Wiktoria Kozioł
THE 1992 EXHIBITION IN THE ‘LABORATORY’ AT THE CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART – GNOSTICISM IN THE OEUVRE OF ZBIGNIEW LIBERA

Drawing by Michał Bratko

¹ Zbigniew Libera referred to gnostic beliefs in his works displayed at the individual exhibition, curated by Marek Goździewski, which was held at the Laboratory Building of the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in 1992. It is evidenced by the form of these works, as well as the texts accompanying the exhibition, which I am going to discuss below. According to Jerzy Truszkowski,² the artist turned to gnosticism, having read one of the 1987 issues of Literatura na Świecie.³ The issue edited by the main promoter of alternative spirituality in Poland, Jerzy Prokopiuk, was devoted to gnosis. The said exhibition is never mentioned in publications on the history of art, while the works presented⁴ have never been commented on, with the exception of the installation titled Le baigneur (The Bather). In this text, I suggest their interpretation informed by the classic iconic method developed by Erwin Panofsky.⁵ As the iconographic context, I point to gnostic beliefs, which allow for a broader understanding of the message of the installation, whereas the iconological layer encompasses three aspects. The first of these is the trauma of the absence of mourning in the modern world and the institutionalised procedure of dealing with death. In the context of contemporary studies on this difficult heritage, the analysed works may also constitute a commentary on historical traumas, associated with the numerous places of genocide and burial scattered throughout Poland, as well as the Polish obsessive preoccupation with death. I further suggest that, because of the relationship between Christianity and Gnosticism, the works displayed at the exhibition in the Laboratory become a veiled criticism of the Roman Catholic Church as an institution. The final interpretation is related to the interest in New Age movements and alternative spirituality, strongly present in the culture of the 1990s. I will start my reflection by discussing the pre-iconographic and iconographic layers, with a brief presentation of Gnostic beliefs. I will go on to describe the iconological layer, encompassing the three said nexuses of issues.

At the exhibition held at the Ujazdowski Castle, Libera presented three installations, which depict certain sinuous structures. Minuta milczenia – Minuta milczenia (Minute of Silence – Minute of Silence) (1992) comprises an aluminium angle, some springs, bolts, rubber and plexiglass, as well as a heating coil and a fan (the catalogue features an additional piece of information, namely, that the warm air constituted an element of the work), and a time switch. The installation was assembled of a short, narrow ‘tail’ attached to a circle, filled with increasingly narrower spirals. The form was reminiscent of a flower, with the heating coil at its centre. The circle had 180 cm in diameter, which is of importance, as it marked a reference to the human height, particularly that of an average man. The second installation, Model końca (Model of the End), was constructed of aluminium angles – in double, and in places triple lines, comprising five separate loops, reminiscent of a Möbius strip. The bands radiating from the third loop are joined towards the end into a single line, ending with a cathode-ray lamp, while the entire structure is connected with wires to a small TV set. The installation was 130 cm x 130 cm x 250 cm.

The final, and the best known object, Le baigneur (The Bather, 1991), was composed of plexiglass, rubber, aluminium, bolts, cathode-ray tube, wires, TV set, and a video tape on a loop (250 cm x 60 cm x 60 cm). The film showed dirty water flowing into an inlet similar to a metal drain of a washbasin. The TV set, displaying the opening of a draining pipe, transformed into a milky-white, translucent pipe made of plexiglass. The pipe ‘protruded out’ of the TV set, serving as its floor stand, to subsequently turn into three full loops of a left-handed spiral. The respective parts were put together using black connectors.

