Patrycja Orzechowska

The inner landscape of the body
is connected with love and death:
the lover and the killer
are its privileged explorers.
Konstanty A. Jeleński¹

In the picture you can see a man. He is posing in front of a grove. Looking awkward, as if frightened, confused. His hands clumsily hold somebody’s ankles, their legs drooping lifeless to the ground. The torso of the body that the man is holding disappears into the grass, covered with a frock. Upon closer inspection you will notice that the passive body shown in the picture is not dead, but it is in fact artificial. The man is posing with a female dummy, and the picture was taken from the crime scene investigation records connected with Joachim Knychała, a man suspected of being a serial rapist and murdering women. This image as well as other photographs from the crime scene investigation, employed by Patrycja Orzechowska in her exhibition presented at the Silesian Museum, were taken from the archives of the Criminal Investigation Department of the Regional Headquarters of the Citizen’s in Katowice; Patrycja Orzechowska obtained them from the Katowice Regional Court. The series of pictures has been provided with a laconic informative description and given an enigmatic title Eksperymenty [Experiments].

The choice of this word as a commentary about the activities of law enforcement bodies aiming at reconstructing and then solving the mystery behind the murders implies a perversely impersonal approach. It provokes many questions; who is meant to be the object of the experiments, and who is meant to carry them out? Would the experiments be the reconstructed acts of Knychała and would their object be the bodies of maltreated women? Or would the experimenters actually be militia officers performing procedures in which crimes are being reconstructed in a theatrical style and it is the suspect himself who is the object of the experiment? Although most people associate activities of serial killers with cold calculation that is typical of psychopathic personalities, who are incapable of feeling empathy, there seems to be a hint of passion about the murderous act itself—a powerful feeling produced in the murderer through a direct contact with the victim—that is the ultimate contact which results in release from tension, thereby eliminating emotions. Referring to activities of a killer as experimental would imply an experiment, which involves an emotional connection between the investigator and the “object of investigation.” Formalised measures connected with homicide investigation, however, appear to be completely devoid of emotion. It is their impartial nature that is supposed to aid the pursuit of truth. Reconstructed through activities of a law enforcement body, the murder is automatically elevated to the sphere of representation, and by the same token the potential objects of the experiment—the suspect himself and the theoretical victim of his own “experiments”—become subject to control, subject to the viewer.

This kind of visual situation recurring in a sequence of images made of archival materials and photographs choreographed by Patrycja Orzechowska, provided with an informative description and an individual title which often provokes anxiety or horror, constitutes the main theme of the exhibition Love and Medicine: An Anthology. Inside a kaiserpanorama, which has been on permanent display in the Katowice museum, series of pictures move one after the other, including Rany [Lacerations], Święte sińce [Holy Bruises], Syphilis, Ciało obce [Foreign Body], Ciało pedagogiczne [Pedagogic Body], Antyciała [Antibodies] or Historia spojrzeń [A Story of Glances]. The sequence remains the same and it is only the beginning of the narrative that changes, namely, it always depends on where the last viewer left off.

Accordingly, the choice of Experiments as the beginning of my analytical narrative revolving around Patrycja Orzechowska’s project is arbitrary insofar as it corresponds with the logic of her strategy of representation. Having said that, in the complex and mosaic-like structure of the project, which undoubtedly calls for a holistic approach, namely multiple viewings and comparisons that facilitate a reconstruction of meanings, the pictures illustrating the crime scene investigation mentioned earlier are a synthetic commentary on the artist’s strategy as an investigator. At the same time, they work as a metaphor of a situation which occurs during the exhibition, where the viewers are encouraged, or, to put it more accurately, urged to look into the very ‘bowels’ of Silesia using the optical instrument she has prepared. The title of the exhibition, however, seems to imply the artist’s more universal interests, which are not directly connected with the local context. The combination of two notions, “love” and “medicine” has been complemented by a term, which enhances the universal character of the exhibition as it signifies Patrycja Orzechowska’s desire to anthologise some representative works. What we come across here is a selection of certain phenomena taken from the cultural landscape of Upper Silesia, which has become a physical foundation for her investigations. The actual meaning of the title results from a semantic tension between the notions. The term “medicine,” which has a more scientific ring to it, seems to project the way in which—from the artist’s perspective—one can understand the broad category that is “love.”

