ZLOTA RACZKA MEANS GOLDEN HAND, Liliana Lewicka

She was missing one arm. "Where is my golden hand?" she moaned, her dark eyes blazing with red fire. "Give me my golden hand!”

In Polish culture, to say someone has a zlota raczka is to say they have the magic touch, or more specifically the ability to create anything once they “touch it”. It is often said in relation to people who work with their hands (laborers), specifically men who perform general contractor work. For this work — which makes reference to Joseph Beuys’ performance ‘How To Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare’ (1965) and Marina Abramovic’s ‘Seven Easy Pieces’ (re-performed in 2005) — Liliana Lewicka created and documented a performance of a haircut. A haircut is a universal act of personal maintenance and, in one form or another, has a place in every culture. Hair cutting and styling is both a huge global industry, and a quotidian experience familiar to almost everyone. It is a business as well as a craft, but also, as this performance emphasizes, a form of labor. The performance occurred in Berlin, Germany with two performers from different parts of the world: Michael Forrey, the stylist, from the United States of America and Linda Kostowski, the model, from Europe. The model sat semi-naked. The hair stylists’ hands were covered in gold leaf.

The work draws attention to the act of daily personal maintenance as itself an aesthetic experience, as a form of intimacy, of the intimate labor of producing the body as aesthetic, of transformation. The zlota raczka or “golden hand” can be interpreted in many ways: as a comment on the labor of producing beauty, on beauty as both an aesthetic experience and an industry; as an homage to the “magic touch” of the stylist who transforms what s/he touches; as an appropriation of Polish vernacular for a contemporary transnational context. When concepts travel, they effect a displacement of the quotidian, which then appears in a new light.

Text written by Damon Young