Life After Dark
by David Crowley, Royal College of Art
Creative Review Article

There is no possibility of mistaking where power lies in Warsaw today. The city’s unequivocal embrace of capitalism is marked in the countless billboards that cover almost every surface of the Polish capital. Entire façades of hotels, high-rise blocks and even historic buildings are cloaked in massive fabric screens promoting Coca-cola or ice cream. Behind these glossy surfaces, many of the communist-era structures on which these ads are fixed are slowly crumbling. Advertising, it seems, represents not only Poland’s happy embrace of commerce but also its disregard for the communist past.

This impression is not, however, entirely accurate. One can still trace a seam of socialist advertising in the city, not least in the neon signs which punctuate the city skyline. Most were installed in the 1960s and 1970s and, surprisingly, many still function. Photographer Ilona Karwinska has been drawn to these illuminated signs, often recording these remnants of the socialist city just before they were discarded or the buildings on which they were fixed demolished. Exhibited in Warsaw’s Palace of Culture and Science in November 2007, her photographs attracted considerable interest from the city’s citizens. The letters pages of the city’s newspapers and email forums filled with memories of neon. Some writers charted their affection for these radiant symbols, emphasising the memories of friends and family that these signs trigger: ‘I remember seeing this sign every week when we took the bus to my grandmother’s flat’. Others recalled the crisis of the mid 1980s when the country slid into bankruptcy and the neon and street lights were periodically switched off to save power. As one writer noted, without neon the city suddenly seemed a greyer place. It was as if these neon signs – often advertising the services of seamstresses, chemists and cafés – had been forgotten until being captured by Karwinska’s lens.

Nocturnal Spectacles

But how can the existence of these often graceful and witty signs be explained in the first place? After all, the shops were rarely overflowing with goods in communist Poland. Consumers did not need to be encouraged to shop (and in fact the notorious queues in the Eastern Bloc were the sign of an economy which could not deliver the goods). Moreover, official ideology was antagonistic to commerce. Production, in the brave new world of the People’s Republic of Poland, was to prevail over consumption. Accordingly, one ideologue in the early 1950s called the advertising hoarding in the West the ‘shrill screams of a hyena’. By contrast, the socialist city was to present its citizens with new ‘cultural’ values. The Marszalkowska Residential District built in the centre of the city in the early years of communist rule was to become the model for Poland’s future socialist cities. It was decorated with uplifting sculptures of muscular workers and sturdy peasant-women ‘building socialism’. Its shops were obscured by the shadows cast by elegant, deep arcades. These devices made sure that the passer-by admired the overall and harmonious effect of the district’s monumental classical forms rather than the goods for sale.

Not all responses were so sympathetic. Journalist Leopold Tyrmand, for instance, objected to the dreary appearance of the new city centre scheme in his now famous diary of 1954:

Monotonous, identical, gigantic, flat boxes with columns, turrets and allegorical figures will extend Warsaw’s greatest streets for kilometres. No one who has seen these designs, will be able to imagine himself in this monotonous and appallingly boring place ... These buildings will provide apartments, offices and hotels. Yet it is impossible to imagine them bearing neon signs, advertisements or any individual accent …

Tyrmand expressed his views in private. It was not long, however, before such criticisms could be publicly vented. When the Eastern Bloc tried to cast off the dark shadow of Stalin, much attention was given to the appearance of Warsaw. How could it be brought back to life? For some, the answer lay in neon. Stolica, a popular magazine, led the ‘campaign’ to neonise Warsaw: Marszalkowska Residential District – with its monumental sculptural ornaments and classical colonnades – would shake off its dreary atmosphere with ‘advertising, lighting and neon’. These are ‘the elements which in the evening hours lend great liveliness and diversity to a city.’

The embrace of neon did not, however, mean a capitulation to capitalism. It fell into the politically correct category of ‘socialist advertising’ based on ‘dependability and total trust’. Like signposts, these brilliant torches in the cityscape would be useful landmarks by which citizens and visitors could navigate a rapidly growing city. Fixed and unchanging, they would not encourage the voracious cycle of fashion on which capitalism thrived. By simply announcing a commodity or service (‘Save with the Polish Saving Fund for your apartment’), neon would disseminate important information to the people.

All this was true enough, but the results were not quite as prosaic as neon’s supporters suggested. The illuminated lettering and dancing symbols announcing the appearance of ‘Cocktail’, a new cafe, or ‘Ambassador’ and ‘Szanghaj’, both restaurants, introduced a new cosmopolitan vocabulary to a city in a country which had largely had its borders closed to the rest of the world. Strange creatures settled on the city’s buildings including animated butterflies (to mark, of course, a florist’s) and electric spider (announcing the presence of a music shop). The city authorities became keen patrons of neon; at one time instructing Reklama, the state-owned sign company, to ‘neonise’ the entire length of a major thoroughfare running to the city centre. The authorities – despite the communist claim to be expert planners – had misjudged the cost. The project would, as the director of Reklama acknowledged, have required 12,000 metres of neon tubes. Many of the signs were the product of talented graphic designers. A leaping volleyball player overlooking the main Stalin-era square – used to advertise the presence of a sports shop below – was designed by Jan Mucharski, a member of the renowned Polish Poster School of the 1950s and 1960s. An animated sign, she launches her ball in an arch that rises into the air and falls, in sequence, down the side of the building in sixteen neon ‘frames’.

The new neon lightscape suggested life after dark. Shaking off Stalin, the Poles enjoyed a liberal period when modern art could be displayed and jazz, and satirical cabaret performed without attracting the attentions of the censor. This new mood was captured in Andrzej Wajda’s neglected 1960 film ‘Innocent Sorcerers’. Warsaw’s shadowy jazz clubs and inky black streets, lit only by neon signs and the light cast from shop windows formed a backdrop to a love story. Neon was inseparable from pleasure.

Photographer as curator

Karwinska was first drawn to make her photographs when she noticed these signs disappearing from the cityscape in 2005. This pattern of loss has continued in the months which have passed since. A number of the signs and the buildings on which they were once fixed which feature in this book have been removed or face demolition. The Relax cinema on ul Zlota which once drew audiences with a backlit logo in looping red lettering has closed and its façade been cloaked with a billboard. Supersam – a 1960s supermarket which was once graced by large 3-d lettering – has been demolished, despite a wave of protests in the city about the loss of one of its familiar landmarks.

One of the first signs to draw Karwinska’s attention, the 1974 lettering marking the entrance of the ‘Berlin’ gift shop disappeared before she had the chance to photograph it. She rescued the six-illuminated letters from a skip and set about having the sign restored by the company which had made it over thirty years earlier. Karwinska is not neon’s only saviour. In 2006 the volleyball player was restored with funds raised by another young Polish artist, who, when asked why she had saved the sign, said ‘this neon comes from an exceptional time when, thanks to a policy which set out to brighten the city, it was possible to achieve great advertising, often abstract, by renowned artists.’ This is, of course, a provocation in a culture which still finds it difficult to find virtue in the communist years. But neither Karwinska nor the growing number of young neon enthusiasts is infected with the nostalgia for communism which in Germany has been dubbed ‘ostalgie’. Too young and too smart to yearn for the past, they find something else in these signs. The value in these bright symbols lies in their capacity to cast a distinctly local light on the tidal wave of global advertising which has washed over the city.

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