Besides these three-dimensional objects, there were two simple drawings in pencil on cardboard (152 cm x 102 cm), labeled as Bez tytułu [Pathos], 1992. They were fixed onto a whiteboard. The first (placed on the left) presented a series of five-pointed stars placed one on top of the other, each subsequently smaller. These stars wind, evoking associations with a human spine, left bent, with characteristic sections of kyphosis of lordosis. The drawing on the right appears much like the actual vertebrae and discs of the backbone. Marek Goździewski interpreted these as cups, ending in a saucer. ‘The spine’ was presented as right-sided (based on its structure, I assume the chest would be turned to the right). Thus, these constitute two outward-opening axial forms. Between them, Libera placed a sheet of paper with six citations from the authors of early Christian doctrines, who argued against the teachings of Gnostic sects.⁶ These passages provide an account of Gnostic cosmogony, discussing the creation of the material world. The fullness of the divine being – pleroma – emanates energy of which smaller entities are formed – aeons. In line with these principles, pleroma consists of a defined number of aeons, which, the further away they are from divinity, the lower their position in the hierarchy of beings; moreover, the lower levels contain greater numbers thereof. According to some interpretations, on the lower aeons, due to their remoteness from the divinity, a potential of error emerges. Various Gnostic schools had different views on the nature of pleroma, Valentinianists believed the 30 aeons to be the divine attributes, through which the divine unity manifested itself in the world. Serpentinians claimed the it is of one of the aeons, the Serpent, that the spirit and soul had originated. The Serpent was identified with the being from the Genesis that made first men sin; however, the fact was valued positively: Adam and Eve had experienced gnosis; they had thwarted the plans of Yahweh, the evil god, the Demiurge. Perhaps due to the reference to a serpent, the work Le baigneur (The Bather), being a reflection on dead body, has a serpentine, spiral form, reminiscent of the dna structure. The fragments of texts selected by Libera and presented on the boards provided an account of Gnostics’ beliefs about the creation of matter as a result of an error. They present elements of a cosmogony of one of the Gnostic sects, a cosmogony associated with the development of aeons, opposed to the highest spiritual reality.⁷ These differ in detail; according to the Ophites (Ophians, Serpentinians, Sethians), the world was originally made up of the divine being (the Father), and the beings that accompanied it (him?), known as aeons. One of the aeons, Sophia (Wisdom), fell prey to Pathos, for it wanted to get to know and understand the might of the Father, which resulted in an explosion and the creation of material reality. In the narrative sense, Sophia left her husband and – because of her ignorance – ended up having intercourse with Pathos. This resulted in the spiritual reality being trapped inside the material one. As supposed counterparts of the perfect pleroma, the material world contained pleromata, which were created due to the mistake committed by Sophia. The consequence of this philosophy was a parallel (positive and negative) attitude towards the body and the immaterial realm (partly valued positively): according to the Sethians, the Father was equivalent to man’s telencephalon, the Son to cerebellum, whereas the Holy Spirit – to the spinal cord.⁸ Worth mentioning is the misogyny of this history, since Sophia is presented therein as a women who betrayed her husband and whose error had far reaching, negative consequences, much akin to the actions of Eve in the Old Testament. Were we to believe the author’s intentions, the artist chose the title Pathos, motivated by associations with the English meaning of the word pathetic as ‘miserably inadequate’.⁹ The poorness of the physical aspect of life was to be confirmed by the association between the spine and teacups, which made up an unstable, wobbly spire.

The entire exhibition is set in the context of various aspects of the psycho-physical dilemma, referring to the dualism or even the tripartite division of the Universe into three separate kinds of substances: the body, the psyche (the spirit), and the pneuma (i.e., the divine spark); and the presentation of hypothetical relations between them. The passages selected by Libera indicate why the artist decided the exhibition should feature a drawing of stars transformed into a human spine, placed next to the image of cervical vertebrae. Besides the material order, there also exists the order referring to the divine pneuma, the supramaterial element, yet not directly associated with the phenomenologically given consciousness, the spirit. The place of the spirit is on a higher level than that of matter, but it also serves to create the illusion of the physical world. People represent various ranks of self-discovery. Those who focus solely on the material world are never going to experience illumination, thus remaining subject to constant reincarnation. The other group focuses on the spirit, and their situation is far better. However, only the enlightened ones, who recognise the existence of the divine element (pneuma), get to know the true nature of reality and shall avoid subsequent incarnations. Libera’s work is titled Pathos (initially, Untitled, 1992) and refers precisely to the aeon of Suffering, which exploded in Sophia. The exhibition is related to the reflection on the parallel status of the human body and the mental reality (i.e., consciousness), as well as the structure of the Universe. Stars may be interpreted as a hint – they bring to mind the system of seven stars, the conviction held by ancient Gnostics that the cosmic universe is constituted of seven star-planets, with an archon, an evil demon, corresponding to each: Yaldabaoth, also called Saklas and Samael, identified with Saturn; Iao, associated with Jupiter; Sabbaoth, associated with Mars; Astraphanos (Astraphaios), associated with Venus; Elaios (Ailoaios, or Ailoein), i.e., Mercury; as well as Horaios – the Moon; and the Sun – Adonaios. Each archon had a female counterpart, with Astraphanos being lined with Sophia (phanos comes from the Greek verb ‘to appear’, whereas astra in Latin means stars, which in this context symbolise the emergence of matter as such).

