Introspection - a conversation with Małgorzata Potocka

Marika Kuzmicz: Margaret, let's talk about your life so far and your relationship with art, which started when you were a child. You had extraordinary parents. Can you tell at least a piece of their story and thus about your first contacts with art?

Margaret Potocka: I had a rather luxurious situation - in the sense that I didn't face incomprehension. When I listen to my friends who became artists, but had no one in the family who was involved in art, and who had to struggle to be able to study at the Academy of Fine Arts, for example, to create, I see that my situation was quite different. I grew up among artists. I didn't go to kindergarten because I was kicked out of it - ostensibly for talking, but actually for "being different" from the rest of the children. 

So I grew up in the studio with my Dad, who was a production designer, so I accompanied him all day at work, on the set. He would make film mock-ups, and I would glue something together, paint something, and live only that way - I didn't know too much that you could do otherwise. When there was shooting on the set, I would sit high on the scaffolding and watch the film being made all day...It was magic. Back then, for example, 40 doubles were made each. Today it's more like 2 or 3 max. This absolutely did not bore me, I watched these doubles as if by magic. When I went to school, I found myself in a completely foreign world, because my world was those sets of my father, the actors, the set, the films. I met people such as Andrzej Pawlowski, Roman Modzelewski, Stanislaw Fijalkowski, Lech Kunka, for example. Father was an extraordinary man, different from everyone around him and very creative. He taught me to be creative, I played with photographic paper and developer, for example. That was great. 

Your father, the well-known stage designer Richard Potocki. Will you tell more about him?

The biggest difference is that technology and the internet has speeded everything up tremendously in just a few years. We take the instant transmission of photos and text for granted. As a photojournalist for 60 years, I well recall a different time when I would send packages of undeveloped rolls of film with hand written captions to editors all across the world. DHL and FedEx were vital for my international work, even the regular mail system on occasion. Then digital cameras and the internet came along, changing everything, and a lot more time had to be spent at the computer. Newspapers were the first to take advantage of the technology as they require a quick turnaround for news stories and photo quality was less demanding. It took longer for color magazines to adapt, the sort I worked with, who had to wait until digital photography improved. Online media didn't exist at all until relatively recently but it certainly didn't kill print media, as some predicted. Yes, Dad graduated from architecture in Moscow, he was an assistant to Sergei Eisenstein. To this day I have such a vase that my father got from him. I keep my paintbrushes in it, and Dad traveled with him through the war, he managed to save such a souvenir. When the Polish army was forming, he got to Poland. He left his wife Sara and two children in Moscow. Leaving, he told her not to worry, because he would immediately bring her and the children to Poland - he is an aristocrat from a Polish family, there would be no communism and everything would be fine. This was, of course, a complete utopia, as the world had changed so terribly that not only could he not bring them to Poland, he could not even go to visit them. For years. He was persona non grata, not allowed into the USSR. And because he was quite a famous person - in film circles it was a famous production designer - he created the SEMAFOR film studio and knew all sorts of film effects and tricks (which he learned by watching Rodchenko, for example), he was all the more not allowed into the Soviet Union. It wasn't until 1970, when I played the lead role in a film Legend, someone from my parents had to go with me to the screenings of this film in Russia. My parents were already divorced at the time, and my mother said that she would never set foot there in her life. And father dreamed of going there, to see his former family. 

So Richard and Sarah have divorced?

- Yes, a few years after the end of the war, by correspondence. They were a pair of extraordinary artists. He was a production designer, and she was involved in making artistic makeup and models for animated films, puppet films by Alexander Ptushko. Sara was Jewish and was threatened with death in the gulag, but she was not exiled simply because Ptushko stood up for her, he said she could not be replaced by anyone. And that's the only reason Sara survived. 

There were problems with my going to Mosfilm, because my father was not given permission to enter Moscow. I remember that finally Ekaterina Furtseva, who was then the Minister of Culture of the USSR, after probably three months of, let's say, negotiations between the Polish and Soviet ministries, gave my father such permission that he could cross the border. We finally met with Sara and their children, with whom, by the way, I am still very close to this day. Well, but now there is another time when the regime separates us and we cannot meet. Now, after all, I will not go to Moscow....

