Piktogram - talking pictures magazine

Image/Text

Image/Text is a film programme of work by Polish artists that investigates the transition from the domination of the 'pure visuality' of modernist art to post-modern 'textual practices' that were so important for the emergence of contemporary art in the 1960s.

Seventeen screened works date chiefly from the 1970s and the turn of the twenty-first century. They have been made using various media, including 8 mm, 16 mm, and 35 mm film, video, and computer animation. There is found footage and amateur film. Some of the films are black-and-white and some are in colour, with and without sound, analytical or lyrical. Made by women and men. Texts, words, letters - introducing order, narrating, but also confusing, falsifying, being rearranged, broken up, deconstructed, introducing chaos. The set is not chronological, its purpose is rather to confront and release new meanings resulting from unexpected conjunctions.

Curated by Lukasz Ronduda and Michal Wolinski in association with Piktogram Talking Pictures Magazine and The Archive of Polish Experimental Film (CCA Ujazdowski Castle).

LIST OF FILMS

Paulina Olowska Zapraszam na wystawe Welcome to the Exhibition, 2005
Ewa Partum Poem by Ewa, 1973
Jozef Robakowski Mój film My Film, 1974
Akademia Ruchu Europa Europe, 1976
Wilhelm Sasnal Bez tytulu (Jej oczy) Untitled (Her Eyes), 1998
Amatorski Klub Filmowy IKS Mikolow Humbug, lata 60-te
Wilhelm Sasnal Bez tytulu (Przewodnik po Nowej Hucie) Untitled (A Guide to Nowa Huta), 1997
Marysia Lewandowska & Neil Cummings Tearing, 2002
Igor Krenz Ogien jest lepszy od nozyczek Fire Is Better Than Scissors, 1990
Paweł Kwiek Ja i telefon Me and the Telephone, 1972
Wilhelm Sasnal Bez tytulu (Mlodziez) Untitled (Youth), 1999
Jan Simon ja/ty Me/You, 2004
Anna Niesterowicz HH, 2002
Józef Robakowski Cwiczenie Exercise, 1972/1973
Andrzej Lachowicz Bez tytulu, fragment filmu "Zywa galeria" J. Robakowskiego Untitled, a part of the film Living Gallery by J. Robakowski, 1975
Wilhelm Sasnal Anarchia Anarchy, 2001
Ryszard Waśko Zaprzeczenie Negation, 1973

Image/Text programme is shown as a part of:

UBS Openings: Saturday Live

Word Sculpture
Saturday 25 November 2006

The power and beauty of the spoken and written word is the focus for this programme of performances and film.

Image/Text Starr Auditorium: 15.00 - 16.00
Ewa Partum: Visual Poetry Throughout Tate Modern: 16.30 - 19.15
Carl Andre: Poetry Reading Starr Auditorium: 19.00 - 20.30
Martin Creed: Words Starr Auditorium: 21.00 - 22.30

Film descriptions

1. Paulina Olowska
Welcome to the Exhibition
2005

In 1923 Karel Teige creates his famous Alphabet, in which a dancer dressed in an avant-garde gym tunic poses imitating the shapes of Latin letters. Over 80 years later, Paulina Olowska recreates the Czech avant-garde artist's alphabet. History comes full circle. The language of the avant-garde has become a stylistic convention. Revolution has been reduced to pose, a set of gestures, to repetition, dressing up (Olowska's elegant dress is red).
Like in her numerous earlier works based on the re-enacting, or appropriation, of avant-garde aesthetics and strategies, Olowska seems more interested in the desires and urges underlying them than in their actual goal. That is why the artist separates the imaginary from the symbolic, emphasising her interest in the non-symbolic qualities underlying the phenomena under scrutiny: the energy of the perverse-vigorous striving towards the 'delight of transforming oneself and reality'. The reference to 'idealistic' aesthetics (originating in a period when art still had its goals, missions, utopias), which evoke an optimistic belief in the possibility of change, acquires a critical edge in an era when few believe in the possibility of fulfilling any desire.
The first screening of the Image/Text film programme shown in the context of the Potential exhibition which was meant as a voice in the debate on the planned Warsaw Museum of Modern Art. Invited by us to take part in the screening, Olowska used her alphabet to formulate a sentence that, in an ironic manner, indicates the place where artistic utopias aimed to reject the artistic salon and actually change the forms of social communication end up.

