Contents of spoon-archives/avant-garde.archive/papers/orange.txt
Oranges and Lemons
Over the last 18 months (1987-1988), while more familiar protest has
been gathering pace across Eastern Europe, in the industrial town of
Wroclaw a new dissidence has emerged. Socialist Surrealism has
arrived in Poland under the banner of Orange Alternative. Unlike
those pursuing nationalistic or economic freedom, Orange Alternative
make no explicit demands at all; rather, they have adopted an
altogether more radical strategy - that of directly challenging on
the streets the State appatatus' monopoly on Truth. During the last
year and a half, the Orange Alternative (so called because orange is
a non-political colour in Poland - there is a nascent White
Alternative in Warsaw) have staged a series of "happenings" on the
streets of Wroclaw that have succeeded in attracting mass
participation as they expose to ridicule some of the most deep-seated
aspects of the ideological rhetoric of the communist State.
Many of these events have been truly inspired, combining playfulness
with a ruthlessly tongue-in-cheek approach that has consistently
wrong-footed the authorities. The prime mover and inspirational leader
of Orange Alternative is the taciturn yet charismatic Waldemar
Frydrych, known to all as "Major". Unshaven and dressed a little like
a New Age Traveller, the 35 year old independent writer, former
graduate in history and the history of art, generates a certain
amount of reverance a more and more extraordinary tales grow up
concerning his life. Major has been the main initiator of the
"happenings", the most successful of which have, as time has pass ed,
been honed down into succinct anecdotes that have received some airin
gs in the western press. For those that might have missed them, the
most reported of these starts with the "happening" on 1st June last
year, International Childrens' Day, when dozens of participants
dressed as gnomes or smurfs with red hats danced in the streets and
distributed sweets.
After an anti-war demonstration on 1st September, October 1st saw a
"happening" known as "Who's Afraid of Toilet Paper?". Focussing on one
of the primary espoused functions of the State as one
of redistributing the social product, the decision was made to aid the
authorities in their task - redistribution begins at home. At 4.00pm in
Swidnicka Street - site of many Orange Alternative happenings - Major
and others solemnly distributed single sheets of toilet paper to
passers-by. "Let us share it justly. Let justice begin from toilet
paper. Socialism, with its extravagant distribution of goods, as well
as an eccentric social posture, has put toilet paper at the forefront
of people's dreams. Are the queues for toilet paper an expression of
(a) a call for culture? (b) the call of nature? (c) the leading role
of the party in a society of developed socialism? Tick the right
answer." This same theme was later echoed when Major was arrested on
International Womens' Day for distributed sanitary towels in the
streets.
October 7th is the official Day of the Police and Security Service in
Poland. This time, Wroclaw youth under the banner of Orange
Alternative decided to assemble and march to demonstrate their
appreciation of these public servants for "doing their duty with a
smile", showering police officers and patrol cars with flowers.
Attempts to embrace the police and thank them were met with
reasonable force and Major was arrested once again.
Operation "Melon in Mayonnaise" took place on 12th October, the
anniversary of the Polish People's Army. Orange Alternative held
"manoeuvres" in the streets of Wroclaw under the slogan "The Warsaw
Pact - An Avant-Garde of Peace".
On 6th November, the eve of the October Revolution, Orange Alternative
held an elaborate celebration when about 150 people converged on a
restaurant which had been designated the Winter Palace. Two groups
had constructed large models of the battleships Potemkin and Aurora
and the leaflets distributed beforehand to announce the event
encouraged all to attend wearing something red to play the part of the
Reds. Banners were carried bearing slogans such as "We support Boris
Yeltsin" and "We demand the full rehabilitation of comrade Leon
Trotsky" (leading to the misreporting in the western press, who missed
the irony of the occasion, that the demonstration was by Trotskyist
youth.) Another banner demanded an 8-hour working day for the security
services.
As crowds gathered and passers-by of all ages started to join in and
shout "Revolution" and Bolshevik slogans, those who had not brought
something red to wear queued to buy Zapiekanki (a type of Polish
hot-dog that comes liberally dabbed with ketchup) in order to hold
them aloft. The police, realising what was happening, moved in to
close the hotdog stall down. The vendor argued that he had never done
such good business, but the police were adamant; no more hot-dogs were
to be sold. The next person in the queue, on being refused a hotdog,
asked for just ketchup and was promptly arrested.
During the referendum on social policy held on November 27th, Orange
Alternative demonstrated and called for Wroclaw to be the city with
200% turnout: "Vote Yes Twice". 150 people were arrested and detained
for a number of hours. Againon 7th December,the streets were flooded
with Santa Claus's: "Bring Christmas decorations, fir branches to
decorate the subway. Let's help the new administration in this noble
task... Let the new existence shape the new consciousness!!! Only
Santa Claus can save you from poverty." Confusion reigned as the
police tried to round up the Santas, arresting many official Santas in
the process. A crowd of more than 2,000 called for the release of
Santa and pressed in on the police, later surrounding the district
Police HQ before being dispersed.
Such "happenings" continued throughout Poland, in Wroclaw, Poznan,
Gdansk, Krakow and Warsaw during 1988; during the Nowa Huta strikes a
letter was read out to the workers giving support to strikes in the
most fulsome terms. The author of the letter was Lenin. Stalinist
hymns were sung by a crowd which gathered round the chimpanzee cage in
Wroclaw Zoo. On June 30th, following the release of activist and PPS
members Pinior and Borowczyk, a demonstration took place featuring a
mock trial at which the defendants were Pinior, Borowczyk,Marx and
Engels. More recently, Orange Alternative have paraded the streets in
groups as the People's Guard with toy guns and a pet dog, demanding
identification papers from the police, who demanded theirs. This
month, on the anniversary of the Russian Revolution, 4000 people
marched through Warsaw chanting "We love Lenin".
