Różowy?

"A large, trapezoid-shaped white bed quilt has been spread on the floor. The sharpest corner has been pierced with a wooden signpost saying, in pink, przejscie (passage). Flat river stones form a passage across the quilt. They are arranged into a segment of the circle that has the signpost at its centre. At some distance from the installation have been heaped up soft parts of my sculptures:pillows, cushions, various quilted and stuffed objects, pink and white. Upon a moment's reflection, I pick up a pink 'author's flag' and an armful of the objects. I enter the quilt and try to keep my balance, walking from stone to stone. I try in my boots to walk on the stones without staining the white quilt. Losing balance, I throw the pillows, coverlets, and cushions away and the reach the far "shore" with the flag only. I sit down and stay like that. The rejected soft objects lie on the other side. Photographs documenting the performance and the flag itself are later displayed on the wall behind the installation" - Passage Beyond the Quilt (first performed at BWA Krakow, Poland, March 1979), Maria Pininska-Beres.

Fair play to Maria Pininska-Beres. She may have been dead for over twenty years but she's pretty much written my review of her Living Pink art exhibition at The approach (lower case affectation, the gallery's own) for me.

Which is just as well as it left me utterly baffled. That's not uncommon. I'm often baffled. Sometimes confused. Occasionally discombobulated. I don't necessarily mind that. It's good to try something new, break away from one's comfort zones, but I really couldn't get my head around what the curators were doing with her work in this small, above a rather pleasant pub, Bethnal Green gallery. Perhaps I'd have needed to witness the actual performance instead.

So I reached, as I so often do, for the pamphlet you can pick up on the door. I often think if art needs explaining then it's not really working as well as it should do. But, having said that, I'm a very conscientious art reviewer and wouldn't like to think I'd missed out on something.

I'm still not sure if I had or not. Taking its name from a 1981 performance (the year of the artist's fiftieth birthday) in Krakow, this modest collection was Pininska-Beres's first exhibition outside Poland but I'm not totally convinced that 2019 Britain, even in its Brexit addled state, compares with the political oppression of Poland in the early eighties.

Pininska (I'm feeling more familiar now) had planted a pink rose bush outside a Krakow gallery and asked, in three languages, "whether roses are going to bloom pink in Poland next spring?". It was her expression of hope at a time when there wasn't much around. Nothing bloomed in the spring. Not in the rose bush outside the gallery, nor in the wider Poland.

Pininska's use of pink is said to have "simultaneously and concisely encapsulated Pininska's defiance of an undemocratic and patriarchal political system whilst being a symbol of freedom that also celebrated the feminine and the erotic". Some of these works (with titles like End of the Feast and Smudged with the Sky) were made during a "period of extreme surveillance and oppression" within Poland. That's all well and good and I can see how it would have made perfect sense, even been quite shocking, in its original context.

But, now, and here, I'm not sure it really says anything. It's more of a history lesson than something that says anything to us about the times we're living in now. The cruel thing about history is that it doesn't repeat itself, at least not exactly, but keeps finding new variations. Bastards evolve their strategies and techniques just as surely as the rest of us do to serve their/our purpose and, therefore, art that gently revolted (for anything stronger would be too risky) against General Jaruzelski isn't necessarily a perfect fit to make sanguine comment about the evils of Boris Johnson, austerity, and Brexit.

Of course, not all art has to comment on current issues (though two of the very best exhibitions I've seen in recent years had very strong political messages) but, without that, Pininska's work is simply quilts, pillows, flags, cushions, and lots and lots (too much eventually) pink.

It's not unpleasant to look at (though it's not particularly exciting or aesthetically pleasing either). It's just a bit pointless now. Perhaps Polish expats will get a lot more out of it than I did. In a spirit of Solidarnosc with those Polish expats I went downstairs to the pub and drank two pints of Litovel. Which I then realised was a Czech lager and not a Polish one. What a total glupek!