(Klara Kemp-Welch, “Antipolitics in Central European Art. Reticence as Dissidence under Post-Totalitarian Rule 1956-1989”,  I.B. Taurus& Co Ltd, London – New York 2014, pp. 221-262. The book was published in the series “The International Library of Visual Culture”)

In a series of occupation strikes on the Baltic coast in December 1970, workers in Gdansk and Szczecin protested against dramatic increases in basic food prices announced two weeks before Christmas. Several were shot dead by police as they left their shipyards. The worst violence, however, was in the port of Gdynia. After a broadcast appeal from the local authorities for strikers to return to work, dozens were massacred by police with machine guns on arrival. Party Secretary Gomulka was replaced in the wake of these events, but the Party had irrevocably lost the support of most workers, and of those few intellectuals who remained in the Party after the widespread “anti-Zionist” purge of 1968. As David Ost explains: For many oppositionists, the events of 1968 demonstrated that the Polish “communist” party had become little more than a typical fascist party, without a hint of its original socialist programme … the opposition now felt that it had absolutely nothing in common with such a party, and there seemed little point in addressing democratic demands to it.¹Ost, Solidarity, p. 52. Adam Michnik later observed that political change “from above”, as anticipated by Revisionists since 1956, was no longer on the cards. Marxist-Leninist doctrine was now “a dead creature, an empty gesture, an official ritual”, nothing more.²Michnik, A New Evolutionism, in Letters from Prison and other Essays, p. 146. Even so, Revisionism had popularized the ideas of truth and humanism, which were under attack in the official propaganda, and by opposing passivity and internal exile … laid the basis for independent participation in public life, by making it clear that faith in one’s ability to exert influence on the fate of society is an absolute prerequisite for political activity.³Ibid., p. 137.

Writing in exile in 1971, philosopher Leszek Kołakowski regretted the passivity of many intellectuals in the wake of the massacre of workers in 1970. He attributed this to the fact that a large part of the Polish intelligentsia has been persuaded to believe in the complete inflexibility of the shameful system under which they live.⁴Leszek Kolakowski, Hope and Hopelessness, Survey (London) 17/3, (Summer 1971), p. 37. His “Theses on Hope and Hopelessness” concluded that the socialist system was unreformable (its main function being to uphold the monopolistic and uncontrolled power of the ruling apparatus, irrespective of public interest),⁵Ibid. but he also advanced theses on hope. Kołakowski explained: even the most innocent forms of social organization, if not subject to proper police control, can indeed transform themselves into centres of opposition.⁶Ibid., p. 41. Crucially, the inflexibility of the system depended on the degree to which the population is convinced of its inflexibility. Kołakowski proposed that the contradictory internal tendencies of state socialism visibly weakened its cohesion, thus making the idea of active resistance exploiting contradictions in the system a viable means for challenging a system whose ideological basis had long since collapsed, leaving in its wake only the threat of Soviet invasion and the weak promise of economic improvement.⁷Ost, Solidarity, pp. 62-3. By the second half of the 1970s, other oppositional intellectuals in Poland had also come round to this view.

Gomułka’s successor, Edward Gierek, sought to improve relations with society by boosting consumerism and hopes of economic prosperity. To this end, the Polish economy was opened to the West for loans and technology, with investment directed, in particular, to the coal, steel and motor industries.⁸See Włodzimierz Brus in Alec Nove (ed.), The East European Economies in the 1970s (London: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1982), p. 123. With the successful production of Fiats under licence, and an increased range of goods on sale, consumer expectations soared. However, exports crucial to servicing the mounting Western debt dropped sharply in the wake of the international recession following the oil price rises of 1973. By the mid-1970s, Poland’s foreign debt was barely serviceable. Rather than default, the government sought the drastic solution of price increases to cut the staggering 12 per cent of GDP being spent on domestic food subsidies.⁹Anthony Kemp-Welch, Poland under Communism: A Cold War History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 201-2.

On 28 June 1976, Party leaders announced sharp increases in the price of meat and staple foods, prompting spontaneous nationwide protests, despite an attempt to pre-empt and prevent them by calling up around 7,000 target people (among them the student leaders of 1968) for military service in the run up to the new “pricing operation”.¹⁰Ibid., pp. 206-7. The Prime Minister’s appearance on television later the same day, to state that the increases had merely been “consultative” and would be withdrawn, proved to be an astonishing admission of the workers’ power to veto a major item of policy by the mono-party state.¹¹Food prices remained frozen at 1960s rates by huge subsidies. The govern­ment tried to tackle this by introducing, unannounced, a tiered system of pri­cing, giving better cuts of meat to “commercial” shops, which sold for higher prices or Western currency. When the next round of price increases was introduced, from 1 July 1980, they triggered the strike action that became the basis for “Solidarity”. The ensuing campaign to jail and blacklist strike leaders prompted intellectuals to form a Committee for the Defence of Workers (KOR) in September 1976, to offer medical, financial and legal help to those being persecuted for their part in the price protests, and for their families. Unlike previous groups, KOR acted openly. Its foundation was announced by the prominent writer Jerzy Andrzejewski in an “Open Letter to the Speaker of the Parliament” and an “Appeal to Society and to the Authorities of the Polish People’s Republic”.¹²Jan Józef Lipski, KOR. A History of the Workers’ Defense Committee in Poland, 1976-1981 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). Uniquely, all KOR’s public statements attached the signatories’ names, professions and addresses. While this made the authors easy prey to police repression, it also gave public credibility to their statements. In calling for civic courage from others, they showed the way themselves. Partly through KOR, it became apparent to the wider public that Communist claims to subservience and obedience could be resisted. It became possible to say “no” to demands by the state. Kolakowski’s theses on the self-organization of society were thus confirmed.

As one of the founders of KOR, Jacek Kuroń, had already explained, there was a growing recognition among citizens that there was no need to wait for the advent of a more independent culture and society, or the development of a full-blown political opposition. Like Havel, Kuroń argued that engaged citizens with a sense of common purpose could reclaim the public space monopolized by the Communist Party through self-organization. He cited the parallel achievements of different groups within Polish society whose sustained resistance had succeeded in preserving some level of independence from the monopolistic state system: farmers who spontaneously de-collectivized at the end of 1956, workers whose protests had on several occasions forced concessions from the state, writers and intellectuals who had continued to fight against censorship, and the Catholic Church, which consistently resisted repressive state measures.¹³The pioneering account is Adam Michnik, Kościół-lewica-dialog (Paris: Instytut literacki, 1977), trans. David Ost as The Church and the Left (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Adam Michnik argued in “A New Evolutionism” that the future of political life in Poland now depended on the convergence of small groups of the nonconformist intelligentsia with the activities of the working class.¹⁴Michnik, A New Evolutionism, p. 147. Most important was to act openly. As Michnik explained: Given the absence of an authentic political culture or any standards of democratic collective life, the existence of an underground would only worsen these illnesses and change little. Revolutionary theories and conspiratorial practices can only serve the police, making mass hysteria and police provocation more likely.¹⁵Ibid., p. 142. He concluded that an unceasing struggle for reform and evolution that seeks an expansion of civil liberties and human rights is the only course East European dissidents can take.¹⁶Ibid.

The aim of KOR was to spread the refusal of state demands into society as a whole, creating positive space for activities that could no longer be controlled by the political authorities. KOR’s focus was on transforming society, bypassing the state, and rebuilding the independent social bonds that the system tried to destroy.¹⁷Ost, Solidarity, p. 57. A reconceptualization of politics was underway, in line with the realization that democratization might not require state transformation after all.¹⁸Ibid., p. 65. As Ost explains:

If activity that takes place within civil society alone — between individuals drawn together neither by business contract nor political necessity nor religious bond, but only by a desire to engage in social activities of their own choosing — can properly be called ‘political activity’, even though such activity ignores the state sphere that is normally considered the locus of politics, then it should be possible to bypass the state altogether and still effect political change.¹⁹Ibid.

By this account, independent cultural activity was also a field of antipolitical political activity. This final chapter examines the activities of the artist Jerzy Bereś in the 1970s and 1980s and how he reclaimed the public space as a non-coercive sphere for initiating independent dialogue and promoting democratic values. Although he is less well known internationally than he should be, his ability to exploit loopholes in the system to provoke and stimulate dialogue at all the key turning points in this extraordinary period in Polish and Central European history was remarkable, and deserves more scholarly attention.

Bereś had studied under Poland’s leading sculptor, Xavery Dunikowski, at the height of the drive to enforce Socialist Realism, and was therefore initiated, from the outset, into the absurdities of socialist cultural power politics. Dunikowski’s entanglement with the authorities could be said to have reached its apogee after Stalin’s death in 1953, when he became the favourite for a lavishly funded competition to design a 15-metre-high monument to Stalin to stand in front of the newly erected Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw. His proposal for a massive granite sculpture was rejected along with all the others, however, and no monument was erected, as the committee unanimously found each of the proposals inadequate to the task of representing all the facets of Stalin’s greatness. One member of the selection committee is recorded as recalling, though, that Dunikowski’s project had made Stalin appear indifferent, dangerous, with his cheeks sucked in as though he were spitting, spitting on the whole world(!)²⁰Henryk Urbanowicz, cited in Piętnastometrowy Stalin, Nowe Państwo, no. 3 (2003). See also Jerzy Bereś, Wstyd: między podmiotem a przedmiotem (Kraków: Otwarta Pracownia, 2002), p. 229.. As one might expect, given the circumstances, Bereś graduated strongly committed to artistic independence. Nevertheless, he would later characterize his thinking on the relationship between art and politics in the following terms: My position is that art has precedence over politics, but … through art we can talk about everything, [including] politics.²¹Bereś, Jestem za otwarciem dialogu – z Jerzym Beresiem rozmawiają L. Guzek i W. Bosak, Tumult, no. 6 (1990), p. 41. Artistic independence, then, for Bereś, in contrast to Kantor’s artistic “disinterest”, did not centre on an avoidance of explicit allusions to the political. His position was that of an “outsider”:

I was in conflict with the art circle, having a different attitude to the matter of defining freedom. This circle, particularly in Poland, considered any engagement with or contestation of reality as entering into dependence. For this reason pure art was defined as a position of freedom. I believe that it is the opposite, this is escapism. Freedom is the right to have a voice on every issue.²²Bereś, W poszukiwaniu wolności, z Jerzym Beresiem rozmawia Paweł Łubowski, ARTeon, no. 7 (2001), p. 25.

