Culture and Organization

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The Identity Paradox? Reflections on Fluid Identity

of Female Artist
Katarzyna Kosmala
To cite this article: Katarzyna Kosmala (2007) The Identity Paradox? Reflections
on Fluid Identity of Female Artist, Culture and Organization, 13:1, 37-53, DOI:
10.1080/14759550601167271
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14759550601167271

Published online: 16 Mar 2007.

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Culture and Organization, March 2007, Vol. 13(1), pp. 3753

The Identity Paradox? Reflections on Fluid

Identity of Female Artist
KATARZYNA KOSMALA*
Heriot-Watt University, School of Management and Languages, Edinburgh EH14 4AS, UK
Culture
10.1080/14759550601167271
GSCO_A_216654.sgm
1475-9551
Original
Taylor
102007
13
K.Kosmala@hw.ac.uk
KatarzynaKosmala
000002007
and
&
and
Article
Francis
(print)/1477-2760
Francis
Organization
Ltd
(online)

The aim of this paper is to explore the paradoxes in the evolving identity of a professional artist, contributing
to theorisation of identity formation and performance. I use an example of a Warsaw-based female artist of
the 1970s generation, who has engaged her life experiences in critical practice, Zofia Kulik.
Kuliks identity formation encompasses the process of privately infused professionalism. Her story provides
an alternative account of organising identity and professional practice from the local perspective, contributing to the problem of difference in work and offers insights into how female professionals, here in the
occupation of an artist, can challenge disadvantage and discrimination created by the work context, the art
world. The story reveals that contextual factors infuse fluidity in the evolution of creative careers and occupational identities. I conclude that identity construction is an open-ended process, embracing temporal
discontinuities.
Key words: Identity; visual artist; gender; work; fluidity

I used to think that the artist and the artworks are needed in our society. Today, I believe that the artist has
become yet another citizen. Art doesnt seem to have any mission anymore. Democratic majority roles, and
this majority prefers record-seeking sports than arts (Zofia Kulik1)

ON THE FRINGES OF THE EUROPEAN ARTS

Identities can only temporarily point at the attachment to the subjects position, a process of
chaining of the subject to the flow of discourse (Hall, 2000: 19). Indeed, the (artistic) identity in the CEE region is in a flux of negotiations with the past and belonging to a new
Europe.2 Socially constructed problems such as traditionalisms, historical myths and
nationalisms, and traditional models and roles all appear significant in the reconstruction of
artists own self-images (Cvijetic, 1999). More than temporal attachment to identity can be
problematic given that we simultaneously occupy different positions in the world. These
positions reflect units of identities, constructed within the play of power and exclusion. The
multiple nature of the self, thus, can reinforce ambiguity and insecurity about the self
(Collinson, 2003: 534). This insecurity is even more prominent in the context of the arts, in
the occupational identity of the artist, where the status is ambiguous and individuals often
create in isolation, in largely unregulated contexts.
In contemporary arts, there is no rigidly defined system of rules and artistic labour; its
creative and critical insights are generally undervalued. Identity, thus, is interwoven with
*Email: K.Kosmala@hw.ac.uk; Tel: +44 (0)131 451 3551; Fax: +44 (0)131 451 3296

ISSN 1475-9551 print; ISSN 1477-2760 online 2007 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14759550601167271

38

K. KOSMALA

open, subjective stylistic means, forming aspects of an articulation of the self and self-representation in the art world. Bain (2005) argues that often envisaged as informal nature, an
artistic occupational identity can render the professional artist as an empty signifier. In the
lack of recognition of artistic labour as real work, where the creative process is often
performed in a private sphere, the status of the artist comes from drawing on a repertoire of
shared myths in a construction of professional identity and communicating it to others. She
also points at several myths of artistic identity attributes, such as socio-economic and cultural
marginalisation, alienation, outsider status and creative autonomy. These myths become
catalysts for temporal identity construction and perseverance of a professional status for the
artist, while being on the fringes of society. These myths engender action and sense-making,
simultaneously reproducing cultural order within which they occur (Bain, 2005: 256).
Indeed, societal ambivalence, cultural production and private desolation make the occupational identity of the artist fluid. The self becomes in part a symbolic project that one recreates, refashions and re-fabricates, juxtapositioning what is private and public, personal and
political, individual and historical (Elliot, 2001: 6). I argue that the self, although constructed
in a socially and historically localised moment, cannot be explored in isolation from
interpretations of the individual experiences and thier specificity for a subject (a person)
(Taylor, 1992).
The aim of this paper is to explore the evolving occupational identity of the professional
artist. I use an example of the Warsaw-based female artist of the 1970s generation, who
has engaged in critical practice, Zofia Kulik. In particular, I explore how she has engaged
her life experiences (artistic practice) in identity construction and identity management.
Kulik explained her particular geo-political location and temporality of the identity as her
Polish hunch-back, which evokes a certain helplessness. It is not the lack of intelligence
or talents; it is the lack of rational, efficient and proper functioning of everything and the
lack of the normal attitude to everything, without cynicism, without all those ambiguities,
without the pissed-off approach. This, obviously, has an impact on art, and also our
behaviour and feelings with others (Kulik, in Sitkowska, 19861995). Her story reveals
that contextual factors influence fluidity in the evolution of creative careers and occupational identities.
In the 1970s, critical art movements spread world wide and critical artists both challenged
and transcended traditional means of art production and ideologically infused representation.
Art rhetoric located some of these artists in the opposition to the mainstream and to the power
of art institutions. This was the Western rebellion. At that time, however, on the fringes of
the European arts, in the CEE region under communist regime, state funding was cut for
more alternative arts. The state ideology enveloped in a communist interpretation of socialism promised a more homogeneous society, where differences in gender, class and culture
were somewhat dispersed. There was also a kind of political censorship in the visual arts, and
not financing the artists who engaged in a critique of the political system (Truszkowski,
1999), simultaneously silencing critical and feminist art practices across the CEE region.
Some artists, however, continued to locate their practice outside the mainstream ideology, in
a space that was recognised as the counter-culture (Andreas, 1999) Identification with the
state, through formal art practice and state commissioning was looked down upon.3 These
underground political movements challenged the communist regime by questioning the role
of dominant systems in the construction of identity and difference, to the extent that this was
possible, that is, without attracting repression (Polit, 2000).
The female artists of these underground movements, such as Kulik, were in a particularly
difficult position. The occupation of professional artist is associated with the myths of
predominantly male notions, such as a grand maestro or genius (Parker and Pollock, 1981).
Indeed, being an artist has been seen as a male occupation, a male thing. Women in the

