_______
We are subject to the production of fact by power and not
We can regulation another than by producing truth....
Power never ceases its interference, its inquisition,
Your registration of the truth. She institutionalizes,
professionalizes and rewards her search
Michel Foucault, Discrimination Order
The discourse of power is irrevocably entered into human existence, so it is constantly present in both the reflections of philosophers and in artistic activities. Today, 2 opposing positions have been marked in a peculiar way: optimistic, in which within the constantly ongoing discourse it is possible to scope a compromise creating a field for individual freedom and pessimistic, presuming human engagement in structures negating the existence of space for the free improvement of the individual.
Michel Foucault, among others, was a spokesperson for concepts that assumed pessimistic scenarios. The French philosopher, historian and sociologist identified power with force and viewed it as the essence of a symbolic or actual conflict between individuals, which is constantly resumed to guarantee the stableness and unity of a power average based on a network structure and creating a flexible, centreless strategy enslaving all subordinate individuals. In Foucault's view, the existence of this network strategy is guaranteed, among another things, by developing, perpetuating and sustaining the cognition that supports power, which the institutions organising social life gotta watch over. While the positivists perceived cognition as a description of facts explaining reality, Foucault saw a certain subjective communicative in it that allows control of society due to the fact that it provides evaluation criteria and applicable patterns for many individual, social, political, legal, economic, etc. actions shaping the planet of culture. He was of the opinion that control tools remained most frequently hidden from the individual, unrecognized by entering both the psyche, emotions and views, as well as the area of the body, where power imprints the top stigma, deciding, by reason of biopolitics, not only on the functioning of the body normatively classified as "health" or "sick" (according to authoritative narratives inactive in force in the late 1990s, homosexuality was a illness unit!), but even on the life or death of a single man (the death punishment is inactive being carried out in many countries in the world).
Hannah Arendt presented a much more optimistic imagination of power in her deliberations that Foucault did not separate power from violence. In her opinion, power is simply a essential part of human life in society, as a structure it determines the fulfilment of the mission of an individual whose real destiny is to be political activity understood as an action for the benefit of the human community. The German philosopher emphasized the fleeting nature of this structure, prone to demolition and transformation. Although historically conditioned power of established character falls sooner or later, its constant transformations let the accomplishment of social goals, which, in Arendt's view, are the essence of human existence. It criticized people who did not take any action and took no part in the political life of the communities, accusing them of conformism and amicability. On the another hand, she commended crossing the borders of peculiar interests and leaving the safety region to open up to the world. Freedom is something to be developed in the modern world. As a natural phenomenon, she considered the conflict between sovereignty and subordination, while stressing that power ends in a place where multiplicity is replaced by unity and its tools become instruments of violence. Arendt’s optimism was based on religion in the natural morality of man, in the love of neighbour and wisdom, which, in her conviction, set the appropriate framework for achieving compromises that form the lives of communities.
The contemporary works of art reflect almost straight the discourse of power present in philosophy, revealing the multifacetedity of the themes present in it. In order to illustrate the variety of opportunities active in this issue, the curator at the Wilson Glass Gallery in Katowice, the exhibition, Monika Paca-Bros and Irma Kozina, offered cooperation to respective prominent Polish artists, mainly painters, cartoonists, graphic designers and sculptors, but besides to artists reaching for digital media. As part of the show, they presented their works: Zbigniew Bajek, Piotr Desperak, Karolina Fabia, Ilona Chancellor, Pavlo Kazmin, Tomasz Koklęga, Bogdan Król, Marek Kuś, Karolina Lefek, Michał Minor, Marian Oslislo, Joanna Rudzińska, Monika Szwed, Lesław Tetla, as well as participants and participants of social protests shaping today's political life, especially representatives of the Polish feminist social movement National Strike Women and activists of the independent citizens' initiative Free Courts, who agreed to rent for the exhibition artifacts utilized during the demonstration in Poland.