As of 1968, Bereś began to produce individual actions, which he referred to as “manifestations”. Like Koller, he had swiftly rejected the conventionalized form of the Happening. As he explained in relation to his participation in Kantor’s Panoramic Sea Happening, my appearances were a protest against this doctrinarian tendency in art.²³Bereś, Fakt twórczy. Pojęcie dzieła Cz. I (1978), in Bereś, Wstyd, pp. 17-18. In contrast to what he perceived as the unsubstantial yield of the Happening, what interested him, he said, was not the … provocation of the public, as was the case with Happenings, but rather a message, which I want to articulate in these situations.²⁴Ibid. Bereś understood the dilemma of what he called the performer’s “entanglement” in a whole conglomeration of fetishization, idolization, from which there is no way out.²⁵Jerzy Hanusek, Katalog twórczości Jerzego Beresia 1954-1994. Część II: Manifestacje, in Aleksandra Węcka (ed.), Zwidy – Wyrocznie – Ołtarze – Wyzwania, exh. cat. (Poznań: Muzeum Narodowe, 1995), p. 147. He was dissatisfied with the conventional relationship that performance art and Happenings established — a relationship where performers and audiences tended to mutually objectify one another. His own aim was more idealistic: to nourish a situation of partnership on the basis of subjectivity.²⁶Bereś, Jestem za otwarciem dialogu, p. 47. If the term “manifestation” conjures up perceptual, political and spiritual registers of meaning simultaneously, Bereś deliberately wove these threads together.²⁷Fluxus artists had previously used this word in “Flux-manifestations”, al­though they had neither attempted nor intended anything like the sustained investigation of its multiple dimensions, and it is unlikely that it was by way of Fluxus that Bereś came to the term.

Prophecy I, Bereś’s first independent manifestation, took place at the Foksal Gallery in Warsaw on 6 January 1968. The gallery was filled with branches and logs cut from a fallen tree.²⁸See Hanusek, Katalog twórczości, pp. 98-9. The artist appeared before the assembled public naked, with a noose of thick rope and a white piece of cloth around his neck, a red piece of cloth and two crudely moulded boards strapped around his waist, and began to construct a pyre with the wood, before taking the noose from his neck, unwrapping the pieces of red and white cloth from his body, and constructing a bow from a piece of curved wood, strung with the pieces of cloth, the colour of the Polish flag. Pulling the bowstring taut, he prepared to fire, then tied a piece of jute with the words Prophecy I in place of the arrowhead. Finally, he tied the pieces of wood around his waist to the assemblage, signed one of the boards with green paint, and made handprints on the other. After the artist had extricated himself from the boards, the audience could see a mould of the contours of his body carved into the wood, physical traces bearing witness to his presence, suggesting their quasi-mystical status as relics of the event. During what the artist termed his “independent work-action”, a short text was repeated aloud: The Creative Act I. Bereś’s statement proposed a new path for the future: the authentic creative act / belongs to a new future / reality. The independent / action of a clearly defined personality / can give the guarantee of the existence / of a conscious creative act.²⁹Bereś, Akt twórczy I, (1968), in Bereś, Wstyd, p. 9. The artist’s commitment to authenticity is militant and uncompromising, particularly the emphasis on the “clearly defined personality”. The message was, among other things, a declaration of the need to continue to struggle for Polish independence. The taut bowstring in the national colours, poised to be released, symbolized readiness — a promise for the future.

A brief description of Prophecy I by Wiesław Borowski appeared in the Communist weekly Kultura but it was accompanied by a scathing condemnation by a leading columnist, who reported:

There was so little to see at the Happening, that in despair Mr Bereś undressed, but then there was even less to look at…according to the posters stuck up around town, the traces of the event produced by Mr Bereś can be seen between the hours of such and such, but these are nothing more than the sort of traces that call for the immediate summoning of a cleaning lady.³⁰The critic wrote consistently scathing reviews under the pseudonym “Hamilton”. See: W 2500 lat po Hipokratesie (Perswazje), Kultura, no. 5 (1968), p. 12.

Thereafter, Bereś’s actions were largely ignored by the press, and if they were reported it was only in order that they might be ridiculed. Documentation of his actions, when publicly presented, was frequently censored. Henryk Urbanowicz, Head of the Fine Arts Workshops (PSP) — the organization in control of the state monopoly on public art commissions, under whose aegis the Foksal functioned, censored all traces of the event. Bereś recalls that when he asked on what grounds, he received the reply: Things like this at a time like this — impossible! Out of the question! At a time when Dubček is coming to power, to do things like this.³¹Bereś, Sztuka wysokich napięć, z Jerzym Beresiem rozmawia Łukasz Guzek, in Suchan (ed.), Tadeusz Kantor, Niemożliwe , p. 192. Polish officials, Bereś later deduced, may already have been anticipating the crushing of the nascent Prague Spring in neighbouring Czechoslovakia.³²Bereś recalled: “We were all racking our brains: “what Dubček?”‘, Bereś, W poszukiwaniu wolności, p. 25. Bereś’s mobilization of the issue of Polish independence acquired retrospectively prophetic overtones the following month, when national outrage was sparked by the authorities’ closure of Kazimierz Dejmek’s allegedly anti-Soviet production of the Polish romantic poet Mickiewicz’s play Forefathers’ Eve at the Great Theatre in Warsaw.

Bereś took his cue from the resulting outcry to carry out Prophecy II on 1 March, the day after the important meeting of key literary figures from the Union of Polish Writers (ZLP) on 29 February 1968 to condemn this latest act of censorship. Central Kraków was occupied by a contingent of militia, and secret police were positioned so as to cordon off the main square, thereby preventing people from laying flowers at the feet of the statue of Mickiewicz there. Since Galeria Krzysztofory was just beside the square, Bereś’s manifestation was portentous in terms of both time and place. Visitors encountered a peasant’s cart stacked high with wood, and Bereś dressed as he had been in Warsaw, but this time with an axe in one hand and a few dozen copies of Kultura in the other. The artist invited the audience to use the newspaper to light fires around the edges of the gallery space, and to unload wood from the cart to construct a pyre. He mounted this as they did so, until he stood high up under the vaulted ceiling of the smoke-filled room, resembling what he called a “living monument”. The audience were invited to paint the peasant cart with the traditional sky-blue housepaint used in the Polish countryside (thought to keep off flies), while the artist constructed another red and white bow, as he had done in Warsaw, tied himself to the construction, signed one of the wooden boards using a charred woodchip, and descended.

Bereś’s manifestation urged visitors to come together in a ritual sacrifice — setting fire to the state cultural organ as an act of vengeance against the censorship of the cultural sphere.³³Over the years that followed, other periodicals such as Sztuka (Art), Polityka (Politics) and Rzeczywistość (Reality) would all find their way into Bereś’s fires. The artist offered to sacrifice himself, in order to keep alive the prophecy of national independence he had made the previous month, inviting spectators to participate actively in building the foundations for this prophecy to be fulfilled. The artistic manifestation served, therefore, as a collective and cathartic opportunity for people to act together at a time of national crisis. If this was a risky undertaking, Bereś was prepared, symbolically, to fan the flames of opposition to state cultural policy. On 8 March, demonstrating students would also explicitly target the press, raising the cry ‘the press lies’ and burning newspapers in public.³⁴Hanusek, Katalog twórczości, p. 100.

Bereś did not participate in the controversial, compensatory Zalesie Ball attended by the Foksal Gallery artists’ circle in the aftermath of the events of March 1968. He later explained that he spent the years 1968 and 1969 making instruments for manifesting as it was impossible to organize manifestations.³⁵Bereś, Fakt twórczy. Pojęcie dzieła Cz. I, p. 19. This series of “objects-vehicles” made to be installed, albeit temporarily, in public spaces, was Bereś’s way of contesting the Central European events of 1968. The most direct of these is Carriage (1968). A mature tree trunk, sliced in half lengthways, serves as a makeshift stretcher with a primitive wheel at one end. A rough cross has been formed out of a rolled-up newspaper sticking out of a vertical pole, and the negative of a human form hewn out of the trunk — as though the trace of a corpse was ingrained in the wood. On the wheel, the Polish word NO (NIE) is carved out in capitals. On the concrete beneath, NIE has been painted in black at regular intervals behind the wheel, suggesting that this is an object-vehicle that prints the word of protest — NO — as one manoeuvres it. Although Bereś’s construction is far more explicit in its references to the clashes between demonstrators and militia over the course of that year than Tamás Szentjoby’s Portable Trench for Three People, made in Budapest the following year, both serve as powerful variations on the theme of the stretcher.

