past Exhibition
FEAR’S FINAL FLING
- Iva Davidova
- Zuza Piekoszewska-Smith
But I would rather be horizontal.
I am not a tree with my root in the soil
Sucking up minerals and motherly love
So that each March I may gleam into leaf,
Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed
Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,
Unknowing I must soon unpetal.
Compared with me, a tree is immortal
And a flower-head not tall, but more startling,
And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring.
Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,
The trees and the flowers have been strewing their cool odors.
I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.
Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping
I must most perfectly resemble them -
Thoughts gone dim.
It is more natural to me, lying down.
Then the sky and I are in open conversation,
And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:
Then the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me.
Sylvia Plath, I am vertical
It's May 2024, I'm in London, sitting on a couch in a borrowed flat, let to my boyfriend and I for catsitting. Hackney, London area we're in, is in the midst of Spring bloom in its many parks. Unfortunately, their splendor is not for me this time round – my nose is overflowing with an unstoppable stream of snot, and the throat, sore from the onslaught of nasal secretions for days on end now, is virtually burning. And I'm on my first day of period, so my headache is complimented by lower back pain and abdominal cramps. My ailments are so overabundant it makes me laugh.
A bird sings outside of the window, before she left, my friend said it was a blackbird. A swallow was reportedly circling around its nest the previous day, and these, as we know, like to ruthlessly eat the young. So it may well be that the blackbird's song is a lament. I've had a dust and pollen allergy for years, but this year it's no longer seasonal, it has become permanent. Allergies had been on a dramatic rise everywhere, caused by, among other things, climate change. A study by the University of Manchester found that the prevalence of hay fever has risen by 33% in the past 20 years, an increase attributed to various factors — including environmental allergens, urbanisation and climate change. Warmer temperatures and higher carbon dioxide levels are stimulating plant growth and increasing pollen production; which, together with prolonged pollen seasons, is exacerbating hay fever symptoms.
Rising temperatures are also allowing plants to bloom earlier and longer, prolonging pollen seasons. Increased rainfall means plants release more pollen when they bloom, and higher numbers of thunderstorms cause pollen grains to burst, making them more irritating and worsening symptoms. Since warmer weather signals plants to bloom, pollen seasons are starting earlier and lasting longer. Additionally, greenhouse emissions increase the atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, a gas that stimulates plants to increase the production and release of pollen. Finally, countries that previously had colder weather are starting to warm up, so pollen-producing plants are more able to grow.
Similarly to Sylvia Plath 60 years earlier, I instinctively feel I will become more useful horizontal than vertical. The more vertical I'm trying to be, the more erected and dominant, the more feeble I become, the more I feel forces of nature triumph over me. So I return to the horizontal mode, I lay on the grass in our friend's garden, and I succumb to the powers of the earth.
Grass is a political question
The earth and nature seem to recede from our eyesight only to loom larger than ever again. Not only through ever more visible manifestations of climate change: the increasingly extreme weather and temperature, fires and floods, decay and overgrowth, reflecting as well the glaring inequalities in the social world. Nature seems to have decided to take the matters into its own hands, growingly out of control, disturbing the arbitrary systems we impose on it, bringing human “losses” to pile on those environmental.
It is possible my allergic affliction has been intensified in an effect of a theory the Czech artist Iva Davidova tells me about, called “botanical sexism”. According to horticulturist Tom Ogren, who coined the term, pollen allergies have been amplified due to the planting in urban areas of male clones which increases the amount of pollen in the air. Female trees bring fruit, which allegedly “litter” the city landscape, despite being planted in many European cities after Wolrd War II in case another war and possible hunger.
As Iva tells me, this theory isn't confirmed, perhaps it's pure fake news, but given man's predilection to manipulate nature, this theory fell on fertile ground. Davidova is interested in strange, often contrary ideologies about nature, like, for instance, the crux between two seemingly opposite aesthetic ideologies: human striving for beauty and the ensuing destruction. Prettiness and cuteness are aesthetics very popular and present in the contemporary landscape of late capitalism. Iva has been especially interested in grass as a metaphor overused on the internet. “Go and lay on the grass!” is a frequent way of dismissing your online opponent, suggesting that grass means being outside, as well as “being on the grass” as a way of regulating your emotions.
The internet is full of idealised pictures of people laying on the grass. A picture of bare feet on the grass suggests instantly that we are connecting with nature. Memes are complimented with messages such as: Touching grass is not enough, we also need to overcome (here insert any unpleasant phenomenon, such as patriarchy). The artist remarks on how grass's popularity and prestige, associated eg. with English by the house gardens and American suburbs, have become a part of aspiring to a middle class dream. At the same time, maintaining this image of comfort consumes time and energy. It requires plenty of water, sun and human labour, in the form of constant mowing.
In a way it is a metaphor of class discipline. Often enormous swathes of land with diverse planting are being grubbed for the sake of sowing popular grasslands. Grass dominates football fields, golf courses and many public spaces. It's enough to slightly “neglect” a lawn, not mow it, not water it, so that it looses its desirable green colour to become its yellowing opposite, an overgrown weeded nightmare.
Davidova is interested in this intersection of beauty and disgust, growing just under our noses (speaking of which...achoo!). Grassland present in her paintings is populated by cute cats, the internet's favorite aesthetics element. Cats, liked supposedly because they are more “human”, sophisticated and associated with an array of human-like emotions.
