Phoenixes and Cyborgs: Mapping Options in the Field of Art

 _in the ruins of necro-art

We woke up amidst the ruins. Such is the state of affairs communicated today by artists, curators and academics. In the eight years of backlash under the right-wing ultra-conservative government in Poland, it took not only considerable civic courage but also the ability to seek support outside the system to engage with the theories and practices of contemporary art movements and to participate in the co-creation of an expanded, critical cultural reality with a glocal character – one that encompasses the world of human and non-human beings. Contemporary art and critical theories have essentially been relegated to the margins of cultural and artistic institutions. They provided satisfaction mainly within social group echo chambers. These provided wonderful support, but there was often fatigue, even exhaustion, from the struggle for freedom of expression, the search for funding, various forms of censorship and self-censorship.[1]

Many public art institutions were fuelled by dystopian ways of thinking and acting. Tasked with implementing a new official cultural policy, these institutions not only ceased to have anything in common with contemporary art, but also became socially dysfunctional. Often, the exhibitions they presented drew on various aesthetics from the past, which became agents of epistemic violence in the cultural wars[2]. In recent years, ministerial support was granted to projects that served a conservative vision of society, often based on harmful dualisms. In particular, dichotomies of gender, sexual orientation or origin were hierarchised. On the one hand, state social engineering policies generated new flows of political migration, for example through the spread of hate speech equating non-heteronormative, trans or non-binary people with the ‘rainbow scourge’. On the other hand, they led to the dehumanisation of people of non-white skin who have come to Poland in search of refuge. The assault on womxn’s reproductive rights, especially the denial of legal abortion, served to strengthen the position of cis-heterosexual men. It is still scary to be a person with a womb or a trans person in Poland. It is still difficult to be a person with disabilities, their caregiver, and also a sea or river seen as a living person.

But let’s go back to the demoralising period of contempt. In the post-pandemic reality, technological progress was accelerating, but digital technologies were being used to centralise power, spy and control society, so they were widely associated primarily with threats. Similarly, difficult to stomach as they were steeped in crude propaganda, the public media became real powerhouses. On a smaller scale, these phenomena also affected art – it grew claustrophobic and began to serve the purpose of eradicating what was alive and reviving what was dead. Like cultural memory, the role of art was to forge a vision of culture focused primarily on the instrumentally treated past, which served to construct a traumatic experience of the present. Art, too, relied on simplifications and became extraordinarily inhospitable. Sometimes it clumsily appropriated certain strategies of contemporary art for propaganda purposes. It was obsessed with interpreting national history – a common thematic substrate for exhibitions in galleries or museums. Drawing inspiration from the Catholic religion and expressing itself through traditional media, art became ‘necro’. It transformed life into a grim representation and a rigid symbol. It employed resentments and aesthetics that conveyed feelings of grievance and dissatisfaction. Necro-art is a phenomenon that has emerged in recent years and has consumed considerable financial resources. It is an invention of necro-epistemology (in a populist version)[3], whose institutional visibility also gave it the label of being cringe-worthy.

^{[1] More on this topic in the report: Sanjay Sethi et al., Cultural Control: Censorship and Suppression of the Arts in Poland (Artistic Freedom Initiative, 2022), https://artisticfreedominitiative.org/projects/artistic-freedom-monitor/poland/ (accessed 13 March 2024).
[2] By epistemic violence in relation to cultural institutions, I mean strategies and actions associated with censorship in cultural institutions, marginalisation of minority voices, manipulation of history and cultural memory, denial and repression of art that challenges the dominant worldview. The understanding proposed here draws on the theories of authors such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Enrique Galván-Álvarez, Sebastian Garbe and Claudia Brunner.
[3] According to Michael Marder, whose book I write about later in the essay, ‘necroepistemology . . . sees the world through the prism of death cleansed of life, the death, which nonetheless passes for life itself, plus the cutting-edge research on how to delay ageing and to satisfy the ever-growing demand for immortality (for the ultrarich)’; Michael Marder, The Phoenix Complex: A Philosophy of Nature, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2023, p. xiii.}

