Patrycja Orzechowska

Figures of children leave the pages of the book. Their delicate bodies are carefully extracted from the two-dimensional space of the pages where, until now, their lives have unfolded. There they constantly repeated the same gestures, they constantly performed the same activities. . . . Everything began in 1955, in the year the book was published, the pages of which were filled with these tiny silhouettes. Kinderturnen . . . Children’s Gymnastics¹—this book was intended as a kind of handbook for a child’s correct psychophysical development. Here these little silhouettes repeated into infinity the figures they were told to, figures that are captured here in photographs: bends, squats, jumps. . . . Now they are leaving their safe haven.

And so they lie on the table, cut out and sorted into separate categories. They are thrown suddenly into a three-dimensional world that certainly must seem strange and disturbing. One can only imagine how stressful the cutting out process was for them, how the soft paper gave into the scissors, paper that, stored in some cellar or warehouse, had lasted for decades. Its fragility makes one think of the fragility of the human body presented in the photographs reproduced here. The thought of the scissor blades carefully moving around them brings a nervous twitch to the muscles. With attention I bend over their defenselessness.

Slight human figures lie on the table in piles. The pale bodies of children are like an army of old, forgotten robots continually performing the same somersaults. An army of selected children waiting for a sign to go on with what they are doing. For a short time, waiting for what fate brings them, they seem to lead an illusory life in three-dimensional realities. This life seems as delicate as the fate of an autumn leaf, which, torn from the tree, falls slowly to earth, announcing thereby its inevitable disappearance. The existence of semi-transparent ghosts, which by some strange decree of fate we are able to see for a moment in the mist of a November dawn. But then further changes come! The soft paper is subjected to further procedures. The figures of the children eternalized in 1955 prepare to return to a familiar two-dimensional world.

In its essence collage contains a magic element. It is governed by the principle of unexpected, and even impossible, encounters. What seemed hitherto not real, is now completely actual. As if by magic, fragments of previously distant worlds appear side by side. Distant in various meanings of the word: geographic, temporal, in style, and material. Together they build a new reality, full of surprising turns, and sometimes full of absurdities. And it is thanks to the technique of collage that the figures of children, eternalized sixty years ago in an instructional book by Margot and Urszula Kreisel, can lead a new life. Torn from their endless exercises they meet each other in completely new circumstances.

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It is somewhere in the 1950s, although of course as a result of even earlier changes that took place in Europe and the USA, that a new social group comes into being, above all perhaps a consumer group—that is teenagers. It is now that their fashions are shaped, their lifestyle, which manifest themselves in various subcultural varieties, and which become quite substantial and widespread thanks to the development of a pop culture that is closely connected with this age group. In Europe societies want a break after almost fifty years of conflict, which have resulted in two world wars, and which have passed into the phase of cold war secrecy. They want to get rich, catch up with the increasingly prospering American superpower, and achieve prosperity. Considering that the very concept of the child and of the pre-teen craziness of childhood is in the historical context fairly recent, a new challenge is born. How to raise the younger generation? How to educate children so that they can without (any enlargement of) problems pass calmly into teenage, and later into adulthood?

In that case what does it mean to be adult? In a capitalist reality, growing out of the cold war and the arms race that drives forward all that industrial production of mixers, washing machines, refrigerators, and other innovative technological miracles, it means, above all, the most fruitful embodiment of productive powers that are capable of making purchases. It is a matter of being able oneself to take part in creating some product, and to be simultaneously an active purchaser of products made by others. Who, then, is a child? A future producer-consumer, who because he/she lacks the ability and the material means cannot yet produce and consume. However they can take part in family choices of consumer goods, which in time will become more and more important. Those who try to avoid the duties and privileges imposed on them are a-social individuals suffering from various, better and better classified, ailments. The task of public education is the optimum preparation of children for their future participation in a society that is principally understood thus.

Of course, there are various models of child-rearing and their preferences. Some people opt for the harsh discipline of the unconditional inculcation of rigid principles; others, however, speak in favor of so-called stress-free rearing, which is supposed to make it possible for the child to develop freely. The sight of passively trained children can be as depressing as any chance contact with children whose parents, consumed by their own affairs, have given them almost complete freedom of action. It is difficult to balance extreme approaches so that in the future lessons received in childhood may bring any given individual the greatest degree of profit. This is all the more so because people differ even from their own parents, and sometimes seek something else in life from what they do. As a result a considerable number of people devote time and money as adults, so that in the company of therapists of once again various schools they can “heal themselves” of their own parents and the vision of the world that was once given them by those parents.