Each of the invited creators referred to another aspect of confronting the individual with the discourse of power. For Zbigniew Bajk, the individual consequence of the man to events related to the demolition of the old regulation structure and the emergence of a fresh 1 takes peculiar importance. The Krakow artist presented this subject in the form of a circumstantial visual diary, prepared from 1982 to 1984. Its series “Road Scenes” consists of a scaled to monumental dimensions “talia 24 cards” with figures pictured in the antithetic strategy and an image of “joker” placed in the mediate of the deck. This joker was conceived as the artist's most reliable self-portrait, constituting a circumstantial mention point for figures in the advanced boxes of cards, presenting diverse emotional states, escalating from helpless to utmost despair. Until a certain point, the lower equivalents of these figures are red-colored rectangles with photographs resembling photographs of identity cards representing faces subjected to various deformations. The red field may have been read as a metaphor of the socialist apparatus of state power, classifying the unit by restrictive regulations that distorted its personality in specified a way that it lost sight and hearing, and the features of its face were clearly distorted. However, government indoctrination has ceased to bring about the effects assumed by the authorities. As a consequence of this abrupt change in the lower field, a massacred bare body appeared, and on the next card, the detention chamber was shown divided into 2 unattached parts: 1 pictured the beaten victims, and the another pictured the militias who played the function of executioners. It is only after this scene that antithetic figures representing the artist's self-portraits begin to adhere more and more. Thus, this cycle can be interpreted as a kind of way of the Fairy Tale to freedom, a journey of personality initially divided, pitching between an individual formatted by power and an independently reasoning rebel, ready to express views contrary to the doctrines of a restrictive state. The end consequence is simply a free individual expressing views corresponding to his intellectual condition.
Piotr Desperak worked on transforming into a painting of human resources from social revolts, recorded by documentaries reporting their observed events. In Desperak's paintings, emotionally charged scenes take on an additional value resulting from their transformation into the language of art. This generates, among another things, a question about the anticipation of reporting fights and conflicts through artistic means, which, by all means, make feelings of an aesthetic nature. Desperak fundamentally did not want to paper circumstantial historical events, although he decided to put out a work documenting the current war in Ukraine, presenting a monumental image with a destroyed home block bomb in Borodzianka. However, this is an exception. In most cases, the scenes presented by him represent street fights in anonymous cities, with anonymous, playable expressive features of the event participants. The artist focuses on reflecting the peculiar tension between police officers defending the order imposed by power and desperate rebels who decide to forcely enforce their right to freedom. A condition of Desperak’s paintings mention to the individual’s powerlessness toward random events erstwhile an unexpected virus pandemic or another cataclysm threatens human life in any region. Then the guardians of order, representing the apparatus of power, act as rescuers, and officials liable for the harmonious functioning of the city or states are seen as a essential component to keep stableness and tranquility in a panic-stricken society. In addition to issues related to the dual function of authorities enforcing power, illustrated, among others, by dissonance between the police-recipe and the police-watchman of public order, Desperak besides raised the question of the usurped authority that man exercises over the animal world. Illustrated by Sergei Eisenstein, who, in order to give credibility to the images of the revolution of 1917, did not hesitate to sacrifice the lives of horses dying tragically on the movie plan. The subject based on the dominance of the relation between man and horse has been present in Desperak's work for respective years. It was previously performed in the postgraduate work of the artist, defended at the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice in 2021.
The thought of the unauthorised and gruesome domination of man over the animal world, utmost in claiming the right to decide on the life and death of zoological species, was besides taken up by Karolina Lefek, who devoted this subject to graphics made as part of a diploma defended in Katowice's ASP just last year. The exhibition at Wilson featured a poignant graphic matrix of her creation, depicting piles of dead animal bodies created by the senseless action of the human predator.
Karolina Fabia, another young postgraduate of the Katowice Academy of Fine Arts, an artist practicing workshop graphics and painting, reached the subject of Christianity analysed by Arendt in the context of the discourse of power. Since Catholicism assumes the unquestionable protection of life, in many respects it falls into conflict with a certain political reality. The solution to this contradiction is to affect religion in politics, which consequently undermines the moral authority of the Church. Fabia's lithographic and painting compositions uncover the resulting inconsistency, compromising spiritual doctrines, and revealing mechanisms of enslavement of believers utilizing false ideologies. Although it must be admitted that the sound of her works can be ambivalent. The image of Christ with fists arranged to engage in boxing can be read at the same time as an allusion to the Church's giving of this character features not entirely consistent with the Bible's message, but on the another hand, it may propose that present we request not so much Jesus-Pacific as a hero willing to fight for his ethical system. It is worth noting that Fabia's works are highly attractive in formal terms. The triptych of Gothic shapes presented by her, whose infernal content is associated with the work of Hieronim Bosch, was mysteriously reflected from the lithographic matrix, and its contrasting colors match the psychedelic art of the hippie era.
