Cultural glue

I am writing this column while travelling through southern Poland. I have just taken part in the 3rd International Art Meeting, Katowice 2000. Now I am heading for Berlin, nine hours on the train through a landscape so different from the one I know back home. This landscape rarely changes; there are no hills or mountains - it is flat from here to the Baltic.

Yet I leave behind Polish artists with whom I feel at home, Polish artists who have all travelled to Ireland to exhibit or perform - some of them many times. They talk of having an affinity with Ireland. Many artists from Ireland travel to Poland to work and share with the Poles this affinity. One Irish artist I know says it is the only country he will go to even if he has to pay for it himself.

The two countries do not have strong economic or diplomatic links. There is little shared history. So why do artists from such visually different countries feel such an affinity? Well, both countries have a strong verbal tradition. We love to talk and argue. Religion has played an important role. We both have a natural hatred of officialdom and administration. In the USA I saw road signs telling people to wear seatbelts - under the sign it said "It is our law" not "It is the law." The Poles and ourselves think of laws as something to be broken or got round. Even the new Assembly in the North, if it survives, is unlikely to change this.

It is strange then how the emigrants from both countries become the law enforcers. In Chicago there are two main police unions, one for the Irish, the other for the Poles. Perhaps our shared colonial background gives us a disrespect for law, yet in the land of the free we become the enforcers. Certainly emigration is something we have in common. If everyone from around the world returned to the country they claim to be from (perish the thought) then Ireland and Poland would disappear under a mass of bodies.

Even though both countries are shedding their rural and backward images for a modern one, tradition and the past are still considered important. However, looking deeper into our traditions and cultures we see differences. One Polish artist referred to our Celtic past as a strong cultural glue. I think he felt that the stability and strength of our Celtic background meant that we were freer to move forward. The Poles are very aware of how Celtic culture spread across borders; for the Poles it was the borders of their own country that changed.

Polish mythology has two separate roots - there is a folk culture and a high culture. High culture has its roots in the old Polish nobility. From the 16th century Poland was a republic of nobles. Only nobles had the rights of citizenship, and it was they who elected the king. The official language was Latin. During the invasions which started at the end of the 17th century, high culture was a tower of strength and national identity, especially among the nobility. Polish folk culture is a younger tradition based in the countryside. In the 16th century the political troubles allowed the peasant population to develop their own identity which had a strong folk affinity.

So there are similarities and differences in our pasts. Perhaps we need to look to current art practice to explain the affinity I spoke of. Both countries are at the edge of the international art scene. Neither of us are particularly aligned with London, Paris, New York, or wherever the new hub of contemporary Western art practice happens to lie. Unlike the English and Americans who seem to thrive on competing with each other, Irish and Poles thrive on each other's company, on sharing ideas.

Once the vodka is opened, or the whiskey poured, our oral traditions come out and the bonding starts. Sláinte - na zdrowie!

Brian Kennedy

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