Other politically resonant propositions produced by Bereś in 1969 include: an 80-centimetre-high Moralitymeter, a segment of a tree with a flattened human figure carved into it, which, when rolled, repeated the action of sadistically running it over and over again; a primitive wooden assemblage with a wooden sword attached that set a series of aluminium frying-pan lids a-clatter when raised and lowered, provocatively entitled Normalizer; and Altar 0 (Prophecy III), a mobile wooden construction which, when operated by the spectator, causes a red and white cylinder to rise and fall, and a stone to bang into a suspended frying pan. Bereś recalls:

Following the pacification of 1968, no manifestation was possible. The terror of normalization reigned. Prophecy 3 was made in the workshop, but the public could carry out a manifestation during the course of the exhibition by moving the sculpture…. And this aspect so annoyed the authorities that the sculpture disappeared from the exhibition in un-known circumstances and, as it turned out, was subjected to judgement at the District Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party as to whether it was anti-state, or not. It was returned to the Kszysztofory after the end of the exhibition.³⁶Bereś, Author’s commentary, manuscript 1995, in Hanusek, Katalog twórczości, p. 70.

The idea of a group of officials at the District Committee requisitioning the sculpture for a private debate is certainly funny, and a sign of the absurd ambivalence of the cultural policies of a country in which deploying the colours of the national flag was considered a potentially anti-state act. Bereś’s sculptures from this period were for the most part exhibited, albeit often briefly, at Galeria Krzysztofory.

On 11 November 1968, Bereś marked his response to the events of that year with a maverick action at the Galeria Krzysztofory café. Sitting at a round table with a gathering of Kraków friends and a few visitors from Czechoslovakia, he performed what he called an “anti-Happening”.³⁷Bereś, Fakt twórczy. Pojęcie dzieła Cz. I, p. 19. Standing up, he walked over to the next table and stripped to the waist, taking from his bag a heavy rope, a loaf of bread, a knife, paint, a brush and a newspaper. He put the noose of the rope around his neck, and attached the other end to a nail in the wall. He then sat and sliced the loaf, painting each slice black and arranging the black-painted slices in a circle around the table, before picking up the newspaper and reading it for some time. All of a sudden, he shouted “Enough of this!”, tore the rope from around his neck, wrapped it in the newspaper, and stabbed the bundle with the knife, fixing it to the centre of the table. He then asked for a fresh flower. Someone produced a red rose, which Bereś tied to the handle of the knife.³⁸Ibid.

Bread Painted Black was Bereś’s poetic response to the profound sense of impotence produced by the events of 1968. The circle of inedible bread, the noose around his neck, the hopelessness of reading the official version of events in the daily newspapers — all this served as the backdrop to his cry that he had had enough. By casting off the rope that bound him, and violently stabbing the newspaper, he sought to declare his moral outrage at the current situation. This anti-Happening resulted in what Bereś called a “material document”: the stabbed bundle with the rose and the knife, which was displayed in the café, along with some photographs of the event. It was to be among the many works and documents destroyed in summer 1969, when the Krzysztofory café exhibition was targeted by the security services.³⁹Hanusek, Katalog twórczości, p. 100. That artists had been able to use the Krzysztofory relatively freely as their base in previous years had been to a great extent thanks to the protection of the painter Jonasz Stern, who had been a Party member since before the war and had maintained relations with some high-ranking state officials. In the anti-Semitic purges after March 1968, however, Stern lost his position at the Academy of Fine Arts, and an exceptionally grim period, as Bereś describes it, set in.⁴⁰Bereś manuscript dated 1995, cited in ibid.

It was abundantly clear that “state orientation” was now hopeless.⁴¹Ost, Solidarity, p. 33. Bereś recalls: For me, the Gierek period was unbearable. Mostly because of this world of seeming freedom, while in fact it was still a totalitarian system, albeit one masked in a more refined way.⁴²Bereś quoted in Hanusek, “Manifestacja Romantyczna” Jerzego Beresia, ARTeon, no. 7 (2006), p. 31. He conveyed the new hypocrisy in his provocative wooden constructions. Clapper (1970) consisted of three pairs of wooden hands pointing upwards, and one pointing downwards with what looks like a rosary wound around its fingers, all attached to a lever, so that when rotated by the spectator, the hands above produce wooden applause, while the hands beneath begin to pray. He later made a contraption entitled Diplomatic Ping-Pong, another clattering installation designed to be activated by the spectator — with two sets of crudely wrought bats, a fragile pole serving as a point of balance in between, and rocks and frying pans suspended beneath an impossibly narrow playing field constructed from half a thin log. The invitation to play at diplomacy is an invitation to an impossibly crude game, one in which the ball is positioned strategically out of the reach of both players, and the only outcome can be the production of environmental noise. This allusion to the hopelessness of the political situation would not have been lost on the contemporary spectator. Another installation of 1971, Round Table, is also remarkable for its anticipation of later political events. Produced in the aftermath of the workers’ strikes of 1970-1, it consists of a small wooden table with two clenched wooden fists on sticks, chained together in such a way that when one is raised the other is lowered — producing a potentially endlessly angry wooden dialogue. The piece was both humorously absurd and prophetic in so far as the angry stand-off between the workers and the authorities would not let up until the government and Solidarity sat down to the Round Table talks in spring 1989.

In the Gierek era of burgeoning mass consumption, and in the context of the proliferation of sophisticated internationally orientated conceptual practices, Bereś’s crude contraptions clearly represented an anomaly. These were backward objects designed to ignore technological advances and “progress” in an era when these were the only remaining vestiges of official ideology, held up as the highest values in a putatively secular society. His contraptions expressly avoided resembling products, refusing to function smoothly. If there is a critical element to their construction, then, it is conveyed through deliberately humble anachronism, rather than the tongue-in-cheek irony of many of the other artistic actions I have discussed elsewhere in this book. His were objects produced precisely to be used and handled — fragile, yes, but not ephemeral: they were well-constructed, and made to last, surviving today as awkward testimony to a bygone antipolitical impulse to provoke discussion. Rather than referring to these objects for manifesting, and to his manifestations themselves, as art, Bereś referred to both as “creative facts”.

On 16 April 1973, at the Kraków gallery of the state-run outlet with a monopoly on fine arts and antiques, DESA, Bereś performed a manifestation entitled Transfiguration II.⁴³This was the second in a series of works with this title: Transfiguracja I, Centre for the Arts in Södertälje, 6 October 1972; Transfiguracja II, Galeria Desa, Kraków, 16 April 1973; Transfiguracja III, BWA, Lublin, 2 May 1973. The gallery interior, as he recalled, looked like a shop, with a large display window on to the street. He constructed a series of wooden tables, one in the window, the others behind, each slightly higher than the next. Each table was labelled: the first, “Traditional Altar”, the second, “Beautiful Altar”, the third, “Celebratory Altar”. The first had a loaf of bread on it, the second a row of glasses and a bottle of red wine, the third an elegant cake. The artist entered the room naked except for his customary wooden boards. His reasons for appearing naked were disarmingly simple: the pursuit of purity… the pursuit of sincerity… practical necessity — in order to be able to apply paint to his body.⁴⁴Bereś, Nie jestem rzeźbiarzem, Odra, no. 11 (1978), p. 51. Facing the street, he painted black lines on his torso, dividing it, as he cut the loaf of bread into slices. At the second table, he painted green leaves on his body while pouring the wine; at the third, he painted lines dividing his face as he cut the cake. Turning around to face the gathered audience, he invited them to share the offerings he had prepared for them at the three “altars”.

Transfiguration II blurred the boundaries between the rituals of the gallery opening and those of the Catholic Church, with the artist acting as mediator between the two. The state-run commercial gallery was transformed from a space for the consumption of artistic goods into a site for the sharing of traditional spiritual nourishment, in the form of the bread and wine from the altars of tradition and beauty. The third table, with the luxurious cake, meanwhile, served to give the event a less orthodox air, making a concession to the sorts of extra-ecclesiastical rituals that follow the celebration of a sacrament — a first communion or a wedding party. The artist’s solemn and open gift of these three offerings to the assembled public presented them with a choice: would they be more hungry for traditional nourishment, for the usual gallery opening offering of wine, or for the luxury of cake? By performing the ritual of painting his body while he prepared the food and wine, Bereś also offered himself in a symbolic sacrifice to the audience — temporarily embodying the figure of Christ sharing His body and blood with the faithful. In so doing, he added an explicitly Catholic dimension to the theme of the sacrificial body of the artist, already mobilized in the Prophecies of 1968 and 1969.⁴⁵Bereś first tested out the schema in Transfiguration I at the Centre for the Arts in Sodertalje, Sweden, 6 October 1972. The artist recalled that things did not go as planned: “It was my naivety that I counted on the audience joining in by at least symbolically consuming the bread. The Swedes, keeping themselves at a distance, didn’t even come up to the table. The message itself, though, was received in earnest, with surprise that art can be taken seriously.” Bereś, manuscript 1994, cited in Hanusek, Katalog twórczości, p. 101. His manifestation asked what the purpose of a gallery ought to be. A space for sharing spiritual nourishment provided by the artist? Or a space for the consumption of commercial goods? A gamut of phrases with powerful overtones was mobilized — from ‘this is my body”, to “man cannot live by bread alone”, to “let them eat cake!”, so resonant in the consumer-orientated ideological climate of the Gierek years. The artist offered all these possible avenues for interpretation simultaneously, setting up the scenario for a discussion of material, aesthetic and spiritual values through the form of a participatory ritual. Crucially, everything was offered freely. There was nothing to sell, and there is nothing remaining, save the crude tables; the manifestation and its results were intended for immediate consumption—participation.

The Catholic Church and its rituals were to continue to provide one of the principal symbolic languages deployed in Bereś’s public manifestations in coming decades. He was concerned with exploring performative rituals as vehicles for personal transformation. Not merely for the performer but also for the spectator/participant, whom the artist encouraged to share in the symbolic sacrifice being enacted.

