All the Missiles Are One Missile Revisited: Dazzle in the Work of Zofia Kulik

Abstract

This essay revisits one of Polish artist Zofia Kulik’s most important ‘photocarpets’, produced in a moment of hope, retrospection yet continuing war in 1993; seen by an international public in 1997. Visually, its composition is dominated by late Soviet sculptures symbolising Mother Russia and military aggression, yet the composition, ‘kilim-like’, with an additional reference to Polish Catholicism, involves bilateral and rotational symmetries which undermine significations of power and might with various other symbols: bodies, naked or draped, and Polish TV screenshots from both the military and entertainment worlds. ‘Dazzle’, the camouflage-related military term is also related to tears and (repressed) mourning. The female artist’s attitude to gender is crucial. The piece is both a ‘revisualisation’ and ‘rewriting’, relating both to the author’s previous texts on the artist from 1999 and 2001, and Kulik’s own rediscovery of her Ukrainian heritage, which reframes her own vision and understanding of the piece in 2022.

And now, after 24 February when the Russian aggression came to Ukraine—the second wave came to me in looking at ‘my place and time’. All the Missiles are One Missile —it is a work that again or even more today seems to be so ‘current’.

Zofia Kulik, 3 July 2022

The fundamental substance of an epoch and its unheeded impulses illuminate each other reciprocally.

Siegfried Kracauer, Mass Ornament, 19271

All the Missiles are One Missile (Wszystkie pociski są jednym pociskiem), 1993, was a focus of discussion on my first visit to Zofia Kulik in November 1998 (Figure 1).2 This great ‘photocarpet’ (3 × 8.5 m), in an edition of three, now resides in Kraków’s Mocak Museum of Contemporary Art, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris and a private collection.3 Kulik is an internationally revered figure, especially so in the artworlds of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw-based, she has constructed a major body of work, while simultaneously constituting the definitive archive of avant-garde art in her country over the last few decades, including photography-based, performance and video pieces—many her own or created with her partner as the duo ‘KwieKulik’.4 She has preserved the very soul of Polish Conceptual art; she has mentored generations of young curators, collaborators and academics, and generated the most audacious contemporary scholarship.5

All the Missiles are One Missile dominated Kulik’s solo show in the Polish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of 1997 after an extensive tour (Kulik 1997).6 It was an astonishing installation, looking both forward and backward during the transitional period of the engagement of former Soviet satellite territories with the contemporary world, and created specifically during the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina.7 But for an issue of Arts devoted to Eastern European visuality, this individual work is exceptional. Its visual complexity is compounded by a perceptual challenge linked to an emotional depth relating to content, history and memory. It is in itself both an éclatement—an explosion and shattering of meaning—and simultaneously an archive where memory and amnesia struggle for supremacy. The revisiting of the work, so current today as Kulik emphasises, is an act of revisualisation in tragic times, while also an act of textual revisiting, of rewriting.

When I first landed in snowy Warsaw in November 1998, Zofia took me to Łomianki, to her house of many stories (Piotrowski 1999).8 Our communication with each other was hesitant: a guessing game in English and Polish punctuated with Żubrówka vodka and flashes of illumination. The most powerful moment came when Zofia revealed that All the Missiles are One Missile as a title originated in T. S. Eliot’s Notes to The Wasteland of 1922: ‘All the women are one woman’.9 This act of renaming—the refiguration of masculine content by the artist—confirmed an alternative secret. Despite the Soviet bleakness of the work’s content, its imagery of power, submission and of imposed socialist realism, Eliot himself, his voice and his poetry are covertly preserved. The Stalinist desire to impoverish language and to eradicate European heritage—psychoanalysis as well as literature—formed part of our discussion. ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins’ … Eliot’s line resonated in my own theatre of memory.10

Simultaneously, then, with its visual complexity, All the Missiles are One Missile is an aural palimpsest. Once the title is known and understood, the spectator is taken beyond the visual, beneath the surface. Kulik’s verbal substitution, both ironic and tragic, relates to female voices within the polyphonic structure of The Waste Land which Eliot conceived in the aftermath of World War 1. Human losses of unimaginable magnitude were echoed by the bombed and devastated landscapes of Europe. He espoused the persona of the seer Tiresias, who spoke out of time and beyond sexual difference, to depict a historical fresco of fragments redeemed.

