Libera achieved international renown due to his work Lego. Concentration Camp (1996). Out of grey blocks acquired from the famous Danish corporation he build miniature barracks, walls, crematoria and clothes sorting facilities. He used plastic policemen in black uniforms from „Police” sets as guards, and skeletons from „pirate” sets as prisoners. He arranged and photographed scenes based on archival photos from the II World War period. The photos were printed on boxes deceptively similar to original Lego System sets. The pice provoked an extensive press and academic debate reaching i.a. Denmark and Israel. The work found its way to the prestigious Sao Paulo Biennale and – almost – to the Venice Biennale. The curator of the Polish pavilion in Venice pressed to exclude the controversial piece from Libera’s planned exhibition, so the artist withdrew from the show entirely.
Today, editions of the piece are included in the collections of the New York Jewish Museum, the House of the History of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn, and Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.
Lego was created as part of the Corrective appliances series. Others include Body master – a miniature body-building atlas for boys and delivery bed play-kits for girls – for ages 7–9. There’s also the Ken’s Aunt plastic doll – with a body of a late middle-aged woman sporting a ’60 hairdo. Finally, there’s a weight stack made to enlarge penis size. All are designed and crafted with factory precision with packaging resembling actual products found in toy stores.
Other notable series of Libera are Positives – large format photographs restaging iconic pictures of tragic moments in the XX century. Instead of Wermacht soldiers tearing down the barrier on Polish border in 1939 – Libera shows cyclists lifting a roadblock with a „Stop” sign. Instead of concentration camp prisoners in rags behind barb wire fence – we see smiling people in pajamas and quilts behind laundry strings.
The task of critical art is a critical examination of one’s own culture. Inspired by poststructuralist philosophy and the struggles of new social movements, it attacks traditional discourses and manners of representation. It problematizes what has always been obvious. Unlike modernist engaged art, critical art does not have a clear positive program for fixing the world. It prefers the strategy of resistance: „fighting from within and behind the lines” of the system (Foster 1994, Zydorowicz 2005).
Libera characterizes his art, in words of his artist friend Marek Janiak – the „art of embarrassment”. „It brings forth an effect of embarrassment, confusion, it throws the viewer off balance, out of the normal course of thought” – said Libera in an interview with Łukasz Gorczyca and Artur Żmijewski. – „Its beauty lies in an error, in some exceptional dud, in an unknown situation, in the oddity, the puzzlement.”
Libera also said that his art operates like a „virus”. It employs an esthetic that is accessible to the wider audience, almost pop-like. However, at the same time it hides a subversive message of cultural critique.
Pieces from Libera’s expansive body of work were interpreted in connection to problems such as social marginality, bodily practice, gender and sexuality, senility, illness and death, oppressiveness of the state and the dominant culture, as well as memory of historical trauma.
The Corrective appliances can be interpreted as an emphasis of the nature of toys – but also other things we surround ourselves with – as ideological apparatuses, enforcing certain attitudes and social roles in our bodies and minds. A doll or a kitchen play-set prepares girls to the role of a mother in a heterosexual family with a traditional division of work. A plastic rifle is a harbinger of the drill for aggressive, patriarchal, militarized manhood. In the case of toys this clandestine pedagogics of things is not hard to grasp. Recent social studies, however, convince us that there is similar agency to clothes, architecture, electronic gadgets or algorithms.
Libera became a star of the art world in the 1990s but he was engaged in artistic life and created interesting controversial works already in the previous decade.
He was raised in a small town Pabianice near Łódź in central Poland. He was a son of a nurse, a single mother. He is perhaps the only one of Polish renown artists who did not attend to an academy of fine arts. His whole artistic education was informal.
First, there was a musical family of his high school friend, who’s father was a conservatory professor. Then, there were exhibitions in the Museum of Art in Łódź. Several years later a private archive of performance and conceptual art of the 1970s curated by Zofia Kulik and Przemysław Kwiek (KwieKulik duo) became Libera’s „university”, but also a „convent”. Libera becomes an „apprentice” of the duo and lives in their house on the suburbs of Warsaw for a couple of years.
In the beginning of the 1980s Libera entered the counter-cultural milieu of the Pitch-in Culture. They met at an attic of an old tenement house by the main alley of Łódź. Soon after the Martial Law was introduced in 1981 and state-sponsored galleries were closed, the attic became a venue for exhibitions and concerts of the „second circulation”. What members of the Pitch-in Culture had in common was a nihilist, anarchic and provocative attitude to the outside world. They rejected the art from state-run galleries as well as the one connected to Solidarity movement and secretly exhibited in churches. Their sense of humor had a distinct dadaist quality. What was most important for people coming to The Attic was „being together” – participating in an alternative community, an enclave within the oppressive and boring reality of the Martial Law. The first exhibition on The Attic included Libera’s artistic debut.
