Up Front

Close Looks : Infinite Bison

The Art of Magdalena Abakanowicz
By Seán Carlson

Along the Polish-Belarusian border, the Białowieża Forest is home to some 1,800 square miles of old-growth woodland. I had hoped to see the national park during my first visit to Poland, in August of 2005, but the thousand miles I ended up covering by train, bus, and minivan didn’t bring me far enough east to catch sight of the primeval preserve. Throughout my travels, I wrote to my grandmother, moja babcia, my father’s mother, back in Massachusetts, sending postcards as well as brief updates from internet cafes. She had visited the country of her parents’ birth once during my childhood, after Solidarność and the fall of the Berlin Wall, and had kept relationships alive through her correspondence and continuity with the Polish language. As I shared my experiences with her—flying into Wrocław, meeting our family in Warsaw and Łomża, spending an afternoon at the small farm her father left behind—I thought of her reading my notes.

“I always feel better when I hear from you, thank you,” she replied. “Sorry I am not in condition to travel otherwise I would be there, too.” She hoped to visit Poland again the following year, health permitting, but her condition worsened. A month after I returned to Ireland, she passed away. 

The following summer, I invited my sister Tara to travel with me to Poland so that she too could share in a greater understanding of the country and our family. This time, we made it to Białystok, where cousins hosted and drove us to see the great Białowieża Forest. We walked together beneath its canopy of oak and alder, soft-stepping over moss beds. We had come from Sunday Mass, and a cousin’s wife wore her heels while foraging for mushrooms in the decay of broken twigs and fallen leaves. We breathed in both the emptiness and the fullness of the new and ancient growth that surrounded us. The forest floor deadened our footfalls as first we heard, then saw, the European bison. 

Within a grassy patch set apart by a wooden fence, several hulking horn-tipped creatures grazed on the young bark and remaining green of snapped branches scattered on the ground. They bore a resemblance to more robust, heavily shouldered oxen or yaks. The relative petiteness of a single calf, a few months old, highlighted the heft of the adults—one of the largest animals in all of Europe, weighing roughly two-thirds of a ton. Beyond their sheer size, I found myself mesmerized by their coats. Well past the spring molting season, a light trim of brown hair revealed ripples of muscle extending from their necks to their flanks, yet variegated wedges of fur ran like shreds of a cotton bathroom mat on and off the ridges of their spines with a softer, reddish hue. The clumps gave the appearance that the bison had been partly shorn, each in a different fashion. 

“Oh, give me a home, where the buffalo roam,” I thought, might even have sung for a moment, that childhood earworm of the American West, an idyll far from the Polish countryside, as we marveled at the singular żubr, the plural żubry, miraculous rarities grazing in front of us with the familiar disinterest of a cow. These lumbering bovines, descendants of aurochs, once wandered as far west as the Seine and as far east as the Volga spilling south toward the Caspian Sea, bound in either direction by continental rivers. But as my sister and I observed their thick coats and thicker bodies, fewer than two thousand survived.

Seventeen years later, I reflected on this history while exploring the Tate Modern’s recent exhibition, Magdalena Abakanowicz: Every Tangle of Thread and Rope. Promoted as a body of work from someone who “changed what it meant to be a sculptor and led the way for other artists working with fiber,” the collection opened with Abakanowicz’s early tapestries created from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, following her undergraduate studies at the Academy of Plastic Arts in Warsaw. At first glance, these pieces appeared to conform to the traditional styles of Polish ornamental embroidery. Closer study revealed departures from convention. With a penchant for earth tones, horsehair, and other natural elements, Abakanowicz breathed life into flat surfaces by adding touches of texture. She pushed her threading past standard rectangular frames, leaving variable, imperfect edging, hinting at the boundaries she would go on to blur.

An intro panel accompanied by a black and white photograph of Abakanowicz weaving at her loom noted her luck at having completed her studies the year after Joseph Stalin’s death, as “censorship and restrictions of the arts in Poland enforced by the Soviet regime seemed to ease.” Classified as a folk artist, she received state support. But it was the studio space shared by Maria Laskiewicz, more than thirty years her predecessor when it came to the design of tapestry, which enabled Abakanowicz to experiment with the tools and materials of her craft. In her improvisations she showcased an excellence often overlooked in the everyday, of handmade and hand-mended clothing, lace table settings, woven blankets and baskets. Though fashioned with skill, such cultural objects were typically confined to the home rather than celebrated for their aesthetic potential. In Abakanowicz’s hands, these traditions would evolve into extraordinary innovations in form. 

By the late sixties, her tapestry work gave way to more organic experiments. In 1967’s Diptère, she reimagines the wings of the common fly, tenuous threads holding together a patchwork of brown fabrics—horsehair married with hemp and sisal—that evokes a torn poncho of burlap or the tatters of a well-worn pelt. In her 1975 piece Hand, Abakanowicz shows that, even if breaking from tradition, she had her complex family history in mind. The frayed appendage separated from an arm, from a body, recalls the wartime dislocations of her childhood.  

