This essay on Teresa Tyszkiewicz’s extraordinary films is due for publication in a book edited by Zofia Machnicka in 2023. An extract appears below.
Film-making formed a relatively short phase in Tyszkiewicz’s career as an artist: she completed six short 16 mm films in Poland between 1979 and 1981, and another after her departure for France in 1982.[1] Some were made with Zdzisław Sosnowski, her husband and an artist who had been working with the medium since the early 1970s. Indeed, Tyszkiewicz appeared in his films before becoming his co-author. In the ‘Goalkeeper’ series (1975-77), in which Sosnowski adopted the cartoon-like persona of a cigar-smoking sports star, Tyszkiewicz performed another caricature, namely that of glamourous model. Her role was to wrestle a ball from his grip in a seemingly-unending and absurd on-screen tryst. ‘Permanent Position’ (Stałe zajęcie, 1979) was the first of their co-authored films and functions much like an intimate and playful portrait of erotic love, with the camera sometimes seeming lost in the close encounters between the couple. In 1980 she started to make films of which she was the sole author, though Sosnowski remained involved, usually behind the camera. ‘If I could’, she said in 1984, ‘I would do everything myself. But as I don’t have a third hand, I have to ask someone to shoot. In front of me, Zdzisław does it – except that the camera is guided by me all the time. Verbally. I try to make it like a brush that paints me.’[2]
The idea of the ‘brush that paints me’ sounds much like an exercise in self-portraiture and, indeed, Tyszkiewicz is a constant presence in all her films, both as author and subject. The camera holds close, tracking her movements and mirroring her gestures. But her short 16mm films refuse to adhere the conventions of the portrait or to explain her seemingly irrational and compulsive actions on screen by means of narrative or dialogue. For instance, the lens pauses on her face, the theatre of human expression in so much art and cinema, only occasionally. And there is no attempt to sync the murmured singing, moans or sounds of breathing on the soundtrack to the movement of her mouth. Indeed, Tyszkiewicz’s films might be understood as experiments to record desire as it permeates the body.
‘Grain’ (Ziarno, 1980), for instance, combines a series of scenes which are largely filmed in close up and edited abruptly with the effect of delaying recognition or easy understanding: nylon pantyhose filled with grain appear, at first, to be odd, misshapen limbs; and human hair is indistinguishable from the knotty roots of vegetables. Without long shots – used in movies to ‘establish’ the scene – the setting is not obvious either. The entire screen fills with textures: an undulating sea of seeds; a landscape of gnarled root vegetables; and a downy bed of feathers. Tyszkiewicz occupies each one, though what draws her to these stockpiles is never explained. Scene by scene, she tries to disappear, discarding her clothes and becoming absorbed by these materials. In the final phase, she attempts to bury herself – and the monstrous limbs which now seem part of her body – in a massive mound of grain, sweeping dry waves of seeds over her torso. Strange and even perhaps disturbing, this image not, I think, a poetic metaphor like the half-buried woman in Samuel Beckett’s ‘Happy Days’ (1961), nor is it offered as a psychoanalytical symbol like the tomb-womb fantasy discussed by Sigmund Freud in his essay on ‘The Uncanny’ (Das Unheimliche, 1919). Rather, Tyszkiewicz seems to be preoccupied above all with the sensation of touch which, when unclothed, is distributed across her entire body.
Likewise, ‘Breath’ (Oddech, 1981), another non-narrative film, addresses the sensory effects of a different array of materials. Some are ‘raw’ like a rabbit skin and pigs’ trotters, and others – including a fur-trimmed coat and bright red leather trousers – have been ‘cooked’ to be desirable commodities. ‘Breath’ features a scene in which Tyszkiewicz wraps her naked body in cotton gauze (though her high heeled shoes remain delicately chained to her feet). She swathes her legs and torso and then her face in strips of the soft white fabric. This time, it is the act of ‘clothing’ that is the stimulus for sensation. This scene is intercut with another in which Tyszkiewicz’s hands play with some kind of uncertain viscous material – another, very different order of softness. Long liquid strings form when she pulls her hands back from the disquieting ooze.