All the Missiles are One Missile is likewise a historical fresco of fragments redeemed, in a context of ever-renewed war and bellicosity. At the end of my catalogue essay for the Poznan retrospective with its forward-looking title, From Siberia to Cyberia written in March, 1999 (the very month Poland joined NATO), I was compelled to add a post-scriptum: ‘This essay was completed a few days before the NATO bombing of Serbia and the tragic renewal of genocide policies in Kosovo’. Now thirty years of exchanges between Russia and the west are endangered: warm relationships between new generations of intellectuals, writers and curators, using old and new means of communication. The skies darken; warfare has opened up to cyberwarfare; yet Russia’s use of Second World War army material, vehicles, weapons and indeed anti-nazi propaganda reactualises All the Missiles are One Missile; its dazzle not only evokes issues of visuality, of seeing, but again tears, renewed mourning.

To start with, why a ‘photocarpet’ (Kulik’s term)? Evidently the work is constituted of black and white photographic elements, arranged with a dizzying repetition yet a forceful symmetry. In size and visual impact, Kulik references the polonaise or Polish kilim, part of the familiar behind-the-bed decor of so many Polish homes. The kilim’s zig-zag symmetrical patterns relate back to Turkish influences from the Ottoman empire: ‘Our South is Turkish half-moons and horsetail ensigns, Persian tents and carpets, coats of mail and robes, those knightly customs and splendours which the chroniclers of the gentry called “Sarmatic”’.11 The history of the transmission of ornament and of information relates directly, always, to histories of conquest (Jones 1986).12 The kilim retained ancient motifs in themselves female, such as the triangular or diamond-shaped body with outward-facing hooks: the ‘arms akimbo’ motif known as the elibelinde. Another shocking statement by Zofia came from that first interview: ‘In the form of my mother I put the content of my father’. Her mother, a dressmaker, lived in the ‘soft’ world of kilims, embroideries and printed cottons, visits from elegant clients and fashion talk, where cutting out a dress pattern became an occasion for careful economy, skilful artistry. Yet, looking out of the window, Kulik watched out for her father performing in countless military exercises: changing geometric formations on the parade ground.13

After the recognition of format comes the recognition of greyness, the greyness of multiple black and white photographs seen from a distance. Occupied first by the Nazis and subsequently by the Soviets, with over six million war dead, Poland’s boundaries shifted radically once more as it became a one-party, Stalinist state by 1947. The greyness of Poland as Soviet satellite pervades Czesław Miłosz’s (1953) Zniewolony umysł (The Captive Mind), with its analysis of Eastern doublethink and language; greyness as a metaphor was a recurring motif in KwieKulik’s previous performance work (Golinkski 2005).14 The patterns one sees might suggest a comparison with the well-known photomontages of the Soviet modernists, Rodchenko, El Lissitsky or Gustav Kłucis, with his duplicated miniscule Lenins, the repetition of heads in a crowd, of gymnasts, strikers, soldiers, bayonets: a mass glorification of the Revolution. Repetition under socialism was celebratory, a sign of the will to power—all prior to the excesses of the 1930s, the huge tragedies of the war, the expansion of the dystopian empire and its ultimate fall.

