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PART TWO: IDENTITIES, BORDERS, AND MEDIATIONS

Transmigrating Forms: Tadeusz Mysłowski as Cultural Mediator in Transatlantic Exchange

Edyta Frelik

Abstract

This article explores the work of Tadeusz Mysłowski, a Polish-American artist active in New York City since 1970, as a case of multidirectional transatlantic cultural exchange. A self-declared “transmigrant,” Mysłowski embodies the figure of the “cultural mediator,” a concept developed by Michael Cronin and Sherry Simon to describe how individuals translate, reframe, and adapt cultural codes across linguistic and spatial boundaries. His art engages with both the legacy of the European avant-garde—especially constructivism and geometric abstraction—and the American movements of minimalism and conceptualism he encountered after his arrival in the U.S. Unlike earlier European émigrés who quickly assimilated into the American art world, Mysłowski entered as an outsider, navigating New York through visual means rather than language. His early projects—particularly those centered on the city’s gridded layout—translate the urban environment into layered visual compositions that reflect not only aesthetic hybridity and spatial practice but also the material and mnemonic dimensions of lived experience. This adaptive/translational approach aligns with Michel de Certeau’s notion of spatial practice and offers a counterpoint to dominant narratives of American cultural export. Mysłowski’s work reveals how European visual traditions can act on and reshape American cultural forms, complicating Cold War-era assumptions of one-way influence. As both recipient and reframer of transatlantic currents, Mysłowski exemplifies the subtle, ongoing work of cultural mediation that defines the global, post–Cold War artistic landscape.

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1Cities, as Sherry Simon convincingly argues in her book Cities in Translation: Intersections of Language and Memory (2012), have always been “translation zones” in which “awareness and appreciation of difference” are heightened by “the coexistence and competition among meaning systems” (160). The work of Tadeusz Mysłowski—who arrived in New York City in 1970 from communist Poland—is a notable example of how crucial urban experience can be in the evolution of a late twentieth-century modernist into a true “cultural mediator.” His art enacts a dynamic cross-fertilization of cultural codes, engaging with both the historical burden and the structural logic of urban modernity. Employing new modes of expression and practice to respond to the diverse and multifaceted concerns of contemporary society as experienced by a transmigrant, Mysłowski not only acknowledges global transcultural interconnectedness but also highlights humans’ intertwinement with nature and the agency of diverse entities that store and transmit memory—from sociocultural and technological artifacts that shape and augment cognition to non-human forms of environmental memory.

2The concept of “cultural mediator,” first introduced by Michael Cronin and Sherry Simon in their essay “The City as Translation Zone” (123), relates Mysłowski’s New York City projects to the approach adopted by Michel de Certeau in his eponymous study The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), where he devotes an entire chapter to New York City. Particularly important here is the fact that one of the key interpretive tools de Certeau employs to “read” New York is analyzing trajectories and maps. A trajectory, he explains, “suggests a movement, but it also involves a plane projection, a flattening out,” and its “transcription,” or “graph” (xviii), is precisely what the map represents as a kind of “tableau,” “a totalizing stage on which elements of diverse origin are brought together” in a unified whole (121). De Certeau famously describes the activities and interactions of the various constituents of and participants in urban life in terms of strategies and tactics, the former the domain of governments, organizations and institutions, the latter encompassing various everyday practices, or “ways of operating.” He also notes that similarly to “the immemorial intelligence displayed in the tricks and imitations of plants and fishes,” in the streets of modern megalopolises “there is a continuity and permanence in these tactics” (xix–xx).

  • 1 Interestingly, texturology is a term coined by a painter, Jean-Philippe-Arthur Dubuffet.

3While there is no indication that Mysłowski was aware of de Certeau’s work in the 1980s, there are many striking correspondences between their respective viewpoints. Take, for instance, the Frenchman’s idea of “the Concept-city,” which he describes as “a place of transformations and appropriations. … a subject that is constantly enriched by new attributes” (95). Stating that “urban life increasingly permits the re-emergence of the element that the urbanization project excluded” (95)—“the microbe-like, singular and plural practices which an urbanistic system was supposed to administer or suppress” (96)—de Certeau argues that social codes, which are often symbolic and resort to metaphors and ellipses, to be applicable and functional must be both transcribable and translatable (encodable and decodable), able to “decipher a system covered up by an order that is superimposed on it but of the same type” (155). Mysłowski could not agree more, though, unlike de Certeau’s “texturology” (through which term the critic ingeniously translates texture into text),1 his transformations of the city’s rich texture rely mostly on the grammar of visual forms rather than on cross-lingual transfer.