As an intellectual current, Gnosticism encompasses doctrines and religious movements established in the first and second century AD. During the third and fourth centuries AD, these grew in popularity in the Mediterranean and in the Middle East. Some Gnostic ideas may possibly have been older than Christianity, with which Gnosticism came later to compete to ultimately be declared a heresy. Gnostic beliefs are far from coherent; they span numerous fractions which differ in detail; furthermore, researchers have access only to fragments of text presenting these beliefs.¹⁰ Material reality was to have been created by the Demiurge, the evil creator (identified with Yahweh of the Old Testament), and by a number of evil beings possessing supernatural qualities, or as a result of an error committed by one of the aeons (divine beings), named Sophia. The human goal is the exploration of the secret knowledge (gnosis), spiritual awakening and liberation from the material world, in which man was trapped. The essence of Gnosticism, the true knowledge, available solely to the initiated – that is, gnosis – is about ‘man’s trans-rational cognitive experience of himself (that is, his own self), and through it – about the material world, the world of the soul, and the world of the spirit.’¹¹ Trans-rationality means combining rationality (reason, mind) with irrationality (the senses, feelings, will).¹² Jerzy Prokopiuk divides Gnostic movements into: Luciferian, Christian, and Ahrimanic fractions.¹³ The first of these, represented by ancient currents, strove to liberate itself from the material world. The other, emerging at a later stage, is related to the assumption that man has been saved on Earth; it can be traced to the beliefs embraced by Rosicrucianism and Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy. The third aims to dehumanise man and transform him into an animalistic and machine-like being. The exhibition was ascetic and technologised, with installations featuring electric and electronic devices, which may indicate references to Ahrimanic motifs. I interpret the subsequent vehicles for human sensory experience as an illusion, isolating man from the true knowledge. Such a context gives the works a techno-sceptical air. However, the source texts displayed at the exhibition suggest that Libera predominantly referred to ancient Gnostic movements, and this reading of the exhibition appears to be the most grounded if we wish to take into consideration all its elements.

In the work Minute of Silence – Minute of Silence, the flow of warm air may symbolise pneuma, that is, the spirit – one of the three substances of which, according to Gnostics, man was supposed to have been created. Pneuma is derivative of the divine consciousness (not the evil Demiurge, the ‘craftsman’; nor is it a byproduct of Sophia’s capricious actions), it is the divine element in man. It is closely related neither to the spiritual, nor the material world, including psyche (mentality, consciousness), but to the initial fullness, which constitutes a substance separate from consciousness.¹⁴ Model of the End focuses on the negative scenario of human life. The fact that the loops are joined to one another, read alongside the work’s title, suggests that it refers to an uninterrupted series of reincarnations. People who have not been initiated, that is, who have not experienced gnosis, are trapped in their material bodies, while their journey does not end in the ultimate liberation from the physical reality.

The Bather was accompanied by a quotation from the text Le cadavre: De la biologie à l’anthropologie by Louis-Vincent Thomas, describing, how employees of funeral parlours distance themselves from the deceased person by referring to her or him as ‘the bather.’ Thomas’s book studies anthropological attitudes towards death. The context allows us to determine that The Bather is a work about the psycho-physical dilemma,¹⁵ that is, the approach taken by consciousness (thought, soul, spirit) towards the body, as well as the fear of death and methods of neutralising it, contemporarily as well. As pointed out by Anna Markowska, in the institutionalised world where funerals are organised by funeral parlours, the only element left of man is the dirty water running down the drain in Libera’s video.¹⁶ Markowska wrote: ‘In The Bather, the baptism of being accepted into the community of saints transforms into the issue of the blockage of the drain’,¹⁷ for the only trace left of the human body is the dirty water we see in the inlet. In thanatological studies, it was often assumed that in the modernist world death had been eliminated from sight. Set against such a context, death seems to be breaking out, in an unwelcome manner, in spite of the actions intended to camouflage it. In the said passage, the researcher has pointed out the ritual element (washing of the deceased person’s body) as analogous to Christian baptism at the beginning of life. Within the Gnostic framework, The Bather represents the wretchedness of man’s material substance, his insignificance or even ridiculousness (after all, the dead bodies are referred to jokingly, they are trivialised). The installation is reminiscent of a simple organism, a ‘primitive’ creature, in a thread-like form – operating in the water or filled with water – in which a tube serves as the digestive tract, with a drain as the mouth and the excretory opening. Whereas The Minute of Silence was related to the element of air, The Bather refers to water, and Model of the End is permeated with metal objects. These references are associated with the elements, of which the entirety of matter was believed to be made up of.¹⁸ The French title, in all likelihood chosen not solely as a reference to literature, evokes connotations with the works by surrealists, introducing nihilistic tropes and at the same time emphasising the absurdity of human existence.¹⁹

