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Piotr Piotrowski

which arose the radicalism of the gesture of icono-
clasm: the destroying of constructivist sculptures.
Although she destroyed her constructions,
Katarzyna Kobro did not end her creative activities.
In 1948 she produced several sculptures and acts re-
lating to her work predating her „unistic” utopia. Her
reference to the body served as a manifestation of
gender-based identity, individual Identification of the
artist-woman, in opposition to that shared (together
with the artist-male) with the utopia of the „The Third
[One]”. In these acts the object was manifested rather
than the genderless logos, as occurred in the Spatial
Compositions deprived of corporality. Reference to
the act in the politics of the artisfs identity was
thus intended as a manifestation of femininity par
excellence.
In essence, however, the artist fell into another
trap, sińce the act is one of the most mystified and
oppressive kinds of depicting femininity; especially
the classical modernist act, based on a stylistic tradi-
tion of (male-orientated) creativity from the dawn of
the 20th century; art to which Katarzyna Kobro re-
lated in her creative work in the late 1940s. As Carol
Duncan writes, the acts of fauvists, cubists and ex-
pressionists, depict passive women, deprived of a will

of their own, submissive and reified. In the passive
function of giving sexual pleasure, the woman, por-
trayed in a „posturę”, a pose imposed upon her from
the outside (Craig Owens), in modernist creativity is
conducted to the role of an object. The act thus be-
comes a very doubtful form of manifesting subjec-
tivity, sińce the body presented is instrumentalized
in relation to sight (of a małe), and not autonomy
(from the view point of a woman).
The historicism of Katarzyna Kobro’s acts proved
to be a dead end and unconvincing form of express-
ing the human body. It turned out to be incapable of
defining woman’s and the female artisfs identity.
Kobro’s experience, nevertheless, serves as an ex-
ample for a wider discussion, a discussion concern-
ing the illusions of a conservative artistic culture tak-
ing shape during a period marking the end of utopia.
Historicism, fed by a nostalgia and illusion of „para-
dise lost’’, turns out to be a trap in the searching for a
visual expression of the bodily-expressed subject, in
the search for a visual portrayal of the gender’s iden-
tity. On the contrary - as may be seen in the sculptures
of Katrzyna Kobro - it becomes an instrument in the
political hierarchy of gender, the politics of „posing”
and thus in instrumentalizing the female body.

Translated by Peter Martyn