4As an artist, Mysłowski was shaped by his studies of geometric abstraction and constructivism at Kraków’s Art Academy in the late 1960s, but the story of his life is one of many journeys and transmigrations, punctuated with shorter and longer stays in many other cities which provided the necessary context(s) in which he was able to develop and grow. Born in 1943, he grew up in Lublin, an important population and administrative center in eastern Poland, a region historically inhabited by Catholic Poles, Orthodox East Slavs, and Ashkenazi Jews. Although by the end of World War II most traces of its multicultural and plurilingual past had all but been erased, Lublin continued to expand under Communism’s oppressive conditions. From an early age, Mysłowski developed a habit of walking through the city that attuned him to its rhythms and spatial textures. Reflecting years later on how this experience shaped his artistic sensibility, he recalled:

I covered this space in time, and that generated a structure in me, the structure of approaching something, transgressing something. And so today, whenever I enter the [Lublin] Old Town through the Trynitarska Tower, my favorite gate, I feel pleasure. I get into the tissue of this city by crossing its medieval walls. … The Trynitarska Tower is for me like the Tower of Babel, a kind of nucleus through which one enters this unique organism. You can climb to the top to get a bird’s eye view of the city, and by turning around you can see its layout, see where you are. (Mysłowski, Interview, my translation)

5Leaving Lublin in 1963 to continue his art studies in Kraków, Mysłowski soon found that many of his teachers at the Academy were out-of-touch with the radical work of important Polish avant-gardists like Władysław Strzemiński, Katarzyna Kobro, and Henryk Stażewski. His attraction to their art and thought was strengthened after his trip to Kyiv, where he became familiar with such leading representatives of Eastern European Constructivism like Malevich, Goncharova, Rodchenko, Yermilov, and Bohomazov, from whom he may have learned that two crucial constituents of early modernist abstraction were verbal language and architecture, two different codes whose interaction within a visual work produces new dimensions of form, meaning, and experience. Mysłowski’s subsequent brief sojourns in Dresden and Paris further confirmed his sense that the modern city was the proper locus for his investigation of “the essence of things,” which for him meant bringing into view, as one critic puts it, “abstract/formal and real/societal aspects of a relationship” (Cohen 38).

6The climax of the formative part of Mysłowski’s continental education was a one-year stay in Paris in 1969–1970, during which time he became conversant with Western European constructivist styles (Neo-Plasticism, Bauhaus, and French Purism). The most important discovery he made was that, like their Eastern European counterparts, the Dutch, German, and French modernists “viewed the arts as an integrated contribution to a functional society” (Mysłowski, Then & Now 142), which made them kins of urban planners and architects as well as social reformers and visionaries. While in Paris, Mysłowski in the same studious manner examined the city’s historical buildings and other landmarks and Art Nouveau and L’Esprit Nouveau designs of such key innovators as Hector Guimard and Le Corbusier. Especially Le Corbusier’s utopian ideas about constructing a perfect city (“Radiant City”) must have made a lasting imprint on the imagination of the aspiring artist, who would soon encounter in real life a stunning example of modern urban landscape in which, as Le Corbusier had envisioned, human spaces and amenities seemed to be harmoniously intertwined with nature, with residential neighborhoods featuring cruciform skyscrapers and recreational tracts cohesively connected with one another through efficient transportation grids and separated from the city’s commercial and industrial areas.

  • 2 The Hochmans, Jewish Lubliners, had left Poland two years earlier in the wake of the Communist auth (...)

