Magdalena's Abakanowicz Games

Looking through the magazines and books I've seen very often pictures of Magdalena Abakanowicz in a silent contraposto-like-classical pose. I would wonder what is behind this self-presentation, so conscious and calm at the same time? Sometimes, I think we tend to look for objective facts from subjective work, or to give the subjective point of view after reading other people criticism. However, for me her work resists rational simplifications when I am faced with it.

She was born into a Polish aristocratic family in 1930 in Poland near Warsaw and spent her childhood in the eastern part of Poland at Falenty. It's a quite colorful story - her father was a descendent of Abaka-Khan or Abaqa - a Tartar aristocrat from Gengihs-Khan's time. Her mother's roots were Polish and also aristocracy. Abakanowicz's early environment was a forest, fields and thick solitude of a lonely childhood. I guess, that these early experiences resonate in her work, sometimes in presence and use of materials, texture and her interest in organic forms. The II World War broke out, when she was nine years old. It probably left nightmarish scars in her memories. In her own words about her mother I can find clues about her work in general:

They came at night, in 1943, drunk. They bashed at the door. Mother rushed to open it. One opened it to everybody. She did not make it: they began to fire. A dumdum bullet tore her right elbow. It severed her arm from the shoulder, wounded her left hand. I looked at it with amazement. I had seen dead bodies, but they somehow had always preserved their completeness in front of others.¹

In 1973 Magdalena Abakanowicz researched problems of regeneration and nervous systems in humans and animals with the help of embryology and neurology professors such as Partook Wall and Marie Dąbska. Abakanowicz's obsession is evident in her figures, which are always crippled. In stark contrast to classical Greek figures, her's are more about the sadly contemplated incompleteness painfully present in one's consciousness. The classical Greek sculptures are reflecting passing time, but their intended wholeness is still sensed.

To me, her art does not please the viewer but delivers a message: complex and ancient like existence itself. Through different materials and forms her work seems to convey something very basic and profound about human nature. In multiplying one form, Magdalena is able to reveal an infinite chain of meanings, when one become many and many become one. In her art the limits of language yield to a more intuitive understanding. Her work has an archeological appeal; it uncovers layers of different thoughts hidden behind very often simple yet still mysterious forms. Somehow her work resonates in me. The grayness of life behind her multiple, humanly lacking, elements of destruction, the life in its handicapped aspects, individual and still repetitively mechanical - all of these components are a pathway into deeper and more metaphysical questions. Her biography gives full support for inquiring into these very basic and universal problems. Coming from a privileged class, seeing the war's realism and its victims as a child and then aftermath in communist Poland when she had to hide her social status, she shared the life of poverty with many others survivors of the war. Echoes of these unpredictable changes have a place in the structure of her work in the meeting of rustic materials with rather subtle and complex thought, the limited chromatic range of colors and raw texture. All these qualities are recalling a rural existence, the equipment of peasants, and the things basically important to survival.

I remember the times when as a boy living in Austria I was coming back to Poland by train. Particularly striking was the grayness and severity of the landscape after crossing the border, with communism in full force and omnipresent - reflected in tired faces and the stubborn heaviness of life. The range of colors was in a tonality more in Abakanowicz's or Beuys' domain then any other. It always took me some time to adopt myself again to the communistic grayness and “ideological” corruption behind it.

War Games, one of Abakanowicz's latest works, is a good illustration of her life-long commitment (as well as a demonstration of her skill) to create universal symbols through simple means:

For a long time I couldn't use wood. I saw it as an entity finished in itself. Some years ago, suddenly I discovered inside an old trunk its core, as if a spine intertwined by channels of juices and nerves. I found carnality of another trunk with limbs cut off, as if amputated... Fascinated by the corporeality of trunks I decided to bring them into my domain. Doing so I felt encouraged by a strange similarity between us - a kind of relationship.²

The images of War Games are created out of massive tree trunks with additional steel elements. The ambivalent meaning is supported by occasional use of burlap tied with rope. The shape of a given giant trunk suggests to the artist the finished outcome and its meaning. The symbolism of this series is open to broad interpretation. Powerful and weak meet and create a tension in simple tree shapes which resemble the human form. The natural wood, a material used for its hardness and warmth, as well as beauty, is coldly embraced by steel. The juxtaposition of these materials opens the dialectic of controversial feelings.

The tree has many symbolical meanings all over the world starting from the Tree of Knowledge and ending up in a computer language on the tree of folders. In religious symbolism Buddha awaked under a living tree and Christ died on the dead wooden cross. I wouldn't like to make any profound suggestions at this point; I afraid to be killed with a crucifix, although sometimes I feel sarcastic touch in these stories – a fundamental attitude, which makes us people to do the very things we are preaching against, doesn't matter what religion we are following.

