Natalia LL

experimental short film

The tradition of modernism and neo-avant-garde are faced in the project, in which Radziszewski is confronting both – Polish and Western – narratives of art history. Starting from the subversive work of Natalia LL, Radziszewski raises a series of questions on issues such as gender, feminist art, conceptual art, queer and East-West relations and their impact on the art world in the context of the Iron Curtain. America Is Not Ready For This is an open archive in search of parallels between the artistic experiences of Natalia LL and Radziszewski, as well as an attempt to examine the rules of the positioning of artists in the art world, both at that time and today.

In 2019 she became famous again when the decision to censor her works taken by the Director of the National Museum spurred a wave of protests. But the art of Natalia LL was controversial as early as in the 1960s. In collaboration with her husband, an artist himself, she created art that was shocking at the time.

Probably the most notorious work by Natalia LL, Consumer Art presents models delighting in bananas, frankfurters or ice-cream. Obviously, this seemingly innocent activity acquires a strongly erotic edge. Combination of a “cold” film recording with a “hot” sensual motif stands for a rejection of the purely analytical character of conceptual art.

After the great flood that hit Poland in 1997, Natalia LL referred to this fact through her performance on the bottom of a dried-up reservoir on the Bystrzyca River. “Menego” is a title taken from the prose of the Polish poet Cyprian Kamil Norwid and refers ambiguously to drowning in water as well as drowning in the banality of everyday life. The artist sees art as a safeguard against spiritual drowning.

“Impressions” provides an image of conscious corporeality – an image that was rare in the art of Poland under Communism. The work is a joyful spontaneous story about female subjectivity, a film self-portrait of the artist.

Natalia LL carried out the seance Points of Support, during which she performed nude gymnastics combined with choreography on a meadow in the Pieniny National Park. Each of the figures that her body adopted corresponded to a certain stellar constellation, thus building a bridge between the woman and the universe.

experimental short film

The work resulted from one of photographic and film seances, as the artist called them. The use of the procedures of multiplication and the mutual overlapping of semitransparent images on photographic film produces the impression of movement: veiling and unveiling the private parts of the body, but also a sense of artificiality and subversion inherent in photography and film that records the image of reality and “falsifies” it at the same time.

At the end of the 1970s, the artist’s work witnesses a change and enters the spheres of mysticism, mythology and cosmology. Yet, the body continues to function as her primary medium and the performances were seldom performed directly for the camera, although the awareness and necessity of film documentation was obvious for the artist. The first of a cycle of those seances, titled Dreaming, was conducted in 1978. The actions adopted different forms – Natalia LL was asleep in the presence of the viewers or only with the camera as a witness; she was also experimenting with sleeping in the pyramid. Those seances stemmed from the pursuit of reaching the subconscious – the artist very often noted down her dreams immediately after waking up.

The time after 1990 in the output of Natalia LL is marked by an interest in ecology and natural energy. The artist always loved cats, they were often the protagonists of her casual, private photographs. This video is one of the rare artworks with the participation of these animals.

In this work Natalia LL impersonates for the first time Brunhilde – a character from Nordic mythology, the heroine of the opera Valkyrie by Richard Wagner, the artist’s favourite composer. Through the brave heroine she talks about the transience, ultimate matters, meeting of Eros and Tanatos. She uses a banana, a symbol of sexuality familiar from her earlier works, as well as kales and skulls, well-known symbols of death.