2. Ewa Partum
Poem by Ewa
1973

Since 1973 Ewa Partum was documenting on film her ephemeral actions and happenings in the field of visual poetry. The majority of them consisted in scattering letters of the alphabet cut out in paper (throwing them from a mountain slope, in the middle of a forest, into the sea). The gesture aimed to deconstruct the traditional ('worn' in her opinion) conventions and forms of poetic expression, and was the result of a need to replace conventional grammar and syntax of the linear linguistic system with more open-ended and processual structures, taking into account, in the process of their formation, factors such as chance and the recipient's (co-author's) creativity. In the context of Partum's subsequent involvement in the feminist movement, her deconstruction of the syntactic and grammatical structures of language and the creation of anarchic, 'freely drifting' poems can be seen as an act of rebellion against language, recognised as a medium for patriarchal values. To cite Xaviere Gauthier, 'In fact, one can wonder that man and woman seem to speak virtually the same language, that the woman finds her place within the same system of linear linguistics, the same grammatical system ordered by symbolism, super ego, the law, the phallus'. In Partum's visual poetry, the letters of the alphabet are confronted with the natural elements (water, wind) perceived as feminine.
Ewa Partum made her films using an 8 mm camera, privately (for instance at her home in Lodz), while caring for her elderly mother and bringing up her daughter as a single parent. During the same time in Lodz, the members of the male-dominated Workshop of the Film Form made 35 mm films exploring similar problems as Partum in tautological cinema - the Poem by Ewa films were part of the Tautological Cinema series and a continuation of Partum's earlier works such as Poetic Licence Area (1971) or Active Poetry. The former consisted in scattering the 24 letters of the alphabet on the floor in a room to which viewers had been invited (in the apartment of the artist's then husband, artist Andrzej Partum). The doormat at the entrance had been covered with glue so that the letters stuck to the viewers' shoes and were eventually carried out of the apartment. The exhibition ended when the last letter was taken out. The action Active Poetry took place in one of Warsaw's underpasses. Partum scattered letters making up a fragment of Joyce's Ulysses and consented them to be moved, shuffled and confronted with each other by the passers-by.

3. Jozef Robakowski
My Film
1974

The film was made with a single shot recorded in 35 mm. It represents a continuation of Robakowski's interest, present in his other cinematic works, in the problem of biological-mechanical recordings in which he tried to imbue the cold, objective work of the film camera with humane, biological and subjective elements. Above all, however, the film is an ironic commentary on filmmakers' habit of structuring cinematic narration as if it were literary narration. It is also a neo-avantgarde mockery at the very category of authorship.

4. Akademia Ruchu
Europe
1976

A cinematic documentation of an action carried out by the theatre/performance group Akademia Ruchu (Academy of Movement) in the public space of the city of Lodz in 1976. In reaction to the recent brutally crushed worker protests in Radom and Ursus, the AR presented a very dynamic version of Anatol Stern's 1929 futuristic protest poem Europe.

5. Wilhelm Sasnal
Untitled (Her Eyes)
1998

A short film that can be seen as a humorous play with the conventions of cinematic (but also, for instance, cartoon) representation. In a feature movie, when an actor says something ambiguous, the camera usually closes up on his face and freezes there for the facial expression to tell the rest. The expression is also supposed to convey hidden emotions. The tone and timbre of the voice are also important, of course.
Sasnal's film shows still images of printouts with 'his' and 'her' mouths, interlaced with out-of-context on-screen dialogue that says nothing but still triggers off a chain of associations. The last text chart brings us back to earth by telling us, in storyboard language, what the camera's next movement will be. As if we had not guessed by then that it will be a close-up on the eyes.

