SUMMARY

Josefov, the old Jewish Quarter in Prague a golden thresold (Czech: prh) of the Uncanny;
the fascinating Vienna of Freud and Rank; the sharp chiaroscuro of the expressionist Berlin;
the pre-war Polish shtetl, reconstructed under the sun of California in the 1990s; the universe
of Haitian gods and goddesses swirling in their ecstatic dance; the concrete Eden built in the
heart of Mexican jungle, encircled with the blue ribbon of the river Huichihuayn, and last
but not least the virtual, phantasmatic Kingdom of Metavera... The book is an invitation to
a mental journey, a journey in the footsteps of the unusual artists the outsiders, the
diasporists, the escapists travelling into the domain of oneiric visions, of alternative, simulated
spacetimes, and finally, quite often, the mystifiers, the tricksters artfully cutting the thick robe
of myth and sewing its parts back into a veil of illusion.
The first chapter is dedicated to the mythical and emblematic figure of Golem which
derives from Jewish tradition. The most widely known version of the legend involves the
famous rabbi Maharal (Yehudah Leib ben Betsal'el, ca. 15201609), who brings to life
a monster made out of clay (what is especially significant is that the anthropomorphic being is
animated by the power of the Word). As a matter of fact, however, we owe this version now
broadly widespread in popular culture to a daring mystification done by a Warsaw rabbi
named Yehudah Yudl Rozenberg (in 1909). But most of all, the Golem as a figure that often
appears in post-Holocaust literature may be interpreted as a metaphor for the revival of the
creative powers (creatio ex nihilo), of the semiurgy (French: smiurgie). The artists whose
abundant oeuvres have been discussed in the following chapters are indeed such to quote an
expression by George Steiner wanderers across languages. And their art is always in a
way diasporic, created from a distance, so to say, in suspension; always in a way the art of
extra-territoriality.1
Chapter II concerns the artistic and intellectual heritage of Ronald B. Kitaj (1932
2007), a founder of The School of London (the origin of the group dates back to 1976, when
Kitaj set up the exhibition symptomatically entitled The Human Clay). The main attention
here was paid to the analysis of his First Diasporist Manifesto published in 1989. The artist
had a special esteem for Walter Benjamin's philosophy, (which also found its reflection in

After: M. Gluzman, Modernism and Exile. A View from the Margins, (in:) American Jews. Insider/Outsider
and Multiculturalism, eds. D. Biale, M. Galchinsky, S. Heschel, University of California Press, Berkeley 1998, p.
234.

several of his canvases.) In The Truth in Painting Jacques Derrida links Benjamin with the
notion of liminality, even describing him literally as a man frontier. 2 And the state of
liminality, in turn, harmonizes with the phenomenon of a fluid, a processual identity, the one
that is being continously (re)built and (re)created, sometimes on the road of excess (Blake);
the one that is dispersed into mirror images, multiple masks, ephemeral alter egos.
In Chapters III and V I analyze strategies for creating phantom beings or, in other
words, producing human simulacra the strategies that have been applied and developed by
two eminent contemporary artists: Eleanor Antin (born 1935) and Roee Rosen (born 1963). In
the first of those essays I refer to, among others, Black Ballerina from Diaghilev's Ballets
Russes, a fictional, or, better say a parafictional character created by Antin, a character
being the perfect illustration (and incarnation) for notionos such as: Jewishness, Blackness,
Womanness, and, most of all, Otherness. In the same way, one can describe Justine Frank an
alter ego of Rosen a Belgian-Jewish surrealist artist and writer, a scandalist, a pornographer,
blessed with a vivid imagination and cursed with an inability to find her own place (Chapter
V). Justine Frank whose first name is a clear allusion to de Sade's novel, and the surname,
most probably, to charismatic figure of Jacob (Yakov) Frank (17261791) participates in a
kind of sacred transgression, (e.g. see: Bataille's Eroticism).
In Chapter III I also discuss Antin's cinematic mystification, amazingly beautiful and
done, so to say, rebours that is, The Man Without a World (1991), a long-forgotten but
almost miraculously found masterptece by (a non-existing) Yevgeny Antinov, a film, in fact,
being an homage to artist's mother and, at the same time, to the tradition of the pre-war
Yiddish cinema, (e.g. see: Waszyski's Der Dibuk, 1937).
Chapter IV, whose title may be translated as Mirrors, doubles, masks... Maya Deren
and her sisters in masquerade, is dedicated to Maya Deren (born Eleanora Derenkowskaia,
1917-1961), a versatile artist, one of the brightest stars of the American avant-garde cinema,
and an author of Divine Horsemen, a book, or better say an extensive study inspired by
Haitian voodoo culture. I interpret her oeuvre with references to the androgynous selfportraits by Claude Cahun (1894-1954), as well as multiple faces of Cindy Sherman (born
1954), captured in stills from films that never existed, (her famous series of Untitled Film
Stills). It is significant that regardless of the generation distance these three artists share a