7Denied an extension of his French visa, Mysłowski decided not to return home but instead join his Polish paramour Irena Hochman in America,2 thus becoming an emigrant like the thirteen-thousand Polish Jews (about a half of the Jewish population still present in Poland) who were forced out of the country in the wake of the Communist authorities’ anti-semitic campaign in 1968. He embarked on the same route millions of Europeans had taken before him—from a port of departure on the Old Continent to New York City, the gateway of America—but, unlike most of those earlier emigrants, he was able to take advantage of an important technological breakthrough in the field of long-distance travel after World War II: the introduction of inexpensive commercial passenger flights. The journey was not just a turning point in his biography—reunited with Irena, he soon married her and was accepted into her family—but the decisive moment in his artistic development. His description of the impact of his first experience of the New World testifies to his unique perceptiveness as a visual artist endowed with exquisite intellectual and emotional sensitiveness:

I flew over the Atlantic body of water and felt the sensation for the first time of a strange lightness; I had lost the feeling of gravitational weight. … I remember the first time I saw NYC, which was from the airplane, and the view changed my visual perception completely. What struck me immediately was the dominant horizontal and vertical directions in the city structure. (Then & Now 15)

8Fig. 1. Then & Now (2018), 146. Copyright © 2018, Tadeusz Mysłowski, used by permission of the artist.

9It matters not whether Mysłowski literally experienced weightlessness or whether he only retrospectively thus remembered the final stage of his flight away from his old life towards his new. His arrival in America, instead of besotting his mind and his senses, raised them to new levels of alertness, enabling the artist—who did not speak English and had no knowledge of American history and culture—to respond artistically, intellectually, and emotionally to his experience of being reborn as an “alien” with the burden of a known past and the promise of an unknown future. While his first observation is best understood metaphorically—symbolic of shedding his old, European skin—the second is strikingly down to earth: the regimented spatial order of the city’s perpendicular layout struck Mysłowski as embodying the “utopian M E T R O P O L I S,” “an ideal urban structure” (Then & Now 15), a concept that even the most uncultivated immigrant saw as emblematic of America’s success in realizing its dream of becoming the world’s leading democracy—rational, pragmatic, and progressive. Scanning New York City from the plane, he instantly remembered the “mellow and old” Paris he left behind (Then & Now 15), but a different associative recollection was of greater importance: he saw in Manhattan’s gridiron layout a pattern familiar to him from modern abstract art. Not the abstraction of organic or biomorphic lines and shapes, but the precise, rigid abstractness of geometrical, man-made forms he knew from Constructivism, which he considered his most valuable inheritance. Admitting that he “belonged in spirit, blood and flesh to the old European continent,” he “chose the world of geometry” because, he explains, it gave him a sense of “the continuation of [his] Eastern European tradition,” one which he “could thus relate to” (Then & Now 21). At the same time, he realized that “psychologically, [he] was lost—not equipped to survive” (Then & Now 15) and that his adaptation through assimilation and acculturation now depended on his ability “to understand the new reality [he] had just entered, of which [he] was to become a part, and which was to influence [his] life on every possible level: economic, social, professional” (Then & Now 117).

10The language barrier and limited social contacts seemed an insurmountable obstacle, but he clung to his faith in the redeeming power of art, assuming that his best chance to “establish [his] roots” (Then & Now 17) in America was to make the city that was his new home the subject and substance of his art. He was, however, faced with this dilemma: how to understand New York City as a structure and organism through the lens of cardinal principles laid down by the European founders of modern aesthetics—particularly those shaped by the Eastern European traditions of Suprematism and Constructivism—which called for art to eschew emotional or narrative content in favor of transforming subjective experience into conceptual abstraction. Taking as his point of departure the conviction, rooted in those same traditions, that “the identity of the artist was not of the Bohemian, but rather modeled after the scientist, technician or architect” (Then & Now 142)—a notion strangely akin to de Certeau’s “engineer,” a “mediator between ‘the man of the theorem’ and ‘the man of experience’” (de Certeau 69)—he gradually broadened his perspective to include aspects of the urban environment he was determined to study that were not just visual but multisensory. More importantly, as his familiarity with New York City’s multicultural and multilingual landscapes increased, he began to collect and process information about its distant and recent past, its ethnic and cultural origins, and its multilayered and multidimensional complexity as a technological structure that constitutes the physical, material support of the fabric of urban life. Over time, he discovered in himself a predilection for looking at cultural practices, identities, and social structures in the domain of spatial and temporal reference, that is, as shaped by history and geographical and environmental factors.