For Magdalena "an artist is a shaman whose work is infused with unknown powers." Personally I love trees and consider them to be supportive friends - an expression of beauty, protection and life. Nevertheless in War Games,³ through the chain of associations, I see them more as a symbol of amputated knowledge or the fragmentary and enslaving quality of scientific and technological pursuits of the modern man. Not so much the failure of science as such, but its ambition and ill application to explain mystery beyond its reach. Sometimes, this is the knowledge of ignorant, which comes laughing out of the shaman, and does not see its own dead end. She like many others sees through that empty and strong urge of our times to explain everything to the point where "talking about mystery has become indecent."⁴

Since1987, the number of sculptures for this series successively grew. Every piece has its own individual character and story to tell, but also shares in some common aspects of the War Games cycle. They resemble humans or animals, with steel limbs as imaginary prostheses, weapons or some other extensions protruding from their bodies. The titles of single pieces have different meanings, sometimes not related to each other; for instance Bent Sword, Booby Trap, Winged Trunk, Anasta, Sroka or Zadra.

To illustrate, the title of the piece called Sroka suggests a bird since "sroka" in Polish means – a magpie, very particular and rather noisy type of corvine. It shape it recalls the title, but then it also has the implication of a missile. A magpie is traditionally a symbol of a gossip, as in Bruegel paintings and others. The dynamics of this self–confident form (with its sharp beak) evokes a certain aggressive energy.

Most of the sculptures, created by Abakanowicz, have multiple and highly subjective meanings. They open us to flexible interpretations and free flow of associations. A word "zadra" means a splinter, but also it means a small conflict. The sculpture Zadra is playful in form and might be seen as a magnified splinter - a small pain, but on a larger scale. Also I see in it an ancient animal with an elongated neck and sword-like head and a thicker body balancing, in its proportions, on the border between reality and mythical wonders. But additionally it resembles an amputated leg.

In Winged Trunk, I can see a prehistoric weapon or shield sunk into wood. An old, rusty wood mill saw cuts in the middle of the submissively quiet trunk. Can that be an expression of dead hero pinned to the battlefield, or some kind of torture? Again the sculpture is open to interpretation. The piece of burlap tied with rope to this whole provoking figure is a small remnant of Magdalena Abakanowicz's utilization of various media. Once, burlap and rope were the main ingredients of her sculptures. But here they serve to accent the naked and wounded presence of a tree trunk. Weapons and handicapped victims of the war, maybe recollections of her youth during the Warsaw Uprising, in 1944, are written into this ambivalence of interpretation, but the deeper flow can be uncovered - its pulse is there. And the title itself, War Games, like a craftily set contradiction, reveals and hides at the same time to became, in the end, a game of its own. The features most seductive in art, if art really happens, is this ambivalence that captures us on the thin line between the known and unknown, serious and humorous, tragic and comic - in games or in life.

Somehow the crippled aspect of the War Games cycle is the most visible and touching, as an element connecting all the pieces despite their different and sometimes very neutralizing names. The names of the sculptures are making the tragic a game. The mutilation of the tree trunks, their strong presence and size, the space that surrounds and separates them, all create a silence drowned in a sorrow that can't be expressed more eloquently than through these three dimensional objects that remind us our own bodies. Pain, loss and everyday struggle of unfortunate beings is echoed in this metaphorical show. Hannah Arendt once remarked that the whole horror of brutality and human evil lies in its banality. Abakanowicz's sculptures recall the hobbled heroes, forgotten veterans and anonymous survivors of all past wars, and they speak of the suffering, which has no explanation or measurement and no record left behind.

In Partisan Review" Karen Wilkin writes, “oddly, Abakanowicz doesn't seem to have a really sculptural sensibility”.⁵ On the contrary, Magdalena's work reflects the subjectivity of our perception and how we “read into” things and how life experience creates clues for understanding. In her art I feel the verity of subjects sometimes all exposed in one stroke. I can plunge into myself using the mediating qualities of her material representations. It's not a question of good or bad, high or popular art but the quality of transportation to a different dimension that can enrich our self-perception. Is there some objective standard that decides if the piece is successful or can I rely only on my own subjective feeling that something happened?

I saw Magdalena's work for the first time sometime in the seventies in “Zachęta”, a culture center and gallery in Warsaw. Abakanowicz's Abacans, magically transformed the space into something more human and mysterious. The title Abacans, is derived from Abakanowicz's name by art critic Anna Ptaszowska. These monumental pieces of fabric are woven out of string, flax, wool, horsehair, sisal fiber and hemp. They were somehow warm and rustic, strangely close and yet very different from anything else. They had a presence that enveloped me in their own space. I had a childlike feeling of hiding in my parents' closet, though I was unaware at that time of the significance of the work. I saw it and was immersed in it. Twenty years later I am discovering it again and see a difference in my critical appraisal of her work.

Magdalena Abakanowicz's sculptures evoke a feeling of nostalgia for my Poland and my awareness of the differences between cultures that can be, at times, so paralyzing. Her work is woven out of many small impressions that are unique to an East European experience and she has made it mysteriously big and universal. “In American culture, everything goes and nothing matters” as Philip Roth once remarked, “whereas in Central Europe before the fall of communism, nothing goes and everything matters.”⁶

Reading about Magdalena Abakanowicz and looking at her work recalls the forgotten language of polish communistic culture, the police state and militia-man-always-power-hungry mentality, a proverbial chicken yard. At the same time, paradoxically, it recalls me careless and rebellious moments of life poetically unattached to financial security and the externally oriented materialistic approach.

written by Adam Rupniewski ©