In all of these actions, Orange Alternative have enjoyed considerable
success and popular support (on occasions attracting the participation
of up to 13,000 people) by outwitting and embarrassing authorities who
maintain a system which relies on a single version of the truth for
its survival and who are used to a more direct form of protest. Whilst
initially Orange Alternative attracted some criticism that the style
of their actions brought the opposition into disrepute, their success
in partially demystifying opposition by involving ordinary people in
actions in such a way that they do not have to take on the lifestyle
of a militant means that they now have the support of many members of
WiP (Peace and Freedom) and the Polish Socialist Party.
The two questions which occupy a central position in considering such
a phenomenon, however, are firstly the long-term relationship between
Orange Alternative and the more explicit aims of the rest of the
Young Opposition in the Polish Socialist Party and WiP, and secondly
the contrast between the current success on the style of Orange
Alternative and the decline of such tactics in the West. On the first
question, at present there are excellent relations and much crossover
between Orange Alternative and other groups in the young opposition,
even if Waldemar Frydrych eschews a definitively political
interpretation of his motivation in organising the "happenings". When
asked "Do you set up happenings in order to expose the
totalitarianism of the system under which we live?" the reply was "I
do them because I do them, but one does things because of or for
something.. . Well yes, when I was preparing for the gnome happening,
I assumed that we would have a good time with sweets and
streamers..." Josef Pinior, former leading member of Solidarnosc and
now an activist in the PPS described himself as a "great champion" of
Orange Alternative, the content of whose actions "has been on the
borderline between culture and politics and has a surrealist form".
However, Orange Alternative, who are familiar with the ideas of Andre
Breton and the Situationists, encourage self-expression and activity
without a particular set of political demands - indeed the demands
they make are often absurdist and obscure (e.g. "Freedom and Water"
and "Let the world forces of peace flourish in the shade of the
martial arts") in order to avoid the star system of the official
(Solidarnosc) opposition. At the same time, the PPS, for instance, is
poised to consolidate and elucidate just such a set of demands in the
form of a programme at this year's First General Conference, due to
take place this November (1988), shifting the PPS from a broad
coalition of the young Left fighting for the rights of the oppressed
to a more distinct opposition party. Whether this could, in time,
bring them into any kind of conflict with the more anarchic antics of
Orange Alternative, or even whether such a move towards a programme
actually takes place, remains to be seen, but it is tempting to see
Orange Alternative as having the kind of expression that will always
find fertile ground no matter what administration is in power. Their
irony and parody could theoretically be levelled at anyone who has a
clear set of demands to put forward whilst they avoid criticism
themselves through the advocacy of a perpetual "party atmosphere" in
order to "scout out the reality in which we live".
More immediately striking, however, is the fact that, whilst the style
of such a Socialist Surrealism is familiar to use in the West, such an
approach has little popularity here compared with the sixties and
seventies. Indeed the only events which have taken place in Britain in
recent years which have had even a tiny element of some of the
characteristics of Orange Alternative are perhaps the impersonation of
businessmen during the "Stop The City" demonstrations of the early
eighties whose novelty quickly diminished as the police just as quickly
learnt to deal with them. Part of this contrast can be explained by the
extent to which the authorities have learnt to handle ironic criticism
and at the same time some of the skills of the more celebrated
practitioners of "political surrealism" have been enlisted by the free
market. Witness Jerry Rubin's graduation from Yippie prankster to
Yuppie party organiser and Jamie Reid's association with Malcolm
McLaren to help "market" anarchy and the Sex Pistols.
Similarly, in a recent Orange Alternative "happening" General
Jaruzelski had fun poked at him as "The Dragon of Wawel", a mythical
Polish figure. Jaruzelski replied on national television "I may not
be the dragon of Wawel, but I am a dragon". Initially felt to be a
victory in terms of recognition for Orange Alternative, it was quickly
realised that the lack of such a sense of humour had been precisely
what Orange Alternative had previously been exploiting so
successfully. The cunning response was thought to be the work of
government spokesman Jerzy Urban, long known to be something of a
quick-witted and smooth-tongued operator. Again, a story has emerged
that on one occasion when Orange Alternative joined an official
Childrens' Day parade, instead of meeting the usual heavy-handed
police resp onse they were merely officially announced over the
tannoy "...and here comes Orange Alternative", thus efficiently
defusing their potentially disruptive effect by simply incorporating
them into the celebrations.
Of course, Orange Alternative will still find plenty of mileage in an
assured brutal and inflexible response from the authorities and this
is their greatest weapon. But as a warning it should be noted, as the
global market draws ever nearer, esewhere that the skills necessary to
reveal them ultiple meanings within reality are in hot demand in the
world of advertising and marketing. That is not to say we live in
Poland's future, of course, but we do live in a system where there is
less reliance on a single official version of Truth, where multiple
truths mean multiple opportunities for selling and where stripping
away layers of meaning, ridiculing outdated assumptions with a
flourish of smug cynicism and packing your message with multifarious
bizarre and apparently unconnected references is the hallmark of the
very cutting edge of po-mo advertising techniques, now even being
adopted by the government in the marketing of social policy.
When we spoke to Major at a house in Wroclaw he waxed enthusiastic
about the possibility of an Orange Alternative international event
with thousands of people simultaneously across Europe dressing-up as
police and patrolling the streets of major cities. Whilst such an idea
has a certain breathtaking appeal, we in the UK already live in a
society where the authorities themselves can organise, and with a
straight face, a football match between striking miners and the
officers policing them.
George Branchflower, autumn 1988
from Here & Now no.7/8
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