11Delving beneath the city’s surface, Mysłowski sensed that the human-imposed system of order laid over the natural environment—the original host organism—must be predicated on the existence of some deeper substrate whose nature transcends the conventional dichotomy of animate/inanimate or spirit/matter, something that is the root or source of all that exists and is, or is not, perceivable and experienceable. As a painter trained in Eastern European modernist traditions, particularly Suprematism and Constructivism, he was predisposed to seek meaning in elementary forms—points, lines, and planes. What captivated him in his first aerial view of Manhattan was not just the visual drama of its grid, but what it revealed: a sign of the autonomy and agency of all entities, both sentient (humans and living organisms) and non-sentient (objects, materials, and forces). Like de Certeau’s redefinition of the human subject not as a stable, autonomous agent but as a mobile, tactical, relational actor, his inferences in many ways prefigured the “material turn” late-twentieth-century posthumanist thought would take.

12Moving beyond classical humanism, he extended the ideas of his European masters—Malevich’s belief in metaphysical presence within geometric form, Mondrian’s transformation of organic matter into abstract grids—realizing that the perceived geometry of physical structures constitutive of the whole that is the city is a perfect springboard from which to begin a deep inquiry into the infinite complexity of relations and interactions that structure urban life, a quintessentially posthumanist stance. Quite literally, his “springboard” was the orthogonal street plan of New York—a design historically tied to Enlightenment ideals of rationality, equality, and control. The Commissioner’s Plan of 1811 is a particularly interesting example of how, given all kinds of contingencies, the planners reconciled their declared goal of bringing “beauty, order, and convenience” to the city with the “republican predilection for control and balance” (Burrows and Wallace 507). In the end, their distrust of sinuous nature prompted them not just to adopt the time-honored gridiron idea, but to impose it on Manhattan’s ancient landscape in a ruthlessly utilitarian, or totalitarian, fashion—the terrain was cleared, leveled, excavated, graded, and paved, the only acknowledgment of the island’s natural topography being the adoption of long rectangles rather than squares as the grid’s building blocks. Even the planning of Central Park at the heart of Manhattan was not truly a bow to the Romantic “back to nature” ideal, but rather an example of its commodification—or, as Rem Koolhaas put it, “a taxidermic preservation of nature that exhibits forever the drama of culture outdistancing nature” (Koolhaas 21). Though the Commissioner’s Plan created only a semblance of organic continuity, the grid it imposed has, as Rosalind Krauss famously noted in her essay “Grids,” an inherent capacity to evoke a sense of infinity (60) and even the sublime or spiritual (52–54).

13This mystical, almost transcendental quality of the grid has been explored by Mysłowski in works where the New York street map is transformed in extraordinary ways. These transformations reveal how closely his artistic approach aligns with recent strains of new materialism and speculative realism, particularly with the branch of the latter known as Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO). Thinkers in this field—such as Quentin Meillassoux and Graham Harman—argue that all entities, whether things, processes, or ideas, possess irreducible objecthood. Mysłowski’s sustained investigation into the structure of the grid strongly resonates with these ideas. His translation of city structures into layered visual compositions reflects an ontological view in which visual forms are not merely representations but entities in their own right. His transformations of source materials—especially images—evoke the OOO perspective that the world cannot be reduced to appearances or meanings alone. For instance, Meillassoux argues that the world is more than its images, since “any image of a thing is merely a translation of it” (Harman, Meillassoux 133). In line with this, Harman suggests that both thinkers and artists function as mediators between entities—things, beings, phenomena, processes, concepts—all of which carry an inherent objecthood (see, for instance, Art and Objects). In this sense, Mysłowski exemplifies the role of the cultural mediator, a figure theorized by Cronin and Simon as one who operates across codes, media, and epistemologies. His practice not only aligns with OOO philosophically, but it also intersects with the analytical procedures of contemporary cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, and especially translation studies. These disciplines share a focus on cognitive processes of mediation between languages, cultures, and expressive systems. A strong affinity with such methodologies is evident in the way Mysłowski processed data and documents—archival, visual, and textual—to generate series of graphic, sculptural, and multimedia works. Importantly, his adaptation—through translation—of the European cultural codes he brought with him to America to the new environment, allowed him to obviate de Certeau’s implied disjunction between the city’s optical texturology and social practices and lived experience.