Just like the beautiful grass imagery, cats are an expression of human narcissism. Cats' popularity in the city leads to the diminishing of bird populations, which are cat's favourite target. Born predators, cats were brought and made to breed because of their skills as mice killers. Apart from killing endangered species, cats spread diseases. I am also allergic to cats. In Davidova’s paintings, cats and grass are intimately intertwined. Cats wallow in the grass and eat it, helping them in dispensing indigestible elements of their food. It's a source of relief for them.
You don't have to be deeply invested in the Internet's aesthetics to feel the ambiguity of Davidova's paintings. Similarly to the surrealists Leonora Carrington and Leonor Fini, they are surrounded by an esoteric cloud of fragility and eroticism. Monochrome white convex relief invite to be touched and sensually felt. Like the etchings from botanical treatises, they balance deftly between scientific specificity and fable-like metaphor.
Becoming soil, or the presence of death
Zuza Piekoszewska-Smith grew up in Stargard next to Szczecin in north-western Poland, close to Germany. As a child and a teenager she played and hung out around a huge green compound close to her home, where she often would find strange objects, such as parts of furniture, fragments of clothes or even bones. Recently she learned that around this area archeologists found the remnants of several dozen people, who were the prisoners of a nazi soldier camp, Stalag II-D, with more remnants believed to be found in the future. She realised she used to play on the ground of a mass grave. And even if the archeologists suggest the victims mostly died of hunger, it doesn't change the sheer macabre of this discovery.
She tells me she is still processing this knowledge. Her first work in the fine arts academy was a cycle of photographs of this area. It wouldn't be the first time when her work would gather ominous meaning some time after its creation. In 2019 her BA, Ready To Hatch, was a fantasy of becoming a cicada who spends 17 years underground before it emerges. Piekoszewska-Smith fantasised about producing an artificial body that could become her home after hatching. A year later the pandemic started and isolation stopped being sheer potentiality.
Zuza Piekoszewska-Smith's art grows out of a strong connection to the matter and the object. This connection is paradoxical, as despite so many of the objects created by the artist seem to grow out of the earth and very primary matter, it doesn't mean any strong connection with nature as such. The artist grew up in the city and didn't feel a particular connection with the earth, nature or plants, but it's interesting that her parents might have, as they come from the countryside and they migrated to the city only as adults. This is a very typical situation for post-war Poland, where country-to-city transfer meant the betterment of class and material status.
Still, Piekoszewska-Smith's works aren't by any means about class mobility. They also don't seem to lament over the loss of the connection with nature or the need to restore it. Yet what is felt throughout is the melancholy of observing the decay, decline and chaos that man brings to nature. Her objects seem to result from intense and deep reflection over the functioning of objects within our world. She thinks of her objects in time, but not only the time of their making, also their future. What will they look like in one hundred, two hundred years? Are they going to decompose, will they become part of the ecosystem? At the beginning she used bioplastic, which she eventually gave up for the sake of recyclable, found elements: fabrics, threads, leathers, bran and sawdust, soil and stone. Wooden sawdust was the material for the natural sculpture of potatoes, currently because of climate catastrophe a plant hugely endangered by scarcity, despite being considered so common for so long. It can become rare.
Piekoszewska-Smith's works are similar to living organisms. They are fragile and imperfect. They experience cuts, are cuts in pieces, become wrinkled. Natural, recycled materials create a continuum. They indicate their materiality, which included the process of their making and the time the artist sacrificed to them. They are an effect of constant sticking, reusing, transforming, dealing with the matter. It makes me think of the conceptual sculptress Eva Hesse's process. In the 1960s artists turned to procesual art, which was a shift away from traditional, modernist art's reification. Instead of abstract paintings operating with mystical metaphors, art was to become experience, bringing us back to the neglected areas. It was to make it possible for humans to reconnect with time, space and their own body.
In Fantastic reality: Louise Bourgeois and the Story of Modern Art, the critic Mignon Nixon suggested the great precursor to this treatment of matter was the earlier French artist. Using sticky, natural materials to retell her childhood trauma of encountering and domesticating the world (sensual, not only erotic) has become a gate to experiment for the later artists, such as Hesse and Yayoi Kusama. The latter treat the object to make visible the process: desiring, material decomposition, dying. The turn towards the soft, unfinished, imperfect object refers to various ”earthy” processes, such as decay and degradation, reminding us of the rooting of the human body in the history of earth and the land. Hesse cut though her objects and invited decay into her works, so that the dying work could become a recycled material for another work.
Piekoszewska-Smith's art is not ecological, or at least not per se, it is not her final point. It might be instead the realisation of our destructive influence on nature, and the ethical implications of it. Perishable objects stress the presence of death and technologies used, such as stitching, glueing, sticking, which are types of work felt more on the bodily level than as symbols. They do not refer to any external meaning beyond their own materiality or making- process.
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Unlike Julianne Moore character in Todd Haynes' Safe, who, in order to escape the ever-menacing contagious aspect of the contemporary world, I don't want to shut myself into an antiseptic igloo. Natural environment may seem more dangerous as we speak, and we might feel powerless to individually address this imbalance. And yet, art is a laboratory, where these problems might be addressed without giving a final solution. Nature remains dark, foreboding, inauspicious, but in a way, it was never meant to be our friend. To inform about our fundamental alienation from nature is perhaps art's great purpose.
Agata Pyzik
Translated by the author