In view of Patrycja Orzechowska’s creative activities, the abstract notion of “love” can only be perceived in physical terms. Human body, a body that is trapped in the context of social control apparatus in particular, constitutes one of the artist’s chief preoccupations and spheres of research, so to speak. At the same time, the efforts to learn the truth about an experience hiding behind an abstract notion are carried out using investigation tools inspired by a scientific discourse that has a slightly positivist flavour. This implies a sense of inadequacy, which echoes a desire to look for an almost mystical plan, in Love and Medicine. The aspect, which organises and structures the project on a methodological level, however, is a reference to the operation of the apparatus for investigation mentioned earlier, which is connected with the scientific aura of the late nineteenth century. Patrycja Orzechowska materialises it in her exhibition through the kaiserpanorama—a special device, which is a combination of an optical apparatus used for objectified cognition and a machine devised to bring cultural entertainment for the middle classes. The experience of watching a raree-show generates a feeling of closeness to and at the same time of distance from the displayed objects, namely, images. This type of ambivalence also aptly describes the specificity of the investigational approach, which is characteristic of modern medical discourse that has developed in the world of the late industrial period.

Regarding Patrycja Orzechowska’s use of this device, it may seem worthwhile to refer to Hans Bellmer whose art she has also seen as one of her major inspirations. In 1933, Bellmer began an artistic undertaking that he would be always associated with most strongly. Born into a Silesian family of engineers, tyrannised by his father, after having moved from Kattowitz (now Katowice, Poland) to Berlin the artist earned a living by doing precise technical drawings. He was roused from his artistic stupor by his mother who gave him a present—a box of artefacts from his childhood days. Sometime after this discovery, when he visited his parents’ home in Bad Carlsruhe (now Pokój, Poland), he initiated an “undertaking of his life,” inspired by his observation of little girls undergoing treatment for tuberculosis at the local orphanage. Aided by his brother, he built his first Doll—an incredibly perverse artificial girl. He thought, however, that this prototype doll was lifeless, wooden. Thus, his first innovation involved imbuing the doll with “an inner life through constructing six ‘panoramas’, which can be viewed inside her by pressing a button on her breast. These are: a ship wandering about in the Arctic ice, a scarf decorated with, say, little girls’ phlegm, some sweets, suggestive sketches illuminated by a myriad of colours.”² In this way, the belly of the Doll became a sort of a “physical raree-show,” a comprehensive hyperbole of the modern desire that is dependent on the power of glance, verging on a compulsive need to look into human body and comprehend its functions. At the same time, “the Doll [which] rejects any temptation to appeal to intellect” became a protest against all normative systems or institutions and one of “the most effective ways to disenchant that have ever been devised by mankind to throw off the shackles of all control systems imposed on it by the institution of family and work and kept up in political regimes of all countries—the shackles that everyone confronts in their lives.”³

The problem of the modern desire to look into the human body and to subject it to the power of glance, juxtaposed with the need to throw off the shackles of normative control mechanisms, is visible both in Bellmer’s Doll and in Patrycja Orzechowska’s raree-show. It has been discussed in a similar manner in the writings of the twentieth-century theorists, critics of normative mechanisms operating in modern society. One of the very first publications to have commented on the phenomenon of normativisation, a normativisation of health in particular, was Georges Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological. The idea, which was first developed by the theorist of medicine in his Essai sur quelques problèmes concernant le normal et le pathologique, in 1943, emphasised a necessity to apply individualised standards when describing heath of an individual patient. Expressed in the essay and elaborated on in the treatise, his theories accentuating the need to consider diverse life experiences of people are also a protest “against the privileged biological perspective of positivism [ … ].”⁴

The omission of people’s live experiences, in this tradition, as well as a reference to the origin of the effect of norm and normality in modern societies were also discussed in Michel Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic. The reference to the author of The History of Sexuality in the context of Patrycja Orzechowska’ art is obvious, but also essential, chiefly because of the fact that the artist seems to have been building her apparatus for investigation in a manner that is analogous to Foucault’s Archeology of Knowledge—which clearly transpires in Love and Medicine.