14Crucially, Mysłowski arrived in America at a time when critical theory was undergoing radical upheaval. One of the most important intellectual movements of the time was the “linguistic turn,” marked by Noam Chomsky’s generative grammar and William Labov’s variationist sociolinguistics. These approaches aimed to uncover the deep structures of language and its role in shaping human narratives. Many of these ideas were controversial, and not all endured. As George Lakoff observed, transformational grammar failed by “[not] taking into account the fact that language is used by human beings to communicate in a social context” (Lakoff). Similarly, George Steiner, in After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (1975), argued that to truly understand language and translation “we must pass from the ‘deep structures’ of transformational grammar to the deeper structures of the poet” (108). While Mysłowski was not systematically following advanced developments in social and linguistic theory, he was an avid, if somewhat indiscriminate, reader—attuned enough to recognize and collect compelling ideas. He assembled a personal archive of “daily clippings”: articles and images from newspapers and magazines, quotations, statements, notes, and other visual and verbal fragments. A large, unorganized selection of these materials—often difficult to navigate due to dense layouts—was published years later in the volume Then and Now: New York City Fragments: Tadeusz Mysłowski at the Crossroads (2018). The hefty book documents his artistic evolution, beginning with his first sight of Manhattan from the air—a moment when he realized that the city’s structure was a complex puzzle he needed to decipher “to understand [his] relationship to New York” (Then & Now 117).

15Earning his living as a menial worker at Textile Creators Ltd., Mysłowski focused upon developing a rigorous procedure for processing the perceptions and materials he collected while wandering Manhattan’s streets. Like most newcomers and visitors, he was especially struck by the skyscrapers projecting their perfect geometry towards the sky. When he began work on the first of his New York City projects, he decided to approach the matter systematically, like a land surveyor-cum-researcher. Maintaining existential balance between his quotidian and artistic lives was easy as he did not consider them as distinct from one another, a sense that was strengthened by his promotion to technician and photographer. He says: “I treated the experience of walking in the area of Sixth Avenue like a map problem, thinking of the places where a street and avenue cross each other as the intersection of two lines” (Then & Now 118). Particularly attracted to visual representations of New York as a physical space designed to accommodate residents and their busyness, he was struck by the cohesiveness of the composite outline of the city emerging from drawings, photographs, maps, city plans, cartograms, charts, and topographies he accumulated. He instantly noticed that the gridiron core of the various images not only matched precisely his first impression of Manhattan as a stretch of land superimposed with a gigantic lattice but was also congruent with the central pattern in the works of geometric abstractionists he admired. More importantly, however, he saw New York’s grid as more than just a visual/physical/geographical/urban actuality. It appealed to him as a sign encompassing and embodying a synthesis of what he considered his most immediate artistic goal, which was this: how to reconcile the past, the present, and the future, and intertwine them to establish his personal “Ground Zero” from which, as he puts it with a nod toward Malevich, he could begin to “discover the world in a New Way” (Then & Now 25).

16For his first American project, New York Faces (1976–1980), Mysłowski selected a segment of the Manhattan grid extending from Central Park South to 14th Street between Fifth and Seventh Avenues. Having rented a digital photo booth machine, he collected about 5,000 images of passers-by at two locations: Times Square and Rockefeller Plaza. He then processed the black-and-white portraits saved on the computer and had them printed out in black-and-white on A4 perforated paper used in offices for text and numeric data. Scaled up to c. 30–40 cm, the digital images had the relatively low resolution of a standard office inkjet printer, making the matrix of black rectangular pixels visible to the eye at close range. The compositional process and its outcome again bring to mind de Certeau, who, dedicating his celebrated study of city life to “the ordinary man,” “a common hero,” observes:

We witness the advent of the number. It comes along with democracy, the large city, administrations, cybernetics. It is a flexible and continuous mass, woven tight like a fabric with neither rips nor darned patches, a multitude of quantified heroes who lose names and faces as they become the ciphered river of the streets, a mobile language of computations and rationalities that belong to no one. (v)

17Assembled in several rows in wall-size panels, these portraits of random New Yorkers not only represented, as the artist asserts, “the social structure of the city,” but, because they had been taken by an automated camera (which, he says, “augmented” his own viewpoint), they also recorded “transactions between people and technology,” Marshall McLuhan’s seminal idea whose impact on his own thinking at the time Mysłowski openly acknowledges (Then & Now 60).

