MONIKA K. ADLER

Who is Petite Nicole? by Nicola Carley.

Chapter Four: The Mad Polish

Chapter four

The mad Polish

By the time the last week of February dawned, I had made friends with Jerome - another Canadian guy who had been staying in the Auberge and who, like me, had outstayed his welcome. He introduced me to the hostel just around the corner, which was great as it meant I only had a short distance to drag my possessions and they even had a lift – luxury! It felt as though I was beginning a new era. This excitement was soon dampened a few days later however, when I was told that the only bed available that night was a mattress on the floor in a room which already had one resident – or sharing the double bed with as yet unidentified resident. I took the floor. The next morning I was passing Starbucks on the start of another day scouring for jobs when through the glass, I noticed a girl I thought I recognised sitting in the window. She looked warm in a big long coat, and had dark, Eastern European looks with the almost compulsory highlights they often seemed to have in their hair. It shadowed half of her face and her wide, deep eyes. She sat inside, working on an Apple Mac as I stood freezing on the outside. I realised I recognised her because she too had been staying in the Auberge. I had never really noticed her before. She was the quiet ‘observer’ of the social experiments around her rather than a ‘participator’. I pushed the door open, walked over and introduced myself.

“Hi, I’m Nicola. I was staying in the same hostel as you the other day but I never had an opportunity to speak to you really.”

“Oh, yes. Of course I remember. You are the English girl in the hat.”

“Yeah. I guess that’s me.” I said, laughing. “I thought it needed a rest today. My name’s Nicola. Nice to meet you.” I proffered a hand.

“Hi, I’m Monika Adler. I’m from Poland.” She said taking it and I looked down, noticing her pale skin tone. “So, what are you doing in Paris?” She asked.

“To be honest? I guess there are many reasons really, but, well...” I paused. “More than anything I think, it’s that someone opened the door, just a crack, onto potentially, a whole new life. It opened to show me something with a beautiful exterior but I wasn’t here long enough to be able to scratch it off to see what was beneath it so, here I am, scratching!”

I wondered if I could also use that as an excuse to explain the awful state of my nails after living in a hostel for almost two months.

“You?”

“I’m an artist. I have an exhibition here in Paris, just off the rue de Rivoli, close to the Louvre,” she said, handing me a flyer. “I know some of the other artists working here in Paris and my friend agreed to loan me his exhibition space for a few weeks. Their art isn’t much good. They are all too obsessed with their own penises to see much beyond that but the relationship works for me at the moment,” she said, with a look of disdain. “You should come along and take a look at my work. I’m there every day from 1pm to around 7pm.”

“Cool. I will do. I have to do some job-hunting in the morning but I could pop by in the afternoon.”

***

And it was true, she was there, every day, all day with the video of her work playing on a loop, Nine Inch Nails providing the soundtrack to her Paris life. Like many artists, she sees herself as a work of art or as she calls herself – an international art icon. A glance at her own blog posts and the self-photography there and it would be easy to write her off as a narcissist. However, by looking beyond the surface, there is a sharp intelligence. For example, the key to her photograph of a dog turd on a Paris pavement lies in the title – “Bourgeois Paris” in which is embedded a distillation of hypocrisy. The Paris bourgeoisie are rich and ‘upper class,’ educated and privileged, yet they are happy to leave filth wherever they and their pooches roam – truly beautiful. Adler is fired by a passion to question society and lead society to question itself and I was captured by this energy from the first time I met her.

One critic writing on her blog said:

“To really understand Monika K. Adler’s art you have to put yourself above the social borders and political thoughts you know as everyday rhetoric, you have to open your mind and see the entire world in a single shot because behind every image is a very deep philosophy with its own arrogance, irony, romanticism, sadness, rebellion for freedom and change.”

Or at least that’s what I saw when I visited the gallery the first time and first laid eyes upon her ‘Chef-d’Oeuvre’ Mademoiselle Guillotine in life size. It quite simply stole my breath away. Looking beyond the mirror, the following were my thoughts on the work giving some explanation as to why later, I was willing to run all over Paris on her behalf:

The Unspoken Word

Monika K. Adler was born in Poland. She graduated from the School of Fine Arts and the European Academy of Photography in Warsaw, Poland. Her works have been shown in scores of exhibitions in Eastern Europe and published in trade magazines but Monika wanted to reach Western Europe and it seems in that world, to make it as an artist, without being well connected, you must be willing not only to sell your pictures but also your soul. Either that, or remove your knickers to secure a good agent.

I was struck by the poignancy of Mademoiselle Guillotine. It appeared to me, saturated with meaning. Having just come from London and a political climate of War and pro-human rights, this picture spoke volumes. In the UK recently, there had been an increasing awareness of the subordination of women in many countries and the many forms it takes; from the killing of baby girls in China to female castration in Africa and the Taliban’s regime of the degradation of women. Monika’s pictures seemed to give a voice to these women. Many classical artists throughout history portray the naked female body with a submissive quality; laid back poses, paintings of women naked with their babies and women relaxing in the nude or portraits to be hung over a mantelpiece. The talent in Monika’s pictures lies in her ability to retain the femininity of the female and at the same time, show the innate power that lies within her.