This methodological aspect is clearly indicated by one of the pictures the artist has employed in the exhibition. Entitled Pedagogic Body, it shows a group of children performing physical exercises under the supervision of a teacher, in a large room. The caption below the image provides more information. The children shown in the picture, which was taken in 1926, are patients of the Psychiatric Hospital in Rybnik. Unlike Canguilhem, Foucault presented the problems of norm—including the norm of mental health, which lies at the core of the artist’s Silesian project—in terms of a collective experience inherent to historical mechanisms. Foucault describes the origin of how the notion of norm has operated in society: as an epistemological model that organises cognition—and a political model that controls behaviour.⁵ In his portrayal of the individual’s contact with the category of norm, the actual individual experience is eliminated completely in order to show the experience of the individual, which is inherent to historical narrative that is anonymous and yet collective. In Foucault, one’s confrontation with the phenomenon of a modern clinic is devoid of any individuality. It is focused on the figure of the doctor, who is given the opportunity to broaden his objectivised knowledge, rather than on the patient—in the clinic the doctor can “improve his own experiences through establishing contact with the patient and observing his experience (‘medical view’) expressed in institutional terms, which determine it as an acknowledged and controllable social experience.”⁶

An interesting picture of medical institutions’ impact on society and the individuals who constitute it emerges from the writings of both theorists. Modern medicine as an instrument to learn an objectified truth of the world makes people subjected to medical procedures develop a sense of anonymity, which results from attributing them a condition that is compatible or incompatible with the norm. Besides, this model points to the importance of keeping control over one’s body.

In cultural writings from around the year 1900, one can easily come across echoes of such paradigm of knowledge. The title of Patrycja Orzechowska’s project immediately brings to mind the classical novel by Michał Choromański. It is symptomatic, if only for the fact that what Jealousy and Medicine focuses on are problems connected with the influence of modern, medicalised thinking on interpersonal relationships, especially those of a sexual nature. The impact of clinical medicine reverberates in the description of the main character’s passion. Widmar, an old—and I’m using the term loosely—industrialist suffers from recurring bouts of insane jealousy. In Choromański’s novel, jealousy becomes almost synonymous with love, which the erotically paranoid Widmar feels for his newly married young wife Rebeka. The emotions he experiences are an expression of his possessiveness about the gorgeous and unquestionably enigmatic woman he accuses of cheating on him with many people. Among a series of Widmar’s inconsolable frantic and feverish visions of her trysts, the most compulsive mental image that feeds his sick imagination is her alleged love affair with the surgeon, Dr Tamten.

Delving deep into Choromański’s description of a pathological feeling, one cannot help but think that the main object of Widmar’s jealousy is in fact the surgeon’s expertise. His investigations revolve around a mysterious operation performed by Dr Tamten on Rebeka when he leaves for a couple of days. It is unattainable for the protagonist of Choromański’s novel to look into the female body, to penetrate her so as to assume total control over her as a person. Consequently, his unattainable desire is to assume control over the object of his love through ‘medical view’, which he can transform into an object of research. Male urge to fully control the female body, to comprehend women’s enigmatic physiology is subjected to an interesting inversion in Choromański’s novel. The ‘disease’ that has taken over Rebeka’s body, which symbolises a pathology ascribed to women’s physiology by the patriarchal culture, seems to be projected onto the male character. Thus, the disease becomes a metaphor of love in the sense that the woman’s erotic appeal infects the man, who—being aware that he cannot control the one he loves—loses control over himself, succumbs to love. Having outlined some context for Patrycja Orzechowska’s unique investigation methodology, and also the sequence in which the materials she found are arranged, let us take a close look at the pictures. One of the main themes is most undoubtedly artificial body and mannequin: Rany [Lacerations], Wdech [Inhale], Wydech [Exhale], Ciało fantomowe [Phantom Body], Adam, Anne. Here are some descriptions of the pictures in the first of the series I have mentioned: Oparzenia twarzy pierwszego, drugiego i trzeciego stopnia [First-, Second-, and Third-degree Facial Burns], Odmrożenie oraz złamanie otwarte palców stopy połączone ze stłuczeniem [Chilblain and Open Fracture of Toes, and Contusion]. These terse captions, completely devoid of emotion, describe artefacts from the Central Mine Rescue Station in Bytom. In the pictures we can see pieces of flesh-coloured silicon material which renders the injuries. Among the artefacts are actual parts of human body, such as toes or a face, but also abstract pieces of skin, on which wounds emerge like sculptural ornaments. Fragmentation of human body as presented here results from thinking in medical terms—it is supposed to serve rescue training aimed at protecting human life or health. The action dictated by noble motives here reveals the very core of the method, in which a mere glance, a ‘medical view’ involves dismembering the body, disintegrating it, so to speak. Besides, it shows a transformation of what is organic, that is to say, at least partly unpredictable, spontaneous, impossible to oversimplify—into what is inorganic and dead, the abstract.