THE IDENTITY PARADOX

39

same occupational community, in the arts, need to assert their position and their professionalism in this occupational field and become what Gherardi (1996) labelled travellers in the
male world, where social structures set up expectations and social obligations, positioning
gender relations in this professional context. But to become a critical female artist in 1970s
Poland further complicated a sense of the self.
The personality of the artist, in particular a critical artist, reinforces the idea that creative
individuals exhibit attributes of challenge, arrogance, societal interference and hostility,
which often translates into a rebellious nature towards established norms (Csikszentimihalyi,
1990). Kulik belongs to that group as she questions the established order and its dominant
powers and challenges the limits of what is perceived as acceptable through her critical practice. A complex layering and interpretation of conflicting elements of her own (private) identity formation, echoed in her practice, derives both from her inner history (a private person
working from home) and from the external social environment (the art world, in the CEE
context, its institutions and politics).
A version of socialism in 1970s Poland and its welfare policies did cut back gender-based
social and economic discriminations across the CEE (Kowalczyk, 1999). Instead, the state
appropriated the womens question, diminishing gender inequality to an economic issue.
Women became objects of social and political manipulation, particularly in professional
practices, including art practice. The tendency of women to take an active role in the labour
market in the 1950s and 1960s occurred as the government responded to a deficit of employment, especially in the services sector. Despite womens equality of rights, a rhetoric propagated by the communist government, women in professional and executive roles were
disprivileged (Kowalczyk, 1999). Further, in the 1970s, the Polish government invoked the
propaganda of a womans primary role as a mother. This socially constructed (dis)placement
and a constructed picture of womanhood was echoed in the professional context. This is why
the tenets of Western versions of feminism in that time appeared somewhat different in the
CEE (Kowalczyk, 2002). In the art practice milieu, female professional artists who engaged
in critical practice could to some extent benefit from state policies and simultaneously
became members of the opposition, through their involvement in the alternative and underground artistic movements. Managing the socio-political and emotional dynamics of the
critical practice required the non-acceptance of ones position (here, also the gender concerns
of being an artist in the male world) and pursuit of ones definition of being an artist, but in a
somewhat contested position through the transformation from a nice girl to nice bitch
(Katila and Merilainen, 2002).
Feminist literature emphasises the importance of multiple subjectivities and the fragmented, discontinued nature of the self, fluid, crafted, performed selves (e.g., Eckert, 1985;
Kondo, 1990). Performing identity reflects a repository of roles of gender norms, like playing
a game of temporal engaging and disengaging with the social world and enacting certain
ideals of femininity and masculinity (Butler, 1993). This links with Fourniers (2002) notion
of playing a game of disconnecting. Indeed, performing identity, a reflexive process of
constituting and individualising, can form a source of meanings in life and ways of experiencing the world (Ecker, 1985). Kuliks otherness does not point at a lack of confidence or
assertiveness but is a particular way of engaging with world, through a performing of her
evolving identity. Her fluid identity replaces a more traditional role, based on the fixed categories of being a women and being an artist. It is a means of entering into the relationship to
the self, an ability to transform the self and to achieve praxis. This is how Kulik reflects
herself and fuels her intrinsic motivation to create, through identity performance in artistic
occupational life and professional practice.
Drawing from cultural and visual studies, I also argue that the idea of identity is constituted through the power of discourse and enacted through the subjects temporal positionings

