In early 2023, I was invited to write a short analysis of Wanda Czełkowska’s ‘Black Frieze’ for the retrospective exhibition which is currently on show in the Muzeum Susch. Czełkowska died in 2021. The frieze is fashioned from a series of canvas panels. An early version from the early 1970s is is pitch black, each screen is punctuated by dozens of regularly-placed white “pin-points” and two swirling patterns. Later Czełkowska introduced an additional white panel. This is the version that can be seen on the wall in this photograph.
My photograph was taken in Czełkowska’s studio, an industrial workshop in the suburbs of Warsaw which is maintained by her estate and still contains much of her work including many of the heads for which she is best known. But the studio contains much more, not least wonderfully spare abstract drawings and some of her early figurative sculpture. The experience of seeing her art in the setting where much of it was made was a thrill. Much of Czełkowska’s ouput is little understood and the Muzeum Susch show – along with a Krolikarnia retrospective in 2017 – will do much to encourage new thinking about her art.
My essay for the Muzeum Susch catalogue is short and tentative, but here is an even shorter extract …
Black Frieze seems less an engagement with the science and technologies then delivering astronauts and cosmonauts into space than with its mysteries. And perhaps particular affinities can be drawn between Black Frieze and the ideas of Stanisław Lem whose brilliant and philosophical articles and books were widely read in Poland in the 1960s (and counted Czełkowska among their readers). Solaris (1961), his most famous novel, describes a sentient planet, albeit one that appears to be indifferent or resistant to human attempts at communication or to read its “thoughts” (fig. 5). The data from automated machines scanning Solaris fails to cast light on the planet-being, and the scientists in their research station can do little more than observe the patterns which seem to form on its ocean surface. What they call “symmetriads” – fiery balls – emerge from the regular waves of the ocean to form massive baroque columns above the surface of Solaris; “mimoids” excrete dust to form massive facsimiles of anything in their vicinity. When, in Lem’s words, a mimoid “starts an amazing hyper-production”, an unforgettable spectacle develops “… to the delight of the abstract painter and the despair of the scholar who tries in vain to understand anything of the processes taking place”.[1] Hypothesis after hypothesis offered by scientists to explain these perplexing phenomena fall short, not least because the symmetriads sometimes “illustrate” and sometimes contradict the laws of physics. “These hypotheses”, Lem writes, “brought out from the grave and revived one of the oldest philosophical problems – the relationship of matter and spirit, consciousness.”[2] This relationship might well be understood as Czełkowska’s concern, too. In Black Frieze she seems to be asking how might the mind conceive of the infinity of space, and perhaps even to know itself.
Solaris expresses Lem’s indictment of his own profession, namely, the hubris of science fiction writers and film-makers who imagine the cosmos populated with human-like beings and earth-like landscapes: “Thanks to time travel and FTL [faster than light – DC] the cosmos has acquired such qualities as domesticate it in an exemplary manner for story telling purposes”, he wrote, “but at the same time it has lost its strange, icy sovereignty. SF doesn’t know of the cosmos of colliding galaxies, the invisible stars sucked in by the curvature of space, the pulsating magnetic fields”.[3] Black Frieze is by no means an illustration of Solaris, or any of Lem’s other works (and one suspects that Czełkowska would have been offended by the suggestion). Nevertheless, she may well have been one of his delighted abstract artists, and the bubbling designs of the flanking panels of Black Frieze were her own symmetriads. As an invitation to scan the night sky, Black Frieze sought the sublime qualities of deep space. And the contrasting rhythms of the pulsing dots and the bubbling effervescence of the cosmic clouds seem to separate the known and the unknown, calculation and consciousness, or spirit and matter. Holding on to what Lem called the Cosmos’s “strange, icy sovereignty”, Black Frieze (figs. 6, 7) invited feeling, albeit of a perplexing kind.
[1] Stanisław Lem, Solaris (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2002), 184–185.
[2] Ibid., 40.
[3] Stanisław Lem, “Cosmology and Science Fiction”, Science Fiction Studies 4, no. 2, July 1977, 108.
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