On Friday, August 12, 2022, Natalia Lach-Lachowicz, one of the most recognizable figures in Polish photography, died at the age of 85. "Kwartalnik Fotografia" wrote about the Wroclaw-based artist many times between 2000 and 2012, and to check it out and get to all the articles, it's best to look at the Great Personal Index, which is part of Krzysztof Szymoniak's book, Without Aperture - 13 Years of "Kwartalnik Fotografia," which can be purchased in our store, the KF Gallery.
We would like to remind you of two articles - "Consumption forecast" by Adam Sobota from issue 17 of 2005 and "Trouble with Natalia?" from issue 23 of 2007. Earlier, because in issue 3/2000 about Natalia LL in the article "PERMAFO Gallery - attempts to register reality (part II)". wrote Magdalena Z. Ignaczak, while in issue 9/2002 you can find an interesting analysis of the work of the Wroclaw artist "Natalia LL - the transcendental gaze". By Reinhold Misselbeck.
Natalia LL's photographs of today's photography viewer no longer shock, but when looking at them it is worth remembering when they were created, especially "Consumer Art." That was half a century ago! That is, in the times of coarse socialism, permanent shortage of virtually everything, called "temporary difficulties in supplying the population." Bananas, for example, used by Natalia LL, most Poles knew only by sight. Also feminism or free love and unfettered eroticism, were just beginning to appear in the public space. The art of Natalia LL and a few more artists of the time required a lot of courage, both in the political and moral sense. Let us remember Natalia Lach-Lachowicz.
Consumption forecast
In one of Natalia LL's authorial statements, we find that art by no means solves the riddles of existence, but instead points to them in a particular way. On the other hand, in the text "Art and Freedom" from 1987, she defines art as a search for freedom, writing: Freedom is an end in itself, while art pursues this goal.
From the juxtaposition of these statements it can be deduced that freedom is not understood by the artist as liberation from the determinants of life, but as the freedom to inquire into their mystery. Authentic creativity should be unfettered in this inquiry, so it must also be individual, referring to the experience of a particular existence. The artist assumes that the inevitable interdependence of the individual and society sufficiently guarantees the communicability of even the most personal manifestations of art, all the more so when the fundamental problems shaping human consciousness at various levels are decisively articulated there. In the works of Natalia LL, such problems, categories or concepts are clearly accentuated, which relate to the fundamental dilemmas that polarly differentiate human consciousness. This can be the question of the unity or dualism of the union of spirit and body, the opposition of the ideal eternal form (the so-called Platonic form) and material creations undergoing destruction in time, the difference of experiencing the world through concepts and images, the opposites of vitality and death or intimacy and externality. Sometimes the expression of such oppositions is further accentuated through the use of oppositely treated media (such as photography and painting). Commentators on Natalia LL's work have repeatedly pointed to this type of artistic strategy as characteristic of her art. For example, Lech Karwowski, in the text to her 1990 exhibition catalog, wrote: Duality is the content and obsession of Natalia LL's great catalog of masks. It delineates the field of her authorial reflections tormenting the moment of unity, but always from the point of view of duality [...] Natalia LL feels dualism as a deep wound inflicted on the self by existence. Treating opposites as real, she struggles with the problem of the substantiality of evil, its demonic presence.
In turn, Grzegorz Sztabinski (in the introduction to the catalog of Natalia LL's exhibition in 1993) wrote, among other things: An excess of meanings, often mutually questioning or cancelling each other, personal character and distance, irony, are features that co-occur in Natalia LL's series of paintings and installations in the 1980s. In them, the artist combines what appears to be contradictory. She shows that a thing or a situation is both so and different at the same time. Thus, it can be considered that in the last decade Natalia LL realized her postulates from the mid-1970s, bringing to the meeting elements from the world of things and the world of ideas, which do not match, diverge, and at the same time interact with each other.
One of the categories that appear within Natalia LL's work and comprehensively encompass the extreme possibilities of interpretation is consumption. This slogan appeared between 1972 and 1975 in the titles of a series of works referred to as "Consumption Art," and in 1975 also as "Post-Consumption Art." These were a series of photographs and films showing the faces of women eating bananas, sausages or kisel in an ostentatious manner. The motif of consumption again directly appeared in the works of Natalia LL in the late 1980s, where the head was depicted undergoing various manipulations and devouring objects in the form of dolls. At the time, the author herself commented on this fact in the text "Theory of the head" (published in 1991), writing, among other things: The head is not only the noble seat of the brain. It is also a creation that has a cavity that absorbs externals, that is, various solid and liquid foods, odors and audible noises. The ability to absorb external matter is an incredible mystery of the head, there is shown here with great power the principle that bread becomes flesh and wine becomes blood. Without this principle, the idea of Christianity would be unthinkable. The mystery of absorbing externality appeared to me with such acuity that all my art since 1972 has been related to the conceptual play of consumption.
