Voloshyn Gallery is pleased to present Afternoon of a Faun, a solo exhibition by Karol Radziszewski, in which the artist takes a queer perspective on a figure who revolutionized the world of ballet – the Polish-Ukrainian choreographer and dancer Vaslav Nijinsky.
Karol Radziszewski works with painting, film, photography, and installation. Radziszewski has often reinterpreted the work of other artists, mainly of the Eastern European neo-avant-garde by looking at their work from a queer and feminist perspective, or identifying its queer aspects. He attempts to rewrite the official history and create his own narrative.
Vaslav Nijinsky (1889-1950) has fascinated Radziszewski for years; Afternoon of a Faun is not their first encounter. The dancer appeared in one of the twenty-two pictures in the monumental Poczet series— portraits of queer figures from Polish, and more broadly, Central European art,
science, and politics (this work is part of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw). The form of this series draws reference to Jan Matejko’s Poczet królów polskich (Portraits of Polish Kings, 1838-1893), which depicts Poland’s rulers in a chronological order. These portraits were typically found on the walls of every Polish history school class, and thus became ingrained into every student’s memory.
Radziszewski’s Poczet offers a new, non-heteronormative look at history, revealing queer heroes which are not a part of the school curriculum. Radziszewski’s work therefore inquires not only into history as a normative story of the past, but also as a tool for teaching, passing on, and securing knowledge about who we are, and who we can become in the future. Radziszewski presents the tale of Nijinsky in an unusual painterly timeline.
Vaslav was born in Kyiv, into a family of Polish émigré dancers. The exhibition’s story begins with a religious event—Vaslav’s Baptism in Warsaw in the Church of the Holy Cross. Little Vaslav has blurry edges, as if he were still taking shape, defining himself, emerging. Perhaps, however, Nijinsky’s edges will never be sharp, leaving the ballet master a blur, a legendary enigma. Amid whites, greens, and blacks, Vaslav is suspended between the holy water and the father’s hand. Radziszewski reconstructs the artist’s biography, holding it between the mystical and the erotic, the figurative and the abstract, the artistic and the vulgar. From these dichotomies, separated from the earth, yet inevitably falling down to it, a revolution is born.
As a boy of only a few years old, Vaslav and his sister wandered Kyiv at dusk. Practically every evening, he attended his parents’ performance. Kyiv of 1893 is a riot of colors, sounds, and smells. In the young Nijinsky’s mind, the evening strolls turn into exciting escapades in a vibrant city. The frosty, starry sky and the hero, Bohdan Khmelnitsky’s monument at Sophia Square. Was this how little Vaslav saw him in Kyiv in 1893? Trembling, indistinct, merged with his horse?
From his early youth, Nijinsky learned to dance, mainly at the Imperial Ballet School in Saint Petersburg, where he was immediately pointed out as an exceptional student, and a rising star. His striking talent and good looks quickly brought him the attention of much older patrons, lovers, caretakers, and groomers.
The likeness of his first lover does not appear in the picture, but his presence is there in the title—Prince Pavlov Lvov’s Apartment. Radziszewski takes the witty approach of having us see Nijinsky from the prince’s perspective, idealizing the young lover. Spread out on the bed and protruding his derriere. Like the Odalisque, seemingly defenseless, he meets the gaze. Another one, the Russian impresario, Sergei Diaghilev, resembles a vampire in Radziszewski’s picture, invited into the house through the slightly open door (Dancing for Diaghilev). For a long time, Diaghilev took care of not only Nijinsky, but his sister and mother as well. It was he who took Nijinsky to Paris, where his career really took off.
The majority of the exhibition contains direct references to Nijinski’s work. From the dancer’s wide repertoire, Radziszewski draws out the roles and pictures that are both gender and sexually ambivalent. He is interested in performance, movement, and dance; costume, disguise and camouflage.
Nijinsky looks out from the picture in full make-up and costume, with rose petals sewn on (The Spirit of the Rose). The red blends in places with his muscular body, he struggles with melancholy. The three other assembled pictures change, as in stop-motion animation, into the painter’s rendition of a dancer’s movement (Nijinsky as Harlequin, Tänzer Nijinsky [after Georg Kolbe], Afternoon of a Faun). Before Nijinsky turns a full pirouette, he transforms several times: a dancer with a raised leg in a Harlequin costume, like a faceless geometrical figure; Nijinsky with arms outstretched, like a flaming sculpture by the Nazi’s favorite sculptor, Georg Kolbe; and finally, with his chest and horns stuck out—the man and goat in Afternoon of a Faun.
Alongside The Rite of Spring, Afternoon of a Faun is where the artist broke with the principles of classical ballet, paving the way for formal dance experiments that continue to this day. From then on, the Faun in the ballet has been not a personification of perfection, but, like Nijinsky and the audience watching him, an earthly creature, full of tensions and eroticism. It is animalistic, with minimalist choreography recalling the flattened bodies of Egyptian hieroglyphs and renditions of protagonists on the surfaces of ancient Greek vases. Breaking the classical symmetries and hierarchies. An orgasm, a bout of vertigo.
Nijinsky writes in his diary that to feel is to be a god and not to feel is to be a monkey. He writes: “It was one’s body feeling, not one’s mind.” Then he enters the kingdom of mental illness, where he would remain for thirty years, until his death. Several dozen crayons and pencils on paper have been preserved from this period. Nijinsky draws compulsively, and the lines form circles, mandalas, the image of an eye. Perhaps these are scores for a choreography arranged in his head? The lines turn into steps, and the steps into constellations. Radziszewski closes the exhibition with an abstract work cribbed from Nijinsky, as if by the very act of copying he could unravel the artist’s mystery (Untitled [after Nijinsky]).
Karol Radziszewski’s Afternoon of a Faun is also an exhibition on art itself, and its revolutionary potential. Radziszewski not only joins the group of people who have painted, sculpted, and described Nijinsky, he also literally presents their work in his pictures: fragments of choreography, photography, sketches, costumes, and sculptures. He creates a half-documentative, half-imaginary labyrinth, presenting his strategy as an archival artist, adding the ballet master to a new canon of queer art. These actions contribute to an ongoing and arduous process of decolonizing stories of art and culture in Central and Eastern Europe. Radziszewski brings Nijinsky into a democratic space where he can exist outside of imperial propaganda, one in which he can be free.
Arms stretched out to the sides. Fingers and toes fanned out. A neck like a swan
and a goat, alternately stretched out and slumped down. The clock strikes the hour of the Faun. The afternoon sun does not set over Kyiv.