You and your Dad were very close.

- Yes, I knew all about his troubles, longings, problems, suffering. It was because of the whole situation with my film and the fact that we made a trip to Russia together. When my father and Sara met, I looked at them and tears were dripping. It was very beautiful and very dramatic. 

Did you want to be a set designer? Like Dad?

-I wanted to be a cinematographer. And in the beginning it was an architect in general. My mother taped my whole room with Le Corbusier, Pevsner and other most beautiful buildings in the world, so that when I woke up I would see these beautiful buildings. In this Architectons Malevich. I was absorbing all that surrounded me. I didn't have to learn it. My brain and body absorbed it forever.

Then how did it happen that you went to the Acting Department instead of the Cinematography Department? 

- Prosaic story. My father very cleverly avoided dissuading me from the idea, he simply made me geld some cables from the camera and lights. And it was too heavy, physically I couldn't handle it. He asked me if I could see the cart carrying the lights, which I would have to push. Of course, Dad and I didn't know about how technology would change, that cameras would be lightweight, that there were no cables, that everything was remote and digital. 

 But I still have to mention to you that those wonderful parents of mine unfortunately parted and divorced in a terrible way. I was probably the only child who really wanted them to separate, because there are rather no such children. And all my life I fought with my mother, which I regret very much today. My Mom's name was Maria Chybowska, she was a documentary film director. She was an extraordinary person, but she went through terrible things during the war, as a result of which she was always depressed. Mom was an assistant to the prominent director Andrzej Munk. Despite this, her mental state was very bad, all the time in fact. After her death, I learned that she had been at the execution wall three times during the war. Once she was detained for having a leica in her backpack, once for wearing a Red Cross armband, and once when she was a 14-year-old nurse pulling the wounded out of the Wola hospital, trying, along with her older sisters, to save the lying tampa patients before the Gestapo came in and started shooting the wounded. I couldn't have known about these stories as a child, because how was she supposed to tell me. So, unfortunately, I knew a mother who either cried or laughed hysterically - she was never calm. Dad had a saintly patience with her, because she was the second great love of his life, but they simply couldn't stand the traumas of war.

She eventually walked away from him, having a whole lot of grief for Dad. She had a whole lot of resentment towards the whole world for the wrongs she had suffered. At the time I didn't understand it, today I do. They didn't manage to be together. But the house was unusual. Painters came to visit - Stanislaw Fijalkowski, who lived next door, the director of the Art Museum, Ryszard Stanislawski. First Alina Szapocznikow, then Urszula Czartoryska. I have a cool memory when a whole group of op-art and kinetic art artists from Italy came to Lodz, to the Museum of Art. It was an event. Beautiful people. They spent a lot of time in our house, we spent time with them in the museum. I had my father's white sheets of paper and black pencils, thick and thin, and drew spirals all the time, enthralled by their work. At school they taught us about antiquity, and I was passionate about contemporary art. Lodz artists: Szapocznikow, Stanislawski, Fijalkowski, Wróblewski, the environment of the Academy of Fine Arts in Lodz (then the Academy of Fine Arts), the Film School - these were my father's friends and the people among whom I grew. 

I used to think that it was Jozef Robakowski who drew you into the environment of the Lodz avant-garde, and that you knew it from early childhood. 

- The environment was my childhood, but Joseph was the only person at the time who understood this world of mine. In high school, in college, I felt a stranger. He made art of the kind that fascinated me. I spent a lot of time with him and that's how it started. I was preparing for the art history exam at the Acting Department, and even before I passed the Directing Department, and I had a lecturer there, Prof. Zwolinskaya, who bored me terribly.I was looking for an alternative and my colleagues said, "Go to Robak." Well, and I went to Robak, that's how our love began. But he was, in a way, my destiny, through my previous life, childhood, parents. If not for that, we would not have understood each other. Only when Father left, when Joseph appeared, I began to fully appreciate what I was growing into, I began to think about it. What I regret is that I didn't ask my parents about their past, about their work, that somehow I didn't fix it. Well, but I didn't do it anymore, unfortunately, and it won't be reversed.

