The article is an analysis of life stories of female visual artists connected with the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow (Poland). It explores the specificity of women’s experiences and constitutes an attempt to examine the role models and gender hierarchies which dominate the artworld. The article emphasises two analytical categories – uncertainty and struggle – to demonstrate how they organise the life stories of female artists, and tries to explain how such life stories can lead to re-evaluation of the perception of art as a male profession and contribute to a greater appreciation of women’s activity in the artworld.

Crip Testimonies: Disability and Protests in Poland in 2018 and 2020

Author uses the category of Robert McRuer’s “crip resistance” to think of two waves of disability related protests, which took place in Poland. In 2018 disabled people and their caregivers occupied the Parliament for 40 days to demand higher social security benefits and many people, including those without disabilities, took to the streets to support the protest. In 2020, the Polish Constitutional Tribunal prohibited abortion based on disability status, which caused anger among huge parts of Polish population, including women with disabilities. This article looks at disabled people’s statements made in 2018 in support of the interabled group occupying the Parliament and compares them with disabled women’s voices regarding recent introduction of the ban on abortion based on disability status. I call these five statements made by disabled people “crip testimonies” and analyze how Polish experiences of disability do not fit neatly within Western conceptions of disability developed within disability studies, most prominently, the social and the medical model of disability. In other words, this article pays attention to what is unique about Polish experiences of disability and makes a case for thinking about disability through people’s testimonies, not theories.

Acousmaticity of Film Sound Effects: Media Mystification of Foley in the Context of Sound Design

The text is about the foley profession, an important specialty performed as part of film sound design, at the post-production stage. What’s important here is both, the foley artist’s body, which becomes an instrument, and the ontology of created sounds, which are inserted into the finished film and synchronized with the picture. The author wonders if there is still a place for foley artists in the digital reality and common computerization of work. But the most important issue concerns the nature of sounds themselves, in the context of their production, acousmatics and the ubiquitous sound design.

What is the sound implemented into the picture, does the picture give credence to the sound, even though the sound is “substituted” because it is produced in the studio? The situation is debatable, in the context of acousmatic listening (i.e. without the context of the source), because the picture provides a substitute context for the sound, and the viewer (listener) accepts this audio-visual relationship without reservation (as long as the sound is prepared well). Especially since by going to the cinema, the viewer agrees to a form of manipulation in the name of entertainment. Usually he or she is not aware of the mystification in the field of sound, which - within the oculocentric perception ‒ for him or her is only a complement to the picture, although, in fact, it plays a fundamental role in understanding what is happening on the screen. Other topics discussed in the text concern the communicativeness of sound and the historical background of the foley profession. Also important are the interrelations between foley and sound design and other areas of sound activity, as part of the preparation of all the audio layers of a film.

Corpomuseum as an Ideal Type

The beginning of the 21st century was a time of great museum revolution. Many museums have been created that focus their activities not so much on collecting artefacts as on presenting impressive exhibitions, largely made of media relays. New museums are increasingly moving away from the concern for durable goods that characterizes traditional museums and transfer knowledge to their recipients through modern products and attractive technologies. In connection with the implementation of new and costly solutions regarding architecture, equipment, organizational structure and functioning, they actually need a lot of capital in the form of public finances and “human resources” from the very beginning of their activity. It seems that at present the need to raise this type of capital in a case of creating new institutions is far ahead of the need to collect works of culture that have constituted the essence and sense of museums created in previous centuries. The quality of planned projects also ceases to be related to the significance and reputation of the material culture heritage, and begins to be measured by the scale of the new museum buildings and the number of visitors. Products instead of cultural goods, or even products understood as cultural goods; visitors as engaged customers; capital understood by finance and “human resources”; large size ‒ which covers many issues ‒ ranging from structure, and architecture; modern technologies; political influence; brand strength and promotion ‒ all these aspects resemble the corporate model of organization. They provoke reflection on the functioning of the museum as a corporation, which is the purpose of the ideally typical structure of the “corpomuseum”.

Wind from the North: The Discursive Construction of Heimat Exemplified by the Edifice of the Former Royal School of Building Crafts (Königliche Baugerwerkschule) in Katowice and its Decoration

The paper examines the edifice of the former school of building crafts (Baugewerkschule) in Katowice, Upper Silesia, which opened in 1901, and its decoration. The works of architecture, painting and sculpture were interpreted as carriers of a discourse calculated to construct Heimat, located within the borders of the Prussian Silesian Province. The building’s forms, reminiscent of the brick Gothic of northern Germany, were characteristic of the milieu of the Technische Hochschule in Hannover, where the designers of the edifice were educated. The city’s coat of arms was depicted on the facade, the vaulted ceiling of the auditorium was decorated with dragon and gryphon motifs of Scandinavian origin, and its walls painted with images of St. Hedwig ‒ the patron saint of Silesia, viewed here as a deconfessionalized personification of the land ‒ the Prussian eagle, and four iconic monuments of historic Silesian architecture. Thus, references were made to various levels of identity ‒ local, regional, national, and the mythologised Germanic North. The narrative constructed in this way fits into the cultural nationalism of the educated German bourgeoisie (Bildungsbürgertum), which grows out of the Romantic tradition. At the same time, the emphasis on the opposition of the North and South can be seen as a strategy for overcoming the peripheral status of Silesia in a world organised by the West-East axis. The school’s building in Katowice exemplifies how the elites of the German Empire used visual means to construct modern imagined communities.

This essay interweaves Stefan Morawski’s critique of postmodernism and Jean-François Lyotard’s expression of the postmodern sublime as “the presentation of the unpresentable” in a wide-ranging appraisal of the culmination of the postmodern age. This juxtaposition finds expression in the concept of the two modes of a negative sublime: the negative dynamical sublime exemplified in the stockpiles of nuclear warheads scattered widely across the globe, and the negative mathematical sublime represented by the omniscient electronic informational web that increasingly entangles individuals and societies.

Stefan Morawski’s Critique of Postmodernism

Stefan Morawski’s Concept of Mass Art and Aestheticization of the World – Critical Reflections

The text considers the concept of aestheticization and the influence of mass culture on it in the light of Stefan Morawski’s views. Morawski adopted a value-laden attitude towards mass art. That is why in his reflections on aestheticization processes its role remains unnoticed by him, contrary to his original declarations. This is why I have to ask Morawski questions that he leaves unanswered. Does in fact the spectacularity of contemporary life result in its “art-like” constitution? The author of the essay gives a positive answer here, stressing that mass art becomes the model for shaping life, and tries to answer what this pattern is based on. Thus Morawski’s views appear here as a negative point of reference. The positive part of the considerations, on the other hand, focuses on Walter Benjamin and Jean Baudrillard.