The art scene in Wrocław, Poland, seems especially taken with collectives at the moment. While the Awangarda Gallery recently brought in work by Russian group Chto Delat, this city has its own rich history of collectives tied heavily to tumultuous sociopolitical events of the past. The groups Orange Alternative and LUXUS developed concurrently out of the revolutionary 1980s—spurred on by student protests and the Solidarity resistance movement—with a mutual understanding that developed into a loose affiliation.

LUXUS. Tu Wolno Kochać Się, 2013; mixed media, LUXUS Magazine; Photo: Michal Wisniowski

Encoding actual protest actions, the Orange Alternative sought to turn resistance into a symbolic narrative and thereby circumvent the communist regime’s policing and military countermeasures. It confronted the political situation head on, and in this way, it differentiates itself from LUXUS. The latter continues to virtualize a kind of reactionary reality against the failures of the state and of ideology and against the avant-garde. It operated in opposition to existing art movements such as Conceptualism and Abstract Expressionism—somewhat belated arrivals to the Eastern Bloc perhaps—but also became an early vehicle of capitalist critique in a place where capitalist activity was still limited.

Jerzy Kosałka. Instalacja wodno-elektryczna (Hydro-electric Installation), 1993; Photo: Michal Wisniowski

Under the weight of its historical context, the LUXUS collective is currently involved in a multipart exhibition inside a massive air-raid bunker. The towering concrete cylinder is now home, albeit temporarily, to the Wrocław Contemporary Museum and is the site of a collection of LUXUS artifacts. The LUXUS Magazine exhibition serves as an archive housed inside the safety of the museum and is poised for some potential, not-so-theoretical future crisis.

LUXUS artists have risen out of a Western fantasy of wealth to use whatever is available. With a significant focus on the temporary and provisional, they create crudely printed posters, street art, found object sculptures, and installations. They appropriate commercial productions and generate performances. The reality of having operated under the state’s watchful eye imparts a need for the ephemeral and a readiness to be unmade, broken down, and withdrawn. These aesthetics are particularly evident in the low-brow posters that line the curved bunker walls, an installation of crude cardboard buildings, and the spacial intervention that reads “tu wolno kochać się” (making love allowed here). Even souvenirs in the form of printed matchboxes are available for the taking, a reference to the Solidarity’s strategy of disseminating information in similarly altered matchboxes.

Bożena Grzyb-Jarodzka. Cancer, Szablon, (Edycja na Zapałkach) (Stencil, Matchbox Edition), 2013; mixed media; Photo: Michal Wisniowski

Meanwhile, LUXUS artists Bożena Grzyb-Jarodzka and Ewa Ciepielewska’s highly saturated and vivid paintings blend pop-culture idols and spiritual icons into a kind of inebriated haze. The use of color in these works serves as evidence of an indulgence in various substances,  a LUXUS tradition and an open secret, but it also speaks to the delirium of capitalist production. Such chromatic echoes continue in A Cat with a Stupid Facial Expression—a key visual element in the group’s identity. Based on a mass-produced cat toy, the image is repeated ad nauseum in various iterations. Its repetition reiterates a societal inundation with kitsch and conflates the Polish fascination with icons of both capitalist and religious origin.

LUXUS. 2013; installation view, LUXUS Magazine; Photo: Michal Wisniowski

The whole experience of walking through this museum bunker and the LUXUS Magazine exhibition gave me a sentiment of futility. Bamboo frameworks and manufactured detritus encroach upon the stairways and passages, making for a claustrophobic environment. Simultaneously, artist Patrycja Mastej’s installation on the second floor covers the walls in a panorama of the surrounding neighborhood and is littered with cutouts of presumed luxury goods. Titled Szczepin in the Icing of Luxus (2013), Mastej’s piece—made interactive by allowing participants to reconfigure the cutouts—reinforced the sense of futility I felt in light of these masses of kitsch.

Patrycja Mastej, Szczepin in the Icing of Luxus, 2013 (detail); mixed media. Photo: Michal Wisniowski

An unspecified member of LUXUS is quoted in the museum’s guide saying, “We create independently a world for ourselves, a world where we would like to live; our own magazines, our own music and films.” Insofar as such creation maintains a level of critical self-awareness, it exists as social practice. But what happens if the line between practice and reinforcement becomes blurry? Such modes of production may have been more radical in the past, but are these modes of artistic production still distinguishable from present commercial production? LUXUS takes mass-produced goods and their conventions into a realm that is nauseatingly effective. Kitsch is transformed and regurgitated into hyper-kitsch.