But parents are only the base of this educational ice-berg. That monument is built of teachers and pedagogues of various hues, with whom kind fate has brought us into contact during our lives. Of course, those from childhood are the most important, just as the events that happen at that time shape us. The child’s mind, soul, and developing body are particularly susceptible to influences, and (accompanying this) to wounds that will later turn up in adult life. Belief that the mind to a certain degree shapes the body, and vice-versa that conscious work with the body can bring measurable effects for the mind, such a belief is present even in a materialist culture like the Euro-American one, also called Western culture. Arnold Schwarzenegger has often told how by will power when young he formed his muscles by imagining every day for several hours what he wanted them to look like. But certainly, as we can imagine, that was not the only training the future governor of California engaged in.²

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The two-dimensional paper figures of the children pile up on the table, waiting for their new life. An army of flatlanders, who have managed to escape from their limited, faded, black-and-white world of 1955. Deserters from the past, from a sterile time held motionless on the pages of a handbook. Here they passed a truly boring existence. Their task was to present how to perform given exercises. But also to present how not to do them. Did anyone ever open this book? A few used copies were bought by Patrycja Orzechowska via the Internet. The German original and the Polish translation date from the same time. What was their reception? Were they popular? I know nothing about that.

The figures of the children are more or less the same size. Dressed almost identically in one-piece gym suits, they have very similar hair—both the girls and the boys in the collages have short haircuts. They make up a homogenous, little, black-and-white, faded crowd. It’s hard to find any individuality here. But still, ignoring the repetition of the faces of the same children (the artist, as we have said, used several copies of the book that were available to her), these are actual individuals who once existed and who perhaps are still alive. Their biographies, like their names, are unknown to me. For sixty years they have existed here in the form of a flat game fixed in a photographic frame of light and shadow. Patrycja liberates these flatlanders from the fetters of this frozen, monotonous existence. Literally, by means of her scissors, she cuts them out from their context. Silently she plans for them another life.

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And so we see them afresh. The silhouettes of children cut from the pages of the book fill the abstract spaces of the collages. They are now suspended in an unconfined, conventionalized space, which in its symbolic ascetic quality suggests the medieval gold that points to the existence of an ideal, heavenly world, before which the enigmatic life proceeds of hieratic saints with their heads eternally all at the same height. Here, however, the word ascetic takes on a very concrete meaning, for the collages are done on bare card that frankly reveals the coarseness of the paper. Among others, in the series Undergrounds it appears, too, in the form of a sandpaper background of sorts, summoning up in its dark abrasiveness a whole range of associations, which range on different levels of meaning among issues of the resistance and weight of matter and the ineluctable transience of such delicate entities as newspaper or human skin. Dominating these compositions, its presence constitutes a very strong contrast in relation to the majority of works of the cycle, lightly suspended as they are in a space that has no credible support or points of reference.

The silhouettes of children floating in those spaces filled with “air,” existing always in the context of rather enigmatic objects, of constructional frames bringing a kind of order. It gives to the bodies a decorative aspect. Twisted as a result of constantly performing gymnastic exercises, they build the main points of tension within enigmatic, austere arrangements. The children climb on constructions that resemble metal racks of some prototype equipment (Skeletons) or also hang at ease from non-existent flying machines (Black Holes). The highlighting of an ornamental value (as, for example, in Structures, or particularly in Ornaments) is a cunning way of asking questions about subjectivity. The anonymity of the human figures achieves in several of these collages such a degree of concentration that existence in this form becomes problematic, and we start to ask questions relating to the possibility of treating the human body in this decorative way.

Patrycja Orzechowska is a person whose sensitivity permits her to ask awkward questions where few people are able consciously to see the ethically problematic nature of certain iconographic patterns that have been repeated for centuries. The ethically problematic quality of seemingly innocent ornament. Working on a series of collages, the artist has associated the anonymous figures of children from a German book published in the mid-fifties with the sculpted faces of putti, faces that fill the interior of a local church visited on walks – the famous Oliwa Cathedral in Gdańsk. This discovery very clearly dug secret subcutaneous paths in the artist’s imagination, just as cunning beetles try to build their passages within wooden sculptures. In old photographs of the church that she showed me, the heads of putti—those heavenly children—pitilessly separated from their torsos, float at ease among vortices of cloud. These clouds now seems to have as their main task to cover up this fact, a drastic one in the context of the realia of our earthly corporeality.

The iconography of the church speaks unexpectedly in a more direct manner in one of the last series of the cycles, in Monstrances, although here, too, it remains in fact only the suggestion of a shape. It is as if a religious symbol had been secularized, a symbol now taken over by an imagination that is the expression of another vision of the world. Patrycja’s gesture, however, seems more critical, meta-narrative, than something that generates some new ideological meanings. In any case, it raises associations, which are not without a critical undertone, with the procedure of the expropriation of religious iconography by totalitarian systems that avail themselves of the cult of the individual and the fetishism of worldly sanctity. Systems in which human masses, gathered on a work day over the workbench, and on holidays on great demonstrations, constitute only a collection of anonymous elements, an ornament of bodies flowing into space.

