The Polish Poster School was noted in the fifties and sixties for an originality and strength of design which helped to create the sophisticated respectability in the sixties of graphic art generally .... the great age of the silk-screen. Did such a school ever really exist? Was it not another of the cultural myths with which Poland as a political entity has always surrounded herself? A myth created both by and for her in the same way as her other myths of romantic nationalism, as a symptom of the identity crisis of that nation. That crisis goes on, weathered somehow for two centuries of non-existence as a geographical area and of half a century of very dubious autonomy. If not as a land, then at least as a culture some strong bid for national persona was made in the arts, in literature and, after the Second World War especially, in film - Wajda, Skolimowski, Zanussi - and in the theatre of the absurd - Grotowski, Kantor (Dead School and Mrozek (The Emigrants).
In the eighties, Solidarity presented an image of purity of action, of the independent will of the people, to a jaded Western intellectual elite which had resigned itself to the simulacrum of the mass-media, which, as Baudrillard turgidly repeated, had impacted the possibility of free action and, instead replayed THE CODE endlessly. But, Poland was "different". The political action there offered the charismatic possibility of the continuing existence of the "individual", instead of the photocopy: whereas, in the West, Foucault was assuring his readers that the individual self, as a fluke aberration of history, was now passing out of the flow of time. But, was Solidarity not yet another aspect of the simulacrum, its romanticized revolutions?
The posters in the exhibition at the UAM offered some interesting answers to this interpretation. The rare opportunity to view such a spread of poster work arose from the fortuitous arrival at the University of Queensand of a non-English speaking student, Ryszard Bednarowicz, and his unintentional acquisition of the collection in Poland of F. Zielinski. It was a useful exercise to compare these with the exhibition of Polish Theatre Posters staged at The Performance Space in Sydney in 1986 under official diplomatic auspices. The UAM exhibition had arrived by more "Underground" routes, though none of the Solidarity posters could be obtained. The final exhibition, beautifully mounted and organized as a model of scholarship through the dedication of the UAM's director, Nancy Underhill, was, nonetheless, far from "dry" in the selection of the images, many of which were erotic and violent.
The "school" of Polish posters, we are told in Bednarowicz's authoritative and exhaustive essay, died in the late seventies, subsequently espousing a commercialism of design which made it little different from international trends elsewhere. In fact, since the late fifties, the "school" had been taking trends on board from the West, ranging from abstract expressionism to Pop, through to early seventies psychedelia. How far do they reflect the myth of the individual as remarkably conserved in Eastern Europe? In one sense they are no different from what might be seen in posters from France, or Japan, or any country at the Poster Biennales in Warsaw. And yet, to a Western eye, there is a curious aspect to the works produced in Poland in the last ten years which does make them different. This difference lies in their degree of existential questioning and, consequent on that loss of self-identity, of a heart-felt violent surrealism. This is, perhaps, most acutely expressed in the poster by W. Sadowski, Goya Wieczor Belatowy (Goya An Evening of Ballet). This image almost classicaly expresses the phenomenological dilemma of Sartre. The ingrown claw arising from the mind pierces the eyes. The light of reason is extinguished, the certainty of the Cartesian "I am".
The self-doubt is comparable to that expressed in Andrzej Wajda's films (before the dubiously populist Solidarity film, Man of Iron), as in Danton, or in Zanussi's, Year of the Quiet Sun. The typical Polish film of aimless wanderings and dead-ends.
More than this, Sadowski, Starowieyski (most notoriously) and Pagowski employ a surrealist mode which recalls the wilder dreams of seventies psychedelia and the hypnotic dissolution of self, drug-induced in the West, but in Eastern Europe signifying an act of expiation, of violence against a self betraying itself through socio-political compulsion.
It differs from its superficially similar reflection in West European post-modernism whose loss of self is intellectual, rather than emotional, personally and nationally, and has little kinship with seventies angst or the Melbourne black grid production-line in Australia.
If the Polish self-doubt looks a little old fashioned, it is because politics in the West is just another code. Wajda pointed out recently that such an attitude has no meaning for Poland, except when self-consciously adopted as a Western trend. Freedom is still "real" in Poland, as real as supplies of bread and, since Chernobyl, of breatheable air. Surrealism and anguish is no pose of self-indulgence, but a genuine questioning of the ethical self in a polity locked into a double-bind of chicanery and petty sniping at the individual in the terrorism of the minutiae of life (as described in Kazimierz Brandys' Warsaw Diaries of the 1980's).
Not all the posters expressed such a degree of maniacal introversion, but even the cheerier ones moodied a melancholia and doubt, without totally verging on pessimism.