Funerary rituals are intended to anthropologically separate the realm of the living from the realm of the dead. In Poland, the issue is historically framed. Bathing is associated with genocide in gas chambers. Because of the Holocaust, bodies of the deceased oftentimes lie in unspecified spaces, while the Polish culture of remembrance is marred by an almost obsessive preoccupation with the dead. It is impossible to live a life without separating the realm of the living from the realm of the dead. The living have two options. The first involves activities enabling them to maintain the border and keep the distance (specialised funeral parlours, referring to the deceased person as ‘the bather’, washing the bodies, while in the case of historical remains – solemn repeated funerals, exhumations, erection of statues). The other entails dividing bodies into those worthy of commemoration and those unworthy thereof, that is, refusing the status of members of humanity to a group of dead persons – a procedure which makes it possible again to live ‘among them’. This, however, points to the existence of two divergent currents: the humanisation and dehumanisation of the moribund.²⁰

Referring to Gnosticism, Libera reminds us that that the contemporary dominance of Christianity in Poland, seemingly natural and self-evident, was far from being a foregone conclusion two millennia ago. In an age when there were numerous factions of sects and preachers-mystics providing their own teaching, the message of Christ was perceived merely as one of very many offers in the religious market. The first Christians made decisions, amounting to propaganda, which determined the future of their confession; meanwhile, Gnosticism would often influence Christians, and the other way around. It is partly because of this that the first Christian sects adopted a negative attitude to matter; some even seriously considered completely abstaining from having progeny.²¹ It is also significant that it is the victors in disputes who tend to shape the narrative; hence, we know today Gnostic beliefs mainly from the writings of Church Fathers. Even though fragments of texts written by Gnostics themselves had been found, Libera does not refer to them, which indicates that he found it important to address the institution of the Roman Catholic Church. The debates about Gnosticism served as the stimulus to distinguish between the correct and the erroneous interpretations of Christianity, to separate the ‘pure’ beliefs (orthodoxy) from those that seemed misleading and wrong, and for theologians to warn their brethren against ‘harmful’ doctrines.²² The choice of Gnosticism in this context would appear to not have been accidental: during the 1990s, Catholic priests would often depict heresies, religious sects and other associations of worship as unorthodox and dangerous; what Libera did was merely reach back to the origins of this practice. As written by the publisher of the book titled Gnoza (1988): ‘For many Christians, this «deeper» faith, i.e., gnosis, basking in the mystery of private revelations, asceticism, and especially elevating them far above the multitude of ordinary Christians, may have been equally alluring then as some elements of the wisdom of the East, transcendental meditation, and «the new religions» in general are today.’²³

Yet, since the time of polemics against Gnosticism, Christianity has condemned excessive rationality and the possibility to explore the profundity of faith by force of reason alone, probably – among other things – to keep the Gnostic heresy at bay. The temptation of salvation or self-salvation through knowledge seems to be a perennial human desire.²⁴ Christian self-reflection, which we would refer to today as theology, in the first centuries was also known as gnosis, and thus a true knowledge, as oppose to the false gnosis. Since the very beginning, it was developed in opposition to Gnosticism and was of polemical nature,²⁵ therefore it turned into a hermeneutics of suspicion, tracing manifestations of false knowledge. The counter-Catholic character of the works is apparent also in the book Zbigniew Libera. Art of Liberation, in which photographs of the said exhibition²⁶ accompany a reprint of a 1991 interview with Adam Michnik conducted by Wojciech Karpiński.²⁷ As Michnik observed, after the collapse of communism: ‘The Church was faced with the question: what now? It seems to me that it was decided that the foremost threat is posed by the pluralist, lay, Western civilisation. Merely because it is a civilisation based on the principle of pluralism, permissiveness, in which there is room for drugs, divorces, abortion, homosexuality, pornography; in brief, all this syndrome which is profoundly alien to the Church. And at the same time, it is a civilisation systematically striving to separate the Church from the State.’²⁸