While Bereś’s manifestations had been for the most part confined to being viewed by gallery-going audiences in the first half of the 1970s, from 1975 he sought to include a wider public. An opportunity presented itself in the form of a state initiative. The Ministry of Culture had launched a nationwide programme of events under the rubric “The Alliance of the World of Work with Culture and Art”. Its goals were to enable the artist “to reach the farm-worker’s environment, to familiarize himself with his work”, and to facilitate “meetings in this sphere with thinking about new artistic inspirations”, to “activate the development of cultural spaces in the villages, state farms and workplaces”, among others. On 10 May 1975, factories in the Kraków area were opened for the day so that workers’ families might visit, and a series of events was staged. Bereś was invited to perform at the “opening” at the Szadkowski Metal Works in Kraków (named after the prewar communist Stanisław Szadkowski, who had been arrested and executed by the Gestapo in 1942).

Bereś proposed and carried out what he called a Reflective Mass. He arrived at the factory wheeling a contraption he called his “symbolic wheelbarrow”, which he parked and turned upside down to form a table. People were invited to approach this table to make use of the ink and stamping apparatus Bereś had assembled there, and print themselves a souvenir of their participation in the event. The simple stamp Bereś had prepared for them bore a picture of a face, with the word “face” written under it. People quickly saw that they were therefore being invited to “keep face”, the Polish idiomatic phrase zachować twarz — to keep up their spirits, to remain of good faith, and, above all, not to give up. Having set the ball rolling in this way, Bereś approached two further tables covered in white cloth: one with the words “beautiful altar”, bearing a loaf of bread; the other with the words “pure altar”, with a bottle of vodka and a row of glasses on it. He set about slicing the loaf, painting each piece blue — the colour symbolizing freedom in his visual lexicon. As he did this he painted red lines across his body, suggesting self-flagellation, then poured out a row of glasses of vodka. The manifestation ended with an invitation to those present to have a drink and engage in discussion, bringing artist and workers together to fraternize over vodka on the factory floor. Questions opened for discussion included “What is this?” and “What does it mean?”, in this situation?⁴⁶Agata Szmalcerz, Jerzy Bereś – Naga Prawda, Sztuka, no. 4-5 (1991), pp 5-7. The potential political undertones of the manifestation had been carefully subsumed beneath the artist’s combined concern with aesthetic questions and religious rituals but the event was also potentially an opportunity for these to surface. The ambiguity of Bereś’s manifestation (what, after all, did the face souvenirs “mean”?) and the religious references were potentially critical, but there was nothing concrete that could be pinned down. It was a risky strategy, for, as Bereś recalls, under Gierek, the Polish authorities had embarked on a campaign to consolidate the “moral-political unity of the nation”, and art with any political overtones was ruled out.⁴⁷Bereś cited in Hanusek, “Manifestacja Romantyczna”, p. 31. On leaving the factory, Bereś remembered seeing the site was surrounded by the security services, apparently alerted in case things got out of hand. He was later informed that the event had been discussed at a high level, that Party members were reportedly “furious that such things were being shown to workers”, and that “a strong attack” had been levelled at the Kraków authorities for allowing the event to go ahead.⁴⁸Bereś, W poszukiwaniu wolności, p. 25.

Bereś’s appearance within the framework of such state-sponsored events, or at a state-sponsored gallery such as DESA, undoubtedly raises questions about the degree to which his activities can be classed as independent. If the goal of the opposition was to encourage people to organize themselves in such a way as to circumvent state mediation, then the manifestations cannot be categorized as “underground” in the sense that those of the Czech action artists of the late 1970s, discussed in Chapter Five, might be. What is interesting about this is that the decision to work to some extent within the framework provided by the state — and to attempt to use the opportunities this afforded for reaching a wider audience — was pragmatic, if risky, and effective. If Jiri Kovanda had no opportunity to reach an audience beyond a close circle of friends, Bereś’s access to a factory full of workers, given a day off for the occasion, was an extraordinary opportunity to expand into a wider dialogue — the opposition, for its part, would also go on to find, by the 1980s, that it was impossible to avoid entering into negotiations with the state, if change was to become a real possibility. The politics of antipolitics unravelled with the formation of Solidarity in 1980. Social demands could not, in the circumstances, remain outside the realms of the political for long.

Bereś’s willingness to appear within the framework of state events was an intuition of what was to come. In the end, his desire to act publicly was stronger than his desire to remain symbolically “independent”. Material independence at least, was surely unattainable while the state remained the sole employer. Nevertheless, Bereś explored the possibility of moral independence, mobilizing the language of Catholicism in unorthodox and surprising ways. By bringing the rituals of the Church into the state-run gallery and the factory, he sought to pit the values of two powerful systems against one other, inviting the audience to explore the contradictory ambitions and claims of each through the potentially neutral medium of the artistic manifestation.

Bereś’s use of the terms “Mass” and “Altar” in the titles of his works treads a fine line between Church and State. On the one hand, there was potentially a degree of sacrilege in all this — a naked man with long hair performing inexplicable rituals involving crudely constructed altars. On the other, there was a serious overidentification with religion — one that sought precisely to activate, rather than to undermine, some of the fundamental values of the Catholic Church. Above all, Bereś would later say by way of explanation, he was seeking to challenge the ownership of language by particular groups so as to call into question how meaning is produced. A criticism of his choice of symbolically loaded terms necessarily highlighted the very questions he wanted to raise and to explore. One just has to have contact with authentic reality, he wrote: Our postwar struggle could be decoded on the principle that there exists authentic reality and artificial reality, built through propaganda, ideology.⁴⁹Bereś, Wstyd, pp. 46-7. Truth, he argued, cannot be owned once and for all by any one group. Nevertheless, his identification with religious terminology was also entirely sincere — and sought to expand the spiritual beyond the confines of the individual conscience and the framework of the Church by prompting dialogue. He explained:

Of course, I used the term “Mass” with a certain hesitation — hesitation accompanies everything I do, because I take these matters very seriously…. Some people think that this is some sort of a dispute with the Church — not at all! After all, it was Christ who taught that this sacrifice occurs permanently, it is fulfilled all the time — referring to situations in life. In this sense anyone is in a position to enter into Christ’s role who will be able to do so truly and honestly.⁵⁰Bereś citied in Krystyna Czerni, „Wiara (w sztukę) czyni cuda, czyli litur­gia twórczości według Jerzego Beresia”, Znak, no. 7, kraków (1993), p. 66.

Bereś thus combined a certain reticence with faith, at a time when the moral authority of the Polish Catholic Church was rising as the moral bankruptcy of the Communist authorities became all too clear. By implying that anyone might take up Christ’s position, he was extending the emancipatory potential of the mystery of Christ’s sacrifice throughout society — maintaining that the one precondition was to do so with truth and honesty.⁵¹One of Bereś’s wooden sculptures of 1968-9 had been entitled Maximilian Kolbe (1969). It paid homage to the Polish Franciscan friar who volunteered to die in place of a stranger in Auschwitz in 1941. In 1982 Kolbe was canon­ized by John Paul II, who referred to him as “the Patron Saint of our difficult century”. Sacrifice became a moral reference point to be collectively explored.

In a manifestation that he called Monument of an Artist (1978), Bereś walked three kilometres from Warcino to Kępice in eastern Poland wearing two wooden boards tied around his waist. The boards read: “Body of the artist”. He towed behind him a heavy wooden monument with a flag reading “Spirit of the artist”.⁵²Hanusek, Katalog twórczości pp. 120-1. Upon arrival in the town square he burned the ‘Body of the artist’ boards and dressed himself in the “Spirit of the artist” cloth before pouring vodka into glasses and inviting the audience to drink. Discarding the “Spirit of the artist” cloth, he then dressed himself in a piece of cloth marked “Contact of the artist with the public”. These three elements — body, spirit and contact with the public — were central to all his manifestations of the late 1970s and 1980s.

Bereś’s invitation to spectators to witness his peculiar re-enactment of a certain model of artistic and religious truth was a highly effective local variation on Havel’s commitment to “living in truth” as a way to oppose the post-totalitarian condition of “living in a lie”. A commitment to truth was also being nurtured within the writings of Havel’s dissident counterparts in Poland at that time. Adam Michnik wrote, in 1976:

In searching for truth, or, to quote Leszek Kołakowski, “by living in dignity”, opposition intellectuals are striving not so much for a better tomorrow as for a better today. Every act of defiance helps us build the framework of democratic socialism, which should not be merely or primarily a legal institutional structure but a real, day-to-day community of free people.⁵³Michnik, A New Evolutionism, p. 148.

A commitment to behaving in the present the way one would like to be able to behave in the future; acting today as if the desired tomorrow were already a reality, was one shared by the Church’s faith in the power of words and actions as a vehicle for transforming social relations, irrespective of the political risks this entailed.⁵⁴Ost, Solidarity, p. 68.  Thus, although Christianity offered a contested model of truth, in Poland it was one that came to be associated with the struggle for ‘anticipatory democracy’ being waged by the Polish opposition.

Dissident circles became increasingly open to dialogue with the Church hierarchy in the second half of the 1970s. As Michnik wrote in 1976: The role of the Catholic Church is a crucial element in Poland’s situation. The majority of Polish people feel close to the Church, and many Catholic priests have strong political influence. He noted that the Polish episcopate’s programme of action had been steadily evolving in a direction that shared a great deal with the evolution of the democratic opposition. Documents issued by the Church hierarchy now made frequent reference to the principles of the Declaration of Human Rights; in pastoral letters, Polish bishops have been defending the right to truth and standing up for human freedom and dignity. Most important, they have been defending the civil liberties of the working people, and particularly the right to strike and to form independent labour unions. He concluded that the Catholic Church, which consistently resists pressure from the government … has necessarily become a place where attitudes of nonconformity and dignity among the people can mingle. It is therefore a key source of encouragement for those who seek to broaden civil liberties.⁵⁵Michnik, A New Evolutionism, p. 145.

