Kunstgeschiedenis

The high importance of the progress of an artwork in conceptual art

 

Barbara Potyka

DTFO 2

 

 

During the lectures of History of Art, that I had opportunity to take during the first year’s course I found the work of conceptual artists very interesting. My first and the strongest association with conceptual art was the mentioned during the lectures work of Sol le Witt as well as the work of my favourite polish author of concrete poetry – Stanislaw Drozdz. The chosen by me two absolutely different artists reminded me about something I might forget in the last few months, namely, that the progress itself in creating of an artwork can bring much more joy and interesting experiences with than the end result. I could notice that few weeks ago while helping Saskia Noor van Imhoff with finishing her sculpture “Mijn archief” for Fotofestival Naarden. Since then I’m in doubt if documentary photography the right for me choice was; I’m thinking still more and more about autonomous visual art, which leaves definitely more space for the imagination and makes a concept happen without the pressure, that the end result is the most important in the whole process of creating.

When I was at grammar school, my teacher of literature passed on to me her love for poetry. And so I got to know my for years on end favourite author of concrete poetry – Stanislaw Drozdz. His poems are far from the classical perception of poetry, but for me his work is more than only poetry; it’s a quintessence of love for words. As Drozdz said: “I think that everything I had to say, holds my work (…)”. Drozdz was born in 1939 in Sławków and died this year on March 29. Has a degree in Polish philology from Wroclaw University, where he studied between 1959-1964. In 1964, he debuted as a poet with traditional poems in "Arka. Informator Klubu Młodzieży Artystycznej ZSP", and in 1967 started writing his first concrete pieces. He is among the most eminent representatives of concrete poetry in the world and since 1968 has been exhibiting in Poland and abroad. Eleven years later he edited and published the book “Poezja konkretna. Wybor tekstow polskich oraz dokumentacja z lat 1966-77” ("Concrete Poetry. A Selection of Polish Texts and Documentation 1966-1977").

Stanislaw Drozdz became very fast one of the leading animators of concrete poetry in Poland, organizing by the way many exhibitions and academic sessions on the subject. Since 1971, he has regularly collaborated with Warsaw's Galeria Foksal, where his work is shown till these days. His works hang also in museum and private collections in Poland (e.g. National Museum in Wroclaw, Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz, CCA Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw) and abroad (e.g. Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Schwarz Galeria d'Arte in Milan, Museum of Modern Art in Hunfeld).

 

He is a full member of the Association of Polish Fine Artists (ZPAP). In 2001, he won the prestigious Koscielski Foundation award for "combining in a creative and visionary manner two spiritual disciplines: art and poetry". In 2003, he represented Poland at the 50th Venice Biennial.

Concrete poetry emerged as an artistic genre in 1953, when its manifesto was proclaimed at an international symposium in Stockholm. It was particularly popular in the West in the 1950s and 1960s. Concrete poets create poems in the shape of visual compositions formed with arrangements of letters and typographic signs that do not follow any semantic or syntactic relations. Drozdz himself so characterizes the discipline:"...concrete poetry consists in isolating the word, making it autonomous. In isolating it from the linguistic context, as well as from the context of the non-linguistic reality, so as to make the word signify in itself and unto itself. In concrete poetry form is determined by content, and content by form. Traditional poetry describes an image. Concrete poetry writes with it."

Drozdz has throughout his career referred to his works as "ideaforms"; has been creating them since 1967 and already a year later exhibiting (he debuted at the now-nonexistent Galeria Pod Mona Liza in Wroclaw). The term "ideaforms" derives from the forms of ideas, or concepts, that are realized at the moment of their formation in physical space. "Ideaforms are substantial-formal, self-analyzing codifiers of reality, integrating science and art, poetry and the visual arts.”

Ideaforms are both text and image, the categories, without losing their specificity, flowing into each other. The artist creates texts on two-dimensional surface and texts in three-dimensional space. Drozdz's texts are highly varied: there are letter texts, word texts (e.g. KLEPSYDRA / SANDGLASS, ZAPOMINANIE / FORGETTING, 1967), digit texts (e.g. SAMOTNOŚĆ / SOLITUDE, 1967), sign texts (e.g. NIEPEWNOŚĆ-WAHANIE-PEWNOŚĆ / UNCERTAINTY-HESITATION-CERTAINTY, 1968), and texts-objects ( ).

Because I’m limited to three pictures only I’ll try to describe his according me most interesting texts, beginning from ZAPOMINANIE / FORGETTING, which is one of Drozdz's early poems. The artist wrote the word "zapominanie" a number of times one below the other. The word on top has all the letters, and in each consecutive line the word "zapominanie" is reduced by a single letter, until it is but alone period. At some point, the word's original meaning gets lost.