In this image, the power of the naked female body - far from subordinate - is a strong dichotomy. She is at once naked and masked creating a ferocious irony. The Western and Oriental symbols of femininity clash with such intensity that on first view, one might find oneself gasping for a breath. These symbols - the burkha and stiletto shoes - are superceded by her naked sex and the defiant, provocative stance. Her legs are not bound to keep them open, she chooses to keep them spread. This along with the expression in the eyes and the stiletto shoes (a fetishised object in Western culture) seem to fight against the masking of her face and the hands tied behind her back. Her ‘gaze’ challenges the voyeur to look her in the eye rather than at her nakedness and into her soul and ‘truth’. Perhaps this is something that many find difficult because it makes her less of an object. The eyes are the windows to the soul. It is how we read a person. Her gaze taunts one to look at her as a person at the same time as the authoritarian, totalitarian male – war, rape and the brutalisation of humanity, inferred by the symbolism in the image. The title, Mademoiselle, Guillotine appropriates her as the one capable of violence.

This image gives a voice to those women who cannot speak for themselves. It speaks against those forces that cover the female body and put it under wraps for exactly the reason displayed in this picture; the female body has a dangerous power. In fact, throughout history, women have been referred to as objects of danger. The Bible and Church Fathers are littered with quotes which portray women as; organs of the devil; the hissing of the serpent; the most dangerous of wild beasts; a scorpion; an ass; a dragon; a daughter of hell; a sentinel of falsehood; a sentinel of hell; the enemy of the peace. It can reduce some men to a helpless state, physically and emotionally inferior in that moment to the woman hence ‘feminine’ denotes in this picture, the very opposite of the dictionary definition.

The rhetoric in this image is a search for truth as it battles the stereotypes of femininity – assuming it is a weakness. It speaks out against the binds that society places on women; the roles it expects her to play. Religious and cultural dialectics are expressed in the stark ironies of the Burkha style mask in contrast with the naked genitalia and the world wide symbol of aid – The Red Cross - creates a context of War - in this picture, is not helping the woman from her binds. This could also be interpreted as another one of society’s binding, repressive symbols like that of the Burkha as women have often taken up the role of carer or nurse.

The photograph also speaks against censorship. Even in the Western world, the BBC will allow film of men with flaccid penises but a woman’s sex cannot be shown. It may be a Western woman’s ‘choice’ to wear stilettos but nevertheless, it conforms to the male’s view of what constitutes sexuality - something that is celebrated in the Western world. In the East, women conform whether by choice or otherwise, to the male-dominated culture and wear burkha. Covering up what is deemed to be ‘dangerous’ there: a woman’s face and body. Monika might fear for her life in Saudi-Arabia or Iran for creating such a work.

It would be easy to write this image off as an insult to women the world over but look beyond the veil. Here, polarised cultures are transcended to bring together both East and West. It is a comment on Paris where the Muslim ‘emigrant’ of countries such as Algeria and Morrocco meets the Western female in a sepia tone, nostalgic of a past long gone in the narrative of this photograph. Long live matriarchy.

From that moment, this image, moved me deeply enough that I pledged my allegiance to Monika K. Adler and her one-woman revolution. I was closely able to identify with its sentiment - the feeling that women have been abused, bound, gagged, covered up and forced to conform to a patriarchal and capitalist world view. My mother herself was sexually abused giving rise to her alcoholism, which systematically destroyed her and any relationship I had with her. My father believed that education for girls is a luxury, not obligatory and would rather have seen me married off at the age of 16. He refused to pay for me to go to college and after several horrendous secretarial type jobs, I decided the only way out was to study in the evenings. However, my fight for independence continues even now, years after leaving Paris because how can creative thought flourish with the incessant noise of corporate clatter?

Interestingly, Robbie was entirely repelled by Monika. Perhaps unsurprising considering that he was a man. It had taken me a couple of weeks to break through his icy exterior, but he thought her predatory, egotistical and vacuous and saw nothing but darkness in her work. I saw another side. Predatory or not, I felt that some of her work had something powerful to say. I did wonder, looking at the photo she’d taken of the dog turd, whether I might be able to pass off that ‘pain-au-chocolat’ I’d forgotten about in my suitcase as art. No, I thought to myself. I had better hang onto it. Never know when you might need a few extra calories, even if they were a bit white with age and fungus.

Chernobyl of Love – Makabryczna baśń o Wyzwoleniu

Z prochu powstałaś i w proch się obrócisz … zanim jednak to nastąpi … zagrasz w wielu kiepskich rolach narzuconych Ci przez religię, społeczeństwo, edukację i wychowanie. Zagrasz też w miłość i po przez nią i w niej z czeźniesz lub się wyzwolisz.

Film Moniki K. Adler i Marty Potulskiej „Chernobyl of Love aka Drink Blood of your Sin” wyzwala jego bohaterkę z traum przeszłości osobistej i społecznej. W serii na przemian makabrycznych i metaforycznych obrazów kobieta pozbywa się ulepionej z doświadczeń innych „ siebie samej”. Najpierw musi zabić i zjeść „mózg” patriarchatu, organ kontroli i unicestwienia, by odejść i doświadczyć dobrodziejstw wolnej woli. Krew słodsza jest niż miód, cierpienie doprowadza do oświecenia, oświecenie do wolności. Kanibalizm seksualny niczym magiczne odczynienie przeszłości zwane zemstą krzyczy spełnieniem i wyzwoleniem totalnym.

Chernobyl of Love zrealizowany w czerwonym lesie niedaleko nieczynnego już reaktora atomowego na Ukrainie to makabryczna baśń o zdobywaniu siły, siły narodzonej z cierpienia, ale i z przemocy. Agresja Marsa i nieprzenikliwość kobiety drapieżnika dają jej przepustkę do nowego życia, tylko od niej zależy jak je wykorzysta, którą drogę wybierze i jak odnajdzie się w samoświeceniu, a raczej w samoświadomości.

Monika K. Adler

13th Jan. 2012