You haven't archived your own work either....

The biggest difference is that technology and the internet has speeded everything up tremendously in just a few years. We take the instant transmission of photos and text for granted. As a photojournalist for 60 years, I well recall a different time when I would send packages of undeveloped rolls of film with hand written captions to editors all across the world. DHL and FedEx were vital for my international work, even the regular mail system on occasion. Then digital cameras and the internet came along, changing everything, and a lot more time had to be spent at the computer. Newspapers were the first to take advantage of the technology as they require a quick turnaround for news stories and photo quality was less demanding. It took longer for color magazines to adapt, the sort I worked with, who had to wait until digital photography improved. Online media didn't exist at all until relatively recently but it certainly didn't kill print media, as some predicted. Yes, this is unfortunately true. It seemed to me that I would make time, that I would deal with it later. When Joseph and I were together, we just lived in art all the time. We set up the Exchange Gallery in our apartment and there were crowds of great people, important things were happening. I was aware of this, I knew it had to be documented...I dedicated myself to it and didn't archive my work. I was not put on the poster. Besides, I also thought that Józek's work was more important than mine. I believed that I would manage to take care of my own things because I was younger, that time passes and there comes a moment when you say, "And now it's time for me." Except that it doesn't work that way. You can't take care of something for years and then suddenly want to go back to it.

 And here too, paradoxically, Józek helped me, because it was he who asked me one day what had happened that I had stopped doing my own work, which was, in retrospect, extremely original. Jozef said that if I hadn't dropped it, I would be at the heights today. Maybe that would have been the case, or maybe not, because we won't know anymore. Once Joseph said that life cannot be reconciled with art. I for one am an enemy of separating life and art, because it is impossible to separate a person from what he creates. What we experience, how we live, is the essence that determines what art we create, what we do. 

When I was 14, my Father bought me my first serious Zenith camera and said: "From today you take pictures. You record the world as your diary, a record of images, events, situations, and it has to be emotional." Now years later I see that my works are emotional. I am in these works, or there are also others, or there is interaction with people. 

All your works that you have done, how would we arrange them, are simply a continuation of this diary that you have been doing since you were 14 years old, you know that?

- Yes, absolutely yes. My whole life. 

All of these works are introspection, although seemingly many of them are about the world around you.

-Yes, that's a great word. I have to remember it. It's the core of what I do. Constant introspection. 

And your first exhibition?

- I remember every detail of it. This is also what my Father arranged for me. I was with him in Polanica, because he was working on a film there at the time. And I walked around the Spa House, around the flower beds and took close-ups of the pansies - all the colors were there. I did macro close-ups, which ultimately looked like abstract paintings. We developed them on ORWO slides, which gave a specific image quality. My father cut them and helped me frame them. Then he covered the windows in the dining room with photographic paper, took down all the pictures that hung there, painted the walls with pearlescent white decorative paint to reflect the light, and projected my slides on that big wall. That was my first vernissage... Although no, because the first one was when I was 8 years old. It was a group exhibition in Pilichowice by the lake: me, Jacek Lomnicki, Elzbieta Czyzewska and Kepinska, we painted pictures. And my father strung a rope between two houses and hung those big cardboard boxes of ours on it. The whole town was alive with this exhibition. 

Didn't you want to study at the Academy of Fine Arts?

- I wanted to, I wanted to. I still feel like painting, but I don't have the courage. I really liked to sit in the studio of my uncle, Konstantin Gorbatovsky, who taught me how to mix and apply paint - we used to go to him with my Father on vacations by the sea. He was a brilliant painter. But somehow I didn't have the courage to take it up myself. Besides, I wanted to be a filmmaker, like Dad. I don't think of myself as a director or an actress or a cinematographer, I just think I'm like him, a filmmaker. 