1977 saw the circulation of the Black Book of Censorship in the Polish People’s Republic, detailing shocking revelations about the Polish censorship apparatus by a young censorship official who had defected to Sweden. Its widespread illegal circulation further undermined the moral legitimacy of the authorities.⁵⁶Tomasz Strzyżewski, Czarna Księga Cenzury PRL (London: Aneks, 1977). In March, ROPCiO was founded — an independent group committed to overseeing the defence of human rights on the back of Poland’s signature of the UN International Convention on Human Rights that month.⁵⁷Kemp-Welch, Poland under Communism, pp. 225-6. As economic disaster continued to loom large, and as opposition groups became increasingly organized and eloquent, the state began to seek improved relations with the Church.⁵⁸Ibid., pp. 227-8. Gierek met with Cardinal Wyszyński, and visited the Vatican. In October 1978, the first Polish Pope was elected. John Paul II’s pilgrimage to Poland in 1979 (2-10 June) marked a watershed. Although his itinerary was restricted for political reasons, up to 12 million (around a third of the population) were able to see him in person, even though no days off were officially given to workers to attend his 32 sermons. He spoke of human rights, dignity and labour, talked about the necessity of seeking reconciliation and opening borders, and, at the Presidential Palace, declared that Peace and understanding among nations can only be built on principles of respect for the objective rights of every nation, such as the right to exist, to be free, to respect social and political subjectivity, to create its own culture and civilization.⁵⁹Cited in ibid., p. 229. The visit was stewarded by the Church, rather than the state, whose  “displacement” under the circumstances was symptomatic of the degree to which the social had succeeded in by-passing the political in the popular imagination. The Pope’s eloquent statements on human rights and geopolitics provided a strong moral message to the nation, on the eve of the emergence of Solidarity.

In summer 1980, the Polish government made its third attempt to raise basic food and commodity prices from 1960s levels. The country’s external debt had risen exponentially, and debt-servicing now took up all export earnings. Domestic food subsidies, meanwhile, had risen from 19 billion złotys in 1971 to 166 billion złotys in 1979. Unlike 1970 and 1976, the new round of price increases was unannounced and uneven — having been delegated to provincial Party Secretaries told to increase prices when and where they could. In addition to the price increases, introduced without prior warning, the authorities announced stiffer work norms at major enterprises. It was a toxic combination.

The authorities sought to treat the first signs of protest as mere “disturbances”, and dealt with them locally by paying compensatory wage increases. The plan was to resolve the “price question” rapidly, without raising wider issues. However, enterprises which had settled often returned with fresh claims on hearing of more generous awards elsewhere. Although the early July strikes were sporadic — official reports referred to them merely as “work stoppages” — a pattern of protest was emerging. To avoid the street massacres of 1970, protestors stayed within the workplace. Unlike June 1976, they did not call for the cancellation of the increase, but moved towards more nuanced discussion of financial compensation and economic management in general. A form of primitive dialogue was emerging between the rulers and the ruled. Tensions rose sharply in the eastern city of Lublin, including a blockage of the strategic railway line between the Soviet Union and Eastern Germany, where 470,000 Soviet troops were stationed. After negotiations with Mieczysław Jagielski, a government minister who would also perform the same role a month later in Gdańsk, a settlement was agreed which included wage compensations and fresh elections to the official trade unions. Members of the former strike committees could stand as candidates. Despite this settlement, strikes continued across the country.

Poland’s most famous strike began at the Gdańsk Shipyard on 14 August. Originally small-scale, demanding the reinstatement of a popular crane operator Anna Walentynowicz — recently sacked for political activity — and compensatory wage increases, this proved to be the birth of Solidarity. After an 18-day stoppage that brought almost the entire region into the strike movement, the inter-factory strike committee under Lech Wałęsa and the government team under Jagielski signed the Gdańsk Agreement (31 August), guaranteeing an “independent, self-governing trade union” (Solidarity) and the right to strike. Similar, and to some extent more far-reaching, agreements were signed with striking workforces in Szczecin and Silesia. The ‘Solidarity period’ had begun.

Bereś variously referred to Solidarity as a creative fact, a stimulator of judgement, and as a social work that brought together millions of people.⁶⁰Bereś, Dzieło stymulatorem osądu (1981), in Bereś, Wstyd, p. 43. Solidarity interrupted the suspension of judgement that came with social stagnation like a successful artwork breaking through aesthetic stagnation. He sought to make his own manifestations “stimulators of judgement”, in support of the spirit of solidarity sweeping through Poland. In autumn 1980, at the All Polish Plein-Air of Young Artists and Theorists in Świeszyno, Bereś carried out a Political Mass. Standing naked before the audience, he introduced the event by saying that what would follow would be neither a Happening nor a performance, but an attempt to enter into the dialogue that had been shaking Poland since the strikes on the coast and the expansion of Solidarity. He approached one end of a long strip of cloth on the floor that read “Political Altar”, painted his knees white, fell to his knees, and painted the letter ”O” on his chest, before getting up, repeating the action, and adding another letter. He continued in this fashion until he had painted the word ofiara, translatable as “offering”, “sacrifice”, and “victim”, on his body. He lit a bonfire of paper and kindling in the centre of the cloth, and painted a large red letter “V” (symbolizing victory and freedom) on his body, crossing out the white word beneath. Bereś walked the remaining length of the cloth on foot, leaving red-paint footprints behind him, dressed himself in robes made of scraps of cloth, painted a blue rose on his clothes, poured out glasses of water, and offered these to the spectators. Carefully pouring water around the edges of the fire, he asked the spectators whether they would like him to extinguish it or not. They asked him not to, and everyone remained seated, watching the fire until it burned itself out, leaving the canvas with a hole in the middle. This was then affixed to the wall, and displayed for the remainder of the event as a material document. The festival was nearing an end, so government officials and administrators from the nearby towns were in attendance. Bereś recalls that the official visitors were outraged and claimed that they had been offended. They raised serious objections to the organizers of the Plein-Air, although during the action they did not protest and calmly watched until the end.⁶¹Bereś manuscript dated 1994, in Hanusek, Katalog twórczości, p. 129.

The Political Mass was a bold action and a rare attempt at this time to clearly identify with the growing political momentum of the opposition. As he had done on previous occasions, here too Bereś combined religious and national iconography, but this time he made the political motivation of the manifestation explicit by introducing the previously taboo word — politics —into the framework of the action. Initially, he played the part of the pilgrim, gradually approaching a central point of sacrifice on his knees, as though offering himself to the nation in a symbolic act, before rising, as though from the ashes of the sacrificial fire, standing erect, and abandoning the position of supplicant. The action marked the events of 1980 as a turning point in the march towards freedom — one that resulted in a new-found dignity and promise. Although the precise nature of the sacrifice was sublimated, the developments Bereś identified with here point to the combined impact of the formation of Solidarity and the landmark visit of the Pope. Following these events, he seemed to suggest, the path forward need not involve further sacrifice, but should proceed in an open fashion. People should now have the confidence to stand up and continue to move forward, entering into politics openly, rather than cautiously approaching its altar on their knees.

Piotrowski has referred to Bereś’s use of his naked body as a sign of authority and spiritual power, sanctioned by tradition and a metaphysical sense of history, as opposed … to the material and usurped power of the Communists, referring to the grand narratives of Polish culture, the romantic myth of the artist-prophet and the sense of national mission, to explore the national heritage as a source of authority to criticize the reality of Communism.⁶²Piotr Piotrowski, Male Artist’s Body: National Identity vs. Identity Politics, in Hoptman and Pospiszyl (eds), Primary Documents, p. 233. Bereś’s body, he writes, invokes the mystical Christian tradition, whereby the body is sacrificed in order that the spirit might be reborn.⁶³Ibid., p. 230. He is certainly right to point to Bereś’s revitalization of these aspects of the Polish Romantic tradition as a basis for pursuing cultural independence. But it also seems to me that Bereś’s message is more complex than such a reading would allow. Although he invokes such traditions, there is clearly a sense in which the humility of his manifestations — their “poor” aesthetic — is at odds with the heroic vision of the artist-prophet that these traditions deployed. The artist’s cultivation of anachronism, while not completely undermining the romanticism of the gesture, certainly troubles it. Bereś is a diminutive figure, and there is a shyness coupled with his determination to appear naked before the public that precludes the possibility of inscribing his manifestations into traditional, national, patriarchal discourse. The model of masculinity he embodies is almost as reticent as it is resolute in its nudity. Bereś’s appearances, therefore, call into question, rather than to reaffirm, the authority of the past, while simultaneously trying to salvage something of the possibilities it prophesied for the future. His actions brought Christianity and national tradition together in new ways to search for a useable model of subjectivity and to foster a contemporary form of spiritual rebirth, drawing on past sources for inspiration.

In September 1981, having carried out just one manifestation in the interim — one that had avoided overt political references, as underscored by its title: Pure Work — Entitled Nude — Bereś returned to political themes, this time within the framework of the XIX Meeting of Artists and Scientists in Osieki on the Baltic coast.⁶⁴10 September 1981. See Hanusek, Katalog twórczości, p. 131. Spectators saw a cart with a large pole bearing a sign saying “Wheelbarrow of Freedom” parked outside a building. Bereś appeared naked from the building and announced that what he was about to do was neither a Happening nor a performance, but a manifestation documenting the recent history of Poland. His brief introduction ended with the words: I was nine years old when the ongoing drama of the fight for the freedom of Poles began. Taking up the primitive wheelbarrow, he began to walk around the park with it, stopping periodically to paint a date on his body in black: 1939, 1944, 1956, 1968, 1976, 1980. The dates were a form of shorthand for key moments of resistance: the struggle against the Nazis following the German invasion in 1939, the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, the events of October 1956, those of March 1968, the strikes of 1976, and the activities of Solidarity in 1980, clearly resonant for the local audience. Wheel-Barrow of Freedom, as Bereś called the manifestation, produced a collision between Polish history and the schema of the Stations of the Cross, manifesting micro-politically the scars of history in a ritual designed to bear witness to their truth. Pushing the vehicle onwards, the artist demonstrated his commitment to moving history forward, to finding the next station. This marked a striking departure from his first engagement with the wheelbarrow theme in Polish Wheelbarrow (1966) — an immobile contraption whose wheel was positioned on a white circular line and whose mast was tied to a tree stump, making it clear that it was structurally impossible to move the vehicle except in circles. Now, in 1981, Bereś demonstrated that the time was ripe for Poland to move independently once more. To mark the end of the manifestation, he signed the flag with the words “Wheelbarrow of Freedom”, declaring his commitment to this new possibility.

