In the opening moments of Hanka Włodarczyk’s film Ślad (1976), the Polish artist Alina Szapocznikow (1926–1973) takes a hammer and chisel to a rough sculpture with a sure, quick hand. We can’t see the chunks of stone flying away but because of the way Szapocznikow reacts we infer that they do – every so often, she flinches. Next the scene shifts to an exhibition opening where Szapocznikow, dressed in silvery animal print, accepts a bouquet of lilacs. Then she’s back in the studio slapping clay onto the crotch of a composite female figure with a wooden panel. Chiselling, charming, chiselling again, rubbing shoulders and hosing down clay: the back-and-forth swing between the studio and the gallery splits artistic labour into two modes: the social and the creative. It’s the former I find fascinating. I like to watch a celebrated woman working a crowd. The torturous oddity of historical female creativity is so engrained in the cultural consciousness that sometimes it’s easy to forget that the mechanism of rediscovery kicks in precisely because these women spent a good portion of their lives receiving awards and having roses tossed at their feet. By showing us the artist caught up in both types of work – making art and building a reputation – Włodarczyk skips over questions of inspiration and motivation. She doesn’t invite us to wonder what dark corner this art making impulse might have come from and we never learn why Szapocznikow is doing what she’s doing, only that she’s doing it rather well. Perhaps, Włodarczyk implies, it is none of our business.
In Slád, there’s no blasting of the interpretive Tannoy to put Szapocznikow in context or qualify her, like the somewhat back-handed homily given to artist Ruth Asawa in Robert Snyder’s documentary Of Forms and Growth (1978), which smuggles her profession into a care-orientated role call: “mother, teacher, artist, civic leader”. Włodarczyk presents us with a reel of Alina Szapocznikow fully formed and at the peak of her career that feels both immediate and distant. She’s there, unmediated and unaffected, but she doesn’t address us. In fact, she doesn’t acknowledge the camera at all aside from the odd stomach-flipping wink. As a portrait of the artist, Włodarczyk’s film privileges the presence of Szapocznikow’s body at work rather than her personal narrative. This is possibly because Szapocznikow, a Holocaust survivor, has the kind of history that can make her artistic practice look like a metaphor, or working through, of her early experience. Like Anselm Kiefer born on the night his house was bombed, or Frida Kahlo pierced through like a medieval saint, scenes of trauma are easily repackaged as origin myths. Contemporary critics tend to agree, viewing Szapocznikow’s biography as a threat to interpretation rather than a key, and warning that it might “threaten to overwhelm the experience of looking at her art” or oust critique with “mythology”.[1][2] And there are good reasons to be wary of biography. Elizabeth Hardwick described it as life “waiting to be lived again by way of the flowing bloodstream of documentation”; all those letters and notes and loose papers that must be uncovered, interpreted, uploaded, corrected, catalogued, and collaged into a convincingly consistent fiction.[3] But, as Hardwick asks, “who is served by it, except the facts themselves? They alone live and breathe, aimlessly reproducing, wandering.”[4]
The problem we can infer from this macabre image is that a researched life risks suffocating the human life that lies buried under it. Data acquires “a monstrous life of its own, a greater vivacity than any lived existence” (Hardwick again). But it isn’t lived existence. It is nothing like lived existence. Part of the reason why the avatar-protagonists of biographies are so monstrous, or monstrously divine, is because of the weight given to actions and positions which, when lived, might have been experienced in any number of complicated, compromised ways. When a biography aspires to monolithic totality, either by way of summation or an exhaustive recording of events, it leaves no space for its subject or the embodied moment. Hardwick argues that biographies must acknowledge themselves as literary and artistic compositions in order to account for their inability to capture a life and all that means. An error or omission can be a way of acknowledging artifice, like leaving a gap in the story through which the reader can glimpse the wider world beyond its walls. This is one of the functions of Włodarczyk’s restraint; we never learn much about Szapocznikow, about where she lived or what she liked, her politics or her family, so we’re never fooled into thinking that we know her. Włodarczyk prevents her portrait from blotting out Alina Szapocznikow by only showing unconnected moments. Instead of mythology, there is remainder, an opacity that acknowledges all the parts of life that resist exposure.