A work of art in the form of a photograph of the act of consumption can be perceived as a provocative glorification of the banal, especially when such an activity is taken out of context, for example, it does not refer to the documentation of customs, or to that symbolism that many depictions of feasts in ancient painting had. Such provocation may stem from a desire to oppose the typical exclusivity or abstractness of the artistic message, ensuring that the work is identified through the audience on the basis of current conventions assigned to the concept of art. In this aspect, Natalia LL's "Consumer Art" is close to her earlier works, such as: "Permanent Registration," "24 Hours" or "Intimate Sphere." These realizations from 1970-1972 stemmed from the adoption of the concept of art as a constantly occurring process, whose permanence and immediacy can be compared to the nature of such life processes as breathing, sleeping, eating or moving through space. The permanence of art was a slogan preached since 1970 by the creative group Permafo Gallery, in which Natalia LL was active together with Zbigniew Dlubak, Andrzej Lachowicz and Antoni Dzieduszycki. Their strategy was to achieve those unique qualities required of art through subjects related to common situations, which were documented as directly as possible.
Such an analogy as evidenced by the artist's works, however, may have concerned only certain aspects of the external manifestation of art, but not the mental realm. For at the level of the mind, art must require insight into the essence of life processes, and then the banal becomes only the medium of art, that is, however, something unusual. Thus, in all of Natalia LL's works, banality acquires an intriguing expression, as it is intensified through serial repetition and ostentatious sincerity, which also releases a vague eroticism. Ordinary and personal facts, shown in this way, can fascinate and repel at the same time, as is the case today with television reality shows. They take on a disturbing expression as we more or less consciously identify them as the tip of an iceberg made up of phenomena and desires that we tend to suppress and hide. It was peculiar to the climate of the 1970s that "Consumer Art" was interpreted in the spirit of structuralist and semiotic theories on the creation and functioning of signs. On the one hand, this was helpful for opposing overly emotional and purely sensualistic interpretations of art, but on the other hand, it limited the possibilities of interpreting these works based on the rich traditions of symbol and allegory in art. Insights into the possibility of transforming a sequence of physical events into signs through photography tended to stop at the operational level. Of course, to the extent that the so-called new media of the time (photography, film, video) broke the stereotypical rules of identifying and valuing art, this made sense. Antoni Dzieduszycki in 1973 wrote, among other things: In Natalia LL's works, registration primarily involves actions, actions that transform into signs [...] The sense of this action is perhaps most clearly visible in Natalia's latest series of works, "Consumption Photography." The ambiguity of the action, which transforms from a simple act of eating, as it were, into a sophisticated eroticism, and finally into an almost magical gesture, into a system of signs, a code that would seem to be universally used, and yet unknown to us, not only intrigues, but also causes the awakening of reflection precisely on the sign, on the codes we commonly use to achieve mutual understanding. And this reflection, which ultimately becomes a reflection of art on art, is undoubtedly one of the most valuable artistic achievements of Natalia Lach-Lachowicz ("Photography," No. 7/1973).
"Consumer art" may have evoked certain associations with pop art, a current of art that had been developing since the 1950s, where artists made programmatic use of the patterns of mass culture and responded to visions of capitalist prosperity and propaganda of universal consumption. Admittedly, the sense of such art in Poland at the time, with its socialist economy of scarcity, was generally questioned, but on the other hand, the 1970s in Poland was a period of strong awakening of consumer needs and promotion of simplified ways of satisfying them. Even if social opportunities were limited, the standards of visual incentives for maximum consumption were fully understood by Poles. In the work of some artists associated with pop art (e.g. Mel Ramos, Allan Jones or Sigmar Polke), one can find some parallels with this ambiguous way in which Natalia LL treats the processes of material and aesthetic consumption. The artist constructs her works as mental clusters in which triviality and transcendence, literalism and metaphor mix. In the 1970s, she uses models whose somewhat doll-like beauty is accentuated by the sterile elegance of glossy black-and-white or color photographic prints, and who ostentatiously consume bananas, sausages or kisel, giving this activity a somewhat perverse character. The author aims to make the viewer's attention circulate between the mouth of the person eating and his or her wide-open eyes directed at the camera, as if to equate the concepts of looking and consumption. Indeed, this is a procedure widely used in various advertising materials, to fix the name of some product in a layer of basic visual-emotional associations. However, Natalia LL's works do not go beyond the pure model of such situations, presenting a brilliant combination of extreme effects: the literalness of the representation and the possibility of interpreting it as generally as possible (with this intention, the word "art" sometimes appears among the photos). The result of this strategy is as original in expression as it is universal, and the success of "Consumer Art" at major exhibitions in Western Europe and the US attests to this. In the 1970s, such Polish artists of the younger generation as Zdzislaw Sosnowski and Zygmunt Rytka also used forms of mass-media culture to question the values propagated there, but they did not achieve equally convincing results in this. Perhaps this is because the moral themes they took up (figures of sports or political idols) were not so easily transformed into timeless visual symbols.
