Between Magical Marxism and Heresy: The Progressive Spirituality of Natalia LL

In a 2014 catalog, Natalia LL writes: “Art appears to me as a great mystery that transforms the tremors and uncertainties of the artist’s intuition into a spiritual realm of ideas that runs parallel to material reality.”¹ Although scholars have repeatedly returned to the search for overlooked meanings in Natalia LL’s oeuvre, they have so far rarely addressed the spiritual dimension of her creative practice.² This omission seems all the more intriguing given that most interpretations developed in recent years focus on the transgressive and introspective dimensions of sexuality.³ However, critics have not read Natalia LL’s strategies as expressions of a philosophical, or perhaps even theological, conviction about the essential connection between matter and spirit, which she evoked through performance.⁴ Therefore, one could even risk the claim that many of Natalia LL’s self-commentaries, aimed at revealing the spiritual dimension of her artistic practice, met with polite condescension. The likely reason lies in their “language, which seems so simple that it becomes puzzling, and so infantile that it appears mysterious.”⁵

Thus, attempts to move beyond the established interpretative frameworks while taking Natalia LL’s interest in the metaphysical sphere seriously acquire the specific tone of a return to biography.⁶ Drawing on Julia Kristeva’s reflections, Anna Markowska observes that excluding noninstitutional religious belief from interpretations of Natalia LL’s work simplifies the picture of her oeuvre. This way, Markowska turns to experiences shaped by time and place, namely by twentieth-century Silesia as a space of migration, ethnic syncretism, and social tension.⁷ In doing so, she signals that investigating the spiritual dimension of artistic practice does not have to entail separating symbolic meanings from social activity. Therefore, we may understand Natalia LL’s participatory actions, undertaken from the early 1970s onward, both as conceptual experiments or feminist interventions and as the result of a conviction that “individual people … rather than hierarchies of power are the bearers of faith.”⁸

Integrating spirituality into the interpretation of Natalia LL’s work, and that of other female artists, aligns with the growing interest in this category within cultural studies. This interest stems from abandoning the unequivocal nature of religious discourse.⁹ Today, among other things, we can speak of feminist spirituality, which encompasses various positions derived from the transformation of cultural and religious movements under the influence of liberation theology and feminist theology.¹⁰ However, the question of spirituality also concerns the evolving dynamics of the humanities themselves, which have opened to the study of emotions and abandoned binary oppositions such as rational–irrational, objective–subjective, or scientific–nonscientific.¹¹ Placing spirituality, including its alternative forms such as esoteric tradition and occultism,¹² among art history’s concerns allows us to highlight nonorthodox iconographies and local visual traditions that blur the boundary between the artistic and the naive. In addition, this move highlights specific research methods.¹³

We could also consider the revisionist history of feminist art proposed by Agata Jakubowska¹⁴ with spirituality in mind. The foundations of feminist researchers working outside the Western center include meticulous source analyses, grounded in biographical material and in the acknowledged significance of the local visual culture context. In such case, these foundations would clearly intertwine with the new humanities’ methodological challenges, including the introduction of powerful concept-theories such as imagination and affect into art history’s practice.¹⁵ If we treat spirituality as a similar category, its application may reveal spaces of rejected knowledge,¹⁶ even in contexts where we have seemingly said everything.

Toward Progressive Feminist Spirituality

In her 1975 text on Natalia LL, published in the Feminism and Art issue of heute KUNST, which she edited, Gislind Nabakowski invokes the witch figure.¹⁷ She draws on Jules Michelet’s book La Sorcière (1862) to define the specificity of the strategy adopted in the currently iconic series Consumer Art (Sztuka konsumpcyjna; 1972–1975, Figure 1). The witch’s weapons encompass a special rapport with the forces of nature, combined with an ironic distance toward the phallocentric culture. As Nabakowski suggests, Natalia LL explores this witch myth unconsciously, accurately exposing the male subject’s fear of the spirit of otherness.¹⁸ After all, the “demonic and challenging gaze,” manifested by the photographed models, once served as a pretext to subject women to repression for their emotional difference, intellectual agency, and sexuality.

