Governments are afraid of the visual arts

Recently elected president of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA), Polish historian Małgorzata Kaźmierczak visited Argentina and spoke about the challenges in terms of freedom of expression.
Małgorzata Kaźmierczak was elected president of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) in January. It is no coincidence that one of the axes of her management in the next three years will be the treatment of freedom of expression and censorship. Born in Krakow in 1979, Kazmierczak has a PhD in History and specializes in performance.

Visiting Argentina (she was in Buenos Aires and Rosario) with an active agenda linked to her research on local performance and as president of the AICA, the specialist held meetings with art historians and several members of the Argentine Association of Art Critics (AACA). Chaired by Florencia Battiti (with Fernando Farina as vice-president), the institution participates dynamically within the international organization. The Argentine section, founded in 1951 at the instigation of Jorge Romero Brest, has 64 active members, including art critics, curators, art historians and cultural managers from all over the country.

The international section, meanwhile, was founded in 1950, after two congresses held in 1948 and 1949 at UNESCO headquarters in Paris. Today, it is made up of 62 member countries. Kaźmierczak spoke with Ñ on a Saturday afternoon about freedom of expression, the importance, necessity and expansion of the concept of art criticism in this century, and its impact, in fluent Spanish.
-What is understood today by art criticism?

-Everyone has their own definition, but for me it is a position towards reality and towards art, towards the cultural policy of your country. That can be expressed with a review, a text, an exhibition. Sometimes there are periods when you can't organise exhibitions or write reviews because of censorship or financial problems, but during these periods you can still participate in talks and discussions about art. Art is always part of social life. We need to keep questioning everything. For our community in Poland, art criticism is important. Even after a critical text appears in a magazine we discuss it. It's like criticism after criticism.

- Is criticism in crisis?

- People always talk about the crisis of criticism and that there are fewer and fewer magazines. But when you look at it historically, this crisis has been talked about since the 1950s. Of course it is a problem when magazines close for financial reasons, but that doesn't mean that there is no art criticism or that it is not important. It has always been important and it will exist in other forms perhaps. Now it is easier with social media. There are people who do criticism on Youtube and comment on live exhibitions. There are countries in this world where you can't do it any other way either. In the 90s, in Poland, there was almost nothing, and when we had the Internet, everything moved to virtuality. And now we read these texts as classics about some exhibitions and artists. The form doesn't matter.
- What impact can they have on the public?

- If the criticism is intelligent and profound, it has an impact. In my case, after reading a criticism I can change my opinion. For example, regarding the Venice Biennale, I expected criticism from specialists from different countries to know what they thought, because maybe I didn't see something that others did, because there were so many works from different places. For me, what critics write is very important, especially in relation to international events.

- You often point out differences between what happens in Western and Eastern Europe.

- Yes, we who are in Eastern Europe are fighters and that is why we have so much affection for Latin America because we feel a bit similar. We have never had easy times for the people, for the country, for art. After the war, we built new countries, almost from scratch. Our important artists are not as well known as those in Western Europe because there is a lack of market, a lack of promotion. But art is still more interesting this way because people need to fight to be able to show and make art in general.

-Being president of the AICA gives you a global vision of what is happening in different parts of the world. Can the visual arts be considered dangerous in the 21st century?

-Censorship and freedom of expression are my favorite topics. It is very curious that governments are afraid of the visual arts. In Poland, in the last eight years, we had an ultra-right government that censored us for things linked to religion, for blasphemy, in relation to issues such as abortion, refugees, the LGBT community. Exhibitions were cancelled or reported to the police. We had an average of 300 cases in court per year. And then it happened that towards the end of that government we had no censorship because we censored ourselves. That is why I say that if there is censorship it is not so bad yet, but if there is self-censorship it is all over. Now it happens a lot in Slovakia and Hungary. But it also happens in Western Europe and in the United States for other reasons.

-Why do you think they are feared?

-It is interesting to think about why those people who want to destroy art pay so much attention to it. I have feminist artist friends who receive death threats, crazy comments on social media. But it doesn't happen as much in Latin America; here there is more economic discrimination in the sense that suddenly something is not done because there is no money. At AICA we want to organize workshops on these issues. We signed an agreement to work together with the Freemuse organization, which fights for human rights in general, but also for authors' rights and freedom of expression. We want to organize workshops for curators, critics, artists, students to find out how we can defend ourselves against censorship, discrimination, and which international organizations can help us. Of course we can't change the world, but we can show resistance, we can change ourselves. It is very important to think about whether there is an artist censored in an exhibition, what should the other artists do? Maybe remove their works from the exhibition as a gesture of solidarity. It happened to me when one of my texts was censored in a catalogue and then the other critic said he was withdrawing his and there was no catalogue. These gestures are important, although sometimes it is difficult to decide because things happen so quickly. It is even possible to think that it is one's fault, but no, it is the fault of the censors.

-How did you learn Spanish?
-The first time I came to Latin America was in November 2019, when I went to Chile (during the social outbreak) and Brazil. I participated in two performance events, in Valparaíso and Curitiba. I discovered that in Latin America I can find the kind of commitment and social impact that I look for in art in general. I fell in love with Latin American art. I enrolled in the course at the Jagiellonian University and started at a very high level, although I had never learned it before. It was a great pleasure. Then Covid-19 started and I had a lot of time to watch movies and series in Spanish. I continue learning and I love discovering the subtleties of the language.

-What other management axis do you propose to carry out until the end of your presidency?

-We are working on incorporating more sections in Latin America, Africa and Asia. I want to decentralize AICA a bit because most of the members are from Europe. And there are sections that existed, then disappeared, and I want to help them come back.
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