_unshackling galleries

We are flushing out stale ontologies and entrenched epistemologies from the entrails of a burnt-out social organism. We are looking for a space where we can turn our dreams of a new paradigm of art into reality. Why not find such a space in the gallery deemed to be the most representative exhibition space in Poland, a gallery that has become a symptomatic example of the paralysis of art institutions? Why not do it in a country whose emblem is a silver eagle with a golden crown on a red field? Hope has not completely turned to ash, and out of the ashes of antiquated cultural policies, the desire to participate in the co-creation of supportive spaces for contemporary art is being reborn – for those sparks of creativity that have been smoldering in queer miniverses^[1] over the past few years, at virtual raves, on Discord, on artistx’ social media profiles, in self-funded non-galleries, home and commercial spaces that have partly taken over the role of public galleries. Fortunately, one could find inspiration for contemporary art outside the country’s borders – while studying art abroad, participating in residencies and transnational projects. But it is not fair when the Promethean condition arises from the inability to spread one’s wings in one’s ‘own’ nest, or when the available opportunities are reserved for those already established in the art world and adept at navigating the hardcore system.

The exhibition From the Ashes at the Zachęta – National Gallery of Art is a proposal for a new opening of space for contemporary art, which I interpret in the context of the rebound from conservative social and cultural policies. The curator Michalina Sablik was inspired by the phoenix – a mythical bird symbolising rebirth, transformation and a new dynamic deal. She invited artists from the generation of the 1980s and 1990s to collaborate on the theme of dystopian and utopian visions of today’s multi-crisis reality. It turns out that members of the younger generation avoid references to the local political situation. However, they identify pathologies with extractivist policies or the neoliberal forces of digital capitalism. The installation Waste (2023) consists of a mechanical wing tapping out a rhythm in the sand, its slow pace perhaps suggestive of exhaustion. Klara Woźniak’s narrative makes me think of the controlling and technological enhancement of nature, but also the loss caused by the industrialisation of dreams and the commercialisation of human imagination. The monumental video SND (2021) by Sara Bezovšek reminds us that memes, gifs and internet videos have become elements of the age of wasteocene. The materials collected by the artist weave a post-apocalyptic reality into a stream of recurring nightmarish representations. The pessimistic content that scrolls across the smartphone screen does not motivate action, but rather imbues the body with a symbolic order of ecocide. The body of the doomscroller is reduced to the thumb, which serves as the tinder that ignites the doomscrolling. In the video essay All Hardware Sucks, All Software Sucks (2023–2024), the artistic duo Extreme Girl (Lena Peplińska and Laura Radzewicz) and szkoda (Kasia Piątkowska) develop themes related to online social isolation in a convention reminiscent of the Black Mirror series. Narrated by a character inspired by corporate mascots, the piece deals with the history of the internet and social media under the reign of digital capitalists.

The case for the phoenix is supported by the aforementioned book by Michael Marder, The Phoenix Complex: A Philosophy of Nature (2023), which takes up the theme of a dynamic understanding of nature in the world of ecological crises. Marder sees the phoenix as a transhistorical figure that embodies the cyclical nature of existence. For him, rather than a mythical figure confined to a particular history or representation, the phoenix is a symbol that embodies a certain way of thinking about the natural world, which he calls the ‘phoenix complex’. By this term, the Basque philosopher understands ‘a mix of affects, ideas, images, and associations, it retains an effective identity, bolstering the claim to a widespread, generalizable (if not universalizable), and rapidly self-propagating, reproducible, stable and highly mobile mode of thinking and associated practices’[2]. Marder argues that the principle of self-regulating nature embodied by the phoenix does not hold up when confronted with contemporary critical ecological discourses. However, it is difficult to agree with the author when he writes that only a sense of absolute, pure hopelessness can lead to radical change[3]. In the context of the hopelessness of recent years associated with actions in the Polish art field, the figure of the phoenix proves useful in representing the situation of individuals who feel exhausted by internal exile and now return to do art with others. They need support and visibility. They want to flutter their feathers and, together with AI, break the spell cast on the field of art, which conservative worldviews and neoliberal practices are trying to turn into a battlefield. And the field of art should not be a straightforward path to burning oneself to ashes.