6. Amatorski Klub Filmowy iks Mikolow
Humbug
1960s

A film made sometime in the 1960s by workers, members of the amateur film club iks in the provincial town of Mikolow. Dug out as part of the Enthusiasts project (available at www.enthusiastsarchive.net). Its authors experimented in quite a daring way with animated film, achieving effects which situate their work somewhere between Terry Gilliam and Jan Lenica (the outstanding Polish cartoonist, 1928-2001).
One can easily discern a political metaphor in this short story, a critique of the communist regime in Poland. Ended with an ironic punch line, the grotesque speaker's incoherent speech is a backwards recording of an authentic speech by Wladyslaw Gomulka, the communist leader. This is precisely how his speeches were perceived - as seemingly endless, incomprehensible verbal diarrhoea. Equally noteworthy is the opening scene with a view of the town, with buildings covered by billboards advertising Western consumer goods, unavailable in Poland at the time, and the extravaganza of lettering, characteristic for Polish typography of the 1960s used in posters and magazines that, on the visual level, were an enclave of freedom (treated by the government as a fig leaf). What comes through is the unfulfilled longing for a different, more colourful reality.

7. Wilhelm Sasnal
Untitled (A Guide to Nowa Huta)
1997

A travelogue piece in which Sasnal takes the viewers on a trip through Nowa Huta (a sprawling socialist-realist development built in Krakow in the 1950s for the workers of the equally sprawling Nowa Huta steel plant, a flagship industrial project of the era) by filming the consecutive pages of an old, black-and white tourist guidebook. He begins with text - statistics, population data, lists of institutions, historical monuments, entertainment sites, the steel plant's departments. Then he moves to illustrations. An animated car drives across an offset photograph of the city. The smokestacks are smoking, the workers are hurrying into the factories. Dynamic montage follows. A series of close-ups of the furnaces and flowing pig iron (barely visible because of the raster). Then the workers leave, the smokestacks stop smoking, the steel workers in wide hats - looking like the cowboys in the advertisement - light up their cigarettes. The grey, monotonous reality emerging from the pages of the guidebook contrasts with the soundtrack in the background - pleasant trancelike reggae full of synthesiser effects.

8. Marysia Lewandowska & Neil Cummings
Tearing
2002

A found-footage film composed of scenes showing the tearing of pages out of books, files, annuals, magazines, etc. These arrogant acts of illegal appropriation of a common good (which, in a certain, limited and regulated scope, is to serve everyone) are usually carried out in public places - libraries, archives - and are camouflaged in a comical way. At the same time, the scenes are an allusion to Lewandowska and Cummings's practice of 'tearing' them out of other people's films. However, the multiple repetition of these scenes brings to mind the never-ending process of the appropriation of other authors' (as well as common) images, texts etc. and their recycling, reuse for various - all possible - purposes.
The work was originally presented on a monitor hidden deep in the recesses of a Manchester library. Visitors happening upon the monitor were provided with an impulse and a jocular instruction to 'liberate' the knowledge stored therein.

9. Igor Krenz
Fire Is Better Than Scissors
1990

The film is the documentation of a formal experiment and, like with Krenz's other works, two dimensions mutually deconstructing each other are present here. The first of these is connected with the conceptual-analytical tradition that explored the interrelations between text and image - the film is an attempt to literally visualise its title. The second dimension, a neo-dadaistic one, has to do with Krenz's clear tendency for self-irony and for invariably reducing his rational, methodical artistic projects to absurdity.

10. Pawel Kwiek
Me and the Telephone
1972

A film which is ironically related to the habit of immediate detection of meanings and textual interpretations in a representational film. The film perversely plays with the processes and mechanisms through which cinematic meaning is produced. Kwiek divided it into two parts. In the first, the screen is completely dark as the artist describes the process of making the film. The second part is a silent projection of the film that Kwiek described in the first part. Within this structure, Kwiek collides visualisations of two kinds. Mental images of a given situation, created in our minds and based on Kwiek's story from the first part of the movie, collide with actual images of the situation, recorded on film and perceived by the viewer in the second part. Me and the Telephone allows the artist to analyze relations between text and image in a very conceptual manner. The mind of the viewer, which produces 'visualizations of text' in the first part and 'textualisations of image' in the second, becomes the space in which these operations are conducted.

11. Wilhelm Sasnal
Untitled (Youth)
1999

This animated 8 mm film was made using a simple and commonly available tool - the text editor. The subject was provided by the news section of a local newspaper (the same source provides inspiration for the paintings of Marcin Maciejowski, once a member together with Sasnal of the group 'Ladnie'). Music has always been an important inspiration for Sasnal, and, on the formal level, the soundtrack in this film matches its visual layer ('naive' post-techno electronics by a well-known German band).