A feeling of ambivalence provoked by dummy body parts, which are dead in order to save lives, increases when we take a look at bizarre CPR training manikins. Adam and Anne are limbless, reduced to shapeless torsos with heads stuck clumsily; their eyes are open. The caption below the picture reads that Adam is the first patient simulator, which has been used in the Bytom Station since the 1980s. Inside his open mouth is a tube, fastened clumsily, for mouth-to-mouth resuscitation training. The structure as a whole brings to mind a bizarre eye, which—albeit lifeless—makes us see an altogether different scheme, one that transcends relations between the organic and the inorganic, the living and the dead. By evoking the Eye of Providence, it seems to go beyond our glance, it blurs the lines between what is external and what is internal.

The story of Anne, whose face is another replica of the dead mask of “the unknown woman of the Seine” (l’inconnue de la Seine). The body of the “unknown woman” was pulled out of the river in Paris around the late 1880s—and one can say that it became immensely popular. The woman was described by Elisabeth Bronfen in her book Over Her Dead Body,⁷ which focuses on the problem of representation of dead women in visual arts and literature. Bronfen claims that representations of female death worked in such a way that—almost taken for granted—they have eluded people’s attention.⁸ Painterly representations of dead female body were popular in bourgeois art, especially of the late nineteenth century. Bronfen begins her narrative by referring to Gabriel von Max’s The Anatomist, which shows an anatomist meditating the body of a young woman that is about to undergo post-mortem examination. The scholar explains the role played by the representative of the institution that is modern clinic in a very interesting manner. “While the corpse is positioned as the thematic subject, the anatomist is the subject of the action, because he functions as the internal focalisor of the picture, who guides the spectator’s view of the depicted object.”⁹ The depiction of dead female body, evoking the transformation of a living body into a corpse, illustrates the aesthetic definition of beauty, which we come across in similar paintings. The living body turns into a monument to itself, a perfect statue. In this transition state, lifeless, the female body appears as the most perfect, the purest of forms, because it is dead, immortalised as a work of art.¹⁰ The medical view that I have referred to earlier, which in fact was the object of jealousy of the main character in Choromański’s novel, returns in Bronfen’s analysis as a perspective, which inspires a painting. A painting, in which the uncontrollable female body is captured and, devoid of life, becomes a gorgeous object.

The beauty in Max’s painting, however, does not only lie in the artificiality (of the body being transformed into an image), but it also lies in fragility. “It is not just the translation into the inanimate that defines the relation between beauty and death, but also the fact that this form of beauty, even if it signifies an immaculate, immobile form, potentially contains its own destruction, its division into parts.”¹¹ According to Bronfen, the aesthetic that von Max follows in his painting also accentuates some ambivalences typical of the time when the painting was created. The artist, a typical representative of his class, was, Bronfen claims, an ardent advocate of Darwinism akin to biological positivism, as well as a spiritualist and an occultist. Hence, in her detailed analysis of the iconography of The Anatomist, the author of Over Her Dead Body emphasises that the female body it portrays functions as an intermediary between life and death; it represents a promise to get to the truth about the beginning and the end of human existence.

Święte sińce [Holy Bruises]—a series of photographs showing the victims of the Silesian Uprising in 1919 seems an effort to capture an intermediary potential of the representation of the dead body. Amongst the photographed corpses is also a body lying backwards, presumably a female body. Its position resembles the tradition of female nude. This representation, confronted with the title of the exhibition, which refers to a religious context, seems to confirm my impression that the creator of Love and Medicine is interested in the intermediary aspect. Considering the historical and the local context provided by the caption below the picture, one can assume that the image of the victims becomes a medium, which facilitates the pursuit of an objectified truth about Upper Silesia itself.

The idea that it is the female body that is the best medium is connected with a common concept of what is material. In the patriarchal tradition of the West, woman’s body is a material foundation; it is a passive transmitter of meanings rather than a subject capable of generating them in an active manner. Besides, it is attributed to what is related to, or characteristic of this earth more than anything else. Women’s physiology, viewed as a phenomenon which eludes categorisation and thereby is regarded as pathological, remains resistant to the intellectual approach, therefore one is even more inclined to subject it to research that aims at revealing its enigma.

Associating the woman with all things corporeal and earthly is due to the fact that both these notions are part of the dualistic model which attributes the male to the intellectual and the spiritual, and the female to the natural order. As Ewa Hyży¹² points out, the association made between women and ambivalent nature, which has permeated European philosophical tradition (the protective mother and, at the same time, the unpredictable, destructive force) since the Age of Enlightenment, gains more unambiguous, namely, pejorative connotations. Women equated with nature have “no longer been regarded as protective mothers but rather like a mechanism which has to be explained and controlled; nature as well as women would have to be subordinate to men […].¹³

In this context, the association of the dead female body viewed as a medium through which the enigma of the absolute could be grasped, with the narrative about Upper Silesia, reveals new aspects of Patrycja Orzechowska’s undertaking. Mediating a sequence of dead bodies through the window of the raree-show becomes part of the metaphor of medical examination aimed to discover objective truth. It is like mediating fragmented earth, a land, which remains an enigmatic organism. In this way, the context of earth seen as the inhabited area, as well as the primeval matter, which can be explored and utilised, is analogous to the presented contexts connected with corporeality.