18Fig. 2. New York Faces (2016), n. pag. Copyright © 2016, Tadeusz Mysłowski, used by permission of the artist.

19Fig. 3. Then & Now (2018), 60. Copyright © 2018, Tadeusz Mysłowski, used by permission of the artist.

20The grid-like structure of the individual printouts was so obviously analogous to the grid of the Manhattan street map, on which the artist diligently marked the specific location where each portrait had been taken and which he attached to each panel, that in his next New York project, Avenue of the Americas (1974–1979), he decided to focus on the rectangularity of the city blocks and the regular lattice of streets and avenues. Employing state-of-the-art photographic technology, he generated a large number of modular series from source images by having their parts magnified.

21Fig. 4. Avenue of the Americas (2015), n. pag. Copyright © 2015, Tadeusz Mysłowski, used by permission of the artist.

22The process involved stacking and aligning matching and incongruous frames, superimposing positives and negatives, and isolating different fragments as autonomous new images in which the original rectangular shapes and contours were transposed or merged through reduction of resolution and equalization of contrast in dark and bright areas. The outcome of the complex procedure was the appearance of new blocks of black or white shapes in successive prints. As a result, the grid of each source image, progressively fractured step-by-step by enlarging its details, gradually disintegrated and morphed in unpredictable ways—some parts became isolated segments of the visible geometric structure sunk into the white background, while others blended into blots of blackness that less-and-less precisely marked the rectangular spaces originally circumscribed by the crisscrossing horizontal and vertical lines of the street plan. Within the coordinates inscribed in the grid’s rigid pattern, Mysłowski highlighted new perpendicularities, upsetting and disrupting the grid’s perfect regularity.

23Fig. 5. Avenue of the Americas (2015), n. pag. Copyright © 2015, Tadeusz Mysłowski, used by permission of the artist.

24Avenue of the Americas thus naturally led to another series, Towards Organic Geometry: 1972–1994 (1994), whose completion marked a turning point in his investigations, confirming his deepest intuition about geometry as fundamental to visual perception and conceptualization of relations among things, including human beings and the world they inhabit. The artist thus describes what triggered the idea that human presence/essence in the multilayered and multidimensional structure of the city can be transposed/encoded into two-dimensional spatial forms representing universally understood shapes, signs, and symbols:

Consider pedestrian traffic in New York: in the streets and through the tunnel, above and below the ground, contrasting dark and light, silence and cacophony. Underground we share a capsule with strangers, often crossing each other’s zones of privacy as we speed through the dark. Above ground, the usual boundaries are restored. Compressed together in the subway-theater, we observe the human particles / fragmented views of eyes, lips, ears, hands; a living MONTAGE / and the endless multiplicity of ethnicities. (Then and Now 212)

25Fig. 6. Then & Now (2018), 212. Copyright © 2018, Tadeusz Mysłowski, used by permission of the artist.

26Complementing Mysłowski’s first aerial impression of New York City, this description instantly brings to mind the opening of de Certeau’s chapter on New York City, where he writes: “Seeing Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center. … A wave of verticals. Its agitation is momentarily arrested by vision. … I wonder what is the source of this pleasure of ‘seeing the whole,’ of looking down on, totalizing the most immoderate of human texts” (91–92). He concludes his introductory remarks by asking and immediately answering another question: “Is the immense texturology spread out before one’s eyes anything more than a representation, an optical artifact? It is the analogue of the facsimile produced, through a projection that is a way of keeping aloof, by the space planner urbanist, city planner or cartographer” (de Certeau 92–93). As in Mysłowski’s earlier projects, the central “optical artifact” in Towards Organic Geometry was still the grid, but this time it was subjected to an entirely different transformational procedure. Having selected one hundred and sixty-three photographic images derived from his favorite segment of the New York street map, the artist generated ten thousand pictures in which interaction of light and chemical process produced accidental effects such as loss of sharpness at the expense of perceivable physical imperfections and flaws of the prints. Experimenting in the darkroom with various photographic devices (lenses and enlargers) and developing procedures (controllable and uncontrollable chemical processes) to blow up, invert, or reduce photographed grids, he made this crucial discovery: the greater the magnification of a detail, the less geometric its structure appears—sharp edges become blurred, straight lines get sinuous, and their intersections no longer form angles but become irregular curves. As a result, squares, rectangles, triangles, and other polygons within the crystalline structure of the grid are progressively transformed into non-geometric, free forms whose biomorphic shapes resemble cells in a living organism.