In the 1980s and 1990s, in many of Natalia LL's works, the category of consumption already takes on a distinctly metaphysical or even mythical sense (the cycles "Panic Tripple," "Fluffy Tragedy," "Eschatological Landscapes" or "Platonic Forms"). These are enlarged photographic images of the author's head, often with expressive underpainting, where, in addition, grids of lines and grimaces deform the face, and open mouths expose teeth or tongue. Unlike the faces of models used in the past, whose wide-open eyes expressed a state of contentment and external activity, here the artist's closed eyes suggest inner tension, the simultaneity of sleep or trance, as well as aggressive absorption, struggle for survival and eruption of energy. The person shown, represented by the head, seems to be struggling for his existence and position, consuming objects and energetic fluids. At the same time, the fact that she too is consumed is emphasized, as the symptoms of the biological lapse of the body's existence are visible, and the images themselves are also destroyed through various forms of manual aggression into photographic material. The mythological sense of consumption seems to be referred to in these images of heads, where the mouths bite the doll figures. This brings to mind myths of eating gods, such as the Greek myth of the titanic god Kronos, who devoured his own children to prevent the fulfillment of prophecy and loss of power. Among the famous depictions of this myth in art history is Francisco Goya's painting "Saturn Devouring His Own Children" (1821). Myths, religious parables or the confessions of mystics are those messages of knowledge that describe archetypal situations and the basic impulses of human consciousness based on a certain anecdote, a certain concretization, albeit containing a large range of generality. Natalia LL decided to refer to this sphere of experience as early as the second half of the 1970s (through the series of séances titled "Dreaming" and "Points of Support"), and in this way she also expanded the meaning of the category of consumption, which earlier in her works was more akin to colloquial literalism. Natalia LL's realizations in the last two decades, therefore, also function as a postmodern reinterpretation of the principles of her earlier work (which can also be accommodated in the broadly defined category of consumption). The same elements and strategies appear in new garments, in different staffage and juxtapositions. Bananas, which were consumed in a sensual way by models in 1972-1975, later become an object brutally destroyed by the mythical Brunhilde, who is sometimes impersonated by Natalia LL. Bananas also appear as part of an installation with a skull and flowers ("Ferocious Skull," 1994), or their multiplied reproductions decorate the many-meter-long ribbons of fabric covering the gallery space.
One of the Wroclaw shows of "Consumption Art" in 1973 was composed of two parts: one part included photographic boards with the faces of eating models, and the other, located in another gallery, contained boards with multiplied notation of the artist's name, covering the entire floor (in addition, a tape recorder played a verbal description of the works exhibited in the first part of the show). The possibility, suggested in this show (and many other works), of equivalently interchanging forms of recording one's own person, or that of others, corresponds to pointing out possible analogies between a simple banal action and a mythical or transcendental act. But, as already mentioned, in the case of Natalia LL's works, such a comparison also involves showing the dramatic divergence of these states, making their simultaneous actuality a mystery and even a cause of existential trepidation.
Consumption, understood in all aspects and dimensions, is thus a category through which the main themes of Natalia LL's work can be grasped. Understood most generally, it is a multidirectional process that permeates all existence. Understood concretely and in detail, it arouses no less controversy; it is an absolute biological need, but also a stupefying burden of the social order from which we would like to free ourselves. The complexity of man's psychological reaction to these conditions is aptly reflected in the aphoristic title of Natalia LL's 1998 exhibition of installations. The reference for this exhibition was, on the one hand, the great flood of the previous year, and on the other hand, Norwid's text about spiritual loss, drowning. The title of this exhibition repeated the same set of letters three times, forming a different arrangement of words, with a different meaning: "We are drowning, It is silent, It is not us."
Adam Sobota, PhD in humanities. Heads the Department of Photography at the National Museum in Wroclaw, teaches art history at the Art Institute of the University of Zielona Gora. He is involved in the history of photography and art criticism. Book publications: "Nobility of Technique" (2001), "Conceptuality of Photography" (2004).
The article appeared in issue 17 of "Photography Quarterly".
Trouble with Natalia?
The more I know, the less I understand. This slogan is slowly making its way into my consciousness, and this is happening through more works, exhibitions and texts dedicated to the work of Natalia LL.
