry the heavy burden of colonialism (especially those located in the Global North countries and their satellites), class and identity exclusions, ableism and epistemological violence. They are where power is exercised. In order for them to begin to fulfil the role of common, universal and truly democratic spaces, there need to be changes and, first and foremost, people who will make those changes. Reshuffling managerial staff, a practice currently observed in Poland, will not do the job, but structural empowerment of artists, people cooperating with institutions and their employees on a long-term basis should.

Allied Institution

I began this text by mentioning the Open University as an institution intended to provide equal educational opportunities to people with limited access to education, I referred to the museum of the commons, a place for the 99%, which, however, lacked a sense of locality in my opinion, and for this reason I outlines the concept of sustainable museum that deals with its post-socialist history, while using the methodology of repetition as a form of resistance and establishing difference. I recalled the unrealised idea of ​​the Museum of Current Art and the partially materialised concept of critical museum. I treat these ideas, as well as many others, as partners in a conversation about how to imagine and jointly create institutions which we – a diverse and migratory society going through crises and traumas, a post-socialist one that is also mature and democratic, need.

To the concepts and practices described above, I would like to add an idea of my own that developed from the experience I gained in a city gallery, which I call an allied institution. Allyship, as our team applied it in organising such exhibitions-events as Creative sick states: AIDS, HIV, CANCER,⁴² Magical engagement⁴³ or Politics of (in)accessibilities, citizens with disabilities and their allies,⁴⁴ concerns both the exhibition and the gallery as an infrastructure facilitating the intersection of discourses and practices, creating opportunities for building non-standard alliances. For the shows that explores illness (breast cancer and sexually transmitted infections, STIs), we were joined by activists from a support group for women who had undergone mastectomy, HIV activists, alongside professional artists, theoreticians and secondary school students, whom we invited to participate in the creation of an installation initiated by artist Piotr Nathan, and in workshops organised together with the Social Education Foundation. On other occasions, we collaborated with local naturalists, a folk artist (Jadwiga Anioła), the River Sisters movement, and mainstream artist Daniel Rycharski. Within the framework of Politics of (in)accessibilities…, meetings were held between artists with disabilities, allies and participants in the events, for example, people suffering from aphasia and their families (Karolina Wiktor’s workshop). As a team, we wanted to examine a theme, place it in a glocal⁴⁵ context and try out the connections that lay at the crossroads of different practices. What mattered was the construction of a space that would blur the hierarchies of knowledge, with dispersed reference points, where people with substantial symbolic capital as well as those who needed things to be communicated in simple terms could feel at home.

We followed the notion that an allied institution is predominantly a location, although sometimes without a building. It is a situation in which located interdependencies are put into practice, for which responsibility is taken and shouldered, less often referred to as relations or (very reluctantly) networking. It is a site that uses its (im)possibilities and variable privileges to amplify the voices of marginalised people and groups, employing art’s engaged methodologies for this purpose. A city gallery, a museum, an informal collective, a non-governmental organisation and/or a regular event can be an allied institution; important here is the stability that the instituent practice⁴⁶ provides by creating conditions for the continuation of a given activity.

In an allied institution, the curator, or more often the working group, uses the privilege of visibility to simultaneously act as the spokesperson for class, minority, ecological and accessibility demands. The institution then becomes a platform that provides opportunities for articulating social issues of importance at a given moment. An allied institution is a place operating in a local social and environmental context, while at the same time establishing transnational networks of solidarity and cooperation. The main areas of ​​activity for this type of institution include joint creation of communities, unlearning patterns based on feudal bias and unachievable liberal ambitions by taking care of the economic well-being of collaborators, producing knowledge based on experience, co-creating situations that combine art, education and activism, that is practising allyship.

Monstrosity

An allied institution is monstrous.

Like Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, I see monstrosity as going beyond what is considered normative in a given social and cultural context, as mounting resistance and developing the ability to survive. A monstrous institution would therefore be that which is repressed, that which we as a society project onto it and what we expect from it in confrontation with what is materially possible to be attained. It would assume the form of an assemblage. Compiled from fragments of theory and practice, it would resemble the figure of Frankenstein; a monstrous past that escaped universalising musealisation and is actualised in the form of the abject – that which is desired and arouses disgust.

Cohen’s 1990 essay⁴⁷ contains seven theses of monstrosity, one of which claims that monster is a cultural body, made of projections, that it never dies and always returns, that it negates all categories and binaries, that it is embodied ambivalence, otherness, aberration, that it marks and transgresses the boundaries of what is acceptable; it is therefore a thoroughly political entity. The monster arouses fear, while being also materialisation of desire. Monstrous institutions demand a reevaluation of the categories of marginalisation connected with ethnicity, class, and sexuality, and ask why these divisions have been created in the first place. There is something monstrous about the allied institution which lacks clearly defined boundaries, keeps changing and is multiplicity; when one of its heads is cut off, ten more appear. Every authority should fear it.