27Fig. 7. Then & Now (2018), 157. Copyright © 2018, Tadeusz Mysłowski, used by permission of the artist.

28Fig. 8. Then & Now (2018), 160. Copyright © 2018, Tadeusz Mysłowski, used by permission of the artist.

29Out of a large series of such transformations he performed, Mysłowski derived a new concept of geometry, one which allowed him to show that geometric/artificial/inanimate and organic/natural/animate elements are equally inherent parts of the urban ecosystem. Although he did not openly refer to the position of many contemporary critics who, like Krauss, pointed out that as a “flattened, geometricized, ordered structure” the grid is by definition “antinatural, antimimetic, antireal” (50), in several series which both scaled up and scaled down the New York street plan he took the modernist spatial view as his starting point and ended up inverting the grid to bring out or allude to the multiple objects present in or beneath the urban structure at hand. By changing scales and perspectives and rotating, juxtaposing, and superimposing images on one another, he captured the grid’s “metamorphosis in stages,” producing a record of a process in which “geometric forms are gradually converted into organic forms” (Then & Now 152), objects that have autonomy and agency, that live and interact with one another on their own terms and are impervious to man’s grand designs and desire to rationalize and control everything.

30Fig. 9. Then & Now (2018), 162. Copyright © 2018, Tadeusz Mysłowski, used by permission of the artist.

31Quite inevitably, Mysłowski’s discovery of the urban grid’s structural geometric organicity prompted him to return to the human figure, which he now inscribed into Manhattan’s multiple lattices—visible not only in the street plan but also in the structure of some famous landmarks, such as, for instance, the stay cables of Manhattan Bridge.

32Fig. 10. Then & Now (2018), 40. Copyright © 2018, Tadeusz Mysłowski, used by permission of the artist.

  • 3 Mysłowski’s “cross” projects include Cross Expanding Series (1986), New York Composite Series (1985 (...)

33The most important work he produced which combined New York grid’s abstract geometry with the human body as a subject is He + She (2008–2016). In its two panels, as art critic Szymon Bojko observes, the artist “uses cells, vessels, tubes, organs, intestines, and the body’s literal functioning as a metaphorical alphabet” (qtd. in Mysłowski, He + She 21). Similarly to another significant project Mysłowski simultaneously developed over the years—several series of graphic, photographic, sculptural, and videographic works and installations exploring the associative potential of the motif of the cross3—in He + She, he used the human body as a form into which, as Bojko writes, he “physically [implanted] geometric forms found in the architecture and mechanics of the city” (qtd. in Mysłowski, He + She 21). By doing so, he showed that, as art critic Dorota Folga-Januszewska puts it, “there is no antagonism any more between abstract thought and concrete shape. They co-exist in each other, in reciprocal coupling and mutual camouflage” (qtd. in Mysłowski, Then & Now 380). This reciprocal coupling and mutual camouflage of organic and geometric forms can also be seen as a visual, plastic analogue of linguistic transfer and equivalence that occurs when two different codes intersect and meanings inherent in one are rendered by means of the other.

34Fig. 11. Kolekcja grafiki (2016), n. pag. Copyright © 2016, Tadeusz Mysłowski, used by permission of the artist.

35Employing a simple, minimalist graphic vocabulary to convey the historical, cultural, social, aesthetic, and personal connotations of his transmutations of the New York grid and portraits of the city’s inhabitants, Mysłowski’s projects described here are all acts of adaptation-cum-translation which involve mediation and “rewriting.” From the perspective of translation studies developed since the so-called “cognitive turn,” such acts, as Binghan Zheng, Sergey Tyulenev, and Kobus Marais explain in their introductory overview essay in the special issue of Translation Studies devoted to “The Conceptualisation of Translation in Translation Studies,” are “constructive process[es] in which the translator actively constructs a new meaning that is appropriate for the target culture and audience” (169). The uniqueness of Mysłowski’s performance as a cultural mediator/translator lies in that his works embrace and capitalize on the duplicity of both the cultural context they spring from and the audience they are meant for. Mysłowski ascribes this duplicity to his status of a permanent “transmigrant,” a condition he explains in this way:

I admit to being one of the twice born: once in my homeland, Poland, where I was raised and educated, and a second time as an exile in New York, where I learned a new language and experienced a new possibility to question my own reality. I have now had a chance to reflect on my life and country with a vision made clear by distance and separation. (Then & Now 21)

36Reflecting on how his emigration to the United States has affected his artistic identity, he thus sums up the significance of the Lublin-New York axis in his life:

Everything was foreign and confusing to me—it still is. I didn’t belong anyplace .... As a citizen of two continents I embrace two different geographical locations. For many years I felt like an outsider to both cultures. Each time I leave either place I feel a sense of displacement. I miss what I left behind. Each place is my home and the place I’m coming back to. This dualism is the place where I belong. (Then & Now 21)

37One can hardly find a better way to clarify the nature of the dualism Mysłowski talks about than by summoning up the Latin root of the word translation—translatio—which means “carrying across” or “bringing across” from one space, or one time, to another. Although he was born in an ethnically homogenous but culturally desolate country, he early on developed an awareness of its multilingual and multicultural history. Arriving in the United States, like most emigrants, he came up against a shock, a confusing and often debilitating mixture of fascination and estrangement, but thanks to his artistic alertness and inquisitiveness, he realized that what many endure as an excruciating struggle can also be an opportunity to make discoveries which help one to overcome the sense of uprootedness and alienation. It would be an unwarranted overstatement to say that his emigration from Poland was an auspicious act which enabled him, to use Siri Negaard’s words from Translation and Transmigration (2021), “to live in a condition of continuous translation” (2), but it is his unquestionable accomplishment that having settled in America, he quickly sensed that, despite the differences between Lublin and New York City, both are places where imaginative life is animated by the intertwinement of languages, histories, cultures, and practices and actions that constitute the essence of urban life. It is worth noting in this connection that the coexistence and competition in the urban landscape of multiple entities—from living beings and material structures to narratives and artistic representations—often requires, to quote Negaard again, a necessary “filter” to cope with the differences we encounter (2). Translation is such a filter because it allows migrants to localize, adapt, and modify the codes they need to experience the world around them as whole, a place of their being. Mysłowski symbolically universalized the most personal of his New York projects by donating He + She to the National Museum of Lublin and agreeing to its oversized reproduction on Plexiglas panels being placed as the central art piece in Lublin’s Center for the Meeting of Cultures, the city’s main venue for cultural and artistic events. Or, to put it differently, he transmigrated his artistic vision of the world’s most cosmopolitan city back to the place where the seeds of that vision had been sown decades earlier.

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Notes

1 Interestingly, texturology is a term coined by a painter, Jean-Philippe-Arthur Dubuffet.

2 The Hochmans, Jewish Lubliners, had left Poland two years earlier in the wake of the Communist authorities’ anti-semitic campaign in 1968.

3 Mysłowski’s “cross” projects include Cross Expanding Series (1986), New York Composite Series (1985-1986), New York City Crisscross (1989), Cross Drawings (1996), Endless Columns (1996), and Cross Over (2001), the latter a film he made with the help of a professional film-maker, Jac Avilla Vermeer, after the 9/11 attacks. The artist argues that the cross is an “open form”—he calls it “open cross”—that “has a neutral value” (Then & Now 21–42).

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References

Electronic reference

Edyta Frelik, Transmigrating Forms: Tadeusz Mysłowski as Cultural Mediator in Transatlantic ExchangeEuropean journal of American studies [Online], 20-3 | 2025, Online since 01 December 2025, connection on 25 January 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/24797; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/15dmd

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About the author

Edyta Frelik

Edyta Frelik is Assistant Professor in the Department of British and American Studies at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin. She is the author of articles and books on artists’ writings, including Painter’s Word: Thomas Hart Benton, Marsden Hartley, and Ad Reinhardt as Writers (Peter Lang 2016) and Kiedy malarz pisze (jak się patrzy). Wstęp do badań nad pisarstwem artystów (Wydawnictwo UMCS 2021). In 2013, she was the winner of the Smithsonian Institution’s “Terra Foundation for American Art International Essay Prize.” Her research concerns intersections of art, philosophy, and science. Currently, she serves as Vice-President of the Polish Association for American Studies.

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