12. Jan Simon
Me/You
2004

The film refers to the analytical tradition of the Workshop of the Film Form. It was made using a computer program written specially for the purpose by Simon. The artist eliminates his own subjectivity, intuition and expression, subordinating the film's construction and ultimate aesthetical effect to an 'objective' procedure. The program generates a sequence of the words that separate the word 'me' from the word 'you' in the dictionary of the Polish language. This creates a metaphor of communication between two people, a metaphor of the space stretching between 'me' and the Other.

13. Anna Niesterowicz
HH
2002

Sign language can be easily translated into verbal language. It is a codified communication system based on rational premises, like speech or writing, and, like them, it is a product of culture.
Anna Niesterowicz is interested in that which is 'lost in translation' and cannot be explained, which belongs to the field of irrational associations, is 'outside culture', is a result of error, misunderstanding, and especially that which affects emotions and directly touches upon reality.
For the 'uninitiated', street slang (and for example graffiti or the various dress codes) represents a hermetic language. Niesterowicz invited young girls dressed in sport clothes to perform gestures familiar from hip-hop videos in front of the camera. 'Translation' subtitles appear at the bottom of the screen. And when we think we have gotten what we expected, it turns out to be just naive banalities combined with empty gestures. Perhaps this is because the 'speakers' are teenage girls from Poland rather than big, serious Afro-Americans from Brooklyn? Perhaps the 'translation' is bad? Or perhaps someone simply jibes at our expectations that everything can be explained, translated and named?
The Image/Text programme features an abbreviated version of the 8-minute film.

14. Jozef Robakowski
Exercise
1972/1973

Exercise focuses on the relation between 'two sorts of writing', between the materiality of film stock and the materiality of the alphabet. Structural experiments of this kind led Robakowski to formulate in 1975 A Language-less Semiologic Concept of Film in which he wrote: 'As a result of conducted research, the linguistic conceptual system can now be seen as an artificial manipulation, an operation that conducts a rape of sorts on the pure cinematic signal. A film recording is a different order of signification than language and analysis of film phenomena in terms of linguistic categories is therefore impossible.'
The letters appearing successively on the screen do not make up any understandable sentence. Robakowski assigned an artificial sound, generated by synthesizer, to each letter that was somehow similar to the sound of the represented letter but at the same time totally different from the human voice. Sound effect is so interesting that it can be perceived in terms of musicology.

15. Andrzej Lachowicz
Untitled, a part of the film Living Gallery by J. Robakowski
2004

The short piece by Lachowicz forms a part of Jozef Robakowski's 1975 assembly film Living Gallery. Robakowski's goal was to 'reveal at any price the mentality of the contemporary artists, reveal their artistic consciousness.' The whole thing was to constitute a kind of 'performative' gallery presenting the most important (and vital) artistic attitudes and strategies. Each of the invited artists was given time to prepare his or her project, the professional equipment, and 1.5 minutes of screen time.
Lachowicz's film begins with the image of his own abstract painting (which is suddenly replaced by another, similar one). Then we shift to the studio where we see, from above, a group of colourfully dressed young people lined up in rows on a white background which resembles previous abstract image. They then break up the arrangement, move in different directions, and, in a sequence of brief scenes, position themselves in shapes resembling the various letters of the alphabet. These letters arrange themselves in an inscription: the artist's name and surname. This way, Lachowicz tells us, 'me = others'. It is a characteristic statement for him, blending a conceptual reflection on the persuasiveness of language and the media with an existential reflection.

16. Wilhelm Sasnal
Anarchy
2001

During the long break between lessons, Sasnal arranges a crowd of kids in the school yard into the shape of the letter A, the symbol of anarchy. The pupils stand in an orderly manner. But not for long. Order is not fun.

17. Ryszard Wasko
Negation
1973

The film is one more serious, analytical experiment created within the framework of Workshop of the Film Form, however it takes on an absurd character as the score is rigorously 'executed' by the artist. The initial epistemic goal quickly transformed - as repetitions of similar operations continued - into an ironic 'play with form'. Thus, in a highly humorous manner, the seriousness of Wasko's earlier experiments is diffused. This analytical experiment, due to monotonous, emphatic repetition and multiplication of the word 'no' (on the visual and sonic level), was interpreted in western countries (to the artist's surprise) as a protest against communism in Poland.

Lukasz Ronduda, Michal Wolinski