A monographic exhibition of Stanisław Dróżdż
The end of Stanisław Dróżdż’s exhibition at Centrum Sztuki Współczesnej in Zamek Ujazdowski interpenetrates its beginning, giving it the character of a hypertext that viewers arrange for themselves. For this display is not held together by a chronological framework, which, although suggested, is not clear. Here we view a survey of the author’s creative explorations from 1967 to 2007. One can therefore begin viewing from the middle, to end in another middle and, always coming full circle, find oneself at the moment of its apparent beginning. Concrete poetry of the repeated sign on a plane, in space, or the poetic nature of concrete objects that change their meaning because of their location. There are therefore two mutually complementary poles of the artist’s work. The entire map of their density and the structure of the rhythm of their placement within their context, here between the walls of Zamek Ujazdowski, itself constitutes a hypertext and makes every step and gesture of the viewer a part of itself, making the viewer according to its own laws. In this way the viewer is immersed in a world that, after leaving this place, will always remain present in the silence of the hidden ruthlessness of the truth that the world is a text. The 45 “records” presented here juggle our ability to interpret perfectly, apparently allowing themselves to be tamed by it but in fact eluding enclosure by its categorical dimension. We cannot experience these works fully because they remain unfinished, extending beyond the framework of their own shapes and shifting their edges, which determine their firmness, onto us ourselves, making us their limit. If “this world is the people who think it”, and “mathematics is the language of the universe”, if reality is a text, then the creator of “Pojęciokształty” (Concept-Shapes) unfolds this fact for us like a cube, presenting its two-dimensionality and allowing us to assemble it. This assembly, incidentally, is no simple matter, because in fact the coldness of objectivity turns us ourselves into things in the context of a place in which objectivity itself cries out that it limits us — or perhaps limits our minds? For Dróżdż makes the text an object, investigating and analysing it as an object. Yet he does not cross a deep boundary; he stops at it: the boundary of awareness that this object not only surrounds us and allows us to use it, but also thinks us, shaping us and transmuting through us into its own infinity. The question, then, is whether we think the world or the world thinks us?
From between these two questions, as from the relationship of a letter to a digit, a stream of answers bursts vertically, opened by our attentiveness. Let us therefore look at these text-objects closely and see whether they will let themselves be grasped, as perhaps their author himself would wish.
We will open these packaged “magnifying glasses” of the structure of being in a manner as free as it is ordered, beginning with planes, passing through film out into space, so as to end at the tesseract of the space of presence itself within their emanation.
when it begins to be
— then already
when it is
— then still
when it ceases to be
— then already
(already — still — already)
not
that
which is
but
that
which is not
is more
than
that
which is
(from miniatures)
These two poems from the 1960s were included by their author, Stanisław Dróżdż, to give us some ground and a point of reference during our journey through his “laboratory of text and meaning”. They already say everything, so let us allow them to speak for themselves about what we are about to see.
Stanisław Dróżdż’s images are often the result of repetitions, combinations and permutations, giving us a polyphony of signs. From this polyphony a sense begins to emerge that these works constitute part of reality in a way that is natural and observed rather than manufactured. These planes are therefore like scraps of reality itself in its deeply meaningful sense. An encounter with such a scrap creates an impression of infinity, because the boundary of the image is only apparent, while its content is absorbed by the viewer as part of their everyday experiences. The text, which “seems to write itself invisibly, beyond the panel”, refers us to the question of where this inscription “beyond” takes place. Many of the exhibits presented have no title, which appears only in parentheses as a continuation of the text contained in the image. This is the case with records from 1971–1981 (“poza” — “beyond”)
, or later ones such as “trwanie” (“duration”) 
and “od do” (“from to”)
, “i” (“and”)
, in artists’ books they penetrate the structure of the experience of this invisible inscription continuing beyond the frame. In their context, therefore, the place where this inscription occurs is all the more intriguing. Such a process also takes place when a letter assimilates the language of punctuation marks, etc., and when it is replaced by a digit. Thus, for example, “teksty cyfrowe” (“numerical texts”)
, “continuum”
, “przypadek x” (“case x”) 
, “samotność” (“solitude”)
, or even “początekoniec” (“beginningend”)
, from which the exhibition’s title was taken, have an open composition. Many signs there are actually cut off by the physical edge, perhaps suggesting directly that these signs do not exist in such a form and must close somewhere. The question is where they close, where their continuation is. The author himself gives the answer, as we will see later. For now he lets us know that such a situation is by no means momentary and will continue, perhaps always, as “data” (“date”) indicates