As Jakubowska notes, we should question the belief that artists in socialist countries “intuitively” manifested feminist themes and instead focus on local emancipatory contexts.¹⁹ Nabakowski openly states that Natalia LL did not read Michelet’s book. We find it difficult to determine whether Nabakowski knew about the book’s Polish edition with a foreword by Leszek Kołakowski (1961), or whether she realized that Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz’s story “Mother Joan of the Angels,” the basis for the famous 1960 film, employs motifs from Michelet’s work.²⁰ Notably, Kołakowski emphasizes the revolutionary, anti-capitalist, and secularizing dimension of Michelet’s ideas more strongly than the emancipatory thread, highlighting the multidimensional and masculine figure of the devil (Figure 2).²¹ However, also thanks to Maria Kaliska’s translation, the book itself offers a vivid and poetic description of the witch as someone who protects, heals, and wants to become the foundation of a community. Here, one should also mention another witch – Margarita, who entered the universe of local imagination with the first Polish translation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s famous novel.²²

Nearly a decade ago, Mona Chollet announced the return of the witch,²³ which signaled feminists’ full recognition of alternative spirituality. As we see, this return could have taken place in socialist Poland as well. Both the interest in the translations of Michelet’s and Bulgakov’s works and the presence of witchcraft imagery in women’s poetry produced in the Polish People’s Republic (PRL)²⁴ support this claim. As a provocation aimed at the local visual culture,²⁵ Consumer Art could also have constituted an attempt to reveal an alternative dimension of female identity. As Chollet writes, in the 1970s, some feminists came to see witches not only as victims of emerging modernity, but also as fighters resisting capitalism, namely as figures that continue to provide a source of identity for the women’s movement and inspire contemporary ecology.²⁶ At the same time, Natalia LL articulated resistance both to capitalism and its homogenizing practices, which she knew well,²⁷ and to the PRL’s ease in appropriating those practices and embedding them in its social structure.

According to Starhawk and Silvia Federici, authors of now-classic texts addressing the emancipatory dimension of witchcraft, burning at the stake marked a grim prelude to rapid privatization and aggressive land exploitation, which led to the disintegration of community and economic exclusion.²⁸ From this perspective, contemporary magical practices and goddess worship, toward which present-day feminists turn, restore dignity to the female body and offer a way to renew the broken bonds.²⁹ We can credit precisely Starhawk and, following her, Chollet, as those who recognized that magic helps people relearn how to understand the natural environment and create community, and that open-ended and dogma-free ritual plays a key role in these practices.³⁰ Understood broadly as a set of spiritual practices that enable engagement with nature and with other human and nonhuman beings, magic itself becomes “a weapon for the oppressed.”³¹ In short, the return of the witch attacks the deepest cultural foundations of capitalism,³² namely rationalist, technicist modernization. Consequently, the PRL’s modernization discourse, burdened with demands for rapid secularization, industrialization, militarization, and ethnic uniformity, proved all the more susceptible to critique through subtle references to the witch figure.

Natalia LL understood her art as “initiation”³³ and approached performance as a ritual³⁴ referring to the transubstantiation that takes place during Christian masses.³⁵ In these acts, she passed from the material and bodily to the spiritual sphere by incorporating her authorial reinterpretations of iconographic tradition, mythology, and classicism, which often bordered on popular culture.³⁶ This deeply post-ironic “recycling” employed pathos – intense emotionality, corporeality, and a longing for the sacred, namely features that characterize current reflections on the feminist and queer turn toward magic and witchcraft. Therefore, we can easily characterize Natalia LL’s rituals as subversive interventions in which she embodied a contemporary trickster,³⁷ priestess, or, indeed, witch. In this way, she exposed the face of modern culture while pointing to its alternative dimension, one full of incoherence, dissonance, and affects.

Hence, if Natalia LL’s work enacts any form of spirituality, it most likely comes close to “progressive spirituality,” practiced in a close relationship with emancipatory ideas.³⁸ Chollet chooses not to describe this spirituality as regressive or escapist, pointing to “reactive naturality.” Instead, she presents engaged spirituality which transgresses the celebration of maternal, calm, and nourishing femininity and the boundaries of the heterosexual norm.³⁹ In essence, this phenomenon closely resembles “feminist spirituality,” a stance that emerged from the writings of feminist theologians in the 1970s. Contemporary scholars such as Pierrette Daviau have revised this stance, emphasizing the distinctiveness of women’s spiritual practices, in which both the body and everyday life play a significant role. As Daviau writes, “traditional spiritualities usually root themselves in conceptions of a masculine God, where spiritual life stands in opposition to the material and the everyday. These dualistic spiritualities promote heavenly values at the expense of earthly ones, the soul at the expense of the body, and abstract principles at the expense of concrete life realities.”⁴⁰ She also indicates that women strive to integrate these orders by showing a simultaneous interest in humanism and ecology.⁴¹ Like feminists studying witchcraft, Daviau thus recognizes the significant presence of the Mother Goddess in the collective imagery. This figure links to women’s attempts to turn toward representations of the divine that predate male ones, and toward the seemingly new yet in fact primordial and transreligious forms of ritual practice.⁴² According to one pioneer of feminist theology, Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, “feminist spirituality can be occupied with meditation and incantations, spells and incense, womb chant and candle gazing, feminine symbols for the divine and trance induction. Such an understanding of spirituality, of religious rituals and exercises, is found in all religions and not limited to Christianity.”⁴³ Importantly, this spirituality also maintains a close connection to biological change such as birth, maturation, partnership, illness, new life stages, bodily movement, dance, and gesture, and to articulation, which symbolically restores women’s voice and visibility.

