Doing Gender

Doing Gender, an exhibition of the work of Natalia LL, opened in gallery lokal_30 in Warsaw at the end of September 2013 curated by Agnieszka Rayzacher. At the same time she decided to commission a book, edited with Dorota Jarecka, of essays by various writers seeking to elucidate Natalia LL’s work from the 1960s. During this decade Natalia LL was actively engaged in transforming the very language of art, using the cool objectivity of photography to document the most personal, intimate experiences of two partners. Among the writers, Kazimiera Szczuka, Marika Kuźmicz and Krzysztof Pijarski specifically examine the evolution Natalia LL’s art underwent during the 1960s and 70s and assess its importance; for the artist herself, for the art of the time, and ultimately, for contemporary art.


Doing Gender was the direct result of the meeting and collaborating with Natalia LL. The rediscovery of some negatives from the 1960s enabled us to include many previously unseen photographs in the exhibition. Some of them constitute her Body Topology series, from 1967. These images, which set out to create an objective record of the body, were groundbreaking in Natalia LL’s work. We see two people photographed en face and from behind, standing “at attention” in the prosaic open space of a meadow. One of the photos diverges from this principle of strict objectivity, as Andrzej Lachowicz is seen bashfully covering his genitals with his hand. There is a paradoxical energy in these apparently deadpan images; an energy which comes from the need to record naked, non-posed bodies forming a unity with the surrounding nature, and — via their apparent inertia — merging seamlessly into the
monotonous country landscape.


The idea of a permanent, and — however grotesque it sounds — dispassionate record returns soon in the greatly expanded series, Intimate Recordings (1968–69); and again in Intimate Photography (1968), where her interest in the body as pure form is even more apparent. Later, at the beginning of the 1970s, Natalia LL fully follows the idea of “permanent registration”; she records a road, time, and finally her own face. In these works existential, erotic, and social themes are all brought into the arena of analytical art, making these photographs and films some of the most original works of Polish conceptual art. Marika Kuźmicz writes about this in the essay, Natalia LL: Somebody Else is Me, where she asks; what is spontaneous and what is scripted in Natalia LL’s concept of “permanent registration”, and can photography be separated from mystification?


Some works from the Intimate Photography series were first shown in 1971 at the PERMAFO gallery in Wrocław, in a walk-in installation also called Intimate Photography. In the essay Doing It Right: Natalia LL’s Poetics of Publicity, Krzysztof Pijarski notes the ingenuity of the installation’s spatial arrangement; and also the powerful way it places the viewer in confined proximity to the photographic images. The images in the Intimate Recordings series manifest a new female sexuality; active not passive, open not hidden, joyful not obligatory. Natalia LL herself authors this new sexuality by placing her own body within the frame of the picture. In the essay Revolutionary Year 1974, Kazimiera Szczuka sees Natalia LL acting as a courageous exhibitionist, deliberately flouting the social structures of Poland at the turn of the sixties and seventies; a woman aware of her sexuality and the power emanating from it repudiating her subordination. And Natalia LL’s bravery and uncompromising resolution in presenting such explicit sexual imagery ultimately paved the way for a later generation of Polish artists, who again raised these issues in the 1990s.


The exhibition was accompanied by screenings of the film America Is Not Ready for This, by Karol Radziszewski. It details the film-maker’s search for Natalia LL’s presence in New York in 1977, where she travelled on a Kościuszko Foundation stipend, and where she came across the leading artists of that time. Radziszewski interviews many artists who remember Natalia LL from her time in New York. Fragments of this interview are included in our book.


We hope that this book will fill in a gap in the research and interpretation of Natalia LL’s art. This gap opened up partly because the artist consciously decided not to display her works from the Body Topology series, as well as a vast collection of black-and-white and colour photographs from the end of the 1960s, which she gathered together under the title Intimate Recordings. Neither the character nor the breadth of her Intimate Photography collection was known until now.