Issue 4 (34) 2017

2017

Publication date: 20.12.2017

Licence: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Editorial team

Issue Editors Małgorzata Radkiewicz, Magdalena Matysek-Imielińska

Issue content

Pejzaże kultury

„Zorganizowane i zaangażowane”. Mieszczański ruch kobiecy i kobiecy ruch artystyczny w Niemczech przełomu XIX i XX wieku ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem Stowarzyszenia Artystek Śląskich

Ksenia Stanicka-Brzezicka

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 4 (34), 2017, pp. 453-467

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843860PK.17.031.8198

The article presents the activity of women’s artistic associations in Germany at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. It focuses on the Silesian Women-Artists Association founded in Breslau (now Wrocław) in 1902. The association’s goal was a protection of the members’ interests, an organization of the collective exhibitions and a dispatch of artworks to bigger exhibitions. The positioning of the Breslau Association in the process of formation of the women’s association culture in the bourgeois milieu, with the help of a sociological perspective and social class categories, is the main goal of the article. The applied method is justified not only by the references to the literature using or analyzing the same sociological perspective, but also by visible connections between the social context and the subject and style of the works of art. The city was the hob of the association activity and it enabled collective actions. The cultural capital and behavior patterns created in the bourgeois milieu stirred up an activity of women and women-artists, who started to associate. They left the private sphere which had been ascribed to them, and entered the public, which had been reserved for men. In 2002, Rita Huber-Sperl wrote „The associations, generally speaking, and women’s associations in particular, are achievements of the bourgeoisie”. The Breslau Association seems to affirm the quoted thesis.

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Cieszyn cieszynianek – kulturowy obraz miasta w literackich narracjach jego mieszkanek: Edith Schmettan-Demel i Bronisławy Uher

Grażyna Kubica

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 4 (34), 2017, pp. 468-490

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843860PK.17.032.8199

The capital of the Duchy of Teschen, a medieval city-castle, has always embodied the characteristics of diversity (in terms of ethnicity, religion, class and profession), as well as strong sense of citizenship of its inhabitants. Nowadays, researchers are often no longer able to analyse this phenomenon without falling into nationalist anachronism, usually referring to only one (Polish) tradition, which is in fact quite new, forgetting other ones (Jewish), deliberately omitting them (German), not recognizing their importance (Silesian), or exaggerating their historical significance (Czech). There is also lack of female perspective that would allow a more complete picture of the phenomena. The paper presents and analyses the women’s voice of two literary narratives about Teschen written by its inhabitants: the novel by Edith Schmettan-Demel Die Sieben Kinder des Pastors Kattenschlag [The Seven Children of Pastor Kattenschlag] of 1931 and the memuar written in Silesian Wokół Placu Kościelnego i Kościoła Jezusowego. Spóminki z młodości Bronisławy Uher [Around the Church Square and the Church of Jesus. Bronisława Uher’s Youth Memories], released in 2015. These two voices: of the forgotten Silesian-German novelist and of Silesian-Polish author, significantly testify to the pluralism and the specificity of the urban lifestyle as well as the modernization in the female version. The interpretative framework of this article is the perspective of classical urban sociology and anthropology, as well as feminist thought.

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Przyczynek do dziejów Władysławy Spiżewskiej, wyemancypowanej pionierki bydgoskiej fotografii zawodowej

Katarzyna Gębarowska

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 4 (34), 2017, pp. 491-509

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843860PK.17.033.8200

In partitioned Poland, as in Western Europe and America, women were involved in photography soon after its invention, although their number in the 19th century was small. At the turn of the twentieth century, women worked mainly in family-owned photographic businesses and only a few established their own studios. Władysława Spiżewska was one such exception. Spiżewska was the first Polish woman who opened her own photographic studio in 1917/1918 in Bydgoszcz, then known to be part of Prussia. The main focus of this article is to tell the story of this heroic woman, whose history and achievements have been utterly forgotten. Even though photography was an emancipated medium, women were seldom chronicled in the traditional canon of art history written by men. This study results from extensive research conducted by the author on Bydgoszcz female photographers before the Second World War. The article presents a brief history of the Margraf family, from which Spiżewska originated. It also describes the peculiarity of the Bydgoszcz market of photographic services during the turbulent years of gaining independence in the 1920s, as well as photographic techniques popular at that time. The author of the article takes the reader through the life of Władysława Spiżewska – from birth, two marriages (including one with her student twenty years her junior), the difficulties related to the running of the studio, through to the closing of her business in Bydgoszcz and emigrating to South America.