As formally elaborate as Fabia's works are exhibited at the Wilson Glass Gallery scrolls of Poznań artist Monika Szwed. In its view, the aspect of the discourse of power is, powerless in its essence, the fight of man against his dependence on the planet of nature. The compositions of this artist introduce the thread of a female struggling with physiological laws and belonging to a circumstantial zoological chain. In 1 of the scenes shown by a woman, urine becomes food for another organisms. In another of the performances, a female is associated with a cosmic cycle with spring procreative instincts that seem to affect her behaviour to the degree that chaotic deer respond to the calling of nature. At the same time, however, a female in the image of Swede can usurp the right to control the surrounding space, enslaving not only the dead objects in her house, but even the animals that accidentally visited her garden. The discourse of power in the images of Monica Swede gains the position of complex dependencies that make man erstwhile a master of the situation, and another time must yield to the laws of Space, against which he turns out to be completely powerless.
The question of man's powerlessness toward the enslavement and overpowering external circumstances was peculiarly expressed in Joanna Rudzińska's works. The artist proposed a two-fold metaphor. On the 1 hand, she showed a character who, by motion and pose, informs the environment about depression – a frequent reaction to the excessive force exerted on the individual by the outside, and on the another hand offered the viewer a circumstantial hiding place: a cocoon made of pieces of cardboard. This cocoon can be interpreted as a peculiar method to deal with the attack of undesirable external stimuli, which the artist has carefully worked in specified a way that their creative “working” causes transformation, turning a possible aggressor into a shelter that brings comfort and relief. Ultimately, this shelter is no longer needed, and defeating our own weaknesses is tantamount to the act of destroying the cocoon. The issue of stress work and the fight against adversity, which can control us by taking distant our desire to live, was addressed by Rudzińska in reasonably specific, invoicing-various image compositions made from the paper messages sued in rolls. The artist included in her works a message about the therapeutic effect of art, offering viewers to deal with difficulties through creative actions.
Otherwise, the issue of power discourse is represented by Tomasz Koklęga, who for respective decades has created figurative sculptures for public spaces. 2 of the human-like figures displayed by him, devoid of heads, seem to be making neckless movements to keep mysterious bullets. 1 of these bullets is gold, the another is glass, reflecting the outside planet upside down. They can be a metaphor of any ideas or desires (powers, money, fame, etc.) that man allows himself to be completely overpowered and enslaved. The 3rd character of Koklęga stands rather calmly on 2 strong legs, holding a mask in his hands. Inside it is simply a slot-like gap in the coin acceptor. It can be interpreted as a ready individual each time to apply a face adjusted to the amount of money thrown into the acceptor. Thus, for Koklęga, the discourse of power is purely abstract and straight related to the worldview that we choose as a life direction indicator.
Our weaknesses resulting from the adoption of a circumstantial ethical strategy are devoted to 2 paintings delivered for exhibition by Bogdan Król. Although their effect is not conclusive, they depict the naked, deformed body of people filling the mysterious sectors A and B. possibly this is an allusion to various kinds of classifications that introduce elite divisions, which make us halt acting freely due to the fact that we aspire to be in the ellipse of chosen people. In the images of the King, all represented men are equal, equal to each other, distinguished only by the background on which they appear. It is erstwhile gold, and another time platinum. specified a view can be read as an allusion to actual life relationships in which the position of a given individual depends mostly on external circumstances.
It seems that the King's message is close in his pronunciation to the work of another of the creators, Mark Kuś, who for respective decades has been presenting image fields filled with schematically scratched figures in the outsides resembling the form of a swimmer. The artist usually explains that from his point of view all men are equal. There are no reasonable grounds for treating any as anointed rulers and others as slaves. Everyone has a natural right to freedom, although no uncertainty life circumstances can force a individual to take a certain attitude. Significantly, the “swimming” Kius seems to be a rhythmic decision to decision upwards. While for a long time these characters were drawn or engraved on metallic plates in steel-gray-grafi shades, respective years ago – at the time of the planet crisis and the covid pandemic – the artist decided to give them vivid contrasting colors: red, blue and yellow. In the space of the Wilson Glass Gallery, Kusia's paintings gained additional metaphorical meaning as they filled the walls of 1 of the rooms in layouts resembling stained windows of Christian temples. Suspended in the center of this system, filled with densely coloured human form shapes, the form of a collist, divided into 4 parts, may be associated with the disfigured Earth-Parent. The dismemberment of the wheels into unequal parts does not make a feeling of fear in the viewer, but, on the contrary, it seems to provoke the message that even deep divisions and divisions have a deeper meaning, and crises lead to purification, which gives man an chance to become even better in order to last life in a more valuable way.
