Waving Not Drowning
They tease and torment, these figures with dunce's caps and flags, arrows and pens. Are they meant to show the fool who lurks in all of us? Or the wise fool, the dunderhead whose virtue is his dogged indifference to the world and its concerns? Are they the actor we all long to be, who can cock a snook - in a sometimes quiet way - at authority?
And the banners - are they flags of convenience, hiding our true seditious selves; or signals of despair or hope; or small gestures of defiance? Do they show us waving or drowning, or both?
They appealed to me, here a continent and a culture apart, from the time I first saw them in the smudgy pages of the Warsaw daily newspaper "Gazeta Wyborcza" back in 1991. I loved them for the quality of the drawing, the detail, and the jolt of recognition that went beyond my Scottish affinity for small, oppressed nations with their own living cultures.
In more whimsical moments I used to think of our relationship as oddly romantic, the result of post cold-war opportunities - Januszewski bringing a dowry of creative riches from the east, me offering financial rewards from the west - opportunities almost impossible under the old regimes. It was only the "end of history", as Frances Fukuyama would have it, that made it possible. The newspaper, I work for, had a flirtation with the new world order as expressed in Europe after the Wall came down and communism collapsed. In partnership with several newspapers we published articles from them translated into English. I gave myself the entirely pleasurable task of finding illustrators, who would bring a flavour to complement the writting.
Among them I found Januszewski, probably cheering up some lengthy peroration by Adam Michnik in "Gazeta Wyborcza".
The work he did for my left centre, mainstream daily newspaper brought a quite different dimension to its pages, illuminating in his distinctive way articles on fascism by Umberto Eco, or the politically convoluted career of Peter Handke, or the difficulties facing central Europe, swinging between East and West. It was different, too, from the work I had seen in his collection Ein Narr zeigt Flagge, whose title had tested the ingenuity of my translators here. In the end it seemed to be best expressed as "Fool Shows The Flag". Or was it "Waves The Flag"? Or even "Shows The Colours"? But I had the sense, that his strange men bearing their flags or transmuted into strange ramshackle machines built of words were engaged in a struggle with separation, isolation, self-definition, alienation. This last is not a word we British use easily, it is too fanciful and Continental, too conceptual, for our beef-eating taste. But it speaks unavoidably to the universal diminution of us all in the face of the forces that bedevil our lives in the new world order: the triumph of capitalism, the rise of globalisation, the reduction of citizens to consumers. What's left but to find our own standard and wave it in defiance? To send a signal that we as individuals still have a right to choose what we shall be, and not only what they are selling us? To show that, if we are drowning, we shall go down bravely, leaving a marker to our passing?
I'm not certain what specific isolating forces Januszewski was responding to, when he did those drawings in the 1970s and 1980s, although the stupid crushing weight of the old ideology, added to the rest of Poland's modern history, must be the main factor. And they undoubtedly compounded the artist's problem of how to express his anger, anxiety, frustration and insight while trying in this case to avoid bringing the forces of repression crashing down.
Januszewski clearly found his own vocabulary of metaphor and symbol and it is one that forces us to recognise the enforced withdrawal from normal political and civic intercourse under that regime, something that, for different reasons, is a growing phenomenon in the democracies worldwide.
I've come to think of us here on Britain as Islanders, a concept Januszewski insinuated into my mind. He would send messages, referring to "you on the Island" or to events on "the Island". I used to think, it was an ironic reference by someone interested in his own artistic invasion of a distant market but it has grown into an ideal metaphor for the relationship between us and you over there in Europe. Here in Britain, we have our own special separation, a self-inflicted one, that is increasing and unavoidable. Shakespeare's island fortress "set in a silver sea which serves it in the office of a moat" is even more isolated - surrounded by pollution, the silver sold off and the fish almost extinct. We are hostile to Europe and the political entity of the EU, and have an almost racist dislike of foreigners. We are unwilling to extend ourselves in order to grasp what Europe - and I include Poland here - has to offer, in the way of ideas, art and culture.
So artists like Januszewski wave their flags and catch our eye, attract our attention, and force us to look at a wider world which has, nevertheless, concerns we can recognise as ours too. I hope he continues to do so.
The Guardian, 1997