There is a makeshift quality to Tyszkiewicz’s films. Improvised with materials at hand, they were often shot in the high-rise apartment home that she shared with Sosnowski in Warsaw. Interviewed in 1984, Tyszkiewicz described her approach:
The idea of a film is thought out, but not written down … I have reluctance even to write down the simplest script. I would have to write too much to reproduce what I have in mind. I prefer to work in a direct way – it allows changes, the corrections of ideas. In the course of filming, new areas are created, possibilities for building the final image.[3]
The intuitive and makeshift nature of Tyszkiewicz’s output does not mean that her films lack purpose or ambition. In 1980, with Sosnowski and artist and critic Henryk Gajewski, she founded Remont Film Association (Zespół Filmowy Remont), an organisation to support the distribution and production of artists films, an emergent field of practice in Poland. And she also exhibited her work – in the form of still and moving images – in the semi-independent galleries which welcomed ‘post-conceptual art’ in the Polish People’s Republic (PRL).[4]
In the summer of 1981, Tyszkiewicz and Sosnowski presented their art in an exhibition in Wrocław under the title Film Poza Kinem (Film Beyond Cinema).[5] The title signalled an affinity with other experimental film-making practices across Europe and North America in the 1970s that sought to critically examine film (and increasingly video) as media. In Poland the Workshop of Film Form (Warsztat Formy Filmowej), formed in 1970 as a section of a science club at the Łódź Television, Film and Theatre School, became the best-known advocate of what was sometimes called Structural Film. The Workshop’s members – Józef Robakowski, Ryszard Waśko, Wojciech Bruszewski, Paweł Kwiek and others – formed a critique of narrative film, and its dependence on ‘characters’ and plots.[6] Writing in Warsztaty Formy Filmowej (August 1975), the group’s periodical, Bruszewski attacked the ‘tendency of poetic involvement in art, or, defining another aspect: emotional and expressive: focused on the expression of an artist’s inner emotions, his ‘anxiety’; happily using any uncontrolled – and therefore ‘authentic’ – impulses as a means of expression (hence the favourite criterion of ‘truth’).’[7] Unsurprisingly then, Workshop of Film Form outputs had austere formal qualities, with the wit and humour that undoubtedly shaped their work carefully camouflaged by science. They presented their films as investigations of human perception or endurance. Bruszewski explored, for instance, the ventriloquist effect, i.e. the illusion of synchronicity when images and sounds were combined in films like ‘YYAA’ (1973). And in works like ‘Two-hand Exercise‘ (Ćwiczenia na dwie ręce’, 1976), Robakowski produced what he called ‘biological-mechanical records’, films in which he sought to suppress the control and agency of the cinematographer by ‘scripting’ camera movements (in this case, by whirling two 16mm cameras at the end of his arms).
Tyszkiewicz shared some of the Workshop’s experimentalism and interest in perception. But in their pursuit of feeling and affect as well as their conspicuous intimacy, her films struck a very different chord. Reviewing the Wrocław exhibition in 1981, critic Szymon Bojko championed Tyszkiewicz and Sosnowski’s engagement with the pleasures offered by images in the face of what he called the ‘doctrinal purism’ of the Workshop’s approach:
[Tyszkiewicz] felt psychologically predisposed to express herself in the mediums of photography and film as tools of self-creation. Fate has enabled her to deal with the area of personal sensations, impressions that stimulate the imagination and escaping the control of the intellect. They arise from reality … but perceived in a particular way in fragments, scraps, details, unrecognisable parts. It is these that, revealing their irrational entities and meanings, trigger chains of reactions. They have no beginning or end. They are not evoked in the film to convey information about a whole.[8]
Although the concept had yet to be fully articulated and Tyszkiewicz was reluctant to assign meaning or purpose to her 16 mm experiments, she seems to have been exploring what film theorist Laura U. Marks calls ‘haptic visuality’, the idea that some films invite multisensory viewing. Filmic images which seem to evoke sense memory (like the feeling of water or heat), which are unclear or grainy, or which assume close-to-body camera positions seem to call on the senses of smell, hearing and above all touch in the viewer. Often it is the lack of information – the lossiness or the incompleteness of these images – which encourages the viewer to experience them as a kind of material presence or effect. This lack is compensated by a kind of active viewing in which the eye roves ‘over the surface of its object rather than to plunge into illusionistic depth, not to distinguish form so much as to discern texture’.[9] Making sense of a haptic image requires memory and imagination on the part of the viewer which other forms of image do not seem to need such is their completeness. These full images belong to a category of what she calls ‘optical visuality’, one which ‘sees things from enough distance to perceive them as distinct forms in deep space: in other words, how we usually conceive of vision’.[10] Optical visuality infers a ‘mastery’ – a kind of authoritative spectatorship which, paradoxically, seems to be convinced of its capacity for full comprehension when, in fact, that understanding is produced by a set of techniques – distance, detail, focus and so on. Marks also contrasts haptic visuality with the kind of active, critical viewing that Brecht’s notion of the verfremdungseffekt proposed (the ‘alienation effects’ in theatre and film which in eschewing naturalism, compel viewers to question what is presented).[11] Instead it engages desire and pleasure to provide another, different critique of mastery.