Towards the end of November 1981, shortly before the imposition of martial law interrupted the tide of hope galvanized by Solidarity and the structural autonomy for society it had succeeded in wresting from the state, Bereś carried out his most public manifestation to date: the Romantic Manifestation. It was an idea that he had tried and failed to secure permission to realize since 1975, despite approaching a series of local authorities.⁶⁵Kraków, Wrocław and Zielona Góra. See ibid., pp. 134-5. He began by walking into the main market square in Kraków, pushing another crooked wooden cart. Mounted on the cart were several bundles of kindling, each wrapped in pages from Kultura. Arriving in the square, Bereś stopped and painted the words “Fire of Hope” in the form of a circle, and lit a fire in the centre. After pausing for a moment to look into the fire, he tied a bell in place of the bundle of kindling taken from the cart, and moved on to another spot on the square, the bell on his cart ringing, leaving a group of people standing by the fire. He stopped four more times to repeat this same sequence of actions, adding another bell to the cart each time, lighting further fires in circles with the words “fire of freedom”, “fire of dignity”, “fire of love”, and “fire of truth”. People gathered around each fire, and stood reverently staring into the flames. Although Bereś had hoped that their trace would remain until the paint was naturally worn away by pedestrians, he found that the words had been removed by morning.⁶⁶The artist was surprised to find that the same thing happened when he repeated the action in November 2000. This time the words jarred with the advertising and tourist paraphernalia that have taken over the main square under capitalism. As Hanusek has observed, “Romanticism” was still out of kilter with its surroundings. Hanusek, “Manifestacja Romantyczna“, p. 32. One observer recalls that a man with a briefcase detached himself from the spectators and, swearing violently, began to kick the romantic cart, before vanishing back into the crowd as suddenly as he had appeared when people began to react to his attack.⁶⁷Ibid. The manifestation quite literally put hope, freedom, dignity, love and truth out in the public space, and staged the conditions for their collective contemplation. The photographs testify to the large crowds attracted by the action, and provide a moving picture of the opportunity Bereś had produced for citizens of all ages to reclaim the public sphere and to participate spontaneously in a ritual designed to give hope to the people — hope that freedom was possible, that dignity was attainable, and that love and truth would prevail.

In December 1981 the hope of the past 16 months was crushed, however. The authorities broke their agreement with Solidarity and attempted to destroy the independent union by imposing martial law.⁶⁸Ibid., p. 31. This operation, which had been meticulously planned with Soviet “advisers”, destroyed the offices of Solidarity — the Warsaw branch was simply smashed up by riot police — and interned 6,000 of its most active members. The main loss of life was at the Wujek colliery in Silesia. Although the presiding General Jaruzelski later claimed that his action had been the “lesser evil” by heading off a Soviet invasion, he omitted to mention his numerous phone calls to the Kremlin in the weeks before martial law, imploring their military assistance should his plans fail. This was a request that Soviet leaders — fully preoccupied after their December 1979 invasion of Afghanistan — turned down, which is not to say they would have stood by had Poland’s martial law failed.

For the Poles themselves, as Hanusek recalls: It was an exceptionally grim time. The demonstrations of the beginning of martial law had ceased, most of the Solidarity activists in hiding had been caught. It seemed that all hopes had been buried by the military regime. Apathy and resignation ruled.⁶⁹Ibid. Yet the experience of freedom during Solidarity’s 16 months of legality could never be forgotten. In this sense, moments of liberation cannot be reversed.

Many artists boycotted official cultural institutions in this period. The Church began to play host to exhibitions. Bereś was keen to be involved in the new forum this framework provided — and recalls that the church exhibitions offered artists clear opportunities for reaching new audiences, by lending contemporary art a form of legitimacy in the eyes of churchgoers who might not previously have had much interest in it: The spectators who came to the church for patriotic or religious reasons, and found an exhibition there, tended to overcome a certain reluctance, make a certain effort, to get to the art.⁷⁰Bereś, Jestem za otwarciem dialogu, p. 43. Needless to say, the encounter between artists and church representatives was not always straightforward — and proposals were often rejected. This notwithstanding, the potential for collaboration provided a forum for artists to participate in a fresh form of dialogue, provoking debates about the intersection between aesthetic and sociopolitical problems, and how these might best be expressed.

That Bereś’s ethical position was by now stronger than that of the ageing Kantor became clear that year, when Kantor, presumably afraid of forfeiting his opportunities for frequent travel by refusing, publicly accepted an award for “exceptional cultural achievement” from the state.⁷¹See Piotrowski, Art and Democracy, p. 92. His earlier “disinterest” did not extend to standing up to the state under martial law. Some of the works Bereś produced during this period are remarkably eloquent, particularly a wooden sculpture entitled The March (1982) — a giant wooden foot mounted on a wooden pole with a jute flag at the other end, becoming half flag, half foot; a demonstration condensed into an object: the foot raised as though marching. It balances on a wooden axle standing on a log, and is bound in thick chains — a captive colossus striding determinedly onwards, chained in its tracks.

In 1983, Bereś participated in the artistic symposium/exhibition Znak Krzyża (the Sign of the Cross) co-ordinated by Janusz Bogucki and Nina Smolarz, with the support of the local priest, one Wojciech Czarnowski, at Parafia Miłosierdzia Bożego (Parish of God’s Mercy) on Żytnia Street in Warsaw. The church building had been ruined in the Warsaw Uprising in 1944 and was in the process of being reconstructed through the initiative and collective contributions of the local people. It had come to serve as a meeting place for the opposition in Warsaw. After a considerable period of germination, entailing lengthy discussion with artists, members of the opposition, representatives of the Church, and parishioners, this landmark collaboration between contemporary artists and the Church was timed to coincide with Pope John Paul II’s second visit to Poland, in June 1983.⁷²Bogucki was awarded a discretionary prize of $100 by the anonymous com­mittee of the cultural branch of Solidarity. Bereś was awarded the same prize in 1987, for his sculptural work. As Dorota Jarecka has pointed out, the organizers hoped that the presence of foreign journalists at that time would dissuade the authorities from interfering.⁷³The exhibition lasted from 14 to 30 June 1983; the Pope’s visit took place from 16 to 23 June. Adam Michnik, Takie czasy, rzecz o kompromisie, London: Aneks, 1985, p. 116, cited in Dorota Jarecka, Janusz Bogucki,  pol­ski Szeeman? [w:] Odrzucone dziedzictwo. O sztuce polskiej lat 80, papers from a conference at Warsaw, Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej, 2012, available online at http://www.artmuseum.pl/wydarzenie.php?id=rejected_heritage_jarecka. Many of the artists involved were avant-garde artists, among them Edward Krasiński (who had conducted Kantor’s “Sea Concerto” in 1967) and the experimental artist Paweł Kwiek, who had not previously had any involvement with what came to be known as “art beside the Church”.⁷⁴Jerzy Kalina, Przeciw złu i przemocy. Fragmenty rozmowy z Anną Szynwelską, Warsaw, November 2006. Reproduced at http://www.artin. gda.pl/text/text-p1-29.php. Jerzy Kalina’s The Last Supper was among the most impressive large-scale installations; it consisted of long table and chairs partially submerged by a huge pile of rubble at one end of the church. A long banner of the Polish flag presided over this scene of destruction, apparently torn in the cataclysm, and thus simultaneously forming the shape of a “V” — for victory, resembling a cross. Bereś’s contributions included an Altar of Independence (1982-3)  — another construction in the shape of a “V” with a banner reading “Altar of Independence”, suspended above a simple wooden cross covered in a web of thorny twigs.

Martial law officially ended in July 1983, but many independent artists continued to boycott state institutions, exhibiting in alternative student-run spaces, or within the framework of church exhibitions.⁷⁵Over the course of the years that followed, Bereś continued to stage mani­festations designed to produce a sense of solidarity among spectators, and to encourage them to think about what he called the “highest” values. In 1985, at the opening of the exhibition Niebo Nowe, Ziemia Nowa? (New Heaven, New Earth?), organized by Marek Rostworowski at the church on Żytnia, he lit fires to hope, freedom, dignity, love and truth, just as he had in 1981, with the variation that on this occasion he used copies of the weekly Polityka, rather than Kultura, as kindling. See Marek Rostworowski et al., Niebo nowe, ziemia nowa?, exh. cat. (Warsaw: Oficyna Wydawnicza MEDIUM, 1987). Although there was a partial amnesty of political prisoners, repression of Solidarity activists continued, and fresh arrests were still being made. The brutal torture and murder by the Warsaw Security Services on 19 October 1984 of the eloquent anticommunist “Solidarity Priest” Father Jerzy Popiełuszko, who had urged his congregation to protest against martial law, provoked national outrage and grief. Although those responsible were convicted of murder and imprisoned, they were later released as part of another amnesty. Popiełuszko’s corpse was retrieved after a few weeks from a reservoir, where it had been dumped, and his funeral in November was attended by a quarter of a million people.