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A part of the secularized iconography adopted by totalitarian systems is the cult of heroes, which are a kind of bridge linking the divine leader with the human mass that does him homage. The heroes’ bodies are the bodies of demigods: scaled upwards, vast, and full of power. Bodies that are capable of superhuman deeds, doing two hundred percent of the worker’s norm, or making the greatest effort a sportsman can. . . . Somewhere in the background of the story about a German book that was printed in 1955 and that demonstrates a set of exercises suitable for a child at a certain age, there lurk unsettling glimmers of associations with the fascist cult of the healthy, highly-trained body. It is difficult not to think of such a significant context of time and place. However, it may be—and in conversation Patrycja confirms this idea— that the book was, in fact, produced as an antidote. In this context, a somewhat paradoxical attempt to realize a dream of creating a system for the healthy development of the young generation.

The last thing that I have learned about the context of the book’s production is an eloquent fact relating to the fates of its young protagonists. The children who demonstrate in the photographs how the prescribed exercises should be done are orphans from a children’s home in the former GDR. The year is 1955, and so not much time has passed since the end of the war. It may be that part of these children lost their parents in the circumstances of the denazification programs conducted in Germany by a variety of methods, programs that were particularly intense in the zone under Soviet occupation. Apart from the time when the photographs were made, this is the only piece of information that I have regarding the children, but it allows me to feel the way in which a collective fate is constructed—composed of many elements, of individual human histories. The fragility of the paper silhouettes juxtaposed with the austere constructions of Letters or Skeletons now takes on an exceptional after-taste of the tragic. It suggests thoughts about the unique transience of a life caught up in the context of a hostile time and place. An exceptional dramatic quality accompanies the collages from the series Remains. It is built up by the quite unusual use of material that by its very powerful literalness makes it possible to avoid the banal. Remains are made of elements produced as a result of the cutting up of paper in the course of making previous series. These are rejects, cut out, “lame” fragments, which, lovingly gathered by Patrycja, become now the main protagonists of several compositions.

Fragments of figures, standing on a shape unambiguously that of a seven-branched candlestick, looking upwards, into the emptiness of a background-sky. It is an emptiness which, even if we are three-dimensional persons, we are not capable of understanding unambiguously—for some it is a disturbing, or even terrifying, enigma; for others it is a vision that brings refreshment. One could think that the figures of the children inscribed in the flat forms of letters constitute an extreme imaging of the subordination of the human individual to some overriding idea. For this is in fact just a matter of pure decorativeness, clear projection, typography, in which questions from the field of ethics appear ridiculous and inadequate. And yet there is in these children’s figures something that gives sustenance to such questions, questions that at first creep hesitantly in. And one more thing: some kind of carefree vitality of the bodies that are subject to these gymnastic arrangements, a vitality that—despite everything—does not permit unambiguous interpretation. The dynamism and the at times unbridled mobility of the human forms within the image give these compositions an energy that is hard to grasp, that we can interpret as potential for change. The children’s bodies mounting in twists and turns finally have something of the luminous atmosphere of the bee hive.

The image of the seeming chaos of the bees’ kingdom, which is of course a perfectly organized, hierarchical structure, may take us back to our point of departure. That is 1955, when European society, which had succeeded in defeating one of its totalitarian systems, rose from the rubble of war in order to build up, over the following decades, the myth of the power of capitalism. But here we are in the German Democratic Republic, in other words, in a place which for the next forty years will be under the power of a communist country with a politics that is no less aggressive than that cultivated in fascist Germany. But we look at all this from the perspective of our time, twenty-five years after the liberation of the first countries from Soviet power and after the reunification of Germany. But also from the perspective of the defeat of capitalism. There is something strangely optimistic in these collage compositions, in which the principal role is played by small orphans cut out completely from their original context, freed from the shackles of history, time, and place. With joy they fill up new territories and continue their game. Because that’s the way children are, a little like animals, a little like gods.

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Once when I was a little girl, I was being looked after by my grandmother. My parents, younger than I am now, were going to a party. As they left, my mother said: “Today there’s a great film on TV! It’s called The Wall and you have to see it!” I watched it with my grandmother, who was terrified and constantly tried to prevent my watching it. “It’s not a film for children! You shouldn’t watch it!” It was clear, however, that she could not ignore the argument of parental authority. They had “ordered me to watch” the film, and so we watched it to the end. It’s probably not, however, just because of this taste of controversy that what I saw and heard then has assumed an important place in my memory and imagination. Thinking of it from the perspective of later years, this film seems one of the most important things that shaped me.

„All alone, or in two’s,
The ones who really love you
Walk up and down outside the wall.
Some hand in hand
And some gathered together in bands.
The bleeding hearts and artists
Make their stand.
And when they’ve given you their all
Some stagger and fall, after all it’s not easy
Banging your heart against some mad bugger’s wall”³.