In Tyszkiewicz’s films we can see many of the qualities identified by Marks: close-to-body camerawork; the difficulty of easy comprehension that follows when distance and perspective are withheld; and above all, the address to embodied touch. One knows the ooziness of the viscous liquid or the downiness of feathers in ‘Breath’ because of the strong sense memories that we carry with us. Marks says ‘the senses often remember when nobody else does’ (opening up the possibility of traumatic memory too).[12] The sound design of Tyszkiewicz’s films also contributes much to their haptic effects. Sometimes the sound was recorded ‘in situ’, but more often it was laid over the images in the edit. Much of the music selected by Tyszkiewicz is electronic: large sections of ‘Breath’, for instance, are accompanied by a low pitched rumble or ‘metallic’ oscillating notes. And when she used recordings of sounds in the world, they are close-miked and very ‘dry’: as such, they are the audio analogue of the close-to-body image which Marks describes as haptic. ‘Grain’, for instance, contains sections where the soundtrack features a voice moaning and breathing as if pressed against the listener’s ear; ‘Image and Games (Obraz I gry, 1981)’ features close recordings of fabric being torn slowly, threads snapping audibly. Not as soothing or as soporific as the ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) videos which circulate today, Tyszkiewicz’s soundtracks deliver something similar; skin-crawling sounds.
In their attention to ‘haptic visuality’ Tyszkiewicz’s films – in parts if not in whole – open up a space for what Marks characterises as ‘the erotic’. This does not necessarily describe sexual feeling, though often it does. Rather, it points to a kind of loss of self. By being ‘called upon to fill in the gaps in the image, to engage with the traces the image leaves … [b]y interacting up close with an image, close enough that figure and ground commingle, the viewer relinquishes her own sense of separateness from the image – not to know it, but to give herself up to her desire for it.’[13] This – for Marks – is very different to voyeurism, a form of sexualised viewing in which the viewer maintains a distance or ‘mastery’ over what they look at. The objects of their gaze are isolated and comprehended by voyeurs, or as Marks puts it ‘mastered’. As such, voyeurism is much closer to the kind of fetishistic viewing associated with pornography.