^{[1] This term offers an alternative to the tools and platforms of the technocrats. I borrowed it from Martix Navrot, an artist active in the duo Eternal Engine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzCcNS5Sgv8 (accessed 5 April 2024).
[2] Marder,  p. 4.
[3] Ibid, p. 3.}

_cyborg art

In the context of integrating social and environmental emancipatory policies into new narratives and strategies of collective action, one can find potential in the figure of the cyborg. Embedded in it is also an ontological and epistemological perspective of transformation, regeneration and embodiment of beings that have evolved from what already existed before. The main themes of the current ‘cyber-inflamed’ discourse were recently proposed by Cecilia Åsberg in her programmatic text ‘Promises of Cyborgs: Feminist Practices of Posthumanities (Against the Nested Crises of the Anthropocene)’.[1] I want to use this text to enrich the feminist narrative with a queer perspective, as well as to strengthen my affirmative story about the choreography of locally felt rebirth. For at the Zachęta, not only has there been a clear shift in social energy towards a less dichotomous one, but also, in the part of the exhibition devoted to utopias, works using new technologies have appeared in a way that deserves reflection.[2]

Åsberg refers to the canonical proposal of Donna J. Haraway, an author of numerous ideas in which she combines feminist enthusiasm for technology with its social and political critique. It is worth recalling that the cyborg identity, which was fundamental to feminist technology studies, was characterised by a subversion of the origin and purity of the species and a fluidity between what is animal, what is human and what is technical. The cyborg was supposed to be an expression of opposition to technological determinism, a symbol of political action and contestation, or even a carrier of rebellion against the heteronormative model of reproduction. It was meant to be a seed of multifaceted stories about the complexity of the world we live in, devoid of religious dogmatism, and a subversive creation in a post-gender world.[3] The critique of technoscience that constituted Haraway’s socialist narrative in the mid-1980s, as recapitulated by Åsberg today, leans towards a feminist trans-identity narrative that allows for a distance from humanoid cyborgs and anthropocentric imaginaries. The Swedish scholar undertakes a thorough reconstruction of the discourses related to the figure of the cyborg and develops traces of posthumanist thinking in relation to the glocal nature of the challenges and problems of our more-than-human world of multiple crises.

The eponymous ‘promises of cyborgs’ are expressed in the language of extra- and more-than-human feminist posthumanities, decolonial and postcolonial theories, new materialism, bioethics, biosemiotics or ecocriticism^[4]. They allow for a rethinking of the sense of identity, focusing instead on a sense of belonging that restores agency. They show the possibilities of putting ‘oneself’ together in complex, diverse, possibly ethically sensitive relationships with different forms and figures of human and non-human beings. If I understand the author correctly, such imagined promises have nothing to do with the illusions associated with hope. Moreover, rather than wrestling with the limitations and dilemmas of individual identity, today’s cyborgic narrative speaks more of the need for collective survival. So who is the cyborg of today? For Åsberg, it is primarily a more than human person who signals ‘the needed re-invention of the arts, humanities and social sciences so to reimagine culture, society and human identity in ecological and technological terms’. The author is in dialogue with this need, adding that the cyborg ‘infused feminist interdisciplinarians like myself with the incentive to situate people in ecological context and nonhumans in cultural context in our research’.^[5] It represents, therefore, a certain research proposal and a social strategy for situating them in a field of complex relations. This approach could also be successfully applied to artistic research.

The concept of ‘art’ appears no less than 32 times in ‘Promises of Cyborgs’ in the contexts of critical posthumanism, technohumanism, multi-species humanities, etc. It refers to the dynamically changing ways of producing art, the need to redefine its social role, and the artistic imagination associated with the use of new technologies. In particular, it examines the impact of generative imaging and artificial intelligence tools on contemporary meanings of creativity. Positioning art at the intersection of various scientific disciplines and key contemporary issues makes it one of the crucial tools of what Åsberg describes as ‘cyborg knowing’ and ‘cyborg imaginary’. On the one hand, both concepts point to a project that offers a critique of visual culture and existing imagery[6], questioning the contemporary mass culture industry and its dystopian dimensions (various abuses, violence, racism, replication of dominant culture stereotypes, etc.). On the other hand, the cyborg and its attributes – art, knowing and imaginary – are intended to open up possibilities for transforming the dominant visual field and for realising artistic practices stemming from a concern for the vitality of emancipatory cultural and ecological politics.