In many ways, Ślad’s eschewal of typical biographical tropes is a consequence of the film’s focus on the body. There’s not much to go on that isn’t Szapocznikow’s body at work or her body of work, or the way in which the two collide. The latter is a theme that Włodarczyk herself would have encountered when she saw Szapocznikow’s retrospective at Lodz, two years after the artist’s early death at the age of 46. Szapocznikow drew from her own body and those of her friends and family; she turned Julie Christie’s lips into vermicular lamps, carved Arianne Raoul-Auval’s belly in high-quality Carrara marble and mounted a flayed and crumpled life cast of her son onto a wooden frame. “My gesture is addressed to the human body,” Szapocznikow wrote, “to praise the impermanence in the recesses of our body, in the traces of our steps on the ground.”[5] Włodarczyk plays a recording of this statement over the film’s central sequence, which explores our impermanence and the traces we leave behind by way of an unnamed and depopulated European city and the strange figures that inhabit it. A group of Szapocznikow’s works congregate in an empty street, looking as if they’ve just spilled out of the houses and have come together to discuss a still cooling crisis. If they were citizens, you would assume that an ambulance had just left. The city the sculptures occupy is not an open-air museum of galvanised art, but a devastated remnant: a liquidated ghetto, a memorial of nuclear shadows; a space that seems frozen in the moment of its final catastrophe. It’s possible to see elements of Szapocznikow’s own childhood in the desolate city: the artist was ghettoised with her family when she was 13, and later incarcerated in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Although she rarely spoke about the camps, her vision of the human body as “the only source of all joy, all suffering and all truth” stands as an affirmation of the unnegotiable value of life.[6] No body more meaningful than another, none closer to truth.
With the body and its scrutiny being so central to Szapocznikow’s thoughts, Włodarczyk’s exclusion of human actors or spectators is a notable admission. The shape of this absence becomes clearer when looking at the purposes a human observer might usually serve. In Witch’s Cradle (1944), an early, unfinished Maya Deren film (co-directed with Marcel Duchamp), Pajorita Matta, a young girl with dark hair and a trailing white dress whose balletic curiosity prefigures the way Angela Carter would set her heroines moving within the invisible pentacles of their own virginities, wanders around Peggy Guggenheim’s New York gallery at night. Just as we know from Szapocznikow’s grimace that the rock she’s sculpting is brittle, Matta’s wonderful slack-jawed deviancy suggests that Guggenheim’s collection possesses all kinds of occult and prohibited power. Not every choreographed encounter affirms the artwork’s power; the human observer can throw doubt on it, too. Duchamp’s work appears again in the short film, Through the Large Glass (1976), by the artist Hannah Wilkes. Standing behind his stained glass work, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23), Wilkes strips and poses, covering and uncovering herself with the artwork’s opaque corners, squaring up Duchamp’s reality against her own. In both films, the observers mime the affective and aesthetic power the artworks have on them so we can sense the pull they exert, their strange entropy. We learn about artworks from the way they affect the body of the observer on screen, and how those affects can be embraced or combatted. Without human observers, the artworks are suddenly less obviously affective objects. The sculptures, alone in the city, moving, wounded, and searching, become affected bodies themselves. It’s their journey, their Bildung, their life.
The possibility of an embodied artwork is most clearly articulated in the way Włodarczyk animates Szapocznikow’s creaturely sculptures, breathing life into the works by giving them an uncanny conveyer belt motion. Shot from the waist up, it’s impossible to see how the pulleys and strings might have been rigged to allow the brass and stone sculptures to glide along the streets as though floating one inch off the ground. Their surprising motion seems intimately related to the sculptures’ abandonment, the absence of the artist or the hoards of gallerygoers in the opening scene, as if it’s making up for a lack. Without people, the artworks must observe each other, heroically alone, all of them protagonists in the midst of their own explorations. Włodarczyk creates a world where these monstrous second lives, the artist’s doppelgangers, roam freely. And we empathize with them; though their forms might breach comprehensible limits of thought, feeling, and physical reality, their attempts to navigate their environment are strangely familiar.
Midway through the film, Włodarczyk places one of Szazpocznikow’s last works, ‘Tumours Personified’ (1971), in the middle of a road and films it from the ground. These decollated and melting self-portraits, cast in a blanched polyester resin, surface as immovable ghosts. Szapocznikow’s features sag, distorted by a tightly-wound shroud. They are death masks made from a living model and worked into rigor mortis – tumours wearing the face of their victim, acknowledged as part of that same self. Włodarczyk does not animate ‘Tumours Personified’, but in a flash they multiply and fill the street. In the next moment, close-ups of oily, metallic lips replace the city and rubbery jaws appear and disappear to a beat that sounds like a hammer or a steady knock on the door. Włodarczyk’s staging draws out the curdled grief and horror in the work; the stealth and sudden growth of illness. It’s interesting to contrast it with the photograph of Szapocznikow in her back garden lying on a patch of grass surrounded by another serial work she made after her diagnosis with breast cancer in 1968, ‘Invasion of the Tumours’ (1970). Her attitude towards the tumours is not punitive: they’re not there to be fought or waged war against even though she would die, at the age of 46, less than three years after the photograph was taken. Instead, she cradles a crumpled ball coated in coloured polyester resin as if the two of them are enjoying a tête-à-tête. Szapocznikow’s pose doesn’t quiet the tumour or render it benign (it remains an image of an artist metastasising the energy of an abnormal, uncontrollable growth), but she does meet their malignancy with curiosity, perhaps even sympathy. Like many of the photographs of Szapocznikow in her studio, it introduces unexpected ways of looking at violent disintegration.