Tyszkiewicz’s films seem to offer both erotic and voyeuristic qualities – in Marks’ terms. Indeed, one of the distinguishing features of Tyszkiewicz’s film work is her unabashed engagement with sexuality. Here it is important to recall the world in which she lived and worked. The so called ‘Sexual Revolution’ that occurred in Western Europe at the end of the 1960s reached the PRL in the 1970s and then only faintly and within limits set by the censors. Feature film directors treating female nudity and sex scenes as steps in the progress of liberalism; ‘pin ups’ were a regular feature of the back page of Kino (Cinema) magazine; and the ‘Venus’ photographic exhibitions mounted in Kraków from the beginning of the decade drew large audiences to ‘artistic’ representations of the nude from around the world. Licensed permissiveness of these kinds, were, as Karol Jachymek has argued, aligned to the regime’s programme of ‘modernisation’ (one which depended on borrowing from the West, literally and figuratively).[14] Put simply, the objectification of women was taken as an index of progress. Other public representations of sexuality – including LGBTQ+ themes and pornography – remained subject to what was called ‘socialist morality’, a censorious view of life that had been laid down in the early years of communist rule.[15] Even the sexologists whose books on sexual technique and health have been much celebrated as contributions to public understanding, found that the illustrations to their books were censored by officials who sniffed out pornography on their pages.[16] Although pornography was inadequately defined in Polish law (as elsewhere),[17] an accusation was enough to ensure that an exhibition be closed or a publication pulped. (Tyszkiewicz’s partner Sosnowski knew this from experience: 2000 copies of Polish Art Copyright, a catalogue surveying contemporary art that he’d published as director of the Współczesna Gallery in Warsaw was pulped in 1975 on grounds of pornography[18]). Moreover, the party-state was increasingly willing to accede its authority in such matters to the Roman Catholic church. Artist Grzegorz Kowalski recalled a visit by a state censor to the Repassage Gallery in Warsaw at the end of the 1970s. At that time the Gallery was closely associated with Krzysztof Jung, an artist whose work explored homosexual desire in frank and uncompromising ways. Asked why male genitalia could not be shown in works in the Gallery, the official answered ‘Because we must keep good relations with the church’.[19]
All of this makes Tyszkiewicz’s uncompromising engagement with sexual desire – and with female sexual desire in particular – all the more notable (putting her in the company of a handful of other artists in the PRL including the well-known figure of Natalia LL but also Barbara Falender, Teresa Gierzyńska and Krzysztof Jung, artists who have drawn critical attention recently after a long period in the shadows[20]). Tyszkiewicz appears in differing degrees of undress and sometimes, as I will describe below, in what seems to be a delirious state. Her images are not, however, pornographic, at least according to the conventions of the genre at the time. The frenetic camerawork and short, shuddering cuts in films like ‘Day after Day’ (Dzień po dniu, 1980) frustrate the kinds of scopophilic pleasure which attaches to the illusion of command over other bodies and the penetration – by sight – of parts of the body, actions or states of feeling that ordinarily hidden or invisible. Even in the case of the photographic images that Tyszkiewicz made at the same time as her film shoots, the ‘principle’ of obscuration still applies even if the technique differs. Some of the still photographs taken at the same time as ‘Breath’ feature close up images of her legs clad in tights shot from below. Fleshy set of folds formed by stuffed pantyhose appear in front of her groin. In the penetrating position of the camera and the allusion to genitals, some of these images borrow perhaps from the codes of pornography. They are not, however, pornographic, neither in intention or effect. Indeed it is more productive to consider the relation of Tyszkiewicz’s images to fashion photography than to pornography. As images, they seem to correspond with the visual fetishes of high fashion at the time, most boldly expressed in the work of Paris-based photographers Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton. Often accused of misogyny, these high-stylists channelled dark undercurrents of sexuality to promote fashion. Exercising considerable creative autonomy, they used their photo-shoots to create highly charged images of female sexuality. Androgynous models – in varying degrees of undress – appear to survey each other like voyeurs or simulate acts of S&M, indifferent to the world around them. Writing in defence of Newton, novelist JG Ballard wrote ‘Far from debasing his models …, Newton places them at the heart of a deep and complex drama where they rule like errant queens, blissfully indifferent to the few men who dare to approach them.’[21] Sexuality on the pages of a high-end fashion magazine could take on the aura of an elaborate power game, with misandry being claimed, somewhat naively, as payback for the industry’s long history of misogyny.