Poland was to re-Christianise Europe and be the country in which there was no separation of the State from a religious institution. The global message of Libera’s exhibition seems to suggest that the Roman Catholic Church uses existential fear of death in order to gain actual political influence. Since the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, Libera followed the propagandistic aspect of the institution’s activity and made efforts to comment on it in several of his works (Monstrancja; Christus its mein Leben). The installation displayed at the csw also belong to the group of objects, which the artist later came to see as inefficient because of their veiled message.²⁹

Today, a growing number of critics and curators frame the final decade of the twentieth-century art in contexts other than critical; take, for instance, Jakub Banasiak, who focuses on the issue of modernisation and decay of the State-run system of art.³⁰ Aleksandra Grzonkowska researches the archives of the institutions of Tricity.³¹ Daniel Muzyczuk is interested in the influence that anarchism had on art during this period. Some theorists concentrate on spiritual tropes (Paweł Możdżyński,³² Maksymilian Wroniszewski,³³ Marta Kudelska,³⁴ and – already mentioned in the footnotes – Karol Sienkiewicz, Anna Batko). The beginning of the 1990s in Poland was marked by an increased interest in broadly understood spirituality (New Age movements, non-European religions, religious syncretism, personalisation of religion, esoteric, gnosis, divination, neopaganism, magic). These topics emerged as content representing various levels of complexity; they could be commercialised or simplified as, for instance, in Zbigniew Nowak’s TV Show Ręce, które leczą (Hands that Heal), or in tele-fortune-telling programmes,³⁵ while at the same time they were less commercially approached to in the writings of researcher-enthusiasts (such as Jerzy Prokopiuk), or opponents of the phenomenon, analysing it from the point of view of Catholic theology and the Roman Catholic Church.³⁶ The phenomenon found its reflection in visual arts, in the works, i.a., by: Paweł Althamer,³⁷ Barbara Konopka (e.g., Indyferencje – fluktuacje Księżyca, 1992), and Ewa Ciepielewska.³⁸ Zbigniew Libera observed that the tendency may not have necessarily resulted from consumers making conscious choices, but merely from the realisation that these topics may prove profitable and as such find a presence on a welcoming and receptive market and, therefore draw the attention of readers. The focus on alternative forms of spirituality was related to the visits of Polish artists in Western Europe, particularly Germany, after 1989, for it enabled people to come into contact with New Age movements through articles in the press, books, exhibition catalogues, and during the very exhibitions devoted to spirituality, including in the works by Joseph Beuys, who was inspired by the anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner.³⁹ Another kind of motivation may have been brought in by attempts to find new themes in the re-shaping of the reality of the breakthrough time, as it was impossible to predict the principles of the field of art, then still in the process of construction.⁴⁰ In the oeuvre of Libera, the aforementioned installations fall within a cycle of no longer extant objects created in the years 1991–1993, some for the Polish Pavilion for the Biennale in Venice. Large in size, they used, among others, a magnetic field, in one of the works the artist installed an oscilloscope lamp with an electric circuit ‘generating chaos’, visualised via the lamp. Zbigniew Libera does agree that the works created during that period are an expression of certain general trends, although at the level of personal motivations; rather, they were intended to use Gnosticism as an instrument chosen with a specific purpose in mind. The subject was to be a manifestation of anarchism, avoiding direct references thereto, and of an interest in heresy. Ultimately, the artist was dissatisfied with the results of his work, because the created pieces of sculpture were unsettlingly artistic, aesthetic, sculptural, distant from the counter-cultural activities of the 1980s. He was awarded the unesco Prize and ended up worrying he might be classified as a producer of ‘pretty things.’ They seemed to express an intoxicating hope that in the new political reality ‘one can now be artistic’, therefore, Libera started to seek methods to alter his artistic idiom, and ‘1994 proved to be a wake-up call’, related to the change of convention.