40

K. KOSMALA

made in the wider cultural codes (Hall, 1996). Hence, identities are constituted in and
through difference and subsequently are inherently dislocated (Du Guy, 2000), that is, fluid
and dependent upon the outside world which both denies them and provides the conditions of
their possibility. The story of Kulik provides an alternative account of organising identity and
professional practice from the local perspective, contributing to the problem of difference
in work (Czarniawska and Hopfl, 2002). This paper reveals the paradoxes of identity
construction, its inconsistency in terms of what Linstead and Thomas (2002) referred to as
the conjunction of reflecting on past and future experiences of the self.
Inevitably, as from the perspective of the subject, there are tensions between the
creative and destructive possibilities in the processes of identity construction and management (Jeffcutt, 1993). It could be argued that artists embedded in the other (here the
CEE) context, here considered as their historically informed traditions (the reality of
underground opposition to the totalitarian system) and culturally constructed notions (the
formal art establishments and the institutionalised market) reproduce and re-create them in
the present. The paper offers reflections on complexity and ambivalence in the construction of identity and its organisation emphasising the other and m(other) (Hopfl and
Kostera, 2003), here exemplified by the case of a female artist engaged in critical
practice.
This paper evolves around a story (Gabriel, 1995) about a woman who has managed her
occupational identity of being an artist, which emerged through a series of discussions,
unstructured interviews with the artist and my observations of her life-space (home) and her
work. Evidence is also drawn from the analysis of visual material, documentary research
and critical writings about the artist and her practice. The study, in a sense participatory in
nature, highlights the dialectic between private and professional lifeworlds in the construction of identity. In a discussion of Kuliks story, I acknowledge the historical and cultural
contingency and fluidity in her identity construction. Subsequently, I argue for not abstracting particular forms of personhood from the specific cultural milieus in which they have
been formed and contested (here, the local milieu of the CEE). Kuliks artistic identity
formation constituted: firstly, her involvement in underground and sublime art, in particular
her critical performances with Przemyslaw Kwiek under communism, that is the performing life and living art of KwieKulik; secondly, the era of the political and personal (professional) transformation in the 1980s; and thirdly, her most recent individual practice as a
visual female artist in the context of New Europe. Kuliks reception is placed in the context
of the new generation artists. I also point out the instances of the discriminating and censoring of artists, especially female artists who engage in more critical practice. The paper
provides insights into how female professionalshere, in the occupation of artistcan
challenge disadvantage and discrimination crated by the work context, illustrated here by
the art world.

A FLUID PERSONAE OF KWIEKULIK

In Poland, after 1956, a quasi-liberalisation of the arts and a degree of state tolerance allowed
for some freedom of expression in alternative artistic realms. This was, however, minimal in
comparison to the level of state subsidies given for projects supporting systemic propaganda.
Kulik emerged as an artist in a small group that circumvented official institutional routes and
state gallery spaces, disseminating their works via authors galleries, artists houses, studios,
and other informal working spaces.
In her artistic practice under the communist regime, she questioned the gendered construction of identity. Her diploma work consisted of two parts: one was a copy of Michelangelo

THE IDENTITY PARADOX

41

Buonarottis sculpture Moses made of hardened, coloured rags; and the other consisted of
the simultaneous projection of five hundred slides onto three screens surrounding the viewer.
The slides shown during these projections entitled Open Form 1971, constituted a kind of
Kuliks visual memoirsincidents and events of her life, both artistic and personal. Some
slides represented a naked female with a red scarf, a symbolic representation of the female in
the communist milieu, a sign of official [state] celebrations (Wilson, 2001). Kuliks works
were informed by Hansens idea of the open form, which as she explained facilitated a freedom of her artistic expression and a focus on the context. She explained that the results of the
artists work should be used by the recipients as information possibly explaining current
problems and relations of reality. Kulik wanted the context to speak for itself, in its own
language.4 Revealing the complexity of the form evokes questions about the social, functional and cultural mechanisms of subordination: This spirit of documenting, in a way that is
adequate to the work, as well as the consciousness accompanying you during your working
that whatever you do, you can have it documented, so you can more freely transform your
work, this spirit comes from Hansen (Kulik, in Sitlowska, 19861995). Kulik explained that:
Open Form is the art of creating the background for unique things. To present it suitably to Hansens professional field, it would be an art of constructing architecture which makes a man and contrasts with him, it gets
into service-like, informative and functional interactions with him and, concurrently, it does not overwhelm
the viewer with its form. The form can function politically, despite everything. It can simply be seen a tool of
power, e.g., a typical closed form like the Place of Culture in Warsaw [a symbol of soc-real architecture].
(Kulik, in Sitkowska, 19861995)

Across the CEE region, post-war traumas and the mechanism of systemic subordination gave
rise to the absurd and the ironic in visual culture. Performances provided a perfect arena for a
critique of totalitarianism, often focusing artistic discourse of critique on the body (Sobota,
1996). In their final student years, Zofia Kulik and Przemyslaw Kwiek started to create
collaboratively in the field of performance art. In the years 19701987, Kulik worked under a
public persona KwieKulik, where the capital K in the artistic acronym emphasised both the
professional collaboration as artists in an occupation of the artists and simultaneously mutual
emotional dependence (Michalak, 1999).
Performance works of KwieKulik could be compared to the artistic duet of Marina
Abramovic and Uwe Laysiepen or Abramovic/Ulay (Michalak, 1999). For female-male artistic partnerships, the decision to be involved in body art challenged a notion of professional
identity construction, the codes for masculinity and femininity, domination and subordination. The scripts for their performances were often based on spontaneous actions. Being more
interested in the processes of artistic realisation, in initialising and analysis rather than in
producing traditional objective works of art, the artist prompted participatory aesthetics and
an attitude of transgressing inter-artistic borders (Ronduda, 2004), also those separating art
from life.
The team emphasised the co-operation where more stress was put on communication and
cognition than on presentation. KwieKulik performances were comments on the cultural and
political subordination of the self. Through focus on the context and the form, the artists
created certain cognitive representations of situations, trying to define the character of the
reality in which they lived and worked (i.e. the control apparatus of communism regime). For
instance, at the body performance Activity with the Head in 1978 in Lublin, KwieKulik
caricatured state interrogations used by political authorities. This performance also
commented upon how brutality from the public sphere (political system) can creep into the
private domain, into the domain of relating and of relationships. Kwiek thrusted Kuliks head
into a washbasin, poured water into the basin until Kulik could barely breathe and then
washed the upper parts of his body in this water. Aside from commenting on identity, both
artists explored the limits and fears of the relationships, of relating to each other. Both artists