The three-part composition UNCERTAINTY-HESITATION-CERTAINTY incorporates punctuation marks only. The upper board is covered evenly with question marks, in the middle one question mark is mixed at equal proportions with exclamation marks, and in the bottom the artist has placed exclamation marks only.

 

 

 

In 1977 Drozdz executed at Galeria Foksal his famous work MIEDZY / BETWEEN.

 

      

 

 

The space of the gallery, a white cube, was covered with even rows of randomly chosen letters forming together the word "miedzy". The latter however never appeared directly. The artist in a way led the viewer into the text and into the word "miedzy". As Tadeusz Slawek, one of the commentators of Drozdz's work noticed, the viewer had the impression of being read by the text rather than the other way round. The artist himself described the process of looking at a text so arranged as watching it "from a fly's point of view."

In 2001, as part of the AMS Outdoor Gallery, Stanislaw Drozdz's piece LUB / OR was displayed on 400 billboards in a dozen cities throughout Poland. The presentation accompanied the artist's major exhibition at Cracow's Bunkier Sztuki.

In 2002, Drozdz once again transformed the space of Galeria Foksal. This time letters or words proved unnecessary. The artist used a thin, semi-transparent fishing line that filled the whole space. Several persons worked for two weeks stretching 1,200 meters of a 1 mm-thick line between the gallery's walls, floor and ceiling. The viewers were not let inside, the work could only be viewed from outside, from the hallway. I was then one of the viewers and need to admit that the long, uncomfortable trip from Krakow to Warszawa was worth to see that happening. It was an incredible feeling to experience fishing line as a part of art. Since then I’ve changed my way of looking at ordinary use gadgets. After the first impression I was thinking, that it could be actually much more interesting if all the activity of the last two weeks of hard working were recorded and exhibit alongside the happening. I know that that was not the intention of the author, but anyway… I would do it.

A bit later, at the 50th Art Biennial in Venice, Drozdz showed a project called ALEA IACTA EST - THE DIE HAS BEEN CAST.

The walls of the Polonia pavilion were covered with about 250,000 slightly enlarged (3x3 cm) rolling dice, demonstrating all the possible combinations that can be obtained by throwing a set of six dice. In the centre of the space stood a billiard table with exactly such a set. In a user manual printed in 40 languages the artist invited the viewer to roll the dice and then find the combination obtained among the 46,656 possible results on the wall.

Drozdz's works are at once timeless and contemporary. Thanks to its autonomy and lack of reference to any specific context, the word in concrete poetry refers the viewer solely to the linguistic system as a relational grid. And that’s exactly, what still captures all the viewers to his artwork and make them see ordinary things in a different light.

 

After my first experiences with conceptual art in my own country, I met the work of Sol LeWitt during the lectures of History of Art. I’m burning with shame, that it had place that late in my life, that I never before had the opportunity to see his work or I’ve seen it but had no idea who is the author of a particular artwork. Anyway, I was probably the only one among my classmates (and probably not only among my classmates…), who has never heard before about LeWitt. So I’m not going to describe his work or his biography, but I’ll try to explain what I find so fascinating in his way of thinking by creating and what absorbs my thoughts while admiring his artwork.

The most interesting for me was his assumption, that the idea or concept itself (in conceptual art) is the most important part of the artist’s work. In any other form of art the concept or idea may change in the course of realization; in the conceptual art the concept precedes the realization and is actually ready before the artist begins to work on it. “The idea becomes a machine that makes the art” – exactly this sentence stirred my imagination so much, that I started to look for more information about this trend. Sol LeWitt in turn, divided the idea from realization and passed off none of those two aspects; he divided the conceptual aspect of working from the perceptional; the idea of working from its sensual manifestation. The conceptual art is according LeWitt an obverse of the perceptual art, where the last one is intended for senses, an eye and the emotions, while the first one to the humans mind.

This what makes his assumptions even more interesting is that an artist should eliminate any subjective element like the taste or caprice, because an artwork should be objective; the artist should make basic rules and forms, which he will ply with during realization of his work. The idea itself, even if it’s not going to be played out, it’s an artwork as well as the finished product. That’s why all of the steps he takes - sketches, memos, drawings, models, studies, thoughts, successful or unsuccessful trials – are very interesting. They show the process of thinking of an artist, sometimes much more fascinating than the end result, because “conceptual art is only good when the idea is good”!!!

I find also very important a fact, that according LeWitt the artist is not a kind of ape, whose behavior must be explained by a civilized critic. We are artists and we can clearly express the assumptions of our work; the text must not be considered as a manifest but a description rather of our art practice and that’s why it can change together with the changes in our experiences! It’s obviously not a suggestion for all artists, because there is no only one way of creating art and that’s why the propositions of conceptual art of Sol LeWitt has been earlier read in the context of his own artwork as a conceptual aspect output of minimal art (LeWitt was also one of the main exponents of minimal art).