The virtue that has been placed on the pedestal by conceptual artist Ilona Chancellor is the value besides distinguished in Hannah Arendt's philosophical system, which is commitment to political life, the beginning of which may become participation in local or national elections. Katowice's creator gives his viewers an intellectual mystery, prompting them to reflect on how much an election urn can transform into an urn- coffin, in which the ashes will be laid after the final annihilation of our dreams and election desires.
The paintings and installations of the artist of Ukrainian origin, Pavlo Kazmina, surviving in Tarnowskie Góry may encourage even more active participation in political life. This young ASP postgraduate always emphasizes that as an artist he was born on Euromaidan in Kiev. He was active in protests by Ukrainians against the power of Viktor Yanukovich. He learned to make painting posters in which figure motifs function as a metaphor of the message character to provoke a social reaction. Often, he goes to gross literality in his actions. It depicts, for example, a giant vagina – "rod" (rodina – homeland), attacked by a tank in the form of a giant penis, thus expressing a belief of the male nature of violent warfare. It is not unreasonable, especially in the face of information about Russian aggressors, who commonly rape Ukrainian women, joining the business of bloodyly conquered villages or cities. Kazmin doesn't run distant from hard themes either. In respective compositions it refers to the complex issue of “Russianity” of Ukrainian lands, representing, for example, the gradual emergence of yellow-blue colors from the red flag, decorated with a sickle and a hammer, which has successfully stigmatized Ukrainian identity for decades. Due to household associations Pavlo Kazmin has been in Poland for many years, for any time engaged in political activities of his advanced Silesian friends. At the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian War, however, he ceased to create. Art failed as a way to deal with hard experiences. The paintings exhibited in the Glass Wilson can so be treated as the painter's youthful work. It is hard to foretell what kind of art he will be practicing erstwhile he overcomes the creative paralysis that is presently controlling him. The allusion to wait for change is an empty shelter set up by Kazmin, which is to be a kind of invitation for us to participate actively in the fight for liberation from the regulation of all usurpers.
Lesław Tetla's installation, documenting a camp for Syrian refugees, organized on the Greek island of Leros, besides refers to the actual events. The viscques arranged by the artist are a peculiar tribute to hundreds of lives suffering from the politics of the authorities of countries belonging to the European Union – completely insensitive to the destiny of people who were prevented from surviving in decent conditions. The video presented on the tv screen is simply a evidence of a journey made by Tetla, which penetrated the hard-to-access corners of Leros, documenting the brutal experiences of refugees locked in camps no different from prison for criminals. The intense golden hoove photographed in the movie erstwhile swimming to the shores of the island turns out to be an intense light illuminating the area of the exile camp 24 hours a day, disrupting the nightlife of the people gathered there. The transmission of Tetla in certain circles may seem even controversial. Professionally connected with the Katowice Academy of Fine Arts, the artist offers us a look at the refugee, not as an intruder trespassing on the forbidden land, but as a neighbour who needs our aid and demands empathy due to those suffering and excluded.
The issue of the conflict for freedom and commitment to political action besides appeared in works by Marian Oslo and Michał Minor. Oslislo presented a solidarity poster, designed by him in the early 1980s, and invited visitors to participate, setting cartons and spray sprays on the wall, which were intended to service as their own banner for the demonstration. In Minor, however, creative freedom is expressed in an expressive colour stain by which the artist composes scenes referring to current political events. On his 2 canvases appear not only expressive silhouettes, but besides inscriptions which constitute an allusion to the wars and another kinds of political disputes presently underway.
These banners and another props, which were utilized during real manifestations organized by the Free Courts and the National Women's Strike, were added to the message formulated in the works of individual artists. Their pronunciation is usually unambiguous. They mention to the circumstantial decisions of the authorities to appoint certain judges, or to the fight of women for the right to choose to carry their own offspring. any exhibits are a mention to wider cultural phenomena. This is the case, for example, in the case of the alleged costume shown on the exhibition. Handwritten – heroines of the fresh about feminist sound, written by Margaret Atwood and popularized by later cinema and tv screens.
The Wilson artists and social activists proved that the discourse of power could be considered on many levels. Not only do individuals organized into developed social formations conflict with it, but besides individuals entering into certain relationships with another man, animal, or even with inanimate objects or abstract ideas. On many levels, we usually construct hierarchical structures in which there are expressive divisions between governments and those who, of their own will or of compulsion, are subjected to a process of subordination, not always uncovering the strength to fight for their freedom.