All the Missiles are One Missile is dominated by two recognisable Soviet monuments. The left side of the tripartite work celebrates Vera Isaeva and Robert Taurit’s Mother Russia, 1960, a memorial to the thousands of victims of the siege of Leningrad (Figure 2). She is counterbalanced by Lev Golovnitsky’s Rear to the Front, the gigantic, sword-wielding duo from Magnitogorsk of 1979: the worker, back to us, surveys the iron and steel weapon-manufacturing city, the warrior, facing us, looking west towards the sites of the Great Patriotic War (Figure 3). The wreath-like surrounds are made, on the left, of the repeated pattern of a girl bearing swags of material (her head alternately hidden), on the right, a repeated naked man, again bearing drapes, with a phallus-loincloth formed from a pointed flagpole finial. Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate with bullet-shaped skies at the foot of each ‘horizontally-placed church elevation’ (here, Kulik recalls Poland’s Catholic heritage with this mirror-image structuring device) is again war-related, as are the repeated shots of an assassination, arranged in decorative bands (Figure 4), or the blurred skulls of Polish victims of the Katyn massacre. The pale figure of Kulik’s model Zbigniew Libera in various poses appears as a form of punctuation; repeated on black he contrasts with grey hordes of marching soldiers: German, Chinese, Soviet … (Figure 5) Clothed, he has a dominant position on the black ground between the Brandenburg gate motif and the great twin sculpture, complemented symmetrically on the left by the apparition of a Polish academic female nude (Pantaleon Szyndler’s lascivious Eve, 1902) which elicits a degree of proto-feminist contempt from the artist (Figure 6).15

Indeed as a counterpoint there are many female images in All the Missiles…: still frames from TV programmes showing female dancers, the Miss America contest, or Chinese girls singing in praise of Chairman Mao. In March 1993, Kulik was also watching the film Oh les Girls (Figure 7). She never hesitated to add crutch shots from underwater ballet to her composition (Figure 8).16 Inevitably one thinks back to Siegfried Kracauer’s Tiller Girls whose ‘indissoluble girl clusters’ signified a new modern (Kracauer 1995). ‘Only as parts of a mass, not as individuals who believe themselves to be formed from within do people become fractions of a figure’.17 The ‘reciprocal illumination’ between impulse and epoch that he sees within these practices (see my epigraph) now becomes obscene. The juxtapositions of war and commodified sex compound the information overload in not only Western but ‘Eastern’ TV by this time. The processes would be repeated as Kulik’s photocarpets expanded from All the Missiles … to the huge historical fresco From Siberia to Cyberia, which has likewise received meticulous iconographic treatment and her filmed explanation (Kulik 2004).18 In fact, Kulik’s veritably semiotic analyses of the gestures of the parade, of banners, of flag-waving and of war, anticipate the propos of Georges Didi-Hubermann’s (2016) celebrated exhibition, Uprisings.19 Kulik is a voracious historian of art.

The very premise of grand politics, grand confrontations is, however, collapsed and mocked in All the Missiles are One Missile … Only the two Soviet sculptures stand fast. Kulik’s obsessive duplications and kaleidoscopic principles turns image into madness; bilateral and rotational symmetries dissipate all linear rationality, all hierarchy. The reference to mental instability becomes explicit in figures such as the headless draped female, chosen for the 1994 catalogue cover (Ursula Kwiek, Kwiek’s challenged younger sister posed here). Quantity is also an alibi, while a spatial synchronicity destroys private space, narrative, causality, the blunders of history or the logic of unspeakable crimes. Moreover, yesterday’s live news is now dead, like its protagonists: at the mercy of memory, or today, the zombie resurrections of Vladimir Putin’s fake rhetoric. Let one remember that in All the Missiles are One Missile, beneath the uniform of each robotic soldier, each arm carrying a gun or a banner, is a naked man, a mother’s son.

The process for the creation of All the Missiles are One Missile was highly labour-intensive. Besides rephotography, Kulik’s large TV set (very old-fashioned to my eyes on that first visit) was the source for screen photographs snapped from documentaries, often Soviet, about World War II and its atrocities. The photos were developed in Kulik’s own dark room, with patterns made by the repeat printing of one or more negatives on photosensitive paper while playing with masking to create blank backgrounds and decorative arrangements. Another shock for me in that dark room: Kulik’s white Ilford photographic paper boxes bearing dark photographs of London’s Saint Paul’s Cathedral: so familiar, so estranged in Łomianki.20 I thought at that time of our countries united in war and of Britain’s Blitz, just as I look now at All the Missiles are One Missile, while Russia blitzes Ukraine.