In a lecture delivered the following month, Bereś sought to initiate dialogue about the nature of martyrdom. Opening his Lecture: Dispute on the Highest Values, Part 1, at Galeria BWA in Lublin by entering the room naked, carrying a copy of Soren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (1843) in one hand and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) in the other, he announced that he wanted to share some of his thoughts with the audience.⁷⁶Bereś, Wykład: Spór o wartości najwyższe (January 1984, Lublin), in Hanusek, Katalog twórczości, pp. 138-9. He discussed the need to assess different sorts of values, distinguishing basic values such as food and shelter from what he called “higher”, interdependent values such as justice, love, truth, dignity and forgiveness. He cautioned that while such values tended to serve as the basis for the foundation of religions and ideologies, they could also become an ethical straitjacket, stifling creativity and resulting in “total stagnation”. The value of freedom could go beyond this and into the realm of what he called the “highest values”, such as language, faith and art. These, he admitted, might not be as necessary for life as basic values, but they could become “inalienable” for groups of people under certain circumstances. He then turned to analyse these values in relation to two models of subjectivity outlined by Kierkegaard: that of the tragic hero, and that of the knight of faith.

Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling explores the dilemma faced by Abraham when asked to sacrifice his only son, and thereby to abandon all hope in God’s promise that “through his seed all races of the world would be blessed”.⁷⁷Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and Sickness unto Death, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941 [1979 edition]), p. 32. Abraham prepared to sacrifice Isaac, believing that he was sacrificing all hope: only someone whom Kierkegaard calls a “knight of infinite resignation” could agree to enter into such a paradox. It was this infinite resignation to faith that was rewarded by God, in sparing Isaac. Kierkegaard argues: Spiritually speaking, everything is possible, but in the world of the finite there is much which is not possible. This impossible, however, the knight makes possible by expressing it spiritually, but he expresses it spiritually by waiving his claim to it.⁷⁸Ibid., p. 54. He concludes: A purely human courage is required to renounce the whole of the temporal to gain the eternal … a paradoxical and humble courage is required to grasp the whole of the temporal by virtue of the absurd, and this is the courage of faith.⁷⁹Ibid., p. 59. It is this faith that Bereś compares to that of the Polish situation — thereby prophesying that the resignation of the nation may prove to have been the absurd precondition for its resurrection. His message, then, is one of faith — it is not the tragic heroes who sacrifice themselves for the greater good who will ultimately lead Poland to freedom, but those who are prepared to linger in fear and despair, but continue to believe. The tragic hero, whom Kierkegaard called the beloved son of ethics,⁸⁰Ibid., p. 122. sacrifices himself for the people, who identify with him and accept him. He therefore becomes the people. The knight of faith, meanwhile, exemplified by Abraham, enters into a paradox, unable to decide whether he is someone of the highest faith, or simply a murderer. Although, in the event, Isaac lives, Abraham remains caught in a bind — from which he suffers in isolation. While he has an advantage over the tragic hero is that he remains himself and retains his authentic personality, he lingers in fear, despair and poverty. Bereś brought these two models of subjectivity to bear on Polish history, which, he said, was full of tragic heroes who had sacrificed themselves for others. After the war, though, he argued, the Polish people had decided to forget about their heroes, and accepted that they had to sacrifice them, just as Abraham had been prepared to sacrifice Isaac. These heroes and their history remained alive, leaving the Polish people in the same paradoxical situation as the knight of faith. Nevertheless we are ourselves, and the world has to understand that we will be neither the heroes of socialism nor of capitalism. We have become free not because we are free from fear, despair and poverty, but because we linger in fear, despair and poverty. As he spoke, he painted a red and white cross on his body.

In the same year, 1984, Havel wrote in “Six Asides about Culture”: I have read somewhere that martyrdom does better in a totalitarian system than thought.⁸¹Havel, Six Asides about Culture (1984), trans. E. Kohak, in Vladislav (ed.), Vaclav Havel. Living in Truth, pp. 125-6. He then objected: Something in me rebels against the claim that history has condemned us to the unenviable role of mere unthinking experts in suffering, poor relations of those in the “free world” who do not have to suffer and have time to think.⁸²Ibid. He contends that sacrifice should be understood as the consequence of a thought, its proof, or conversely, its moving force.⁸³Ibid. Havel’s paradigm of the Czech martyr is the philosopher Jan Patočka. Patočka’s Heretical Essays were also a starting point for Jacques Derrida’s The Gift of Death (“Donner la mort”, in L’ethique du don. Jacques Derrida et la pensee du don [Paris: Transition, 1992]), trans. David Wills (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995). In the same way, Bereś’s performative dialogue with sacrifice sought to excavate a more critical approach to Polish history. It was a question that would continue to preoccupy him in coming years. When, in 1986, he delivered Part 2 of the Lecture: Dispute on the Highest Values, in addition to painting a red and white cross on his back, the artist painted a question mark on his torso, provocatively completing it with a red and white dot on his penis. As before, he drew on Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling; this time, though, he argued that neither the tragic hero, dissolved in generality, nor the lonely knight of faith, lingering in paradox, is capable of entering into a debate over values. Tragic heroism, he argued, precludes the possibility of dialogue, because it annihilates subjectivity: the tragic hero objectifies himself; those who follow him objectify themselves by surrendering their subjectivity to an ideal. The “pure subjectivity” of the knight of faith was thus, he proposed, a blind alley leading to individualism, “existentialist solitude”, and a dangerous propensity for the formation of groups so fixated on their own history and ideals that any attempt to forge external dialogue necessarily led to conflict: the nationalist, ideological and religious wars that have marked the history of mankind. The knight of faith, for his part, is a loner, lingering in paradox, fixated on the trembling of his subject. He is unable to enter into contact with anyone at all. And yet, Bereś saw in the story of Abraham the possibility for hope in the form of Isaac’s initiation of dialogue. By asking his father where they would find the lamb for the sacrifice, he prompted the hitherto silent Abraham, engrossed in his own troubles, to address God. Bereś observed that Isaac was the one who provoked a dialogue about responsibility and the meaning of sacrifice, resulting in the extraordinary turn of events that prompted God to intervene, and prevent the accomplishment of the sacrifice He had demanded.⁸⁴Bereś, Wykład: Spór o wartości najwyższe II Część (20 March 1986, Lublin), in Hanusek, Katalog twórczości, pp. 140-1.

Embodying a deflated model of the romantic artist-prophet, Bereś sought to call into question rather than to reinforce this model. He proposed a model of the subject as one who opens dialogue and prompts a re-evaluation of core values rather than continuing along a martyrological path to nationalism. Above all, he wanted to caution his spectators about the dangers of the fetishization of the nation, issuing this warning: The tragedy begins in the situation when a given nation considers itself to be the chosen nation. And I would like to warn my nation, that is to say the Poles, us, against making of ourselves a chosen nation…. This is the source of nationalism.⁸⁵Hanusek, Katalog twórczości, p. 147. His approach was in line with that of key oppositional intellectuals of his time, who had also mined their national history for precedents while remaining aware of the dangers of nationalism. In his essay “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors” (1973), Adam Michnik offered a careful analysis of the lessons of the prewar national hero Józef Piłsudski’s attempt to “train Poles in the spirit of independence”. He asked: Would there have been a Poland without those socialist romantics who raised their hands against the colossus (which later turned out to have legs of clay)? Would the Poles have won independence had it not been for those who continuously talked about the need for independence? Yet Michnik was at pains to emphasize: Piłsudski was not a nationalist. He did not think it proper or healthy to organize a national consciousness around the hatred of other nations, but saw Poland as the mother-land of many nations, a commonwealth of many cultures; he wanted it to be a state in which not only Poles but also Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and Jews could live in solidarity.⁸⁶Hanusek, Katalog twórczości, p. 147. For all his commitment to national independence, Bereś, too, sought to avoid conceiving of this in nationalist terms, declaring that an anti-nationalistic, non-ideological, non-religious national personality is … besides language, faith, [and] art, the highest value.⁸⁷Bereś, Wykład: Spór o wartości najwyższe, p. 59.

The election of Gorbachev to the position of General Secretary of the CPSU in 1985 was to transform the context in which Solidarity, and other peaceful movements of civilian resistance, could operate. With the advent of what became known in the West as Gorbachev’s “New Thinking”, Moscow encouraged East European leaders to reach new accommodations with their own societies, without the threat of Soviet intervention. Most held back and resisted change, but Jaruzelski understood the new opportunities. His growing impatience with the PZPR resembles that of Gorbachev with the CPSU. Both came to realize that, far from exercising leadership, the Communist establishments had become a major barrier to political change. Political changes hitherto unthinkable could now be contemplated, although Gorbachev did not anticipate the dramatic outcome of the transformations that he himself had helped to bring about.