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Zamieszkiwanie miasta. Inicjatywy domów dla kobiet w przestrzeni modernistycznego Berlina oraz Krakowa w dwudziestoleciu międzywojennym

Małgorzata Radkiewicz

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 4 (34), 2017, pp. 510-520

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843860PK.17.034.8201

The text examines connections between the development of modernizing cities in 1910s-1930s and the women’s issue. There are several examples of unique architectural concepts all over Europe in that time, including houses for women in Berlin, Kopenhagen and Prague. Especially Berlin could be regarded as a model modern city with women architects who took responsibility for new, feminist projects of houses for female population of different age and social background. Considering Poland, Cracow seems to be one of outstanding examples of a city where women’s initiative was strong enough to establish a foundation and to built two houses for female post workers. The Cracow leader of the group was Władysława Habicht who was strongly involved in both women’s and national issues. Thanks to her determination and hard work, women working at the local post-office could find a place of their own.

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Projektantki i performerki przedwojennego osiedla Żoliborz w międzywojennej Warszawie

Magdalena Matysek-Imielińska

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 4 (34), 2017, pp. 521-536

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843860PK.17.035.8202

It is difficult to list all exceptional women who lived in Żoliborz neighbourhood between World Wars. For the above reason, I will not be bold enough to write a collective biography. However, it is worth underlining, that both women and the neighbourhood equally benefited from such coexistence. Despite a left wing and social character of Warsaw Housing Association, its space and climate is obviously a masculine projection, however, it is legitimate to hypothesise, that it resulted in the preparation of favourable conditions for the development of urban, public and domestic activity of women living in the neighbourhood. On the other hand, the committed architecture “tailored for human”, concern for conditions for women’s self-development, the shape of the neighbourhood “tailored for children” and formation of new urban lifestyles, were all the contribution of women, whom I called the designers of life in Żoliborz. I do not refer here to a literary meaning of designers, as a term which brings associations towards architecture or design. Żoliborz in this respect, should be perceived in a larger scale as a social experiment, an educational and emancipative project, meant for, developed and flexibly introduced to workers, women and children. These three groups were the subject of experiments conducted by the creators of a social neighbourhood in order to test a new, urban culture, based on “a culture of coexistence”, and also new styles of living. If the neighbourhood of Żoliborz is perceived as an educational and emancipative project, then we should raise two important aspects: education and projectivity. Therefore, while writing about the women of Żoliborz, who actively co-created new lifestyles and fought for their rights to the city, I will refer to them as designers. I also asked about educational dimension of the neighbourhood in order to draw attention to the question stated by Jacques Rancière, about participation or emancipation. In this context it is necessary to analyse the role of women. Were they indeed the designers of the reality of Żoliborz or were they only a subject of masculine educational strategies? The question is legitimate, because, as pinpointed by Marta Leśniakowska, emancipative postulates of male founders of Warsaw Housing Association were merely a facade, which veiled a constant male domination.

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Przestrzenie wygnania w autobiograficznych narracjach emigrantek z pokolenia Marca ‘68

Marcin Starnawski

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 4 (34), 2017, pp. 537-556

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843860PK.17.036.8203

The article addresses the question of exile. The author focuses on spatial-material dimensions of power relations that constitute sequences of exile experience: from stigmatization to leaving one’s home place and country to early steps abroad. How does one strive to overcome the humiliating experience of expulsion on different stages and in different places: prior to departure, during travel and upon arrival in new “havens”? How are spaces of exile remembered as both sites of remembrance and neglected “anti-places”: street violence, left-behind apartments, customs offices, railway stations, border checkpoints etc.? The author looks at accounts of women who left Poland in result of an anti-Jewish campaign launched by the ruling party in response to pro-democratic protests in March 1968. Scapegoating politics and repressive measures pushed some 15-20,000 people to leave Poland as stateless refugees. Focus on women’s accounts might help understand exile not merely as gendered experience, but primarily, and beyond essentialist traps of the “feminine,” as a universal condition. The analysed narratives provide legitimate voice contributing to collective memory and identity of their generation and diasporic community.

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Poza „własnym pokojem”. Artystyczna działalność kobiet w przestrzeni Londynu 1979-1997

Małgorzata Micuła

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 4 (34), 2017, pp. 557-572

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843860PK.17.037.8204

The paper focuses on female artistic activities in London between 1979 and 1997, the time when British politics was dominated by the Thatcherism ideology that reflected the uncompromising style and radicalism of the Iron Lady and that consequently had an irreversible impact on the sphere of visual culture. The paper considers various female artistic attitudes expressed in the cityscape, where both politically engaged manifestos and strategies of escaping political context coexisted. In the article I try to take a closer look at female artistic movements that flourished mostly in abandoned spaces of eastern and southern parts of London, at the anarchistic tradition of running independent print shops of which several had survived until the 1990s, but also at examples of more conceptualized post-studio pieces executed as a form of ‘anti-monuments’. All of those activities had a common denominator, which was the practice of an ordinary life that eventually happened to be also a safety valve of normatively projected city space of London.

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Ethereal beauties and embodied sexualities: Women and the articulation of Brazilian whiteness

Jimmy Turner

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 4 (34), 2017, pp. 573-586

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843860PK.17.038.8205

This article deploys an intersectional lens to refract discourses of race, gender, and sexuality and shine light on the lived experience of whiteness of self-identified white women from the middle-classes in Florianópolis in the South of Brazil. It demonstrates how a complex interplay between beauty and (a)sexuality constructs a culturally mediated expression of national belonging which casts white women outside the imagery of Brazilian womanhood, feeding an existential, although not socioeconomic, sense of loss. The alienation felt by the women in question is analytically located in whiteness, but this whiteness seems to evade culpability, preserving its dominance by pushing the women’s gender identities to the fore. Through analysis of both historical processes and contemporary lived experiences it isolates ‘beauty’ as a contextually specific ‘revealing construct’ which enables us to understand the processes through which whiteness preserves its dominance through the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, and nationhood.

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The Women’s March on London: Virginia Woolf, John Berger, Judith Butler and intersectionality

Maggie Humm

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 4 (34), 2017, pp. 587-592

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843860PK.17.039.8206

The paper brings together three thinkers; Judith Butler, John Berger and Virginia Woolf, not often considered together, to examine how their ideas about assemblies/demonstrations, democracy and feminism apply to the Women’s March on London January 21st 2017. Intersecting these thinkers’ ideas, drawn from psychoanalytic, feminist and cultural analyses, helps to explain key features of the March, for example its careful construction of symbols and intersectional appeal. The paper concludes that the March bore features of older feminism but offered a newer feminism in its uses of social media and intersectional approach.

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Reviews and Resources

Pretekstowość, pamięć i doświadczenie (Wojciech Józef Burszta, Preteksty, Wydawnictwo Naukowe Katedra, Gdańsk 2015)

Paweł Tański

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 4 (34), 2017, pp. 593-601

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Wprowadzenie do fantropologii (Małgorzata Lisowska-Magdziarz, Fandom dla początkujących. Część I: Społeczność i wiedza, Kraków 2017)

Tomasz Żaglewski

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 4 (34), 2017, pp. 602-606

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Across and Beyond – w stronę kultury postcyfrowej (Across and Beyond – A transmediale Reader on Post-digital Practices, Concepts, and Institutions, red. Ryan Bishop, Kristoffer Gansing, Jussi Parikka, Elvia Wilk, Berlin, 2016

Arkadiusz Półtorak

Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 4 (34), 2017, pp. 607-615

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Słowa kluczowe: women’s artistic associations, bourgeoisie, Silesia, urban anthropology, feminist thought, women's writing, Teschen, Lutheranism in Teschen Silesia, Władysława Spiżewska, professional photography, Bydgoszcz, women emancipatory process, female pioneers of photography, Germans and Poles in Bydgoszcz, Women, modernization, emancipation, urbanization, modern architecture, modernism, emancipation, women, participation, architecture, March ’68, place, Polish-Jewish history, women as émigrés, Antisemitism, autobiography, exile, female artists, practice of everyday life, London, participation, cityscape, Whiteness, Brazil, Beauty, Sexuality, Gender, Virginia Woolf, John Berger, Judith Butler, Intersectionality, Feminism, Women’s March on London

Issue 4 (34)

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Issue content

Pejzaże kultury

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2017