Until recently, I was convinced that her work for my perception has no secrets. But the moment I became acquainted with the new works (the exhibition "Woman about Woman," BWA Bielsko-Biala, 2007), or the altered version of the realization "Seeks Consumption Art" (1972), located in the very fine collection of the Zachęta Gallery in Wroclaw, I began to have doubts about the validity of my earlier thoughts. I realized that "Consumption Art" was a form of installation with plates, filled with red wax. This, in turn, led me to ask myself what impulse worked that Natalia LL between "Intimate Photography" (1971), which was a spatial arrangement in the type of environment, on the verge of erotic photography, but also sexuality and egocentrism, with clear references to pop art, but in stylization, and the transition to the decidedly more radical "Consumer Art" (from 1972) and "Post-Consumer Art"? I can't quite answer this simple question - where does Polish feminism come from?
Natalia LL set the signposts for very many Polish artists, and this fascination continues to the present among the youngest generation. Examples include the hueckelserafin duo (Dolls), and even the next generation of female artists from the circle of French post-feminism (Diane Ducruet). But the path that Natalia started from the early 1970s is not repeatable, even though it also set the course for the activities of men, such as artists like Andrzej Dudek-Dürer, who developed his work in a different, very personal existential dimension with a Far Eastern orientation, proclaiming himself a living sculpture, or in yet another aspect Marek Gardulski focusing on an erotic/narcissistic theme, but in a neopictorial aesthetic layer. Of course, the list of artists who follow the path set by Natalia LL or directly refer to her message can be expanded. Certainly, numerous critical texts will be written on this subject.
Why the artistic path that Natalia LL created is not repeatable! The artist entered the double territory of anti-art in a unique way, as body art was a questioning of classical art from the position of the neo-avant-garde. She entered body-art and conceptualism, but revealed her spiritual interests and aspirations by showing what the transformation of the human bios and the development of the psyche looks like personally, but also universalistic in message. This ultimately resulted in art that deals with the human condition and its entanglement with the material body, which is subject to constant aging, or dying. Therein lies the great significance of her artistic work.
How do you define Natalia LL's feminism, in which threads not only of mythology, but also of Christian iconography are legible? At this point it was certainly not feminism, although the starting point could be body-art. This proves that cutting-edge art can be created, penetrating the most difficult themes, such as "Tree of Knowledge" or "Crucifixion."
Many female artists tried to follow Natalia LL, or together with Natalia LL. These included Ewa Partum in her late 1970s activity ("Stupid woman"), later in the 1980s Irena Nawrot and Izabella Gustowska, who began playing with the identity/femininity research. But none of these hastily recalled figures, while interesting and important, went so deeply into existential issues, concerning showing the transformation of body and spirit, or trying to show, for example, the soul of a tree, which is a practically impossible task, like painting the principles of the Decalogue. At the end of the 1980s, Zofia Kulik made herself the "Goddess of the World," which was also of interest to Natalia LL, although to a different extent and in a different iconography. Kulik expanded her creative penetrations to include the aspect of ornament, creating a previously unknown structure of carpet fabric.
From a seemingly trivial and even trivial gesture such as undressing, Natalia LL, like Jerzy Bereś, has made a ritual. But how different are these formulas! In the case of this Krakow-based sculptor and performer, it has been stripped of its parareligious aura; all that remains are references to prehistoric art, its origins, which, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, were linked to political aspects. Unfortunately, it dominated and consequently smudged the initially interesting grand project of the Krakow artist. It's not so easy to be a political artist, maybe it's not worth entering such a matter at all? Natalia LL wants to stay close to the tradition of body-art, but on the other hand with a programmatically contradictory tradition of religious or parareligious art. The difficulty of defining her art lies in the fact that it has transformed from erotic to existential, to ask about the foundation of the world's existence and its dangers in the following years.
It is good that we have trouble interpreting Natalia LL's works. Only in the case of outstanding realizations are different interpretations possible, different artistic contexts, that is, consequently, problems with Natalia. When there are none, the art is quickly forgotten, it turns out to be irrelevant, not very creative for the next generations. And the art of Natalia LL influences and inspires the next generations, who are educated in art schools not only in Wroclaw. Since the beginning of the 21st century, I have seen many graduation works in Wroclaw or Lodz, which wanted to directly refer to the artistic ideas of Natalia LL.
Krzysztof Jurecki - Graduate of art history at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow (1985) and doctoral studies at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw (1990-1993). D. in art history on the basis of his dissertation Continuers of the tradition of the Great Avant-Garde in Polish photography of the second half of the 1950s. Borderlands of painting, graphic art and experimental film (Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Faculty of History, 2018). Contributor to "Fotografia Quarterly" from 2000 to 2010. More about the author -. HERE