42

K. KOSMALA

challenged their gendered identities as the action ended with the image of their heads being
covered in buckets of rubbish (Wilson, 2001).
The KwieKulik duet often criticised the dominant political system and its authority in
identity formation with a use of irony and ridicule. Their performances represented how the
idea of power, as the invisible control of human action, operates in social contexts. For
instance, in 1986 in their work entitled, Arcady, they used a chain as a metaphor of mental
human repression. Arcady, the symbolic land of perfect happiness, was depicted as a place
where invisible power (represented by a paper-made hand) limited human rightsthe
freedom of individual movement and speech. KwieKulik also used political and systemic
insignia for their performances as a means of critiquing the ideology. For instance, in 1985 in
A Hammer, a Head, a Sickle, a Hook, a Shadow, they played with the Soviet symbols and
metaphors of shadow theatre play and in the Semantic Monster in 1984, they deconstructed
the national symbols in the Polish flag (Wilson, 1999).
The Polish duet, similar to Abramovic/Ulays works, did not treat their professional life
independently from their private life. KwieKulik involved their son Dobromierz in executing
their art projects (i.e. Activities with Dobromierz, a series of photographic works from 1972
1974) (Truszkowski, 1999). This is an instance where by an extrapolation of creative inputs to
the family dynamics, parenthood and the associated domestic activities of childcare, the work
became home and ways of being, while home became work and even at times housework (see
Fig. 1).
KwieKuliks critical practice was risky and at times dangerous. In the years 19751979,
both artists were imprisoned for a short period and had their passports withheld. The
artists were excluded from exhibiting both nationally and internationally.5 Paradoxically, at
that time, their practice became even more underground. In the 1978 performance entitled,
Monument without Passports, the artists satirised their professional isolation as artists
within the alternative art scene and mocked the ways in which their individual practice
was supported by producing state-friendly commissions for money. During the performance, Kulik held in her hands a document of the Unrealised Projects whilst her feet
were encased in solidifying plaster. She reflected upon the fixation of her own artistic
position (Sobota, 1996), on her professional identity as a female artist in communist
Poland.
How did Kulik manage her occupational identity and professional practice in those days?
The ideological thrusts of KwieKuliks performances were simultaneously lived working
experiences for Kulik, experiences of emotional distress. She was a young, relatively inexperienced yet professional female artist involved in the heavily loaded critique of the political
system through critical performance. This is partly why there was deep emotional dependence and personal bonding for the KwieKulik duo. Kulik explained, I was [then] so silent, I
could not speak. I needed someone (Kwiek) to be between the world and me (Kulik, in
Wilson, 2001). The identity of the artist was somewhat constructed of two persons, the
professional competence and creative input comprised of him and her, somewhat intense,
somewhat indistinguishable, and therefore, safer to manage for the inner and outer realities of
the then Eastern Block and of a surrounding fog which also you have in you (Kulik, ibid.).
In their constructed occupational identity, there was no Kulik in those years there was
KwieKulik instead.
Figure 1. Zofia Kuliks home and workplace in Lomianki near Warsaw, with the projected fragment of her installation From Syberia to Cyberia, 2004.

POLITICAL AND PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION

In the mid-1980s, Kulik started to question her professional identity under the personae of
KwieKulik. She said, I rejected one thing that I discovered in one of my parents; the

THE IDENTITY PARADOX

43

Figure 1. Zofia Kuliks home and workplace in Lomianki near Warsaw, with the projected fragment of her
installation From Syberia to Cyberia, 2004.

helplessness of a person who has good intentions but is not able to do things well. Is not able
to, yet persists in doing things which are beyond this person. And sometimes this person
spoils everything. I reject this now, both in my art and in our life (Kulik, in Sitkowska,
19861995). Kulik re-examined her personal and artistic dependence in the professional
context and subsequently, the process, like the quality of the produced and performed works.
It was as if she started to speak again in her own occupational voice. She said, Finally, the
dialogue in a duo becomes a thing in itself. A realisation of work, communicating to others
your own ideas, lost importance. I felt bad. I felt a need for a silent consideration more and
more strongly, indeed for self-surprises with my non-verbal decisions, an immediate dialogue
with my works. The work call gave me a hint what to do next by its own private response
(Kulik, in Sitkowska, 19861995).
In 1987, Kulik broke collaboration with her life partner and artist collaborator Przemyslaw
Kwiek.6 The moment of their separation coincided with the collapse of communism in the
CEE. A process of regaining socio-political freedom for Kulik also involved a process of
regaining her professional autonomy as an artist (Truszkowski, 1999).
Kulik (in Sitkowska, 19861995) explained:
For about 17 years I have been working in a duo. I have participated in the realisation of common things,
common objectives. After many attempts I stopped believing in their sense and the conflict-free, group-based
projects realisations. And, simply, I have started to deal with myself. Now, I am looking for something else,
not a partnership in common working initiatives. I am interested in those I feel a big accumulation of psychological tensions, some cracks in their personality, I am interested in those who try to take certain shortcuts to
express themselves. I am also searching for wider cultural plots in my work. I do not want to limit myself to
my own, individual context and environmental conditioning.

