Insects, Threads, and Urinals: Polymorphous Desire Flows in Krzysztof Jung’s Work

Abstract

Abstract The 2019 retrospective of the work of the Polish artist Krzysztof Jung (1951–1998) at the Schwules Museum in Berlin positioned the artist as unequivocally gay in his preoccupation with the male nude. The artist’s body-oriented practice, however, expands far beyond strictly defined homosexual desire. In this article, I discuss complex entanglements of polymorphous desires present in Jung’s work. Introducing the narratives of prostheses, quantum entanglements, and entomology, I look at Jung’s performances known as nitkowania (threadings) and selected drawings in order to trace the free flows of desire beyond identity politics and distinctly disparate sexual categories. Employing posthumanist narratives of bodily extensions, I argue that the ambiguous body in Jung’s practice serves as the artist’s explorations of identity as always—already entangled with desire, sex, sociality, and performativity, and therefore inherently fluctuating and wavering, and blurring bodily boundaries. Through these narratives, I seek to enable an empathic, affective, turned on connections with Jung as the queer archival subject. Such visceral contact across time and space, through a queer archive, grants Jung and his performers agency as we attempt to sense them through their embodiment and through our own, and the fluctuating desire we may share with them, rather than through a limiting set of identity politics.