Jerzy Kosałka. Dama bez łasiczki (Lady Without an Ermine), 2004; mixed media. Photo: Michal Wisniowski

One room houses a dimly lit banquet table littered with fantastical concoctions from end to end. The everyday is contorted into the grotesque, and an opulent, synthetic feast is born. Everything is glazed, sticky, and toxic. At the end of the room hangs a simulation of Leonardo da Vinci’s famed Lady with an Ermine (1489–90), but the creature has escaped the confines of its canvas. Perched upon the painting’s frame, it sits in a moment of terminal irony, a specimen of bad taxidermy.

Imagine if we never had to define ourselves. Imagine if we could exist suspended in a sort of identity probability cloud in which we were only more or less likely to be one thing than another. Or better yet if we could be in two conflicting states at once. We may never know the luxury of being both particle and wave, but we can certainly challenge preconceived notions of self and other. In the current exhibition at Eli Ridgway Gallery, Mutables, curated by director Ashley Stull, the artists take various archetypes of identity, joyously smash them to bits, and build their own specific narratives.

Adi Nes, Christ, 2009. Image courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery, NY.

There is a long tradition of photographs representing the world as it is—a history of “truth”. Photographs continue to carry assumption of veracity, making it an ideal medium of deception. From late 19th century images of ghosts and fairies, to the digitally manipulated images today, our culture wants to believe that what a photograph depicts is true. This concept is uncovered dramatically through Adi Nes’s Christ. The simple titling of Adi Nes’s large-scale portrait imbues the image with so much power and history that I found myself wondering things I know aren’t true. Still, I couldn’t help but give into the illusion. The photograph instills deep familiarity—the scale and shallow depth of field brings you intimately close to a man who embodies many of our culture’s preconceived notions of what Jesus Christ looked like. Drawing on the model’s physical characteristics and dramatic body language, Nes calls on 2000 years of Christ’s likeness in art history  to deeply question the truth and intent of our historical heritage embedded in image.

Gillian Wearing, Lily Cole, 2009.

Unlike Nes’s deeply deceptive image, Gillian Wearing’s portrait of Lily Cole shines a dark and psychological light on the act of portraying oneself. Lily Cole, a particularly doll-faced model, with wide-set eyes, porcelain skin and a small, delicate mouth is already unique and compelling. Despite this, or maybe because of this, Wearing chose to photograph her in a mask of herself. The sophistication of the mask successfully complicates the image—as your eyes wander over the mask, you are confronted with dramatically alternating moments of believability and fiction. The nose, the lips, and the redness of the cheeks all seem like they could be real, except that one cheek is cracked like a broken shell, violently seaming together two archetypes: the model and the doll. In her portrait of Lily Cole, Wearing emphasizes the artificiality and fragility of such an identity, one in which the person may very well be hiding behind his or her own face.

SuttonBeresCuller, Sears Portraits, Ongoing.

In Mutables, the exploration of identity can also be fantastically funny, as demonstrated by the artist group SuttonBeresCuller in their project Sears-Portraits. The framed images sit on a mantle-like platform as if a proud grandparent arranged them, except on closer inspection, one realizes they’re not typical studio portraits. Instead, the trio of artists dress themselves in just about everything you wouldn’t want to have in a “good” studio portrait. Some of the themes include: aged cowboys, each artist with their faces bloodied and beaten, posing with bags of differently flavored Dorritos, and of course with brown paper bags on their heads. The images shouldn’t be expected to convince the viewer of any truths, they function as a playful look into the absurdity of tacky mall studio portraiture and how those mall-goers choose to represent themselves—a perspective on portraiture deeply connected with one’s own self-view.

The success of Mutables is that it reminds the viewer that identity is not a finite state; we are malleable. Whether it’s disguising something other people can’t know, dressing up as an alter ego, or simply being ourselves, the photographic portrait creates a platform upon which the possibilities are endless.