Kulik needed to start anew. She needed a working space located outside the social
order. She has found such solitude at her home. The term home is perceived here
symbolically (a local context) and physically as Kulik has been producing and continues
to produce her works in her house. A home environment facilitates more positive

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K. KOSMALA

emotional display of her work role and creates a distance from the art institutions. The
boundaries for her home become also the boundaries of her workplace, a sort of protective enclave. Home has become the place where Kulik is casting a difference at workplace (Czarniawska and Hopfl, 2002) in her professional identity. In largely unregulated
contexts, such as the arts, there seems to be an intrinsic relationship between the self,
creative self-realisation and the workplace. Often, management of the professional role
incorporates management of spaces between home and work. Artists often physically
withdraw into their occupational solitude, to their studios. Kulik, however, has withdrawn
into her home space for the sake of praxis.
An important instance of the power effects in Foucaults sense is a division of Western
society into the public and the private spheres (Brewis and Sinclair, 2000), where the former
is supposedly dedicated to working and the latter for recuperation (Surman, 2002). In Kuliks
professional practice, however, there is no such division. Home is a space where the boundaries between the private and the public (professional) are blurred in the construction of identity. Hastrup (1987) describes such practice, in the field of anthropology, as a peculiar mode
of the self-ethnography, engaging not in the unmediated world of the others but the world
between selves and the others.
The search for possible new ways of reinventing the artistic professional self Kulik
realised through her archivisation processes of the other. Her working days have often been
labour intensive, structured and overlapping with the late evenings. She initiated a homebased collection of images, a kind of auto-therapy of the manifestations of reality for identity
formation. Kuliks aim was to take the side of the other, to question dominant ideology
visually through collected databasevisualia which could have been transformed into
specific cultural utterances and representations (Hornowska, 1999) in an execution of her
individual art projects. Kulik7 said:
Whenever I recall how they tried to bring me up, at home, at school, in institutions, for a positive, polite and
joyful citizen, I feel deeply distressed. I was never hungry, never cold; I did not suffer any physical discomforts or hardships. So when I feel distressed it occurs to me that it is my own mental weakness, my own fault
in a way. Why am I not a joyful citizen? I have been hammered, we all have been hammered. Hammering
implies a repetitive driving of a nail into something.

Kulik as an individual practitioner became an observer, taking the side of the other, the
subordinated, the repressed. Indeed, Kuliks works from home and through her artistic representations mediate between what is a person and what is the world. The key aspects of her
critically informed art combine redefinition and an exploration of the self, the questions of
ideological subordination and the ways of disciplining the mind and the body. Driven by the
necessity to transform herself from an unassertive individual to an independent artist, Kulik
used the matter of images to look for her own way of working, adopting methods of repetition and multitude, arranging her photographs into maps of labyrinths, where one visual
image could have been juxtaposed with another (Hornowska, 1999), forming patterns. This
could be how she continued to question the construct of identity, both of herself as a subject
and the interpretations of her individual work.
In Kuliks artworks created after 1987, the social discourses form the narratives of the
aesthetic-ideological, often politicised order in identity construction; that is, she arranged
these discourses in symmetric photograph-based compositions. For instance, in Large
Vanitas Still Life, symmetrical arrangements of a recurrent motif of a human skull are
combined with folk ornaments from the shawls of mourning then (former) Yugoslav
women. Kulik mixed cultural and societal symbols to emphasise the relativity of power in
the construction of identity. The artist explained that all my works consist of endless gathering and archivisation of the images of this world. Its complexity derives from the abundance of the archive which I posses. My archives contain various categories of

THE IDENTITY PARADOX

45

documented reality (Kulik, in Turowski, 1999). In Kuliks art, the poignant emptiness of
images is accompanied by very specific figural patterns, some mnemosyne. As in Gerhard
Richters Atlas, her collected visualia is rooted in the artists psyche and in the historical
experience of her generation.
Kulik declared, In 1984 I started to speak (Kulik, in Wilson, 2001). These words
summarise a radical decision in the process of her artistic identity formation. At that stage,
the younger professional woman becomes the mature woman, autonomous of the petrifying
ideological past, liberated from its memories. The professional artist is moving away from
politicised performances of KwieKulik and patterns and a focus on the body, to a period of
individual self-realisation as an independent practitioner.

MICROCOSMS OF THE OTHER REALITY IN THE WORKS OF ZOFIA KULIK

The fall of the totalitarian regime in the CEE region resulted in a pluralisation of the subject
(Piotrowski, 1999), bringing new questions to representations of identity in the visual art
practices. How can we approach our history, as Marx put it, without distorted beliefs and
abstractions of any ideology?8 We are constituted as subjects by being addressed by ideology
that encompasses (Althusser, 1977) and affects us.9 After the fall of communism in the CEE
region, female artists who engaged in critical practice, in particular, took on the creative
responsibility of exposing their (gendered) identities against the dominant cultural fictions.
Their efforts were directed at challenging the cultural assumptions of what is masculine and
what is feminine. Kulik explained that her family participated in the creation of the foundations of that system very conscientiously and honestly. Although now I do not consider it my
duty to have similar views to my mother, I know that what she did was honest and full of
commitment. As the years were passing, I started to realise a certain naivet, some scoutlike character of her behaviour (Kulik, in Sitkowska, 19861995).
From the late 1980s onwards, the artists relationships to the self, to others and to reality
itself, demanding the awareness of different senses, are reflected in her individual practice.
The individual practice required embracing the new institutional context (i.e. applications for
state grants, operation within gallery spaces) and the implications of the emergent art market
(marketing and promotion through production of catalogues, art writing, art criticism, etc.).
Yet, a tendency is to relay temporarily on the projects execution and income unpredictability, infused self-expressiveness, and favouring of the quality of life in more subversive and
cultural terms. In such ways of relating to employment, Kulik is freed from its reduction to
economic security.
In this new context, Kulik continued to work from home. The notion of working from
home became for Kulik a protective territory for professional survival, especially in the
context of a male-dominated art world. Working from home for artists as Kulik who
transcend stereotypical representations of femininity and engage in the systemic political
critique through their practice, the home and the work from home (her studio-based
practice, her office work and her archives) offer a way to relearn the social self, including
the professional self. The inside-outside boundaries of home and work, identified in Kuliks
practice, put into question the way we understand them, which during the past few decades
has attracted considerable interest in critical studies and organisational theory (e.g., see
Thanem, 2003; Cooper, 1990). Also, Kuliks ways of working takes a particular spin on the
gender-related problem of the glass ceiling, that is, the absence of women in particular
professions and related issues of female visibility in historically male-dominated
professions (Gherardi, 1996), here in the visual arts, revealing that invisibility does not
mean lack of presence.