See: J. Derrida, The Truth in Painting, transl. Geoff Bennngton and Ian McLeod, The University of Chicago
Press, Chicago-London 1987, p. 177.

common Jewish origin. All of them belonging to the generation of postmemory 3 come
from emigrant families from East European Diaspora. What is more, they share the same
predilection for masquerade, for creating ephemeral doppelgngers. Each of them is like
Carroll's Alice fascinated by the mirror, longing to see what is on the other side... Therefore,
one of the passages in the essay concerns a Freudian interpretation of the uncanny (das
Unheimliche), a figure of the Doppelgnger as described by Otto Rank, a Lacanian concept of
the mirror stage (stade du miroir), and also the metaphorics of the Gorgoneion reinterpreted
by Roger Caillois and Hlne Cixous.
The logic of mirror reflections has been undermined in a wonderfully perverse way
by Ren Magritte in his canvas from 1937 entitled La reproduction interdite, (Not to be
Reproduced). The mise-en-abyme painting is a non-conventional portrait of Edward James, an
English poet, an artist and an art patron. Chapter VI is dedicated to the life and works of that
eccentric aristocrat, and, I daresay, probably the most radical amongst surrealists; one can say
after Breton a surrealist in adventure (even though, these words were addressed to Edgar
Allan Poe). In this essay I mainly focus on an interpretation of James's opus magnum, that is,
Las Pozas an architectural-sculptural complex that had been built, between the late 1940s
and early 1980s, in a shadowy greenery of a Mexican jungle near the town of Xilitla. That
astonishing concrete Eden in a way resembles or reproduces an illogical, a nonlinear and
an open structure of a dream. I as well refer to an issue of James's artistic alliances with
Leonora Carrington, Pavel Tchelitchew, a theatrical troupe set up by George Balanchine and
Boris Kochno, the aforementioned Magritte, and, last not least, a chimerical genius Salvador
Dal.
Among those who willingly expressed their immense worship for a cataclysm called
Dal4 was a contemporary Polish artist Piotr Szmitke (1955-2013), a founder of the original
doctrine called metaverism (Polish: metaweryzm), based on the category of non-existence,
intelligently juggling with the notion of truth (Greek: met, Latin: verus). Metaverism, both
as a concept and as an artistic practice, may be associated with the well-known Baudrillardian
metaphor of the map that precedes the territory, or 'pataphysics (French: 'pataphysique),
a quasi-science developed by Alfred Jarry. Reflections on the category of non-existence,
and on the origins of the virtual Kingdom of Metavera have been presented in Chapter IX,
closing the book.

See e.g.: M. Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory. Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust, Columbia
University Press, New York 2012.
4
P. Szmitke, Byem duchem Dalego, NaGos, no 13/1994, p. 24.