Tyszkiewicz’s affinity with the twists of fashion is declared in ‘The Other Side’ (Druga strona, 1980) a short film made with Sosnowski in 1980. Shot from overhead, she flicks through an issue of Mode Avantgarde, a large-format and glossy portfolio of fashion images published at the time by photographer Gunnar Larsen.[22] As the magazine’s title suggests, Larsen was committed to the self-serving myth of ‘daring’ fashion as an attack on conservative social mores. Throughout his career, Larsen called for images which provoked a reaction in their viewers, even ‘angry’ ones. Rejecting what was sometimes called ‘the natural look’ of the early 1970s as démodé, and embracing the taste for oversaturated colours and exaggerated silhouettes that marked contemporary fashion, his magazine was like a primer for the ‘performance’ of glamour in ‘The Other Side’: Tyszkiewicz dresses and undresses in sheer tights, glossy black stilettoes, leopard-pattern shorts and a sparkling bikini top, while glittering make-up on her face catches the light. Her mood is self-absorbed as she caresses her legs or dances to a version of ‘Memphis Tennessee’ by The Faces which appears to be playing on a television. Later, she appears to tease her naked male partner, her high heels threatening, sadistically, to dig into his bare feet. (FIG 7) Catching the light of the hand-held lamp tracking her movements, silky sheets and bright-red plastic furniture create colourful backdrop for this world of heightened sensation. Many the same themes appear in ‘Day after Day’ in which Tyszkiewicz seems to desire the inanimate objects which surround her with a passion. Dressed in a red slip and vertiginous heels, she seems compelled by some kind of strange drive to grasp and stroke the chic furnishings, to mount the pipes running up the walls of the apartment, and to bathe naked in the warmth emanating from a bright red lamp. (FIG 8) As if illustrating the psychoanalytical concept of the fetish, Tyszkiewicz seems aroused by things instead of the ‘proper’ sexual object, the phallus. Red dominates in both films – much as it did for photographer Guy Bourdin for whom glossy ‘cosmetic’ crimson was a signature in his fashion and advertising work.
What are we to make of this engagement with fetishistic modes of fashion and commodity aesthetics from other side of Europe? Might Tyszkiewicz’s works be understood as some kind of diary of intimate desires and dreams which were hard and perhaps even impossible to realise in the PRL? Or might these scenes be understood as something like images in a private cargo cult, an attempt to bring Paris closer by making copies of its idols?[23] After all, the shiny, bright coloured commodities and fashions which feature in ‘Day after Day’ were in short supply in Poland in 1980.[24] Or, alternatively, might it be possible to characterise Tyszkiewicz’s films as forms of media critique – in the manner of the so-called Pictures Generation in the USA, artists like Cindy Sherman and Richard Longo who turned their attention to cinema, television and print advertising at the end of the 1970s to explore ideas about how mass media images shaped values, not least the conventions of masculinity and femininity. One of the repeated motifs of Tyszkiewicz’s films (including those made with Sosnowski) is the appearance of images in the mass media: they appear on the pages of magazines flicked by her hands, on the screens of television at home. Declaring their interest the ‘ikonosfera’ (iconosphere), a concept which had been developed by the art historian and theorist Mieczysław Porębski in the early 1970s to describe the era where images don’t just represent the world but constitute the environment in which modern life is lived,[25] Tyszkiewicz and Sosnowski wrote:
We took up photography and film because they are the only available means belonging to the common reality. [The] modern iconosphere exists due to these means and they determine the standing of events and grade of influence. Now [it is] not art, even of the most modern kind, that shapes consciousness, forces points of view and understanding of current affairs– all these and similar aims of art have been taken on by other ways of communication. Television, film, radio and press form the picture of today’s world (yesterday’s as well). And this is not better or worse. It is all quite
simplyas it is …[26]
This acceptance of ‘today’s world … as it is’ describes a kind of acritical position. The point of their work – individually and in partnership – was, it seems, more a matter of comprehension than of judgment; more a matter of understanding than of critique. This may in part be a reflection of the lack of the kind of intellectual tools and concepts which were sustaining critical art practices elsewhere (Porębski’s theory of environmental images notwithstanding). As many art historians have noted, feminist discourse was, for instance, nascent in the PRL at the time.[27] Much the same could be say about the ‘discovery’ of post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory and the writings of Georges Bataille by artists and theorists in Western Europe and North America at the time: in Poland at the beginning of the 1980s both were closed books. Moreover, Tyszkiewicz – to judge from her views at the time – rejected the idea that art could or should be demonstration of a particular thesis or an ideology. That said, in 1981 Tyszkiewicz did make one film which was distinctly and unmistakably ideological.