There is, by the way, such a funny anecdote. Because I was in a convent school, at the Immaculate Sisters, this is a matter for a separate story. My dad took me out of that school. And since he was very friendly with Beata Tyszkiewicz, we went to lunch together and Beata asked, "And what next, Malgosia?" And I answered that I was an actress. Beata held back her laughter, but a few days later Andrzej Wajda called and I played in a All for sale. And then there were other films, everything happened very quickly. I had to choose, and the world of film was multi-level. There were sets, lights, mock-ups, people, text, art history, emotions, and it was all in one. So that I passed to the Film School. First to the acting department, then to directing, where I met Józek Robakowski. In 1978 I went with him to an open-air workshop in Osiek.There my first photographic performances and spatial objects were created.Earlier to such workshops and open-air art workshops Dad went with me, for example to Tadeusz Kantor in Cracow. I watched many of his performances, Cricot 2 performances.And to Wroclaw, to Jerzy Grotowski. 

It was also a time when I was intensively making films about artists: Ryszard Winiarski, Edward Krasinski, Jan Dobkowski, Krzysztof Zarębski or Zbigniew Warpechowski. Films that were documentary on the one hand, and also extremely artistic on the other, weaving my point of view into their work.

This late 1970s was a very intense period of your work. 

-Yes, we went with Jozef Robakowski to Fulda, to Gerard Kwiatkowski, on vacation. And I worked all summer, making my art. Large mazes and boards built from processed photographs, first photocopy prints deformed in various ways. Most of it I did not take to Poland, because there was no way. So that I don't know if it's lost or if I can still find it somewhere. 

Tell us more about what the Exchange Gallery was. 

- She took from the need to fill a certain gap, namely that there were almost no private galleries in Poland. And at the time I was an actress who played abroad a lot. Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia. Jozef would give me directions to the artists I was supposed to meet with, I would meet with them, I would invite them to Poland. I received works from them, which became the core of the Exchange Gallery collection. Józek was getting works from friends in Poland. The apartment was filling up with artworks. 

Probably it would have been a normal collection, such as many in private apartments, if it were not for the fact that times got extremely interesting. Communism began to break, it turned out that for the authorities a contemporary artist is dangerous. At first there was a lot of freedom, in the 60s, 70s it was allowed to open galleries, it was easy to get money, for example, for ambitious educational films about art at the Educational Film Studio, and so on. In the 1980s this changed, contemporary artists were suddenly not trusted. And all sorts of things happened: I didn't get a passport, we couldn't go to Germany. We didn't know, of course, that they would impose martial law, but we felt that the atmosphere had become very stuffy. 

Because it was bothering us, and we wanted to have our own free space, to meet people, to talk to them normally, we made a gallery in our apartment. We called it the Exchange Gallery. Later we translated it to Exchange Gallery - it was about "exchange of thoughts." Martial law cemented how important this was. We would meet, despite martial law, the talks and lectures would go on into the night or all night, so everyone would come with their carrimats and spend the night at our place. Our apartment became a kind of center. The house was such an art hostel. We put out two chairs in the hallway in front of our door, because sometimes the apartment was watched by some men, so in order not to stand, we gave them chairs. 

In the midst of all this, you raised your daughter....

- Yes, at the center of it was Matilda. 

Didn't she become an artist? 

- It's hard for me to speak for her, but I think it was a tough childhood. For a young child it was too much. She wanted normal parents, and I had blue hair and black nails. I had just come from The Appel Gallery, where we spent a whole vacation with Marina Abramović and Ulay. I underwent a metamorphosis, I gained artistic courage, and besides, after being black forever, I started wearing colorful clothes, because I decided that I had the right to do so, to accept my body and enjoy it. Suddenly I became exaggerated, and in this gray reality of Lodz, that's all. So I guess Matilda preferred that I not come to her in kindergarten, instead of answering questions about why her mother has black lips, red eyelashes and green hair. 

So what happened that at some point you gave up doing your work or didn't show what you were doing?

- However, there was a situation in our relationship when I focused on Joseph... He was the main artist. We went, it is true, together to all the plein-air events, I did works there, but actually I did not attach importance to it. I did exhibitions, but it somehow disappeared. My participation in these plein-air events was not recorded. I don't really know why. When Zofia Rydet or Ewa Zarzycka came, their participation was noted, their names appeared on the poster or in the catalog, but mine did not. Maybe it was just that I was Joseph's wife and it could be "ticked off" that "the Robakowskis were at the plein-air event" - so this absence of mine is not quite true. And I didn't take care of it. And then I raised my daughters alone and had to support us. I didn't have the time or opportunity to do art. 

