Occupation with the temporal or symbolic beginnings and prerequisites of the body plays a central roll in the video project Original sin - a presumable beginning of virtual reality (1994). The electronic music is from Dariusz Baster. This project is about the religious (male) phantasm of the birth of evil out of female sexuality.
Feminist Body Art has accustomed us to many things through its unmasking of the malc images, which enslave the female body under the dictatorship of beauty. One must not forget, though, that it is precisly this female beauty that leads to the condemnation of woman as sinful and her 'conversion' into inferior matter, dregs, and ugliness. Portrayals of women in the middle ages showed female bodies that celebrate Venus's seductive appearance on the front side, while the back side reveals nausiating vermin crawling through bursting flesh and sores. Such images have a long tradition. According to this double representation, the desirable and beautiful visible side of woman conceals the most inferior, sinful and frightening corporeal figure ("Frau Welt" - the world). Beauty is the devil's mask. In the disgusting female body, with its vermin and nausiating brood, the shows his true face. Feminist art uncovered this image as an imageo of christian patriarchism.
Perhaps one most have grown up in catholic and communist Poland to reach the degree of shamelessness and radical ruthlessness, with which Alicja Zebrowska's video projekct forces the cultural code of the sinful woman to its outermost point in order to deconstruct it. It is, at the same time, a self-therapeutic process. Using her own body as the object on which she demonstrates and executes the full power of the occidental degredation of woman and the male fear of the female vagina Alicja Zebrowska frees herself, one may assume, from the tyranny of symbolic violence, which forced the female body into a schizoid splitting between nausiating sexuality and the purity of the Virgin Mary. The images in Original sin become a grandious iconoclasm against the christian imagines of the sinful and the pure woman. This is done with such vehement rdicality that feelings of physical, visual pain and reactions of disgust are aroused in the observer and pour vomit-like out of the depths of his (and hers, as well?) fears and nightmares. I must admit, that this installation is difficult to equal.
In Original Sin, an enormously large, unknown form of life from another world opens up to reveal a staring eye. With a feeling of dread, we recognize the red; amorphous lips of a vagina, whose eye is turned on the viewer. The motive of the vaginal cye also dominates the video project The mystery is looking from 1994. The shaved vagina has been given eyelashes and eyebrows and made up with eyeshadow. One does not immediately recognize it. It opens up and reveals a deceptively life-like glass eve. Through inner contractions, pressure and suction, the vagina is able to move the eye, open and close the vaginal lips like eyelids, or oven, in the end, spit the eye out. This game with the eyevagina, that is watching you, is a visual nightmare. In contrast to Original sin, though, the painted and made-up shaved vagina is more strongly aesthetisized. Nevertheless, the sight of this ogling vagina is not only a shock to the eye. It goes right through the body of the viewer, jolting him to the border of nausia and dread.
Hidden by hair and leading into unkonwn depths, this silent, dark mystified, protected and, every so often, openning site of desire and yearning turns the dominant cultural code abruptly around, when it stares back. Traditionally, the silent and sightless vagina is taken into possession by the man. The vagina is the object of a seizure. The symbolic center of all possesive gestures of dominance is the eye, which 'captures' its object. For this reason, the male gaze is phallic. It penetrates. Symbolically, the vagina means nothing other than that the woman is looked upon. She is the object of the gaze. Here. Though, in The mystery is looking, Alicja Zebrowska turns the central axis of our sexual culture around. By opening its eyc, the vagina becomes a subject. This awakening to self-awareness causes shuddering and dread. The gaze is so imprisoned in the schema of male-dominated culture, that the (involuntary) sight of a seein vagina calls forth a deep-scated animosity. Seeing the "ystery" cast off its secrecy and through its gaze, itself become a subject, one has the feeling of witnessing a process of emancipation. Nevertheless, it has the effect of a visual monstrosity.
I expect that the cye-vagina, especially in its extremly feminine make-up, is also an absurd game, a burlesque maskarade not without wit and laughter. This would be a laughter originating in the grotesque, which is closely related to fear and monstrosity, disgust and pain. And we realize, that Alicja Zebrowska, as a woman, has gone far beyond what the man George Bataille dared to do in that most famous document of pornographic surrealism, "L'histoire de l'oeil" (1928).