Some of the artistic works presented in the exhibition From the Ashes take up these cyborg themes of the entanglement of knowing and imaginary in various hybrid formats. Åsberg has even become one of the protagonists of a panoramic photograph by Justyna Górowska, a digital_nymph working in collaboration with AI. The photograph shows womxn artists, scientists and water activists who are members of the hydrosexual movement in art. Much like the video Hydrosexuals Unite! (2023), created in collaboration with queer composer Agata Polak and artificial intelligence, what is essential here is the aesthetics of ecopolitics resulting from the pursuit of inclusivity and diversity of representation through hacked generative AI tools still operating in a schematic way. The adoption of these ready-made tools, created in a different environment, is also an issue raised in Agata Lankamer’s work PowerPuffGirls (2024), with direct reference to ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’. By cataloguing, analysing and editing images of women created by AI, the artist wonders whether, if they are designed by a dominant group for commercial purposes, they can truly perform subversive work in the field of art without replicating stereotypes and prejudices.

X-Philes collective sidesteps the tortuous path of adapting modern technologies, opting for a model of queer community networking based on analogue media. Their Home for Potential Futures (2024) is a post-anthropocentric structure with a plain yet subtle roof that draws on the assemblage traditions of neo-avant-garde and junk art. The title suggests that it does not express unreflective hope, but treats the future probabilistically. The home is made up of bed frames, mirrors and various intriguing details. Each element is inspired by queer poetry, which has defined the open character of the entire project. Although this home has no walls, it has the power to disrupt claustrophobic national symbols, sanctified social orders and culturally rendered binary identities. The building materials include a poem by Martix Navrot, who identifies on a daily basis as a digital witch of technoculture. It speaks of changing the shape of things, of tearing down divisions: ‘if you burn me, scatter me / from the holiest mountain scatter my ashes / so that I would create streams from the dew / so that I would flow and break down the bridges.’ By giving free rein to those tired of necro-art, smog asphyxiation and self-encryption, the work that closes the exhibition also offers shelter to the untamed spirit and desire for a posthuman circulation of energy.

^{[1] After a break, the gallery walls bore witness to young non-binary people simply dismantling the gender system. It’s also worth noting that the curator of the exhibition Does the Rising Sun Affright opened simultaneously at the Zachęta, is also a womxn, Aleksandra Skowrońska.
[2] Cecilia Åsberg, ‘Promises of Cyborgs: Feminist Practices of Posthumanities (Against the Nested Crises of the Anthropocene)’, NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, 15 January 2024, pp. 1–21, https://doi.org/10.1080/08038740.2023.2294194.
[3] Donna J. Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New York: Routledge, 1991, pp. 149–181.
[4] Åsberg, p. 14.
[5] Ibid., p. 2.
[6] Ibid., p. 5.}

_outro

To take proper care of the reclaimed piece of public space for creative work, artists need wind under their wings and robust feminist metaphors capable of lifting paradigmatic changes in art with empathy. However, the materialisation of embodied, multimodal, environmentally embedded multiverses [of queer] imaginary requires systemic support from institutions and a well-functioning infrastructure. Efficiency, functionality and pragmatism seem key to creating a coherent counter-narrative to hallucinating boomerocenes and other meltdowncenes. I raise these issues in the final reflection, pointing out that without this support, contemporary art becomes an endangered species and imagination an easy prey for the entertainment industry. Thus disappear the flows, nuances and subtleties of the relationship between art, science and society that are so crucial to a diverse present and a multi-species future.

Ewelina Jarosz (she/they) – a hydrosexual researcher in the queer-feminist stream of blue humanities. She works as an assistant professor in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at the National Education Commission University in Kraków. Her current interests include the intersection of environmental art, pleasure activism and queer ecologies. She is a two-time recipient of the Kościuszko Foundation Scholarship. As an artist and researcher, she collaborates with the E.A.R.T.H. Lab at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the Posthumanities Hub at Linköping University in Sweden. She is a member of the artist-research duo cyber_nymphs. She is also co-founder of the hydrosexual movement in art and the Blue Humanities Archive project.