Chapters VII and VIII have been, as well, devoted to Polish themes. The subject of the
first essay, entitled Metamorphosis or Reincarnation?, is a very peculiar biography
metaphorically speaking: a never ended story of Maria Komornicka (18761949),
a modernist poetess, a truly sophisticated and rebellious personality; of Maria who, at some
point of her life, decided to get rid of the pinching corset of femininity and to become a man
Piotr Wast the Misfit. That fascinating case has been usually analyzed from a perspective
of gender studies (for example, by Maria Janion). In this context, Komornicka's
transfiguration has been interpreted as a kind of a manifesto or a tribute paid to a woman as a
victim. I argue, however, that her attitude has very little to do with victimism; but instead, her
unusual metamorphosis can be read as associated with the mechanism of regression and with
the narcissistic thanatophobia. These phenomena were of special interest to Rank in his study
entitled The Trauma of Birth (German: Das Trauma der Geburt, 1924), the book being
referred to in this chapter.
The escapist tendencies also characterize literary works by Zuzanna Rabska (1888
1960), a poetess of intellectual emotions, a great erudite, a figure today quite forgotten
(Chapter VIII). While Komornicka in a similar way as Cahun escapes her fears by finding
a safe enclave of the androgyny, Rabska's creative escapism consists in her self-enclosure
within the silent world of books and paintings. What is more, Rabska is a traveler and a sheer
as Janet Wolff would put it flneuse of her time. From her European peregrinations one
time, under the sun of Florence, another time, under the cool, pale sky of Bruges she brings
beautiful ekphrases, in a large amount dedicated to the Old Masters. She is not only an
apologist for the intellectual culture (she thinks had been gone long ago), but also a delayed
modernist; quite possibly the last modernist of the Polish literary milieu.
The vast majority of the artists presented in the book reveal inclinations towards the
aesthetic of the surreal, the aesthetic that is always, to some extent, immersed into the deep
waters of the uncanny. Hal Foster, in his influential study entitled Compulsive Beauty (1997)
points out that it is the Freudian concept of das Unheimliche that encompasses and, in a way,
organizes the surreal imagery. For, in fact, it is a question of as Foster puts it the
repressed material that returns in ways that disrupt unitary identity, aesthetic norms, and
social order.5
Therefore, perhaps, the Surrealist art or, at least, the one that oscillates towards the

I believe this concept to be the uncanny, that is to say, a concern with events in which repressed material
returns in ways that disrupt unitary identity, aesthetic norms, and social order.
H. Foster, Compulsive Beauty, The MIT Press, Cambridge 1997, p. xvii.
5

surreal taste is very often characterized by transgressive and trickster tendencies: in this
respect, Roee Rosen's art stands for the best example. Carl Gustav Jung, in his essay On the
Psychology of the Trickster-figure, draws a parallel between the trickster figure and the witty
Roman god Mercury, as well as mercury as a chemical element, so much praised by the
alchemists. After all, a trickster is always the one who escapes; he/she is as elusive,
imponderable and intelligently toxic as quicksilver in our hands.
Indeed, motives that stand behind the artistic mystifications and hoaxes may be
interpreted in various ways. For instance, literary falsifications were particularly popular in
the 18th century referred to even as An Age of Forgery.6 It is enough to mention The
Poems of Ossian wonderfully found and then translated by James Macpherson, or the
manuscripts of Thomas Rowley's, in fact, fabricated by Thomas Chatterton. In the book,
I argue that, nowadays, mystifications so much widespread in contemporary art provide
a kind of a positive answer for the growing feeling of disappointment and disenchantment
(Weberian Entzauberung) for the collapse of the grand narratives (grands rcits) anticipated
by Lyotard (in La condition postmoderne), and for the end of the social (la fin du social)
foretold by Baudrillard.
Every intelligent mystification involves creating a new, meaningful reality. It is always,
to some extent, a prosthesis for an old order, for the world that has become fluent and
decentralized. Actually, each artistic mystification is based on a parafiction rather to quote
Carrie Lambert-Beatty on post-simulacral, parafictional strategies7 than just a fiction. In
the realm of parafiction, imaginary characters and happenings appear to be highly probable.
Paradoxically, all those Golem-like, ephemerical beings born from a formidable imagination
of Eleanor Antin, Roee Rosen, or Piotr Szmitke do really live, even if they were never
alive... And, regardless that they never existed, they all should have existed...
translated by Magorzata Stpnik

Zob. P. Ackroyd, Forging a Language, (w:) Idem, Albion. The Origins of the English Imagination, Chatto &
Windus, London 2002, p. 424.
7
Zob. C. Lambert-Beatty, Make-Believe. Parafiction and Plausibility, October Magazine, MIT Press Journal,
Nr 129/ 2009, p. 54.