Art as an Inner Experience: The Revision of Realism

Natalia LL identified the 1970s as a distinctive decade because, as she claimed, the works she produced at the time emerged “in the spirit of independent art, against political barriers and constraints.”⁴⁴ The central concerns of her practice during this period involved transforming everyday life, a process that assumed the form of creating spaces for ordinary activities and granting mundane gestures a new, universal dimension.⁴⁵ As Wojciech Szymański notes, the core of Natalia LL’s strategy at that time lay in “appropriating and altering original meanings” of actions. Those situationist détournements⁴⁶ evolved toward an increasingly far-reaching exploration of the relationship between the individual and the universe, or the microcosm and the macrocosm.⁴⁷ This way of thinking about art also intersected with the fascination prevalent in neo-avant-garde circles at the time: the integration of art and science. However, Natalia LL believed that one needed to destabilize the faith in technological progress and in the scientific and rational ways of exploring reality. To that end, she employed countercultural reflections that brought physics and metaphysics closer together, in line with the utopian visions permeating the era of the first space flights.⁴⁸

This ideological shift emerges in the installation titled The Pyramid: Art as an Inner Experience (Piramida. Sztuka jako doświadczenie wewnętrzne; 1979), which included a series of ritual actions-séances. In Stabłowice, a district of Wrocław, Natalia LL built a wooden structure modeled on the Pyramid of Cheops⁴⁹ (Figure 3). Inside the structure, she conducted experiments that involved inducing a dream state in herself and in selected participants. In her view, séances based on generating an oneiric state enabled one to enter a sphere of deepened self-reflection. Consequently, one could realize the connectedness both with previous generations and with other species inhabiting the Earth. As an inspiration for these actions, Natalia LL indicated psychotronics – a branch of parapsychology widespread in the 1960s and the 1970s in Eastern Bloc countries, especially Czechoslovakia. According to this parascience, specific forms or geometric shapes enable one to focus mental energy.⁵⁰

The series of actions titled Dreaming (Śnienia), initiated a year earlier and later continued in the pyramid, signaled Natalia LL’s gradual distancing from conceptualism, which she came to regard as a form of technicism that constrained an artist’s imagination⁵¹ (Figure 4). Natalia LL writes that “conceptualism has wiped the glasses clean, let us wear them now so that we might see the world through them,” thus signaling that analytical reflection on photography served as a necessary transition stage of her creative evolution.⁵² However, the abandonment of the “objective,” “universal” language of art in favor of the existential yet intersubjective dimension of performative practices may also have stemmed from a biographical fact. At that time, Natalia LL developed cancer, which she rarely spoke about.⁵³ Confronting a liminal experience and the fragility of matter, she perhaps envisioned sleeping and dreaming as a process of regeneration and renewal for both the body and art, which she increasingly began to understand as a form of cognition distinct from scientific knowledge.

Thus, The Pyramid becomes a symbol of transcending conceptual technicism, an enchantment of the language of art. However, we may understand this “temple of contemplative practices” also as a metaphorical tomb. According to Natalia LL, the self-awareness that one could gain through the dream séances in the pyramid aimed to result in a face-to-face encounter with the cruelty of life and the loneliness of existence on the Earth, which each person experiences individually, although these experiences remain common to all beings.⁵⁴ The body, and, more broadly, body art or performance art, thus acquires the status of sacred matter or strategy: it mediates transformation, and the individual becomes the collective.⁵⁵ The experience of dreaming within the pyramid can represent a crossing of the individual body’s boundaries toward social communion, an entry into a liminal state between life and death, waking reality and dream, or life and further life. “I do not believe in the death of an individual. I will say more. I do not believe in the death of any being. Life can only change its form,” Natalia LL writes.⁵⁶

However, we may also understand the aforementioned transgression as a continued revision of realism, strongly rooted in postwar reflections on art. Realism constituted the central project of local modernity, as it aimed to combine a specific epistemological stance, cognitive curiosity, and social sensitivity with a distance from conventional resemblance.⁵⁷ The definition of realism emerged amid the complex process of revising the assumptions of Marxist aesthetics and the problem of perception.⁵⁸