This, unfortunately, is often repeated in accounts of female artists of your generation, but also younger and older ones.

- Yes... And then in turn, when I was already with Grzegorz Ciechowski, my affection for him seriously wavered when I had an exhibition in Gdansk. He was observing this opening, about 50 people came during the day, my and Jozef's friends, and Grzegorz said, without thinking the statement through: "You put so much work into it, but it's no use. Fifty people came, and 12,000 came to my concert. Then why do it?". 

It's very devastating.

- Yes, he had no empathy in this regard. Besides, he needed me to organize his concerts, to produce music videos and so on. The fact that I was involved in art distracted me, in his mind, from what I should have been doing. Recently I was talking to Jozef and so I reprimanded him a bit, that in compiling the history of the Exchange Gallery he did not put my name there and did not highlight my contribution there. Joseph said, half-jokingly, half-seriously, "Well, because it was, when we parted, you were not good for me." And that's not so, because when we did the gallery together, I was still "very good," because that was before we parted. We created this gallery together. My works were also created there, but my name is not in the history of the place. It's a situation also of that whole patriarchy at the time, I suspect. 

I'm sure it does. 

- It shouldn't be that you take someone out of the story and then write them in. So that a little bit of it was that he allowed me to create. There is a union of artists, but not quite on equal terms. There should be an errata to the book about the Exchange Gallery altogether. Because it was something we did together. I love Józek, he fascinates me to this day. I realize that I hurt him - let's forgive each other, but some things should be put in order, mainly I mean my participation in the creation of this Gallery.

And why did you decide to fail for your artwork? About your visual works. I have a feeling that you made a decision that you want to bring it out, organize it, show it, though.

- This is a paradox, because it was again Józek who drove it. 

So that's it, because to be honest, I first heard about you as an artist from him specifically. It was already several years ago when he told me about your work Elevators. This started our conversation about your work - he told me about what you were doing and that it was very good and interesting. 

- Yes, well it is because of him. Józek has changed a lot since then. We started to spend more time with each other, we went to the Congress of Culture in Wroclaw and there we talked about it. Jozef began to ask why I stopped doing this, why I didn't do a doctorate, why I didn't want to stand behind my art. Well, and that was the impulse. I was having a bad time in my life at the time, and when I got into art again, I took a breath, I revived, I came out of my depression. 

And how do you see the road ahead for your art and for you as an artist?

- I, without even knowing that I would have the exhibitions you are organizing, was working and making things for the drawer. Different collages, dedicated to different people - a continuation of my Diary and I want to continue it.My Honor Guards, a photoperformance from 1982, I continue now In protest against the war in Ukraine. Thus were created Honor Guard 2022.  Besides, I make photo collages in large formats and Diaries of My Presence in different situations and places.  I feel like I am fresh out of college, I have a lot to do and to show. I would like to do a big monographic exhibition. Hopefully with your help. Then, not that I will be fulfilled, but I will enjoy it. That I will have regained my meaning. That's what I would like right now. 

We don't need other worlds when we have mirrors The biggest difference is that technology and the internet has speeded everything up tremendously in just a few years. We take the instant transmission of photos and text for granted. As a photojournalist for 60 years, I well recall a different time when I would send packages of undeveloped rolls of film with hand written captions to editors all across the world. DHL and FedEx were vital for my international work, even the regular mail system on occasion. Then digital cameras and the internet came along, changing everything, and a lot more time had to be spent at the computer. Newspapers were the first to take advantage of the technology as they require a quick turnaround for news stories and photo quality was less demanding. It took longer for color magazines to adapt, the sort I worked with, who had to wait until digital photography improved. Online media didn't exist at all until relatively recently but it certainly didn't kill print media, as some predicted. Małgorzata Potocka's exhibition, The curator of the exhibition is Marika Kuzmicz

Rothera Mills 10 Mint Street, opening 23.09.2022, 18:00

8th Vintage Photo Festival, 23.09. - 02.10.2022, Bydgoszcz, Kuyavia and Pomerania