46

K. KOSMALA

Kuliks practice continues as critical practice as she exposes the invisible power assumptions and deconstructs dominant ideologies of cultural subversion. Kuliks deconstructive
activities may thus be seen not only as a critical re-examination of the cultural history of the
former system, but also as a self-reflexive process directed at an exploration of her evolving
professional artistic identity and geo-location. These processes have been informed and
guided by her evolving private/professional relationship with Kwiek, her relationship with
her country, its political changes, and the emergent new artistic landscapes, that is, a transformation of the art market, art institutions and subsequently artistic discourse. In that way, the
experiences of being a professional artist can be seen as critically transformational (political
and at times subversive).
Kulik utilises the means of appropriation and deconstruction as artistic tools in her works
to facilitate an emotional break with her occupational artistic past. Kuliks works made after
1987 are more ambivalent than reactionary and often address the artists response to the
disintegration of the communist regime and its symbols (Sobota, 1996). In these works the
artist refers to the visual idioms of socialism, utilising the images of totalitarian architecture,
soc-real monuments and statues, May-day marches, draperies, etc., for example: Medals
(19871989), The Inter-National Gothic (1990), Square of Palace (1990), March, March,
March (1990), Guards of the Spire (1990), Favourite Balance (1991), All Things Converge
in Time and Space; to Disperse, to Converge, to Disperse, and so on (1992), Columns
(1992), Petals (1995) are all, different in size, black and white photographic tabloids, made in
the compositions of mosaics, mandalas, Gothic windows and altars, columns and Persian
carpetsrepresentations of collective and personal memory in the context of fading communism. The artist selected these patterns for her compositions in order to reach through them,
what she argued, and the essence of reality, and in that way to establish more direct contact
through these patterns with the viewers (Hornowska, 1999). Through these visual matrixes,
her feminine (and feminist) symbolic framing of the identity and compositional aesthetics,
Kulik focuses the viewers attention on seeing the world as an ordered structure and a system
of power dynamics. She achieves that through her visual matrixes; a mixture of her feminine
(and feminist) symbolic framing of the identity and compositional aesthetics with the
elements of soc-real utopia.
Some of Kuliks works from the 1990s are not so much the photomontages of the socialist
symbols, but representations whereby she deconstructs the reality of socialism, in particular
the substance of its imagery. Kulik introduced these socialist discourses into the ornamental
structures, making them appearing grotesque, resembling the technique adopted in social
realism. In that way, these socialist realist symbols appear as a masquerade of the images
oscillating between the multiplicity of the codified symbols and the emptiness of emerging
meanings (Turowski, 1999). In All the Missiles are One Missiles (1993) the flat patterns,
despite the accentuated centre, invite the viewer to scan the whole image (the frame) laterally. In a sense, Kulik situates the old stories of communism in an ironic frame of a
disordering order.
In her latter works, made in the late 1990s and onwards, Kulik focused more on the form of
internalised power in identity construction through the representations of more static, repetitive and harmonious photographic montages. With this aesthetic support, Kulik revealed an
artificial and vulnerable character in the social order based on the constructed hierarchies of
power (Wilson, 1999).
The photographic representations of her male nudes implicitly invoke the systemic cultural
signification, defined through a repertoire of specific signs and poses (Wilson, 1999). In May
Day Mass (1990), Moon Skull (1995), the Monstrance (1995) and the Columns (1995), the
male nude is inscribed with a literal signifier or phallic fiction, based on the poses which can
be read as aggressive ethos of masculinity, creating the idea of the visual order of things