And here I would like to mention his work “Four Colour Drawing” from 1970, where the artist operates with four colours (yellow, black, blue and red), four types of line (vertical, horizontal and diagonal) and an instruction how to connect the colours with the lines. Separation of the conceptual aspect of work from the perceptual let the artists manipulate with two different ways of exposing.

There is one assumption more, which I find by the way very unusual, namely that the conceptual artists are mystics and not rationalist, because they achieve results that are not reachable in the way of logical speculations. Only the very illogical way of thinking leads to new experiences. The formal art is rational itself. When we use definitions like painting or sculpture, we usually associate those disciplines with tradition, and tradition - according LeWitt – limits an artist. A notion is something totally different than an idea; a notion implicates a general direction of which an idea is a component. An idea gives to a notion the power of making. The ideas itself can be artworks; they create a chain, which leads to particular forms, but the ideas do not have to take any physical form. So, for each artwork, which took the physical form, exists a lot of other variations that the form didn’t take. An artwork thus might be understood as a link between the artist’s mind and the mind of a receiver, but… might never reach the viewer or might never leave the mind of an artist. Because none of the form of expression is better than the other, the artist can use many different forms, from the expression of word till physical objects. All ideas are art if they only pertain to art. The conventions of art can be also changed by artworks. An artwork that succeeds changes our insight of the art’s conventions and changes our perception. The artist, according LeWitt, doesn’t have to understand his artwork; his perception is not better or worse than the perception of the viewer. When the idea of work is fully formed in the artist’s mind and the final form of work is chosen, the process of realization goes self-contained.

When I look at the work of Sol LeWitt, my very first impression is – a happy artist, who likes to operate (or rather play…) with colours and different kind of lines; an artist who likes order and chooses very conscious the form of work. Most of the time he plies with geometrical figures and if painted on walls – filled in with colours, if sculptures – mostly covered with one colour. That brings me memory about my childhood and youth, when I was passionately drawing sequences of geometrical figures, literally everywhere. I liked drawing generally, but the greatest satisfaction appeared when the whole page in A5 format was very aesthetically filled in with sequences of figures and colours according my own concept. At the grammar school I continued drawing, but mostly unconscious; a page of a notebook and a black-lead or pen made me do it. I do not even remember anymore when I stopped drawing, it was kind of fun and surely aroused my imagination. Probably that’s why is the artwork of LeWitt so important for me; I find there a little bit of myself from the past…

But coming back to the present I would like to introduce very shortly one person more, with who I came in touch during the Fotofestival Naarden – Saskia Noor van Imhoff. She was probably the only artist graduated in direction Visual Art, thus not like the rest of photographers present at the festival. Saskia’s exhibition differed from the rest of the exhibitions; she started working on her sculpture a month ahead and the idea was to make registration of the whole process of building the mentioned sculpture; on this way came the sculpture into being under her hands with a respectively title “Mijn archief”. On the pictures placed here and there the viewer could observe the development of Saskia’a project. “De installatie in de Bastion van Oranje van Saskia Noor van Imhoff is een leuke aanvulling op de meer documentaire werken. In een hoekje van de vesting worden wij gevraagd een smalle gang in te lopen die tegen het einde nog smaller wordt. Wat zou zich daar verbergen, aan het andere eind van de tunnel? Er is in elk geval licht, dus daar lopen we op af. De foto’s zijn hier niet opgehangen aan de muur, maar ze liggen over elkaar heen op een langwerpige structuur die aan een werktafel doet denken. Het lijkt op een verborgen laboratorium, hier wordt er gewerkt aan een idee. Of aan een machine? Verschillende elementen, zoals een rond wit licht komen op meerdere afbeeldingen terug. Foto’s, tekst en verschillende materialen zoals glas en hout roepen herinneringen op, maar het verhaal lijkt nog niet af.” And it will be long not ready. Saskia will continue working on her “Archief” and that takes time.

I liked her story, her own answer on the term conceptual art. She had a clear concept, introduced it to some sponsors and finally received subsidy to be able to work on her happening. And she did succeed.

I hope I will get the opportunity one day as well to develop my own performance. My head is full of ideas somehow limited by documentary that I’ve chosen. At this moment I’m convinced to change the study direction from documentary photography to autonomous visual art, just to make sure that I made the right choice…

 

 

 

SOURCEES:

 

Taschen – Kunst van de 20e eeuw

J.Gage – Colour and culture

V.Finaly – Kleur. Een reis door de geschiedenis

S.LeWitt – Geometric figures & color

Internet

Galeria Foksal in Warszawa (Polen) – the performance of S.Drozdz