From Warsaw with Love

This reinvented city throws one hot post-communist bloc party.

By Russell Smith
Photos by Yassen Hristov

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Szlafrok means housecoat. It’s a funny name for a bar like this, with its black velvet banquettes and gold trim and girl curled up deep in a sofa like a crib, nuzzling a pit bull on her lap like a baby. A bar on an elegant neoclassical square in a Central European city, around the corner from the grandly columned and porticoed national theatre. The name on the sign is spelled Szlafr.ok because it’s cooler to be confusing. The interior is itself rather theatrical, with a 15-foot ceiling and red velvet curtains with gold tassels draped over its glass facade. But it’s hardly formal. The girl with the pit bull has a lot of friends who want to tickle its belly as they come and go. They are wearing jeans and T-shirts and running shoes, and they seem to be the most relaxed people in Europe.

I am drinking, along with Mariusz, the manager, and Agata and Marta and Jowita, who are also pretty relaxed, a special cucumber drink that Mariusz assures me cures hangovers. Soon, he promises me, Ania, the lovely bartender, will mix me the ultimate drink, the flaming drink that is the specialty of the house. Right now, he is teasing Agata about the bars she wants to take us to. She wants to take us to the restaurant Sense, which serves Asian food and is co-owned by a famous actress, and to Zoo, a club on chic Mazowiecka Street, where there’s a bathtub on the dance floor for whoever wants to pose in it. “Warszawka,” he says, “Little Agata likes little Warsaw.”

Warszawka – cutesy Warsaw, pretentious Warsaw – the new Warsaw of shiny martini bars and fashion boutiques. It’s not an entirely positive name. Guys as cool as Mariusz aren’t sure how they feel about a place in which bouncers with headsets select rich-enough-looking people from the eager queue. Rents are soaring, and that’s not good for everybody. Warsaw isn’t supposed to be like that; it’s supposed to be gritty, drunken, passionate, a place of artistic experimentation in paint-stained jeans, of romantic basement taverns.

It is that, too, of course. To find the hyperhip Raster gallery, a suite of rooms in a bullet-scarred prewar apartment building, you really have to look. There is no sign, and the buzzer is inside the courtyard. When I buzz, a voice answers in English and sounds amused: Of course the gallery is open. Why wouldn’t it be? The gallery is in a formerly grand apartment, with soaring ceilings and ornamented mouldings. The paint is peeling, the carpets are ancient. A bald guy in red running shoes and the heavy round plastic glasses of an international art dealer is in discussion, in German, with some young men. There are glasses of red wine being handed out. I feel as if I’ve walked into someone’s living room. The young German men are too shy to talk to me. I nod and they nod back. I peer into a dark room: There’s a video projection on one wall, a scene from an early James Bond movie looped over and over again. It looks a lot like the work of Canadian artist Rodney Graham. I ask one of the shy guys if he’s heard of Rodney Graham. “This piece is by Rodney Graham,” he says.

The young men are, in fact, from a gallery called Johnen in Berlin; they are not the Raster gallery people but are borrowing the space as a kind of exchange. The Raster people are in Berlin. The art is Canadian.

Meanwhile, the Polish art is travelling the world. It is intense work, full of disturbing images and ironic pastiches. Polish artists are famous for their provocations: Artur Zmijewski recently presented a patriotic choral mass sung entirely by deaf children; in the Ujazdowski Palace, a castle on a hill that’s now the Centre for Contemporary Art, I watched Katarzyna Kozyra’s video of people in Playmate masks pretending to hang themselves.

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