Original sin is even more radical. There is no mercy for the gaze, no acsthetization to ease the fear. No maskarade, no make-up. A screen-filling vagina opens to smacking noises, a wobbling cave ontrance made of deformed, glinting flesh, flaccid entrails, a red sucking-organ of lust, strange sea animal, octopus-like, being, or slimey vine. This is not the same organ, to which desire is dedicated. Does this flesh belong to our world at all? The music makes it clear: this is the site of hell. The underworld. The submarine world. Hades. This is the cave, out of which the human race has through the process of civilization laboriously climbed. It has us again. We'd follow Dante and Vergil with pleasure into the "Inferno", but not in here.
This is the radical destruction of the codes of beauty, as far as these follow the laws of the (male) order of the sexes. But not only is il the opposite of beauty, it is also the opposite of pornograpy. It is an emancipating self-violation and self-profanation. For thousands of years, art has ecremoniously presented the beauty of the female body. It was considered beautiful in its completeness and in the proportions of its form. This continuity is ruthlessly torn apart at precisly the site, which needed to remain hidden and closed as a prerequisite for female beauty. Alicja Zebrowska crosses the entire female body out and shows screen-filling only the crevice of a vagina. At one point, the camera moves back, and we see the ogling vagina between two gigantic, open thighs, and over this, in a shortened perspective, two breasts, between which the two-eyed face of the artist can be see. It is a three-eyed monster.
In To Stone, Alicja Zebrowska had to go through the process of the "little death" to come to life. Here, she goes through the hell of the rejection of the female, through the distortion and caricaturization of the female genitals, through the deformation, that female sexuality suffered for thousands of years under the law of patriarchism. What causes disgust in the viewers, is most likely a source of pain for the artist.
And it doesn't stop. A phallus, connected to neither a body nor a subject, penetrates smacking into the vagina and moves back and forth like a piston in the organic cylinder of the body-mashine.
Screen-change: Black slime is pressed into the vagina through a silver cylinder. Tropical sound reminiscent of the jungle. The pumping phallus. A masturbating finger. Bird calls from a crane. Tropes of sexual desire.
A water hose is entered into the vagina through the cylinder and washes it out. Cleansed of the filth of sin? The water, blackened from the slime, swells out of the vagina, until, finally, the water pouring out is as clear as a spring. We are rminded of Gustave Courbet's painting "L'origine du Monde". In the installation from Alicja Zebrowska, we find the counterpart to this male ideal of the vagina.
It's still not over. We gaze at the pressing, pulsing vagina. Something wants to come out. We identify a lock of hair. And we witness, to our horror, the slow birth of a Barbie doll, which Alicja Zebrowska chokes out of herself in much the same way as the observer chokes on inner nausea. Gloved midwives' hands recieve the wet doll.
The Marquis de Sade invented a form of literature, that was basically motivated by the pervertation of sacred christian objects and of cultural values. De Sade remained ex negativo complletely bound to the existance of Christianity and its valucs. The project Original Sin, like de Sade, about violation and profanation. The ostenatious even vile presenation of that which is, in our culture, placed under the double secret of beauty and beastiality, animalic lust and the highest love, the filthy and the holy birth, reaches the limits of what we are capable of aesthetically and psychologically taking in with our eyes. We feel something in our eyes hurling. We want to look away and have to keep looking. Mercilessly, we are pulled into the image, the image as a vagina, the vagina as a gorge that swallows our phantasics and regurgiates them as monstrosities. Something in us splitters and breaks into pieccs. We don't know what it is. I expect, that this has something to do with a form of catharsis, or, perhaps, only with the fact that, reaching beyond such an experience, we arc capable of turning away, of looking up out of the spell, which christian culture has cast on sexuality and, especially, on the female body. And perhaps we can turn toward a new world, another form of encounter, another form of living in and with our bodies. I don't know. But I have a feeling that a great ycarning lies on the dark ground of this film. A yearning, which waits to be freed, as Alicja Zebrowska waited in her stone coffin for a rebirth, which may mean nothing more than healing a body, which has for ages, since the beginning of history, even, been violated.