Object of attack by national madmen and ordinary bandits, the reason for the moral increase of Catholics and a tourist attraction under which thousands of people took a photo. The installation, made of multi-colored flowers, was put on the Zbawiciela Square in Warsaw on June 8, 2012. –
“Rainbow” is supposed to evoke joy, it is pure beauty – its author said. In the summer of 2011, Wójcik established the “Tęcza” Artistic Handicraft Cooperative. For a week, in an apartment on the top floor of a block of flats in Sopot, a group of volunteers stuffed artificial flowers on wires.
This is what Rafał Betlejewski wrote about the Rainbow after its disassembly:
I am writing this the day after the installation is dismantled. Yesterday there was a sad festival in Zbawiciela Square. Crowds of Varsovians, drinking beer and joking, watched the sad gentlemen taking something that had become meaningful to all of us. What have we gained in this way?
It seems that Warsaw is not very good at art. Or he just hates it. Apart from the Rajkowska palm tree, there is nothing in the city created by a contemporary artist that would somehow survive the pressure of public opinion and bureaucracy. We live in a reality designed by a traffic engineer and nothing that exceeds this level of imagination is acceptable to us. Everything else sticks out too much, irritates us too much, or even pisses us off when we are pissed off by Julita Wójcik’s “cheesy” Rainbow and if we don’t swing a Molotov cocktail at it, then at least we’ll be abused. Keep abusing until they take it off.
Rajkowska’s palm was also insulted. That trash, that plastic – bombastik. But somehow it managed to survive because it had not built a meaning expressive enough. We consumed her. For most of us, it has become merely a reminder of summer holidays, an exotic postcard that has no anarchist power, because it has been tamed by us under the name “all inclusive”. We were there, it was fun, the kids were riding a camel.
We pushed all the rest of art to open-air museums. We keep it in terrariums under the name of “museum” and we can safely avoid it. It is important that nothing under our noses grow up, nothing that has no function.
I have never been a supporter of closing art in museums, although my mother has worked at the National Museum for many years. I have been going to museums since I was a child. And yet the horror of enclosing a work in the white space of the gallery walls has always seemed unbearable to me. Night, the lights go out, nobody is there, and it has to be there. The installation as a tissue filled with the artist’s living blood dies in solitude. And when we come to see her in the morning with a ticket in hand, she will have to do everything to please us.
In galleries, an art object is graceful. What else on the street.
On the street, an art object might give us a shit. For him, we are only passers-by, to whom the object does not need to pay attention. Maybe he is drinking his coffee or looking the other way. He doesn’t have to be staring at us. In the street, an art object can be arrogant, just like us. He may go ahead with his head bowed and ignore what we think. On the street, an art object can be itself.
I have always liked it in facilities located in the city space. It impressed me. This independence from me. The object stands there day and night and lives a life of its own that I do not know, just like every part of the city, every inhabitant. He has his problems and fears. It can be damaged, spit on, raped, but it can also learn. Live, make friends. The most important thing, however, is that the object on the street does not need me.
Can you not spend the public money on something more sensible – you say into the radio microphone – can’t there be a flower bed here?
Exactly – but I need art objects on the street. I don’t want a flower bed, I want art. I need it to breathe. To dream. A city engineer, when he designs Powstańców Square and places flower pots there, wants to put reality under my nose. Day. I am suffocating from its pots just as I am suffocating from Wisłostrada, tram tracks, tax office, guarded parking lot and any other thing that has functional dimensions. I am walking around Warsaw and I am suffocating. I know everything, nothing surprises me. The only gate is the past.
When an artist creates an art object, he holds a window under my nose through which I can look into his dream. The artist gives me nothing functional. It only gives me an expression of my imagination, ambition, desire – to sleep. An art object is like a window open to another reality, and its indeterminacy closes in the question: what the fuck is this really?
The art object is for nothing. It is because it is, but it is not for something. This is what allows you to breathe.
These windows, opened by art, let an element of adventure into our well-worn world. They let in meanings that have not been here before. “It means something different to everyone,” they say, and this semantic anarchy is at the heart of the matter. Nobody here can agree with anyone! Because everyone stupid will answer the question of what are the tram tracks for. But what is the Rainbow for? Or a palm tree?
Museums are art cemeteries. These are the bends of the river where waste collects. The current flows elsewhere. Museums were invented as the world became more and more shattered by wars and more and more sites were abandoned. Before, they all belonged to someone, someone needed them, someone wanted them. Now they suddenly became lonely, and someone looking from outside, someone who might have seen them before, thought he would save them somewhere in a hall. He started collecting them.
But the idea to create for “museums” is new and bizarre. Create for the purpose of a cemetery …
Art has its strength when it has someone who wants it. A museum curator is not that. Tęczy Wójcik wanted the Mickiewicz Institute, he built it and he defended it. How strong it is at once!
What I like the most about my own projects is when the work is taken from me. When I myself am pushed away by the viewers, and they themselves recognize that they understand better what is going on, how to steer the process further. This moment is priceless because it is this moment that fully realizes the illusion of reality – it “creates the truth” and allows all of us to learn in a laboratory workshop.
The same thing happened with Tęcza Wójcik. The Rainbow was taken from her, Wójcik was pushed away from the Rainbow, it was considered insignificant, it was found that she did not know herself. What does Wójcik have to tell us? Let him fuck off, we know better. And the Rainbow started jerking as if the Rainbow were real! Well, because the Rainbow also became real – it acquired real meanings for us, essential meanings! Touching our nerves.
It does not matter what Julita Wójcik designed herself when she created the Rainbow. It was important what we thought. What we hate. What we love. What would we be able to do. Who to kill. What to destroy, to kick. Burn.
The rainbow has made its own story. This story can now be followed, described. There was no Rainbow, there was no history, there was a Rainbow, there was history. Sparring, struggles, insults, heroism, deeds, words.
And this is the most important thing in this Rainbow. This is what I miss. This was taken from me. I was taken away from developing a story.
I think that it will be very bad if the Rainbow appears in some cursed place, in some art cemetery, somewhere in a park under the CCA, stripped of its living strength, and being only a memory of some glory and glory.
On the other hand, I have no illusions that the Rainbow will return to the Savior Square. Undressing it seems to me to be an irreversible act. Because stupid. And, as Gombrowicz used to say, one does not argue with stupidity.
PS: I think that even the enemies of the Rainbow feel a void today. They have nothing to spit on, to fight with. They got their way and what? It’s empty. Thread. Their presence is suddenly realized in this nothingness. Is she enough for them?
———-
Julita Wójcik was born in 1971 in Gdańsk.
She studied at the Sculpture Department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk.
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