THE IDENTITY PARADOX

47

(through his body) (Lajer-Burchart, 1996). Kulik comments upon how the mechanisms of
power control both behaviour and an appearance of the self. A man and his body participate
both in constructions of power and in constraining it. Kulik comments on the place of an
individual in these different forms of power systems, representing the instances of individual
entanglement in power mechanisms and values they create.
Kulik becomes the feminine teller of the systemic tale about identity construction, the
woman in charge of the visual processes of constructing gendered categories. She comments
upon gender construction of societal psycho-sexual dependence and culturally constructed
ideals of masculinity. A man is represented as both a victim and an oppressor. This feminine
perspective on cultural subordination reveals the power mechanism in the formation of
gendered subjectivity (Lajer-Burchart, 1996).
Systemic power through the representations of repetitive and harmonious photographic
montages of the world systems is deconstructed in her recent work From Siberia to Cyberia
(2004). Here, memory takes the form of a cultural montage. The image forms a gigantic flow
of media-generated black and white images. The wave, which this stream of images seems to
form a monstrous zigzag, flows out of the past and from the depth of memory, visual memory
and the memory of the body, into a future which is never a continuation of the past but the
new representation of the present (Kulik and Czubak, 2004) . The artist points out the power
of media culture, power which we consume and internalise in the context of any dominant
system. The viewer reflects on the consciousness of media culture and aggressive consumerism. The artist appears to warn against the systems of power in which there is no privacy
(private sphere). She evokes the idea that all dominant systems, either communism or capitalism, exploit the body and mind (Figs. 2 and 3).
Kulik challenges dominant system as she visualises space for feminine that is beyond
representation of a woman as a body. She creates her system and her order in the beautiful
patterns. In these patterns, the viewer can find references to the alternative (utopian)
construction of the world.
Kuliks works continue to challenge. Locally, the views of critical art adopted after 1989 in
the art institutions glorified the underground movements of the 1970s, including Kuliks works.
This glorification was, however, short-lived. Kuliks more radical messages are now juxtaposed
with the current political and moral cultural climax in Poland. Art practice locally has became
more dependent on private sponsorships, and more controversial arts in the CEE region once
again was censored as critical visual representations often contradicted the corporate donors
political interests and networks. Furthermore, some critics connected with the more traditional
or Catholic or academic-related journals accuse the new alternative art of being evil and transgressing all moral norms of the patriarchal culture constructed there for centuries (Kowalczyk,
2002). They are also nostalgic for traditional art, challenging the aesthetic value of contemporary critical arts and even denying that it should have been given the status of professional art.
These nationalistic and conservative discourses evoke instead a universal order of things
(Kowalczyk, 1999), the very order Kulik questions in her tales on the deconstruction of identities. As a consequence, a new obstacle was created, limiting a particular form of expression
and artistic freedom for those artists working within the critical and feminist paradigms.
Democracy in Poland is gendered as male. People who dare to say this out loud are courageous, argues Maria Janion, a Polish feminist theorist (quoted in Kowalczyk, 2002).
Instances of sexism appear to discredit the artists working with critical and feminism-related
issues of the other and of identity. Kulik was denied to show aspects of her installation at
her individual exhibition in the National Museum in Poznan in 1999. The work Kulik made
especially for this exhibition and for the museum was censored and the effect of this was the
emptying of the main space of the museum hall. The work designed for the main entrance
hall was entitled, Both Home and a Museum (see Fig. 4). In the central place of the hall,
Figures 2 and 3. Zofia Kulik, From Syberia to Cyberia, 2004, fragment of the photographic installation and below a detail of Panel 1.

48

K. KOSMALA

Figures 2 and 3. Zofia Kulik, From Syberia to Cyberia, 2004, fragment of the photographic installation and
below a detail of Panel 1.

Kulik planned to locate the obelisk and on the walls the photographs of close-ups of male
genitals from the classical sculptures of the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. These
photographs were envisaged as controversial by the museums director, so he ordered the
guards to remove them without the artists knowledge or consent. The director explained ex
post that this work could have been shocking for visitors (Kowalczyk, 1999).
Consequently, the artist was forced to dismantle the rest of the works. The installation Both
Home and a Museum was supposed to be critical of the institution of the museum in showing
it as an institution of phallocentric power, where the private is excluded from its notion of
public. Kulik depicted how the museum system excludes the other and denies or discounts
gender, class, and cultural differences a rather forced vision of history. Ironically, the
museum system excluded her works.

THE IDENTITY PARADOX

Figure 4.

49

Zofia Kulik, Home and Museum, photograph, 1999, fragment.

How is Kulik received now? Locally, audiences somewhat unreceptive to the problems of the
deconstruction of identity and the questioning of our reality do not easily assimilate her
works. Internationally, Kuliks political messages, her critical attitude, deviations from the
formalist creed, deconstruction or demolishing of identity and narrative works have been
received as a mixed message of just re-facing the past in the CEE or a perpetuating label of
the soc-real tradition (Kowalczyk, 2002), what is often seen as inherited in the visual arts
across the CEE region, through Western art discourse categorisation.
Figure 4. Zofia Kulik, Home and Museum, photograph, 1999, fragment.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS

In this paper, I have explored shifting identity in the occupation of the artist in the context of
the socio-political changes of the CEE. I have discussed the processes of occupational
identity formation and transformation of one of the most recognised female critical artist of
the 1970s generation in that region, Zofia Kulik.
Kuliks story reveals itself as a story of subjugation and perseverance. Her works need to
be placed in the context from which she has come, on which she has called, rejected and from
which she transcends. Despite Kuliks international success as a publicly recognised and
autonomous professional woman, mostly in the sphere of feminist counter-culture, she
remains excluded by the public sphere, the male-dominated art language and the commodity
art market, and thus, from real art discourse. Her story reveals that contextual factors
influence the fluid evolution of creative careers.
Kuliks story incorporates the experience of a crisis, in the 1970s. Her experiences of
marginalisation and of the political context were transformed into creativity. Kulik emphasised a need for change to achieve praxis, building on the individual strengths in the context