‘Image and Games’ (Obraz i gry, 1981) deploys the techniques and themes that she had developed in the previous two years including close-to-body camera work and terse editing, and red accents in what is otherwise a drab world. As in all her films, Tyszkiewicz is a central, obsessive presence. But in the summer of 1981 she turned these techniques and devices to the task of creating a political work. ‘Image and Games’ was made during the height of the confrontation between the Solidarity Trade Union and the state, a period known as ‘the Carnival’ when the opposition secured remarkable concessions from the communist authorities. From its origins as a labour union on the Baltic coast, Solidarity grew rapidly into a national organisation pressing for reforms in all areas of life. For 18 months democratisation moved in fits and starts as the opposition secured its demands by means of strikes and protest marches. At the same, time the economy, already failing, fell off a cliff, raising real fears of blackouts and hunger. Military exercises on Poland’s borders stirred deep anxieties about the prospect of an invasion by the Red Army like those that had occurred in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Caught in gyres of hope and anxiety, artists, writers, theatre companies and others created literary and art works in response to these dramatic and historical events. Tyszkiewicz’s reaction was ‘Image and Games’. Activities and images which once seemed like a personal passions were now pumped with ‘national’ feeling. In one long scene, Tyszkiewicz sorts obsessively, but ineffectually, through an never-ending sea of dreck formed by broken machinery, old bicycles, broken furniture and dented cans. It is not hard to read this wasteland as Poland, a broken country unable to generate the modernity which had been promised to it by successive communist leaderships. When red – the colour of glamour in other works – fills the screen, it now flags ideology, an impression which is consolidated when it forms the backdrop for a meagre slice of bread. If these images were metaphoric, other elements of ‘Image and Games’ approach events far more directly. A newspaper which appears on screen is the first issue of Tygodnik Solidarność, the most important opposition weekly newspaper published from April 1981 until the imposition of Martial Law in December. It is accompanied by the singing of ‘Rota’ (The Oath), a patriotic anthem, the lyrics of which had been written as a protest against German rule of Western Poland before the First World War. The film concludes with a long and steady image of Tyszkiewicz kneeling to support a bag of grain that in the final phase of the film she had struggled to put in place. Tyszkiewicz is now, as other commentators have noted, ‘Matka Polka’ (Mother Poland), a highly sentimentalised icon of the Romantic imagination in the nineteenth century.[28] Her task was to nourish the nation by instilling devotion to Poland in her children while men fought for freedom from the occupation of the country. A red dress and high heels was now worn by the mother of the nation. The glossy fashion magazine is replaced by a newspaper issued by the opposition. By another act of transformation, the monstrous limb once formed by filling pantyhose with grain is now a sack tied with a national ribbon. Perhaps these makeovers were necessary acts of solidarity at the time. The moment did not call for the imagination and audacity which marked so much of her work before. Instead, what was required was engaged art that augured independence from communist rule. Viewed today, ‘Image and Games’ seems like an ambiguous work, albeit not in the disconcerting manner of Tyszkiewicz’s other films. Her filmic vocabulary seems odd and maladroit in this film, unable to make its contribution to history without raising the suspicion of irony: Matka Polka in high heels?
The national motifs in ‘Image and Games’ seem to be a kind of exception in her filmography. As she said repeatedly in interviews and statements at the time, she wanted to work with compelling images and desires which were poorly understood, even by her. This was certainly the case of her last film in Poland, incomplete at the time of her departure. ‘Stadium’ (1982) was a continuation of the themes and techniques with the addition of some new motifs (notably the pins which were to become central to her art). ‘Stadium’ concludes with a haunting haptic image of Tyszkiewicz wrapped from head-to-toe in silver foil, as if mummified in a sparkling skin. ‘ARTA’, filmed after living in France for two years, was a departure. Evidently autobiographical and narrative, it depicts pregnancy and birth albeit it in a fantastic and even feverish form, not least a scene in which she births spaghetti before eating it lying naked. ‘Characters’ now appear clearly in scenes where the camerawork is steady and controlled: in one, Tyszkiewicz dressed like Sosnowski’s Goalkeeper and smoking a cigar watches herself – in a pretty slip – dance to a fragmented soundtrack of the word ‘épingle’ (pin) being repeated over and over. When asked at the time of making ARTA, ‘is art a way of getting to know yourself?’ Tyszkiewicz responded: ‘I feel as if there is someone standing next to me, another me that I am constantly exploring, exploiting. I constantly want to build this other me.’[29] This image of ‘another me’ might well be heard as an echo of all kinds of near-contemporary theories of the self like Jacques Derrida’s auto-affection and Jacques Lacan’s split subject and perhaps an anticipation of others like Judith Butler’s ideas about gender performativity.