During the Martial Law, Libera spend a year and a half in criminal arrest and an internment facility. He was arrested for printing and distributing leaflets in protest against the bloody suppression of the strike in Wujek coal mine. He was released shortly before his debut. This was not the only difficult experience that influenced the course of his life. In 1986 he worked in a psychiatric ward of Pabianice hospital as an occupational therapist for a year. He moved from Łódź to Warsaw to avoid constant harassment by the communist security service (although he no longer had ties to political opposition). In the breakthrough year of 1989 he started a half year long solitary journey to Egypt, Israel and Sudan – as he puts it – a mystical journey of a hermit. He went through a couple of identity crises and departures from art, during which he destroyed his old works.
Libera is also a pioneer of video art. As early as in the time of the Pitch-in Culture he bought a quality Japanese VHS camera, thanks to an inheritance from an uncle from USA. Throughout the 1980s he intensively documented Polish artistic life, including parties and plein air trips of the Pitch-in Culture milieu as well as exhibitions and performances of fellow artists.
He recorded his closest family as well, in private situations, including his 90-year-old bedridden grandmother, with whom he had close ties, and after whom he took care afer being released from prison.
Camera registers a man in his twenties feeding, bathing and changing diapers of his grandmother. It also registers how the grandmother, in advanced dementia, spins around an iron chamber pot on the floor, in regular sequence. Libera identified this strange behavior as a kind of mystic ritual substituting rosary prayer. After awhile, Libera assembled these recordings into a short films and started to show them to befriended artists and curators. That is how some of the earliest, strongest and best known works of Polish video art were made (Intimate rites 1984, Mystical Perseverance 1984).
Zbigniew Libera retained an immense private collection of notes, drawings, documents, photographs and video recordings. In 2010, he donated material from his childhood and youth (until 1991) to the Artists’ Archives of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, free of charge.
„In a radical gesture” – writes the Museum – the artist „makes public nearly all of his preserved document”, including family photographs, documentation of the activities of Pitch-in Culture, and his iconic edited videos.
The curators of the Museum are convinced that the collected material enables studying the „process of shaping the personality and crystallizing main areas of artistic interests, that recur in the mature works by Libera”. One can „see the long-lasting process of preparing the emotional and aesthetic background for future work” of the artist, as well as „trace the sources of the motifs that are key to his oeuvre”.
Sources:
Zbigniew Libera Archive, Artists’ Archives of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw,
https://artmuseum.pl/en/archiwum/archiwum-zbigniewa-libery
Libera Zbigniew, conversation with Gorczyca Łukasz and Żmijewski Artur, Artysta nie może być odpowiedzialny [Artist cannot be responsible] [in:] Żmijewski Artur, Drżące ciała. Rozmowy z artystami, Korporacja Ha!Art, Kraków 2006.
Monkiewicz Dorota, Zbigniew Libera. Prolegomena biograficzne do twórczości z lat 80. [Zbigniew Libera. Biographical prolegomena for the works in the 80s] [in:] Ukryta Dekada. Polska sztuka wideo 1985-1995, eds. Piotr Krajewski, Violetta Kutlubasis-Krajewska, Centrum Sztuki WRO, Wrocław 2010, pp. 141-149.
Ronduda Łukasz, Tożsamość transytowa – życie i twórczość Zbigniewa Libery w latach 1981-2006 [Transit identity – life and work of Zbigniew Libera from 1981 to 2006] [in:] Zbigniew Libera. Prace z lat 1982-2008, Warszawa 2009, pp. 24-37.
Sienkiewicz Karol, Zatańczą ci, co drżeli. Polska sztuka krytyczna, [Those who trembled, will be the ones to dance. Polish critical art], Karakter, Kraków 2014.
Sienkiewicz Karol, Zbigniew Libera, Culture.pl 2007, https://culture.pl/pl/tworca/zbigniew-libera
Foster Hall, For a Concept of the Political in Contemporary Art, [in:] Recordings. Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics, pp. 121-138, Bay Press, Seattle 1985.
Zydorowicz Jacek, Artystyczny wirus [Artistic Virus], Instytut Adama Mickiewicza, Warszawa 2005.
Autobiographical narrative interview with Zbigniew Libera by Piotr Szenajch. Unpublished. Conducted 17.12.2013.
