SOWERS OF MYTH
Of course the Communist Party has had a strong influence on artists’ careers in each of these countries. In Poland, for example, until 1989 graduation from a party-approved school was required in order to work as an artist. Abakanowicz has written that though she hated the school’s professors and teaching methods, she nevertheless remained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw because the diploma was necessary for membership in the Polish Artists’ Union, without which an artist could have no career. In Czechoslovakia, restrictions on style and content have been severe; only “official” party-approved artists were allowed to teach or exhibit. Not surprisingly, ideas about conformity and the oppression of the individual inform the work of several of these artists.
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The works shown here are also linked by their strong sense of history and juxtapositions of the present with the past. The installation created by IRWIN, for example, contrasts landscapes representing a mythic past with views of modern industrial towns. Past, present, and future are also joined in the installation by Jetelova titled Demystification of a Monument.
Whether viewed as prisoners or soldiers or both, this maimed group confronts us with a powerful image of war’s violence and its erasure of individuality. As a girl during World War II, Abakanowicz saw drunken soldiers fire their weapons at her mother, severing her arm. Her mother survived but lost a hand. One can’t help but admire how Abakanowicz transforms her own painful experiences into an art that speaks eloquently for all who have suffered and survived.
Slovenian Athens is a pastiche of images and objects mounted on both sides of a 12-foot-tall orange and gray freestanding wall. One side features five arched panels, each including a painting showing the silhouette of a sower superimposed on a vibrant landscape; above the sower, in the upper part of each arch, is a Madonna and Child. Each landscape is different–an ocean, a forest interior, a snowy mountain pass, a cave, and a rural village–as are the religious images, which look as though they might be copies of sculptures or frescoes in Yugoslavian churches. Each panel is surrounded by a dark wood frame decorated with cast pewter reliefs of grapes, leaves, and sheaves of grain; below each is a gray marble slab on which the words “Slovenske Atene, IRWIN, 1983-1987” have been carved. This side of the installation takes up the theme of preindustrial history, juxtaposing references to the dawn of time (the sunrise painted over the ocean) with scenes of domestication, agriculture, and organized religion.