In 1961, four years before she’d make her first body cast, Szapocznikow wrote, “I like to work with materials in which every touch leaves a trace. This physical contact with the matter gives me a sense of handing myself over to the sculpture.”[7] This handing oneself over is both a loss and a pleasure. The body which leaves traces of itself wherever it goes and on which every touch leaves a trace is, like ours, radically open and hard to define. In Szapocznikow’s work traumatic forms (bloodless unattached limbs, death masks, severed breasts) are often twinned with an erotic force. In the liveliest sections of Ślad, Włodarczyk isolates ‘The Journey’ (1967), a tall sculpture of an emaciated and translucent woman, with a spotlight that might also be a flashlight. On a dark urban night, with a pair of black lenses fused to her face, ‘The Journey’ claws her way through the streets, whirling through the city, careening drunkenly, as if overtaken by an electrifying lust. Włodarczyk draws our attention to a bodily jouissance that in Szapocznikow’s work wraps itself generously around suffering, a counterweight to trauma and illness. But Włodarczyk does more than just emphasise it. The ‘Illuminated Woman’ (1966), a sculpture with a head of soft, gelatinous breasts and lips rising from her neck like a cloud or a wing, moves past a shop window slow and stately as a Hollywood star on location; The Philosopher (1965), a bone ball-joint welded onto one cast leg, stops and stares. ‘Illuminated Woman’ seems to be looking for a place to stand, pausing on the balcony of an old stone building, then appearing again in a shop window framed by streaming rose-pink fabric. Szapocznikow’s sculptures of eroticised female forms are more restless than the others, more curious. George Bataille wrote that nakedness is, “a state of communication revealing a quest for a possible continuance of being beyond the confines of the self. Bodies open out to a state of continuity through secret channels that give us a feeling of obscenity. Obscenity is our name for the uneasiness which upsets the physical state associated with self-possession, with the possession of a recognized and stable identity.”[8] The idea of obscenity as a quest to break out of the self and into the world resonates with the scenes of these searching aliens.
In the 1972 artist’s statement that Włodarczyk plays over the film, Szapocnzikow wrote that the body is the source of all joy, all suffering and all truth “because of its essential nudity as inevitable as it is inadmissible on any conscious level.”[9] What is this essential nudity we can’t stomach the thought of? Is it our openness, mutability, porousness, multiplicity, unpredictability; the fact that we are as much an interspecies chimerical collection of microbial colonies as the psychological borderland of an individual? Or is it the body as a “complete erogenous zone”, an intricate knot of epidermal nerve endings brushing up against the world?[10] However Szapocznikow envisioned it, she called it “inadmissible”, beyond conscious language. But again, here, the instinct to interpret, solve and summarise is misplaced. The body is a source of meaning, not a key to unriddling it. By giving Szapocznikow’s artworks moving and searching bodies, Włodarczyk finds a way of pressing her bodily poetic a little further. Włodarczyk doesn’t so much make a film about Szapocznikow as make the kind of film that, in an alternate universe, Szapocznikow might have made, a form of biography that might be better described as a continuation of a line of thought. In a review of a biography about Hemingway, Hardwick laments that “We get the dirty work and somebody else, somewhere, gets the real joy of the man, his charm, his uniqueness, his deeply puzzling inner life.”[11]Alina Szapocznikow’s charm, uniqueness, and deeply puzzling inner life brim over in Ślad, while the dirty work of sifting through documentation and cross-checking dates is left to somebody else.
Octavia Stocker is an editor at Juxta Press and ghostwriter based in London
[1] Charlotte Higgins, “Body shock: the intense art and anguish of sculptor Alina Szapozcnikow”, in The Guardian, 06/10/2017, [https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/oct/06/human-landscapes-body-shock-the-art-and-anguish-of-sculptor-alina-szapocznikow].
[2] Tomás Pospiszyl, “Alena Šapočniková in Prague”, Alina Szapocznikow: Awkward Objects, edited by Agata Jakubowska, (Warsaw: Museum of Modern Art, 2011).
[3] Elizabeth Hardwick, “Katherine Anne Porter”, The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick, (New York: New York Review Books, 2017).
[4] Elizabeth Hardwick, “Dead Souls”, The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick.
[5] Alina Szapocznikow, untitled artist’s statement, 1972, [https://artmuseum.pl/en/archiwum/archiwum-aliny-szapocznikow/104/7330].
[6] Ibid.
[7] Alina Szapocznikow, “Twarze w ‘Zwierciadle’”, Zwierciadlo 2, 1961.
[8] George Bataille, Eroticism, (London: Penguin Classics, 2012).
[9] Alina Szapocznikow, untitled artist’s statement.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Elizabeth Hardwick, “Dead Souls”, The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick.