Teresa Murak. Selected Earth Works

Sebastian Cichocki

Teresa Murak. Selected Earth Works

Translated by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

Teresa Murak devised an original language of art during the second half of the 1970s, creating works that evoked the notion of landscape, its relationship to the human body, and emotional ties with the ecosystem (particularly its less spectacular forms, such as mud, dust, weeds, etc.), while simultaneously inscribing it into a network of associations linked to both pagan and Judeo-Christian spirituality. In this way the artist in some sense anticipated two tendencies clearly visible in the practice and theory of art in recent years: the currents of post-humanism and post-secularism. This set of references, atypical for Polish art, materialized in a modest and muted practice, composed of a logical sequence of private rituals and interventions, and found itself at the antipodes of the violence and forceful actions proper to the works of the North American protagonists of Earth Art from the end of the 1960s.

Murak’s work (its effect is always natural and uncontrolled growth) leaves traces in the form of temporary configurations of organic material: plants grown on clothing, blooming bits of bread leaven, or desiccated river sludge. Her creations, despite emerging from a religious core that is “uncomfortable” for institutions of modern art, also make reference to the “fissures” of that which is excluded, marginalized, or overlooked in the urban as well as the social fabric. Murak’s art is meant to fulfill the function of a gift, an attempt to build an “alliance” with the public. The material of this practice is relations – both cross-generic, and characterizing collectives based on trust and shared rituals (art shows, mass, processions, manifestations, marches, etc.)

A crucial element – both the motivation, and the cohesive force – of many of Teresa Murak’s work is faith. This element distinguishes her among the (scarce) parallel manifestations of Earth Art in Central-Eastern Europe, such as the extra-gallery installations of the Slovenian group OHO, or the actions of Maria Pinińska-Bereś. To give an example: in the Spring of 1974, Teresa Murak initiated the sowing of Easter Carpet. On a seventy-meter-long piece of material, the artist, along with inhabitants of Kiełczewice Maryjskie and a group of friends (among them, the Norwegian artist Per Erik Fonkalsrud), planted watercress. A week later, on Holy Saturday, the carpet was ceremoniously transported from the attic of the Special State Institute for Disadvantaged Children, where it was under the care of nuns, to a parochial church, and then, after Mass, it was floated down the Bystrzyca river. This event took on an interesting meaning: at the beginning of the 1980s, the artist discovered that the tradition had been continued by the residents of Kiełczewice in various ways, for example, in the form of a large earthen ball of watercress, sowed by Sister Celine, a participant in the 1974 action. The artist’s project thus became part of local religious ritual, thereby “freeing” itself from an artistic context.

Teresa Murak’s work directly in the landscape is the part of her practice closest to the “canonical” works of 1970s land art, tied to actual reconfigurations of the earth’s surface, demanding strenuous physical labor and the transportation of materials. In this context one must mention Sculpture for the Earth of 1974, which was created for a Japanese exhibition (curated by Yoshio Nakajima), and a series of artistic events that took place in the Swedish city of Ubbeboda. The sculpture was composed of a hollowed out half-sphere in the ground, and a hill next to it made of the soil that had been taken out for the half-sphere (the depth of the half-sphere, 162 centimeters, was equal to the height of the artist), which the artist personally built over a period of thirty days. After giving both parts their final form, grass was planted on them. Sculpture for the Earth is both a negation (the removal of earth) and an affirmation (the half-sphere suggesting the existence of another half, in the form of its mirrored, underground reflection). Only three days after the work was finished, the sculpture was leveled with the help of a bulldozer – due to complaints from nearby residents, who saw the form of a pit and mound as overly “aggressive.”

A less well-known group of Teresa Murak’s works are the installations that use river sludge. The first of these was created in June of 1987 in Kleinsassen, in Germany. In the following years river sludge (taken from the rivers flowing through the cities in which the exhibits took place) was used for creating several other installations, such as one in Gallery 72 in Chełm (January 1989) and inside the Church of Heavenly Ascension in Warsaw (October 1989): the latter took place during the exhibition Labyrinth – an underground space, organized by Janusz Bogucki and Nina Smolarz and consisted of Murak coating the corners of two of the church’s walls in sludge. For the artist, the use of the muddy substance was linked to the exhibition of the natural properties of an ecosystem, in which the forces of life and death encounter each other on a microscale: the decay of dead plants and animals, the metamorphosis of larva, the production of clastic rock, etc. The artist recalls: “I built this work with a conscious awareness of the existence of the energy left in the mud by little creatures, fighting for survival.” In this same context, Bogucki describes a return to natural order and the “symbolism of the dust, that we emerged from and in which we exist.”

Murak’s works with sludge serve as a link between her activities beyond the gallery or museum space and her organic (thus, succumbing to metamorphosis) installations within art institutions. In the same way, they can be classified according to terms used by Robert Smithson: as a journey from site (a “real place” that can be found at a specific point on a map, inaccessible to the viewer – the world, which people have not touched) to non-site (a “fake place”, a sterile “edited” world – such as the gallery or museum space). Places can be represented as non-places with the help of samples of material (stone, earth, mud, etc.) and photographic and film documentation, notes, or maps. Another crucial term introduced by Smithson and useful to the interpretation of Teresa Murak is displacement. In this case it refers to the journey from site to non-site of the sludge taken from the river to the gallery, where it is spread over walls and into the corners of the space. The sludge became the zone of transmission for primitive energy – the drying and flaking muddy images “did the work” of the inevitable metamorphosis of the organic components of the piece. Using Smithson’s linguistic analogy, the sludge on the wall is a synecdoche evoking the real world, the world beyond the gallery walls.

The piece Summer 1987, June 15 – August 15, Lillehammer is a particular example of Murak’s work with sludge. Created during a Polish-Norwegian artist plenary in Norway, it featured Jan Berdyszak, Grzegorz Kowalski, Danuta Mączak and Jan Stanisław Wojciechowski as participants. The artist worked with a rye bread leaven placed in a swamp and covered with cloth. The leaven required care and maintenance that would keep it in a semi-liquid state – the continuous addition of flour and water, heating it with flames from a fire burning nearby, removing crusts. After four weeks of this “performance” the leaven grew to be one and a half meters in diameter. This bizarre organic sculpture, growing in the austere Scandinavian landscape, undergoing changes and entering into interactions with other organisms (the sludge “carrying within itself” the fermenting leaven, brimming with bacteria) is a testament to organic alteration, even a religious transformation. The remainders of the leaven were exhibited in a gallery in Lillehammer along with a photograph taken in the swamp.

When discussing the spiritual core of Murak’s oeuvre it is necessary to also point to the found objects the artist makes use of, such as the rags she recovered from the Warsaw headquarters of the Convent of the Visitation of Holiest Virgin Mary. The artist recalls: “Worn by many years of use, they created a pure structure of material. In the 1920s the sisters spun them from hemp growing in the nearby garden. For years they remained in use.” These rags, something like “third-class relics,” are a testament to patience, humility, work, submission, and temperance. Their dingy state, threadbare and full of holes, gives them a specific look: one can say that after many years of use they have become an abstract map of spiritual discipline. Slowly disappearing, they are erased, empty space becoming an ever greater part of them. These peculiar “speaking objects” whose form is the result of the material’s persistent, repeated use in scrubbing the floor, became the raw material for a series of works by Murak. They were exhibited without alteration as a type of “found” material painting, served as a prop for physical actions (such as washing the floor in Galeria Wschodnia in Łódż, in 1992, calling to mind the “sanitizing” actions of Mierle Laderman Ukele), and ultimately became a foundation for planting.

Many of Murak’s works had an ephemeral character and were exclusively created for a circle of friends (such as the little known action Bathing in a Waterfall, executed with Małga Kubiak in 1971), or for members of her immediate family. They are only known from photographic documentation, which rarely circulates in galleries. Another such action is Easter 1981, which took place during Murak’s show at Gallery GN in Gdańsk, organized by Leszek Brogowski, and involved placing a cloth with the titular words sown onto it in watercress on a beach on the Baltic Sea. Together with Brogowski, the artist transported the sign, grown in Warsaw, to Gdansk; after documenting it with photographs the piece was left in the sand. Its later fate is unknown; perhaps it was carried off by the waves, or destroyed as an object of unknown status, with an implicated political message.

This text utilizes fragments of the essay Earth Works. Teresa Murak and the Spiritualization of Slime, by Sebastian Cichocki, from the catalogue Teresa Murak: Whom are you going to?, Gallery Labirynt, Lublin 2012.

Selection of photographic material: Sebastian Cichocki and Teresa Murak