• 1
  Ost, Solidarity, p. 52.
• 2
  Michnik, A New Evolutionism, in Letters from Prison and other Essays, p. 146.
• 3
  Ibid., p. 137.
• 4
  Leszek Kolakowski, Hope and Hopelessness, Survey (London) 17/3, (Summer 1971), p. 37.
• 5
  Ibid.
• 6
  Ibid., p. 41.
• 7
  Ost, Solidarity, pp. 62-3.
• 8
  See Włodzimierz Brus in Alec Nove (ed.), The East European Economies in the 1970s (London: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1982), p. 123.
• 9
  Anthony Kemp-Welch, Poland under Communism: A Cold War History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 201-2.
• 10
  Ibid., pp. 206-7.
• 11
  Food prices remained frozen at 1960s rates by huge subsidies. The govern­ment tried to tackle this by introducing, unannounced, a tiered system of pri­cing, giving better cuts of meat to “commercial” shops, which sold for higher prices or Western currency. When the next round of price increases was introduced, from 1 July 1980, they triggered the strike action that became the basis for “Solidarity”.
• 12
  Jan Józef Lipski, KOR. A History of the Workers’ Defense Committee in Poland, 1976-1981 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
• 13
  The pioneering account is Adam Michnik, Kościół-lewica-dialog (Paris: Instytut literacki, 1977), trans. David Ost as The Church and the Left (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
• 14
  Michnik, A New Evolutionism, p. 147.
• 15
  Ibid., p. 142.
• 16
  Ibid.
• 17
  Ost, Solidarity, p. 57.
• 18
  Ibid., p. 65.
• 19
  Ibid.
• 20
  Henryk Urbanowicz, cited in Piętnastometrowy Stalin, Nowe Państwo, no. 3 (2003). See also Jerzy Bereś, Wstyd: między podmiotem a przedmiotem (Kraków: Otwarta Pracownia, 2002), p. 229.
• 21
  Bereś, Jestem za otwarciem dialogu – z Jerzym Beresiem rozmawiają L. Guzek i W. Bosak, Tumult, no. 6 (1990), p. 41.
• 22
  Bereś, W poszukiwaniu wolności, z Jerzym Beresiem rozmawia Paweł Łubowski, ARTeon, no. 7 (2001), p. 25.
• 23
  Bereś, Fakt twórczy. Pojęcie dzieła Cz. I (1978), in Bereś, Wstyd, pp. 17-18.
• 24
  Ibid.
• 25
  Jerzy Hanusek, Katalog twórczości Jerzego Beresia 1954-1994. Część II: Manifestacje, in Aleksandra Węcka (ed.), Zwidy – Wyrocznie – Ołtarze – Wyzwania, exh. cat. (Poznań: Muzeum Narodowe, 1995), p. 147.
• 26
  Bereś, Jestem za otwarciem dialogu, p. 47.
• 27
  Fluxus artists had previously used this word in “Flux-manifestations”, al­though they had neither attempted nor intended anything like the sustained investigation of its multiple dimensions, and it is unlikely that it was by way of Fluxus that Bereś came to the term.
• 28
  See Hanusek, Katalog twórczości, pp. 98-9.
• 29
  Bereś, Akt twórczy I, (1968), in Bereś, Wstyd, p. 9.
• 30
  The critic wrote consistently scathing reviews under the pseudonym “Hamilton”. See: W 2500 lat po Hipokratesie (Perswazje), Kultura, no. 5 (1968), p. 12.
• 31
  Bereś, Sztuka wysokich napięć, z Jerzym Beresiem rozmawia Łukasz Guzek, in Suchan (ed.), Tadeusz Kantor, Niemożliwe , p. 192.
• 32
  Bereś recalled: “We were all racking our brains: “what Dubček?”‘, Bereś, W poszukiwaniu wolności, p. 25.
• 33
  Over the years that followed, other periodicals such as Sztuka (Art), Polityka (Politics) and Rzeczywistość (Reality) would all find their way into Bereś’s fires.
• 34
  Hanusek, Katalog twórczości, p. 100.
• 35
  Bereś, Fakt twórczy. Pojęcie dzieła Cz. I, p. 19.
• 36
  Bereś, Author’s commentary, manuscript 1995, in Hanusek, Katalog twórczości, p. 70.
• 37
  Bereś, Fakt twórczy. Pojęcie dzieła Cz. I, p. 19.
• 38
  Ibid.
• 39
  Hanusek, Katalog twórczości, p. 100.
• 40
  Bereś manuscript dated 1995, cited in ibid.
• 41
  Ost, Solidarity, p. 33.
• 42
  Bereś quoted in Hanusek, “Manifestacja Romantyczna” Jerzego Beresia, ARTeon, no. 7 (2006), p. 31.
• 43
  This was the second in a series of works with this title: Transfiguracja I, Centre for the Arts in Södertälje, 6 October 1972; Transfiguracja II, Galeria Desa, Kraków, 16 April 1973; Transfiguracja III, BWA, Lublin, 2 May 1973.
• 44
  Bereś, Nie jestem rzeźbiarzem, Odra, no. 11 (1978), p. 51.
• 45
  Bereś first tested out the schema in Transfiguration I at the Centre for the Arts in Sodertalje, Sweden, 6 October 1972. The artist recalled that things did not go as planned: “It was my naivety that I counted on the audience joining in by at least symbolically consuming the bread. The Swedes, keeping themselves at a distance, didn’t even come up to the table. The message itself, though, was received in earnest, with surprise that art can be taken seriously.” Bereś, manuscript 1994, cited in Hanusek, Katalog twórczości, p. 101.
• 46
  Agata Szmalcerz, Jerzy Bereś – Naga Prawda, Sztuka, no. 4-5 (1991), pp 5-7.
• 47
  Bereś cited in Hanusek, “Manifestacja Romantyczna”, p. 31.
• 48
  Bereś, W poszukiwaniu wolności, p. 25.
• 49
  Bereś, Wstyd, pp. 46-7.
• 50
  Bereś citied in Krystyna Czerni, „Wiara (w sztukę) czyni cuda, czyli litur­gia twórczości według Jerzego Beresia”, Znak, no. 7, kraków (1993), p. 66.
• 51
  One of Bereś’s wooden sculptures of 1968-9 had been entitled Maximilian Kolbe (1969). It paid homage to the Polish Franciscan friar who volunteered to die in place of a stranger in Auschwitz in 1941. In 1982 Kolbe was canon­ized by John Paul II, who referred to him as “the Patron Saint of our difficult century”.
• 52
  Hanusek, Katalog twórczości pp. 120-1.
• 53
  Michnik, A New Evolutionism, p. 148.
• 54
  Ost, Solidarity, p. 68. 
• 55
  Michnik, A New Evolutionism, p. 145.
• 56
  Tomasz Strzyżewski, Czarna Księga Cenzury PRL (London: Aneks, 1977).
• 57
  Kemp-Welch, Poland under Communism, pp. 225-6.
• 58
  Ibid., pp. 227-8.
• 59
  Cited in ibid., p. 229.
• 60
  Bereś, Dzieło stymulatorem osądu (1981), in Bereś, Wstyd, p. 43.
• 61
  Bereś manuscript dated 1994, in Hanusek, Katalog twórczości, p. 129.
• 62
  Piotr Piotrowski, Male Artist’s Body: National Identity vs. Identity Politics, in Hoptman and Pospiszyl (eds), Primary Documents, p. 233.
• 63
  Ibid., p. 230.
• 64
  10 September 1981. See Hanusek, Katalog twórczości, p. 131.
• 65
  Kraków, Wrocław and Zielona Góra. See ibid., pp. 134-5.
• 66
  The artist was surprised to find that the same thing happened when he repeated the action in November 2000. This time the words jarred with the advertising and tourist paraphernalia that have taken over the main square under capitalism. As Hanusek has observed, “Romanticism” was still out of kilter with its surroundings. Hanusek, “Manifestacja Romantyczna“, p. 32.
• 67
  Ibid.
• 68
  Ibid., p. 31.
• 69
  Ibid.
• 70
  Bereś, Jestem za otwarciem dialogu, p. 43.
• 71
  See Piotrowski, Art and Democracy, p. 92.
• 72
  Bogucki was awarded a discretionary prize of $100 by the anonymous com­mittee of the cultural branch of Solidarity. Bereś was awarded the same prize in 1987, for his sculptural work.
• 73
  The exhibition lasted from 14 to 30 June 1983; the Pope’s visit took place from 16 to 23 June. Adam Michnik, Takie czasy, rzecz o kompromisie, London: Aneks, 1985, p. 116, cited in Dorota Jarecka, Janusz Bogucki,  pol­ski Szeeman? [w:] Odrzucone dziedzictwo. O sztuce polskiej lat 80, papers from a conference at Warsaw, Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej, 2012, available online at http://www.artmuseum.pl/wydarzenie.php?id=rejected_heritage_jarecka.
• 74
  Jerzy Kalina, Przeciw złu i przemocy. Fragmenty rozmowy z Anną Szynwelską, Warsaw, November 2006. Reproduced at http://www.artin. gda.pl/text/text-p1-29.php.
• 75
  Over the course of the years that followed, Bereś continued to stage mani­festations designed to produce a sense of solidarity among spectators, and to encourage them to think about what he called the “highest” values. In 1985, at the opening of the exhibition Niebo Nowe, Ziemia Nowa? (New Heaven, New Earth?), organized by Marek Rostworowski at the church on Żytnia, he lit fires to hope, freedom, dignity, love and truth, just as he had in 1981, with the variation that on this occasion he used copies of the weekly Polityka, rather than Kultura, as kindling. See Marek Rostworowski et al., Niebo nowe, ziemia nowa?, exh. cat. (Warsaw: Oficyna Wydawnicza MEDIUM, 1987).
• 76
  Bereś, Wykład: Spór o wartości najwyższe (January 1984, Lublin), in Hanusek, Katalog twórczości, pp. 138-9.
• 77
  Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and Sickness unto Death, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941 [1979 edition]), p. 32.
• 78
  Ibid., p. 54.
• 79
  Ibid., p. 59.
• 80
  Ibid., p. 122.
• 81
  Havel, Six Asides about Culture (1984), trans. E. Kohak, in Vladislav (ed.), Vaclav Havel. Living in Truth, pp. 125-6.
• 82
  Ibid.
• 83
  Ibid. Havel’s paradigm of the Czech martyr is the philosopher Jan Patočka. Patočka’s Heretical Essays were also a starting point for Jacques Derrida’s The Gift of Death (“Donner la mort”, in L’ethique du don. Jacques Derrida et la pensee du don [Paris: Transition, 1992]), trans. David Wills (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
• 84
  Bereś, Wykład: Spór o wartości najwyższe II Część (20 March 1986, Lublin), in Hanusek, Katalog twórczości, pp. 140-1.
• 85
  Hanusek, Katalog twórczości, p. 147.
• 86
  Hanusek, Katalog twórczości, p. 147.
• 87
  Bereś, Wykład: Spór o wartości najwyższe, p. 59.