In 1939, after Germany’s invasion of Poland and the outbreak of World War II, her family fled to the forest near Krępa, where they spent four years on an estate owned by her mother, a member of Polish nobility who had married a man with landowning Russian and Tatar ancestry. Eventually though, the war shattered any semblance of security they had managed to create. When the occupying army reached their land, Nazi gunfire tore into her mother’s arm. The family then fled to Warsaw, where they survived despite the obliteration of the city. In the exhibit, a photograph titled “Artist at her country home” shows Abakanowicz during her childhood smiling while holding the reins of a young horse, her head pressed in comfort against its throat. Newfallen snow covers the ground and a row of wooden carts behind them. The image speaks to the central role that nature would play in her future as an artist.

In a later work, Głowa nosorożca, or Head of Rhinoceros (1990), Abakanowicz wrapped a rhino horn in stiffened burlap to create a wall mounting that recalls her father’s taxidermied trophies and the heads and hides of hunts. Her concern for nonhuman lifeforms would find greater expression in her eponymous Abakan tapestries, many of which were on display at the Tate Modern. Labeled “A Fibrous Forest,” a dense scattering of fabric installations created between 1967 and 1984 dangled from ceiling fixtures, drawing its viewers’ gazes both upward and downward and around. These works recast fabric as sculptural installation sets. As they drooped and draped in shades of beige and red and black but mostly brown, the Abakans filled the gallery, massive yet malleable and supple. Their designs, the layers of stitchings, errant but intended tufts like hair and fur, bridged the domestic and the natural, the ancient and the futuristic. A rope spread like entrails or an umbilical cord across the floor, reminders of the end and the beginning of life. The room’s intro panel quoted Abakanowicz describing “her installations as ‘situations’ and later as ‘environments,’” refusing categorization: “Larger than me, they were safe like the hollow trunk of the old willow I could enter as a child in search of hidden secrets.” 

Within the Abakans, I saw the conjuring of an infinite world. I paced around the rough circularity of each work, close enough to witness the consequences of each thread, the openings and closures, the obvious and the hidden, the countless points they connected within a defined space.  They brought me back both to the bison and to my grandmother. Though the numbers of żubry have been growing, they remain endangered after centuries of European slaughter, their near disappearance not dissimilar to the skull stacks and pelt piles that marked the decimation of their American cousin. Unencumbered by the shifting boundaries of nations and empires, in pursuit of vegetative interests with little heed to territorial claims, still the bison fell victim to humanity’s horrors. Even in Białowieża, several hundred years ago the Polish king Władysław II Jagiełło established his original biało wieża, or white tower, to serve as a platform from which to commence hunting. 

When my sister and I saw the bison, we hadn’t been far from the village my great-grandmother left behind a full century earlier, walking for days to board a boat from the Baltic for a life first in Paterson, New Jersey, and then in Yonkers, New York, where she would continue speaking Polish all her years despite the swirl of English around her. Four of her five sons served in the U.S. military during World War II, one fighting back on the continent she had departed. Her only daughter, my grandmother, kept the family’s connections to Poland alive, writing to relatives there through Soviet-era censors, and learning to read the lines left unwritten in their replies. Cousins told me that when it was difficult and expensive to procure medicine, she used to stitch brand-name paracetamol behind the buttons of the used clothing she sent in her packages. When my grandmother died in America, they held a Mass in remembrance of her in Warsaw. I don’t know if my grandmother was familiar with Abakanowicz or her work, but I’m certain she would have appreciated the transformative potential of handicrafts and the statement imprinted on the exhibit wall: “I wanted to make people aware that my captive country still has a high level of old culture contributing to the world heritage, and is at the same time able to speak about the recent reality with the very personal strong voice of modern art.”

Still, browsing the life and work of Abakanowicz within the halls of a building repurposed from London’s former Bankside Power Station, decommissioned purveyor of energy and enabler of pollution, I sensed her awareness of terror, of uncertain yet pending catastrophe. In the patches of fabric striking inward and outward, the unpredictable outgrowths, ingrowths, and various slits, clumps, and humps of fabric, there’s a warning about our nature, our penchant for harm to ourselves and others. 

In a corner of a room studded with husky stone-like forms, Embryology suggested early pregnancies and the qualities of human digits, starchy amputations of fingers and toe tips, but also of potatoes and a hint of unthanked kitchen labor. Abakanowicz’s fragmentation continued in her larger sculptures wrought of iron, the partial shapes of people plodding in place, a headless array of legs and feet in Poznań's Nierozpoznani, the kindred Agora in Chicago, and Puellae at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. 

A video interview toward the conclusion of the Tate Modern showcase played in a loop, reasserting the artist’s concern for the natural environment in an era facing new climate crises. Off-screen someone asks Abakanowicz if she could explain the meaning of her works, but she deflects, encouraging viewers to interpret her art for themselves. To look closely at an Abakan is not only to see the body of a beast hung by a rope but also to see its nature and its environment, a mystery of its survival despite the powerful forces arrayed against it. Suspended from above, at risk on Earth but infinite in the hands of Abakanowicz, her tapestries embody the perpetuity of a familiar prayer: jak była na początku, teraz i zawsze, i na wieki wieków—as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.