Natalia LL, who began her artistic career as a photographer, developed the program of the Permafo group and gallery in the early 1970s together with Andrzej Lachowicz and Zbigniew Dłubak. Notably, Dłubak ranks among the most important postwar theorists of realism. In Permafo’s circle of interests, especially for Dłubak, the problem of the subject’s relation to reality assumed a semiotic tone, likely stemming from his earlier contact with the ideas of the Prague Linguistic Circle.⁵⁹ However, this was not an attempt at an extremely analytical language, but rather a way of cultivating a critical distance toward the existing social reality while emphasizing the potential for change.⁶⁰

Referring to the new understanding of the realism concept that Raymond Williams proposed in the early 1960s, Katarzyna Szopa emphasizes its close connection with an engaged stance. According to Szopa, “when we open our eyes, … we do not see the same world; instead, we literally create the world.”⁶¹ Similarly, one may read the various attempts to renew perception, including donning the “glasses of conceptualism,” to take the next creative step as a proposal for a social revolution, a “politically imagined possibility,” or a “fiction of the future.”⁶²

If the context of transformation encompasses a crisis of imagination,⁶³ then the renewal of perception occurring in the process of shaping a new realism would prove both revolutionary and magical: such renewed perception would have to draw on what one cannot contain within an abstract model of economic relations. Imagining other social relations as based on freedom and equality would simultaneously involve designing a “magical realism” of the kind Andy Merrifield⁶⁴ describes: syncretic, rooted in a romantic idiom, and situated “outside convention.” Therefore, as Szopa argues, every imaginative upheaval must entail a “cult of ambiguity, dreams, and darkness.”⁶⁵

Signaling a move beyond conceptualism, Natalia LL certainly identified a “romantic” upheaval in her art, only paradoxically supported by “a mind honed through materialist training.”⁶⁶ Her use of pyramid symbolism aligns both with the psychotronic experiment and with Egyptosophy as outlined by Erik Hornung. The latter name denotes an idea fundamental to Western esotericism that ancient Egypt served as the source of Hermetic knowledge.⁶⁷ In this way, Natalia LL adopted a motif already steeped in mysticism, which allowed her to view this mysterious structure according to Enlightenment and early Romantic descriptions: as a space for religious mysteries or as a temple of social transformation, built “in honor of the Being who illuminates the universe.”⁶⁸

According to some eighteenth-century authors, the pyramids served as the setting for the Mysteries of Isis and Osiris.⁶⁹ In the photographic and film documentation of Natalia LL’s séances, she appears dressed as a priestess wearing a white robe and a wreath of flowers on her head. This outfit could suggest a Slavic reinterpretation of the solar myth of Isis as an earthly woman and a powerful witch whose protective power proves almost divine.⁷⁰ Isis was also a healer, bringing children back to life. Associating Isis with the Great Goddess, or Magna Mater,⁷¹ occurs in the imagery of contemporary witchcraft and in various versions of feminist spirituality. This association highlights the ambiguous connection to the embodiment of fertility and motherhood. Through regeneration, and through confronting loneliness and the cruelty of her own fate, this goddess gains a new power that also entails a deepened awareness of collective experiences. Thus, instead of abandoning realism as an intellectual and artistic practice, employing magic cultivates the capacity to imagine meaningful transformations of reality.⁷² These transformations also occur through ordinary, everyday activities and states such as sleep, which help us to change the way we see the world and avoid totalizing perspectives.⁷³

The Social Dimension of Heresy

In Natalia LL’s art, the autobiographical gesture played an important role. In one of her texts, presented as an “autobiographical apocryphon,”⁷⁴ she describes the moment when a fragment of a bomb dropped by a Soviet plane in 1945 damaged her parents’ apartment. The family lived in the Old Castle in Żywiec, and Natalia LL’s vivid narrative transforms this building into a mysterious and magical place filled with Richard Wagner’s music: “This monumental and beautifully proportioned building appears constantly in my memories like an obsessive dream.”⁷⁵ The explosion caused only minor material damage: it shattered figurines of a black and a white cat, scattered a bouquet of daffodils, and left behind the smell of burnt feathers. However, in Natalia LL’s account, these acquire a mythical, metaphysical meaning.⁷⁶

In Rożnów (Rosen) in Silesia, relatively close to Wrocław, we find a tomb that Karl Adolf August von Eben und Brunnen erected in 1780 for the von Eben family (Figure 5). Inspired by Egyptian pyramids, the concept emerged during a period of intensified interest in pyramid mysticism, and local tradition holds that its form aimed to aid the interred remains’ mummification, thereby “facilitating” entry into the afterlife. However, the reason for invoking this structure as a context for Natalia LL’s Pyramid is another story. In 1945, the year which left a strong mark on her memory and shaped her consciousness, soldiers of the Red Army looted the von Eben family tomb. Later, the tomb became the setting for acts of vandalism committed by the incoming Polish-speaking community, marked by a lack of belonging to the place. The PRL’s authorities largely watched such actions passively, especially when they involved the Recovered Territories, commonly referred to as “former German lands.”⁷⁷