Pokłady ciał kopalnych [Fossil Bodies Deposits], Szczątki zespołów [Compound Remains], Szata roślinna lub barwy ochronne [Flora or Protective Colouring] are other particles extracted by the artist from the Silesian landscape, which also has a historical aspect—to be viewed through the lens of her kaiserpanorama just like microscopic preparations. These images immediately evoke the context of earth – of material as well as symbolic exploration of what lies below. Fossil Bodies Deposits are in fact photographs of a coal mining disaster, taken from a publication released in Dąbrowa Górnicza in 1932.¹⁴ Amid fallen logs, from which the coalpit had been built, we can see mounds of soil, but also what seems like fragments of human remains that fell victim to industrial exploitation. Compound Remains reach out into the soil and into history, presenting artefacts dated to the late 17th and the early 18th centuries, excavated from the Reiswitz family tomb in Tworki. Finally, Flora or Protective Colouring contains pictures of a Jewish cemetery established in 1815 in Gliwice—a series, whose title suggests a need to somehow protect what lies below the ground, that is to say, the stories and dead bodies, from being overused. What generates this protective colouring is nature itself, which softly covers the gravestones.

Approaching conclusions of the narrative created around Love and Medicine, bearing in mind that the images and ideas I have referred to are merely a selection inspired by intuition and the development of the narrative, the last part of the reconstructed landscape of Silesia, which I would like to pick out from the raree-show, is a photograph by Jerzy Lewczyński. Syphilis shows a woman’s face affected by lesions caused by the venereal disease. The photograph from the series Archeology of Photography was taken in Hungary, but the reference to the infectious disease as captured by the photographer closely connected with Silesia enables us to enlarge upon the analogy between representations connected with the earth and the sequence of human bodies in Love and Medicine—dead bodies, artificial bodies, female bodies and—finally—diseased bodies, pathological bodies. As Susan Sontag pointed out in her classical essay Illness as Metaphor, one of the main spheres in which illness is used as a metaphor is the military and the issues of nation or state, which are related to it. Such a way of presenting threats posed to the state by some external or internal powers originated from the ancient tradition (like in Aristotle’s writings) to depict state as an organism. It became increasingly popular in the nineteenth century when the notion of nation emerged. All types of social phenomena perceived and presented by the ideologues of nation as a threat were always compared to an epidemic. The metaphor was used to provoke collective reactions, which would release demand for the ultimate remedy to social conflict defined as illness. Therefore, national minorities in particular were referred to with an expression deriving from medical terminology, namely, “cancer must be removed from healthy tissue.”

In view of the statement constructed by the creator of Love and Medicine concerning the “Silesian identity” as seen from the outside, the context of illness as a metaphor of the endangered statehood mentioned earlier seems interesting indeed. A common if—I believe—coyly concealed conception of Silesia as seen from the perspective of “other parts of Poland,” often reveals a tendency to regard it as exotic, as well as “foreign,” or even “bizarre.” This way of thinking unquestionably brings to mind modernist normativisation prompted by an urge to describe everything which eludes easy classification, as pathological.

A look at the exhibition Love and Medicine with regard to the pictures discussed above allows us to grasp the meaning of yet another level of the author’s commentary. It refers to the methods one can employ in order to understand history, to reconstruct the multilayered land investigated from a distance. The way in which Patrycja Orzechowska creates her textual and visual narrative unveils a series of ambivalences. She seems to identify with such characters as the anatomist from the painting of Gabriel von Max described by Elisabeth Bronfen. She only does it, however, to imply a threat which is connected with the urge to over-articulate local identity. Its reconstruction, the main instruments of which have been the norm and the tradition of a rationalised, ocular verification, may lead to destruction. The medical view, that is to say, a metaphor of modern cognition, gets rid of emotion and reduces love. Love and emotional involvement is what eludes control, so it may jeopardise the modern subject that rationalises everything. To Patrycja Orzechowska, love is a praise of all things non-normative, therefore it is also a perverse praise of everything pathological which has a chance to elude objectivisation.