Pawel Leszkowicz
This paper examines how the Polish counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s opened up space and possibility for two gay action artists to express their different sensibilities and embodiments and to project an alternative vision of subjectivity, masculinity and gender politics. This study is part of a bigger research project of tracing the homoerotic expression in art — behind the Iron Curtain — in Eastern Europe and the crucial role of counterculture for such subversions. Krzysztof Jung and Krzysztof Niemczyk performed (with) their naked and eroticized bodies; their actions reveal fascination with the male body as an aesthetic, sexual and rebellious subject. The visual conventions of the People’s Republic of Poland distorted and veiled the male body: full male nudity, considered pornographic, was censored. The artists found in the countercultural art communities in Warsaw and Cracow an atmosphere which allowed them to explore their male nudity and sexuality as a basis for oppositional performance art that expressed what was then called ‘homosexual’ fantasies and desires. The actions of Krzysztof Niemczyk and Krzysztof Jung were examples of queer counterculture in the communist system and today they can be analysed in political as well as intimate terms. Through the exploration of the tabooed male nudity, the two performers pioneered art as a form of sexual dissidence, a vision topical in the context of the oppressive heteronormative systems that started to rule Eastern Europe after 1989.