My essay on Kulik, ‘Discovering the Psyche’ was so named precisely because of the dialectical relationship of the artist with mass and the discourse of the mass. The ‘impersonal’ intellectual tools she deployed at the time, from structuralism to mathematics or open and closed forms as analysed by her mentor, Oscar Hansen, were the counterpart to an individual subjectivity and the subjectivities of our encounter: two mutually unknowns engaged in a process of familiarisation which required leaps of historical imagination.21 New interviews corroborate the retrospective strangeness of my experience.22 Our encounter also spins around the concept of ‘dazzle’.

All the Missiles are One Missile cannot be grasped with a ‘look’ or a ‘gaze’. William de Kooning’s words come to me: ‘Content is a glimpse … an encounter like a flash’ (Kooning 1963).23 The counterpoint of black and white camouflages the images, confusing the viewer—the spectator’s viewing distance here is crucial. My Poznan text emphasised the military dimensions of camouflage: dazzle-painting on the sides of ships which conceals identity and number as a counterpoint to Kulik herself, the ‘dazzling’ artist (a doubling surely untranslatable in Polish). I repeat: ‘The psychoanalytic dimension of this unresolved struggle between masculine and feminine, creation and destruction, exposure and hidden identity, accounts for the feelings of both violence and impotence that Kulik has expressed. The body as sign and ensign exists in dazzling tension in the hard/soft, light/dark patternings of the splintering photographic surface’. The entire Manichean structure of the Cold War is expressed here: the dialectic between light and dark as good versus evil, redemption versus damnation. Moral and ethical dimensions are thus imparted via this visual contrast, which exists in a knowing play with ‘materialism’: visual (photographic) representations which from a technical point of view depend upon light itself and its withdrawal, upon the ‘positive’ and the ‘negative’.

When I returned to Kulik’s work in 2001, hoping to extend the exploration of the visual, from language and the psyche to the performative and psychoanalytic, I was wiser. I did not reveal in my new text the shock I felt when discovering Zofia had ‘tested’ me upon our first encounter. She ‘forgot’ to mention Ewa Lajer-Burcharth’s strong reading of Kulik’s post-communist body, recently published. Here, the author mentioned ‘the pang of an exile’s nostalgia’, in the account of her first Western May Day parade in Copenhagen in 1982, and how she ‘burst into tears’ when Italian Communists sang the Internationale at a Bologna rally in 1990.24 Far more than just a ‘pang’ or mere ‘nostalgia’ (a pain for home), the dazzle of tears as mourning for loss or a lost past, is a complex, physiological betrayal of repressed—or positively ‘future-orientated’—attitudes: in Lajer-Burcharth’s case and Kulik’s, the loss of the positive ideologies of a whole Soviet universe. John Webster’s phrase from The White Devil had come instantly to me: ‘Mine eyes dazzle’ (Gunby 1972).25 By this time Jacques Derrida (1990) himself was contemplating Andrew Marvell’s words, ‘These weeping eyes, those seeing tears’—a prelude to his reformulation of the ancient ars lachrimandi (a counterpart to the warlike ars bellandi) into a mourning literature for our times (Brault and Naas 2001; Kuchar 2006).26

I now understood how within Kulik’s post-Soviet ‘photocarpet’, visual imagery was played with and perverted not just as a critique, or an interrogation of historical memory, but as an act of holding, of a making visible as a form of repressed, interrogative mourning.27 What must be factored into the visual encounter—the flash of images—of All the Missile are One Missile? The Soviet demand for labour and self-sacrifice extends from soldiers, heros and mothers to the everyday: Lajer-Burchart declares masochism to be at the core of Eastern European subjectivity.

