I vaguely remembered this guy from the first issue of Weirdo about a hundred years ago, which left me with the impression of someone who, if unusually talented, seemed slightly racist in a way I couldn't quite identify; and I didn't understand what the article was doing in Weirdo. Decades later, I stumble across the Netflix documentary and it begins to make sense, sort of…
Szukalski was, so it turns out, Poland's greatest artist and a man whose work was beginning to attract a lot of attention on an international scale; then the Second World War bombed most of his sculptures and associated work out of both existence and public memory, leaving the man somewhat beached in the United States, unable to pick up the thread of his career. The notion that this may have constituted a great loss to twentieth century art is far from hyperbole, as we see from surviving photos. Prime Szukalski seems to represent a unique fusion of nineteenth century symbolism, deco, and with a touch of later Futurism as practised by Fortunato Depero and others - but with a kind of biological elasticity which foreshadows Giger.
Unfortunately, by the time anyone realised, Szukalski's mind had gone somewhere strange, specifically the formulation of what he termed Zermatism - the study of all those bits of human history which science had missed but which were obvious if you knew where to look, or more importantly, how to look. Having been trained as a sculptor, Szukalski knew how to look at examples of primitive or tribal sculpture from all across the globe in ways which eluded members of the archaeological profession, most of whom had been trained to the point of blindness. Thus, were they at a disadvantage, unable to comprehend that which Szukalski saw because he was a genius, as he admits on more than one occasion in this book.
Behold!!! The Protong distills the basics of Zermatism, as set down in the thirty-nine volumes of Szukalski's great work, compiled over three or four decades. Zermatism holds that there really was a global flood as described in the Bible, and that it was caused by the earth inflating, pushing the water up out of the ocean to cover the land. This inflation is part of a natural cycle whereby the sun draws water away from the earth, then replaces it, like breathing in and out but spread across periods of 26,000 years. Humanity came from Easter Island, proof of which can be found in the ancient artefacts of every culture if you know what you're looking for, but also in the names of ancient places, most of which are in Protong, the once universal language. Protong was a simple language, mainly nouns with a few verbs amounting to the sort of things cavemen used to say in the movies - food good, or stranger make sun go away, me afraid, and so on. Luckily Protong was ancestral to modern Polish meaning Szukalsi was well qualified to decode and record this lost tongue; and in doing so he discovered that most place names refer to the flood and those who survived, so it definitely really happened. Those who survived were human beings, and also yeti - their evil, thuggish cousins of such unfortunate genetic proximity as to allow for interbreeding, resulting in Yetinsyn who look sort of like people but are something else entirely. More or less everything bad that has ever happened has been caused by the Yetinsyn. You can identify them by their short arms, piggy eyes, small noses set above a spacious upper lip like Stephen King and John Major, and general gluttony. They tend to seek out positions of authority from which they can wreak the most havoc. Communism was one of their ideas, in case you were wondering how all that got started.
Behold!!! The Protong came about when Glenn Bray and Lena Zwalve were putting together a book of Szukalski's early works, to which the man only agreed on the condition of it being a companion piece to this summary of Zermatism - it arguably being his life's work, and that to which the sculpture was merely a preamble. This is why some people really need editors, or even just a brutally honest pal who will ask what the fuck were you thinking?
It's an undeniably impressive piece of work in terms of how much has gone into it, not least the beautiful illustrations by which our boy was able to underscore or emphasise the features of ancient sculptures to which he felt we should be paying most attention; but, as you may have realised by this point, the whole thing is fucking bananas. It's the same deal as with that pillock, von Däniken - ancient art and even language scrutinised for whichever coincidental and arbitrary resemblance proves whatever stupid point we're trying to make, with evidence to the contrary either omitted or dismissed as a distortion caused by conventional thinking. Szukalski, for one example, claims that no-one knows the meaning of the name of the Mexican state of Jalisco, because - guess what - it's Protong; and it's the same deal with London, and the Mexican Sun God, Tonatiuh - all Protong, you see! Do I actually need to point out that the etymology of these names is mysterious to absolutely no-one, presumably unless you've encountered them only in library books while searching for stuff to force-translate into caveman Polish?
Yet, Behold the Protong!!! must count as a great work at least on the grounds of it involving actual work, which is more than can be said of Erich von Däniken deciding that K'inich Janaab' Pacal is clearly wearing a space suit; and it's difficult to remain unmoved in the face of a lifetime's labour expended on something so patently screwy - a tragedy but for the pleasure it evidently brought Szukalski and the meaning it gave to his existence. In this sense, I'd compare it to the similarly weird belief systems developed by Richard Shaver, Robert Moore Williams and others as, if not exactly useful, then not entirely without value on some level. Rarely in art has the journey been so much more vital than the destination.