50

K. KOSMALA

of an uncertain and oppressive environment. While skills and creative input play an
important role in coping with change, perseverance and an aesthetic set of beliefs in challenging the dominant systemhere, through critical art practicesignificantly influence an
environment that promotes motivations for self (human) development and possibly, a better
world. Kulik achieved successful professional transformation using in her practice analytical
and creative skills, aesthetic sense and critique.
In order to manage her artistic identity, Kulik entered a space in which the normal societal expectations of an occupational role were suspended, in order to take up the professional
role; she has been involved in critical practice, simultaneously enacting cultural performances of the artist in a male world and being a mother and a woman living and working in
the communist context. Kulik is one of the isolated examples of womens achievement in
visual art practice, compelled to create within a male-dominant environment and yet building
relationships with men who have been her contemporaries and intellectual companions (such
as Kwiek) and refusing temporally socialisation. Through a series of passages, neither
institutionalised nor accompanied by formal routines, Kulik has balanced managing her
accountability to the art world and simultaneously keeping track of her own position and
autonomous practice.
Kuliks flexibility, inclination for innovation and risk taking in her practice all inform the
process of coping with change and evolving a fluid identity. As the female professional she
has rejected, where possible, the constraints of constructed occupational identity and her
feminine role. As a professional artist, situated in a particular socio-history of the CEE
region, she has rejected the subordinated role of the passive citizen and passive female and
assumed responsibility for herself, her work and professional practice. As a creative entrepreneur, she has managed the processes of transformation of her artistic practice in the
context of the evolving socio-political milieufrom communist regime, through transition
processes of opening market economy, to rhetorical politics of new Europe and its institutionalised art world.
There is an emerging organisational literature exploring alternative resisting strategies to
patriarchal constructions of professional identity by female professionals. Katila and
Merilainen (2002), for instance, explore such resistance in female academics. Resistance in
their instance took the form of writing articles, questioning the gendered discourses and
social practices of so-called liberal profession, which in that case was explored in the
context of the academic community. Kulik does not write articles; she resists visually, she
creates representations of identity construction, cultural subordination and inequality. Her
ways of working reflect her political consciousness of sexual difference in art.
Kuliks creative insights and her ability to challenge the viewer inspire and motivate her
working process. In her works, she somewhat dissolves the notion of the self through representation of mechanisms of subordination. In both her body performances and photographic
works, she has highlighted and resisted the ideological assumptions behind the persisting
dichotomy of male-female roles and indeed, behind gender-binding identity construction.
This is also how she has resisted patriarchal articulations of her professionalism and her
occupational identity of the female artist. Butler (1993: 22) argues that identities are formed
through exclusion, through the production of abjected and marginalised subjects, contested
and compelled to give something away, to evolve. Kuliks works can be viewed as abjected
work, a response to a threatening reality. Translating these assumptions into the art world
reflects how feminine creativity and cultural achievement lie buried under misleading societal classifications.
For being a professional artist, in particular a female artist in the male world, requires a
high degree of initiative and perseverance. Men in professional practice, in particular, enact
their masculinities by being more public, visible and assertive. Women, however, tend to

THE IDENTITY PARADOX

51

adopt a more feminine approach in their occupations by being more private and invisible in
the professional milieu (Martin, 1989), possibly working collectively. Kulik found a balance
between the two by her artistic production from home, from the initiation of an idea, research
and data collection, to execution and management of creative process. Combining the socalled separate categories of work and home, Kuliks example challenges the notion of the
glass ceiling simply as an explanation of a gender-infused work inequality.
Now, Kulik, as an established professional artist, continues to create in the context of
global capitalism and media culture. In global arts and in the art world of the CEE, in
particular, there are not many prerequisites or credentials to validate artistic professionalism.
In Kuliks works, the self seems even more frail, fractured and fragmented. She has been
rejected by the dominant discourses both under communism and now. And despite a high
level of skills and education, artists such as Kulik continue to be underemployed and are
awarded the minimal income in comparison with other professions. In such contexts, readymade stories of the self, as Bain (2005) argues, provide significant sources of identification.
In Kuliks identity formation, this process refers to a privately infused professionalism. For
her, being an artist is not only an occupational identity transgressing home-work boundaries;
it is also a mode of her engagement in the world. A division between the active and creative
self-shaping and passive social determination, in Kuliks case, can be translated in terms of
cultural constraints, focusing on the status of the social forces and the institutional dynamics,
as well as on personal agency, consciousness and desire (Elliot, 2001: 2). I conclude that it is
impossible to interpret the political, private and artistic threads separately in Kuliks
professional identity construction and management of her practice. Her identity formation
can be envisaged as a fluid, open-ended process that embraces temporal discontinuity.
Kuliks works continue to challenge, evoking different reactions in viewers, locally and
internationally. Echoes of false ideas of equality, subordination and depravation of individuality, engraved during the communist regime, demand re-surfacing in the processes of identity
deconstruction. Now, a new generation of the artists has appeared on the scene. This more
tolerant generation, socialised in and after the political transition of a period of Europe without walls, working within the parameters of the global art spirit, have a different approach to
questioning identity, beyond gender categories, perhaps a lighter of political criticism, playful
or purposefully apolitical. In this context, Kuliks works and their resonance of reality of the
other are necessary in balancing how identity is locally constituted. Kuliks works play with
our individualised memories, particular memories that we deny but that live in us.

NOTES
1.
2.

3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.

From the authors discussion with the artist, Warsaw 2004.

Despite the images of the Iron Curtain and the Eastern Block which pervaded in the West then (in the 1970s),
there was no homogenous, common cultural identity which could have been summarised under the notion of
the CEE region. This process has been traceable through Western writing about the CEE artists and art
practice, evoking authoritarian patronisation combined with stereotyping as a substitute for getting to know
the other (Andreas, 1999). It could be argued that, unfortunately, in Western discourse such mentality with
regard to the occupation of an artist in the CEE somewhat continues today.
From the authors discussion with the artist.
The authors information was obtained from the artist in Warsaw, 2004.
In the years 19751979, the artists were formally denied to show their works both in Poland and abroad and
their passports were blocked by the state authorities. Their performances, however, were getting more acclaim
internationally. For more , see Truszkowski (1999).
Kulik and Kwiek still remain close friends (material obtained from Kulik in Warsaw, 2003).
From the information obtained from the artist, Warsaw, 2004. Also, for more details see Kowalczyk (1999).
The roots of the idea of socially constituted consciousness derive also from Nietzsche: consciousness is
actually only network for connecting individuals to one another.
Althusser (1984) emphasised that the existence of ideology and hailing of individuals as subjects are the same.

52

K. KOSMALA

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