After ‘ARTA’, Tyszkiewicz chose to make her art by other means. She developed her ‘pin works’ – paper, photographs and canvases punctured by pins – discussed by Zofia Machnicka in this book. Tyszkiewicz’s engagement with film was brief and, in terms of critical and public attention at the time, modest. Circumstances – the Solidarity ‘Carnival’, the imposition of Martial Law followed by emigration to France – were hardly favourable. But it seems certain that film-making was a formative experience which did much to shape the rest of her practice: this was evident literally in that she used photographic images taken when also making the Polish films in the ‘pin works’ later, and some of other her sculptural works – including a ‘dressed’ coat hanger (Sans titre (cintre noir) / Untitled (Black Hanger), 1985) and modified high heel shoes (Sans titre (chaussures N°1) / Untitled (Shoes No. 1), 2004) – represent disquieting versions of fashionable femininity. More importantly, in her films she developed an approach to ‘haptic visuality’ that she was to develop and extend for the next four decades. These ‘early’ films remain compelling viewing today, even astonishing in places. This is perhaps not a result of their resolution or coherence but their dissonance. Tyszkiewicz seems to have been enthralled by spectacular images of ‘glamour’, particularly when they were in short supply in the PRL, and yet found them grotesque. With remarkable boldness, she opened her body to spectatorship – in the most intimate ways – and yet developed a film language which seemed to inhibit voyeurism.
[1] In addition to the six finished films, Tyszkiewicz commenced filming a seventh, ‘Stadium’, before departing Poland. In 2019 Tyszkiewicz edited the ‘Stadium’ footage finishing the film for her exhibition in Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, Dzień po dzien, curated by Zofia Machnicka. I am grateful to Zofia Machnicka for her advice when writing this essay.
[2] Teresa Tyszkiewicz interviewed by Wiesława Wierzchowska, Autopotrety. O Sztuce i swojej twórczości (Warsaw: Interster, 1991), 215.
[3] Tyszkiewicz in Wierzchowska, Autopotrety, 215.
[4] For a discussion of Sosnowski’s work as well as the wider context of Polish Post-conceptual art in the 1970s see Łukasz Ronduda, Polish Art of the 70s (Jelenia Góra/ Warsaw: Polski Western / Center for Contemporary Art, 2009), 320-339.
[5] Galeria Jatki PSP, Wrocław, June 1981.
[6] For an excellent survey of the history and ideas of the Workshop of Film Form, see Marika Kuźmicz and Łukasz Ronduda, Workshop of the Film Form / Warsztat Formy Filmowej (Warsaw: Fundacja Arton / Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2017).
[7] Warsztaty Formy Filmowej, 7, (26 August 1975) cited in Wojciech Bruszewski. Fenomeny percepcji, Janusz Zagrodzki, ed., (Łódź: Miejska Galeria Sztuki w Łodzi, 2010), 211.
[8] Szymon Bojko, ‘Film poza kinem. Debiut Teresy Tyszkiewicz’, Kino 5 (1981): 48.
[9] Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000), 162.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Marks, Skin of the Film, 183.
[12] Marks, Skin of the Film, 110.
[13] Marks, Skin of the Film, 183.
[14] Karol Jachymek, ‘Seks w kinie polskim okresu PRL’ Pleograf. Kwartalnik Akademii Polskiego Filmu, nr 1/2018 – online (accessed July 2022).
[15] Stanisław Jankowiak ‘Zaszczepić zasay socjalistycznej moralności’, Biuletyn IPN 10 (2001): 31-36.
[16] Renata Ingbrant, ‘Michalina Wisłocka’s ‘The Art of Loving and the Legacy of Polish Sexology’, Sexuality & Culture 24, (2020): 371–388.