Therefore, the imagery that Natalia LL evoked in her Pyramid project failed to fit the period’s ideological directive, which aimed to unify society along class and ethnic lines. If we understand realism as a revolutionary stance, then this work reveals its meaning as a symptom of a withdrawal from the economic interpretation of Marxism, or of a turn toward socialist transformation understood through the lens of magical Marxism. Unlike the homogenizing Enlightenment discourse, magical Marxism acknowledges Europe’s “nomadism” and the diversity of its inhabitants’ experiences.⁷⁸ We may also read The Pyramid as a manifestation of feminist spirituality, which “assigns … primary, though not exclusive, importance to the diversity and differences of women’s experiences depending on race, culture, class, country, education, and religion,”⁷⁹ and allows new forms of solidarity to emerge.⁸⁰

In the 1970s, other references may also have carried weight. Although the local communist left supported radical secularization, it nevertheless promoted a local religious tradition, namely the Polish Brethren’s thought. Janusz Tazbir published an important book on this movement in 1971.⁸¹ The Polish Brethren, commonly known as the Arians, formed the most radical branch of the Polish Reformation in the sixteenth century. In this movement’s program, the Polish left focused on social ideas rather than on religious beliefs. The Polish Brethren advocated pacifism, communal ownership of property, and social justice and equality. Compared with other Catholic and Protestant communities, they also differed in the much stronger position of women, who preached sermons and moral teachings and enjoyed guaranteed partnership within marriage. After the Sejm sentenced the Polish Brethren to banishment, women sustained the functioning of the religious communities.⁸² The Arians also employed pyramid symbolism. One of the few surviving tombs of the movement’s representatives, most likely erected in the first half of the seventeenth century, assumes exactly this form (Figure 6).⁸³

If we consider the significance of the Polish Brethren’s thought in shaping The Pyramid’s symbolic meanings, then the psychotronic context of Natalia LL’s 1979 work acquires a different resonance. In 1970s Poland, people understood psychotronic theory also as a way of reconciling the Marxist scientific worldview with human extrasensory abilities – in other words, as an impulse to recalibrate flat materialism toward a more complex picture of the world, while remaining consistent with the ideals of egalitarianism and social revolution.⁸⁴ While treated as a space for magic and for crossing the boundary between the microcosm and the macrocosm, the pyramid also became a place for processing collective experiences. According to Natalia LL, the dreams generated within the pyramid proved both prognostic and retrospective, reaching deep into the past and allowing people to read it through the present, and vice versa.⁸⁵ In fact, the pyramid enabled one to weave alternative scenarios of events and examine one’s own self within the horizon of the community’s experience, in the name of universal transformation.

The body also served as an important vehicle of the revolution. Returning to Nabakowski’s text, in which she highlights the myth of the witch in her interpretation of Consumer Art, we can now interpret this work differently. In addition to realizing that Natalia LL’s strategy was not merely “intuitive,” we should acknowledge that the play with meanings related to capturing male desires actually had a magical dimension. Operating on the imagination, unleashed through the crisis of male potency, can signify breaking the order and structure also at the level of social processes. Corporeality and materiality represent spheres of chaos, uncontrolled growth, and sensual explosion, which support the world’s multidimensionality. In turn, the latter connects with the magical and ritual image of Mother Earth.⁸⁶ This concept resembles the idea of the “magical body” in Federici’s approach. According to Federici, the body’s desire and power closely link to the gesture of resistance, opposition to exploitation, and economic, ethnic, and gender subordination.⁸⁷ Therefore, we may say that Natalia LL found a path back to the rejected esoteric knowledge, namely to the natural wisdom of witches – a tradition of existing close to nature and the body, which connects the past, an alternative present, and an imagined future (Figures 7 and 8). Natalia LL manifested the recovery of spiritual power, which made it possible to free oneself from the rituals of institutions, conventions, and ideologies, including the authority of religious dogmas.⁸⁸ However, this was not a sign of escapist withdrawal. Instead, Natalia LL offered an engaged commentary on her own place within the horizon of her native culture and the reflection on art.

The article constitutes part of research project no. 2023/51/B/HS2/00928, “Alternative forms of spirituality in Polish art 1945-1989”, funded by the National Science Centre Poland.