This is a 1991 vertical sculpture consisting of bronze casts of Karl Marx’s head (several versions of this work were created), a fragment of the unrealised project The Temple of Karl Marx, which Krzysztof M. Bednarski was preparing for a solo exhibition at Gallerie Immart in Rome. The column appeared in the artist’s work in the late 1980s and early 1990s, while he also created other forms from casts of Marx’s head, such as mounds (Marx on Sale, 1999) or bouquets (Karl Marx’s Golden Thoughts, 2003).

Bednarski reached for the German philosopher’s plaster heads as early as 1978 in his thesis: the installation Total Portrait of Karl Marx. Rooted in the reality of the time, this provocative work was interpreted as a mockery of Marxism — a failed utopia — or, on the contrary, a perverse tribute to the philosopher. The head of the creator of Marxism was created on the basis of photographic documentation made by other artists (it was part of the installation) of monuments located in the USSR, East Germany and Poland, and then replicated, thus depriving it of its propagandistic, individual power. Bednarski himself states that he wanted to protest the aspect of the sculptor’s profession as someone who fulfils establishment orders. He chose this official portrait, which functioned in the iconosphere of the time, also because the figure of Marx was never as clearly marked ideologically as images of Lenin or Stalin. Marx’s head has an interesting sculptural form. Bednarski also succeeded in showing that we are dealing with an abuse — the figure of the philosopher was stripped of its power by the regime systems, ceasing to be a symbol of social criticism and struggle, and becoming just a dead prop. The sculptor proved that the overuse of a certain sign and its constant multiplication, duplication leads to depriving it of all ideological impetus, a kind of trivialisation.

Bednarski treated Marx’s head as a hallmark of many subsequent works. The sculpture in question, a column of stacked Marx heads, was created two years after the collapse of the communist system in Poland. It was made of bronze — perhaps in the new capitalist reality the figure of the philosopher is no longer an empty sign?

Karolina Zychowicz

translated by Paulina Bożek