In this light, how might one develop Tomasz Załuski’s analyses of the ‘political economy of the potboiler’ (chałtura,) as regards KwieKulik (Kulik in tandemwith her partner, Przemyslaw Kwiek), as they dealt with the local command economy of art production to support their avant-garde work? He rightly places KwieKulik, ‘command performers’ as I would prefer to call them, as precursors of Western institutional critique.28 Rather than upholding Załuski’s ‘avant-garde versus potboiler’ antithesis, I would advocate an analysis through Jean-François Lyotard’s notion of libidinal economy and the affiliated exploration of ‘living currency’ (Lyotard 1993; Klossowski 2017).29 Here, making and performing are libidinal investments. Communist imagery, its sculptures and its commemorative plaques were subtended by armies of cheerleaders, wreath layers, the organisers of military, gymnastic or mass processions, and on a microlevel, emotional responses to the visual brilliance of red, or the familiar, the sliced yellow curve of a sickle. In 1970’s Warsaw, KwieKulik’s work for the State was continually commemorative. The visual poetry of their critique at this point is full of emotion: see the white sculptured head fragments—brows with noses, chins with mouths—distributed over red cloth or among precious pale orange slices (Activities with AK Kinga Plaque, 1974)30 Kulik’s work on arrangements of archive material for the ‘October Revolution and Poland’ exhibition in the Lenin Museum in 1977 shows the same care for detail, the ‘care’ in curating, that anticipate her future as curator/archivist, as does her insistence on a well-arranged photograph of this moment. And emotionally—bringing us back to her photocarpets — can one really carve commemorative inscriptions for murdered National Army Soldiers without the slightest emotion? The dazzle of All the Missiles are One Missile, distracting attention from Kulik’s orchestral imagination and the hours of patient craft involved, cannot but conceal a repressed mourning, not only for the loss of bodies and ideologies ‘held’ within the parodic structuring of content, but for past selves, past beliefs and past and present investments of desire itself.

Zofia recalls a greater interest in her ancestors at the time of her breakaway from Kwiek. She has now read a more extensive history. She recently wrote to me about her family: ‘“We” means: my parents, my grandparents, and some other close relatives, all came from today’s Ukraina, Lviv district, after the end of 2ww.’31 Her great-grandmother was the native-born Ukrainian, Tekla Bilozor. In addition she recalls living in the closed military town of Legnica … ‘a town near Wroclaw, where Soviet Army was stationed in years 1945–1993’, where her brother was born in 1946, a year before her own birth in a hospital in Wroclaw … Above all she was moved by an image of her father on military parade with the People’s Army of Poland, sending me a photograph: ‘A small arrow is there that starts from one officer, this is my father and the arrow was made by him’ (Figure 9).32 The Soviet army—who liberated Poland from the nazis, yet became a quasi-occupying force, were symbolically seen off the territory on the anniversary of Poland’s 1939 invasion in 1993, the year All the Missiles are One Missile was conceived.

This simple, ageing photograph of Adam Kulik in Legnica, pointed out with an arrow from a row of identical uniformed and saluting soldiers on a cold day in 1947, offers the intimate seeing experience that is the antithesis to the ‘Eastern European, post-Soviet visuality’ of All the Missiles are One Missile: the dazzling, manipulated, politically critical, archive-perverting exercise viewed by the international art world in Venice in 1997.

Its accumulative meanings and affects resonate with us today.

Post-Scriptum

This text is dedicated to Pavel Filatyev, the Russian soldier whose brave denunciation of his shared experiences was published as ZOV on his social media platform VKontakte on 1 August 2022.33 And Zofia Kulik, of course, refutes me: ‘I do not ‘lament’’ she writes. Via her foundation she is supporting twenty Ukranian women and children, hosted by a local farmer, her friend: ‘I see him as a real hero’.34