[17] See Paweł Leszkowicz, ‘Seks i subwersja w sztuce PRL-u’ in Ikonotheka 20 (2007): 51-85.
[18] Ronduda, Art of the 70s, 336.
[19] This episode is described in Izabela Kowalczyk, Niebezpieczne związki sztuki z ciałem
(Poznań: Galeria Miejska, Arsenał, 2002) cited by Kamila Wielebska, ‘Mad Love Between Obsession and Myth’ in A Story of Sin: Surrealism in Polish Cinema, eds. Kuba Mikurda, Kamila Wielebska (Warsaw: Wyd ha!art, 2010), 127.
[20] On the art of Natalia LL, see Natalia LL. Secretum et Tremor (Warsaw: Centrum Sztuki Współczesnej, 2015); Agata Jakubowska, ed. Natalia LL. Consumer Art and Beyond (Warsaw: U-Jazdowski, 2017); on Falender’s work from the 1970s was recently exhibited in Galeria Studio, Warsaw in an exhibition called MATERIA(L)NIE (2022) curated by Paulina Olszewska; on Gierzyńska, see O niej Teresa Gierzyńska (Warsaw: Zachęta – Narodowa Galeria Sztuki, 2021) ; on Jung, see Paweł Leszkowicz, ‘The Male Nude as a Queer Feminist Iconography in Contemporary Polish Art’ in Otherwise. Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories, ed. Erin Silver Jones (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016); and his pioneering book Nagi Mężczyzna. Akt męski w sztuce polskiej po 1945 roku (Poznań: Wyd. Naukowe UAM, 2012); and Aleksandra Gajowy ‘And Sex?’, Third Text, 35:1 (2021): 161-175.
[21] J.G. Ballard, ‘The Lucid Dreamer’, in Bookforum (Spring 1999).
[22] On Larsen’s career as photographer and publisher see Ane Lynge-Jorlen ‘Style of Necessity. Gunnar Larson’s Photography and Fashion Magazines’ in Anna Dahlgren, ed., Fashioned in the North Nordic Histories, Agents and Images of Fashion Photography (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2020) np (ebook).
[23] Interestingly, Sosnowski, Tyszkiewicz’s life and creative partner, had attempted something like this in 1975 when, with Janusz Haka and Jacek Drabik, he recreated iconic works by Douglas Huebler and Richard Long on the basis of reproductions that they discovered in Western art magazines. Called ‘Rekonstrucja’ (Reconstruction), the piece has been described by Ronduda as ‘an attempt to visualise the artists’ “outside position”, their situation of geographical and cultural remoteness, they being sentence to receive only fragmentary information about the “art of the center” in the form of poor-quality reproductions, scraps of texts’, Polish Art of the 70s, 332.
[24] On the theme of consumerism in Sosnowski and Tyszkiewicz’s art, see my ‘The Art of Consumption’ in 1,2,3… Avant-gardes. Film/Art Between Experiment and Archive eds., Łukasz Ronduda, Florian Zeyfang (Warsaw; Center For Contemporary Art, 2006), 16-27.
[25] Mieczysław Porębski, Ikonosfera (Warsaw 1972).
[26] Tyszkiewicz and Sosnowski, artists’ statement in Kontakt. Od Kontemplacji do agitacji exhibition catalogue(Krakow: Pałac Sztuki, 1980) np. (my emphasis)
[27] See Agata Jakubowska ‘The Circulation of Feminist Ideas in Communist Poland’ in Globalizing East European Art Histories, eds.Beáta Hock, Anu Allas (NY: Routledge, 2018), 135-148.
[28] Dagmara Rode, ‘Women’s Experimental Filmmaking in Poland in the 1970s and Early 1980s’, Baltic Screen Media Review 1, vol. 3 (November 2015): 30-43.
See also Elżbieta Ostrowska, ‘Filmic Representations of the “Polish Mother” in Post-Second World War Polish Cinema’ European Journal of Women’s Studies 3–4 (November 1998): 419–35.
[29] Tyszkiewicz in Wierzchowska, Autopotrety, 218.
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