.Alongside these unbounded ones, there are also records that are like points with a closed composition. We observe this in cases such as “życie i śmierć” (“life and death”)
from 1969, or the later “ja” (“I”)
from 1998. This is also the case — though perhaps this is a somewhat intermediate situation between this and the previous one, where the edges of the plane did not close the inscription — in the deconstruction of the word “przemijanie” (“passing”) 
. It is also present in the 1973 image “przybywanie ubywania, ubywanie przybywania” (“the increase of decrease, the decrease of increase”), in “minimum maximum”, “dwa słowa” (“two words”), “samo słowo” (“the word itself”), “język i matematyka” (“language and mathematics”) 
, “białe- czarne” (“white–black”) 
, “zapominanie” (“forgetting”) 
, or finally the series “klepsydry” (“hourglasses”) 
. These points are doubly thought-provoking. Why are they closed compositions? Do they no longer have a translation into reality, or into the field where they write themselves, towards which we are now moving? Well, it seems that the answer is clear. It just cannot be specified. It is as if these records “wrote themselves” within us rather than in some other space. Here one must look into the structure of consciousness itself. From an ontological standpoint, it is possible that we could create reality, or, dancing with it as meaning, could co-create it within its imposed boundaries and subject to its laws. Then it would have to be the case that “we are what we can name”, and the world is that too. The world as the totality and sum of our conclusions. Collective consciousness would then be precisely the world, while the language that would define us and “write” us is in fact the horizon of our encounter with the boundaries of our space of concepts and ability to name. In this view, the cut-off letters, fragmentary frames and incompleteness in Dróżdż’s images turn out to touch on the fact that we determine reality, and thus art as well. His images remain a tissue with certain constants upon which we perform actions. They possess an internal coherence and laws we can use to develop them into a deepening of the essence of what the world is and what our role in it is. “Początekoniec” is an exhibition of a universal character. The images presented there, those with a closed composition, tell us about certain laws, constant principles, orders and rules by which reality is governed. We cannot change them, but we can change our perspective. Such images, points, are an extension of the concept of incompleteness, because despite their apparent definition by the composition’s framework and their existence only within it, they themselves have the character of a snapshot, that is, they also seem infinite and enduring within the process of becoming, or of change itself. 
In the context of the unfinished ones that transcend physical frames, these points acquire a concrete direction, and their vector points towards us. One can therefore say that the unfinished images have their continuation in the reality surrounding us, while the images I call point-images here have theirs within us. It then seems interesting that the artist adapts similar concepts and symbols to both these directions (horizontal and vertical), as though wanting to suggest something to us, which I will try to investigate a little later.
The second group of works at this monographic exhibition consists of films and documentation. Here linear space and time tell a story of the sign and meaning in an accessible way. Changing arrangements of sets composed of the signs “i” (“and”) permute in flashes on the screen in a kind of dance, interlocking and deconstructing one another, indicating changeability as something that sets them in motion. The question tends towards meaning, because the entire work of this trained Polish philologist conveys form and content with equal economy and force. Are these “i” signs from the film “algebra przyimków” (“algebra of prepositions”)
(the successive pages of the book contain individual sequences from the film) not ourselves?Another film shown on the same screen metamorphoses the preposition into a line
and in this way approaches the concretisation of an already tangible poetry. For at this moment the sign becomes an object, and we see that it was already one for the creator, who tries to touch it in order to understand it. Obviously, he wants to do the same with meaning. But the moving images on this screen slip away and change. It is impossible to arrest them; one can investigate them, but not possess their essence. This informs us of something the author experienced and which is the general experience of everyone who takes the object-meaning into their “hands”. The line changes; it is a tangle that unfolds, becoming a moment in a further story, a tangle perhaps of thoughts, constant and singular for a moment, changing a moment later, cut out of a larger number of identical ones that pile up beyond the frame like those prepositions. 
These tangles can be understood as our ideas and beliefs, and the line emerging from the tangle and extending beyond the frame as a sense of being only a part. One such tangled shape, expressing the individual’s set of thoughts and feelings, is extended in the film and thereby connected with the viewer it reaches by stepping outside the frame. Tadeusz Sudnik’s electroacoustic composition “od do”, created on the basis of Dróżdż’s concrete poetry, already marks a transition from representation “outside” to the representation of this poetry within us, through sensory experiences. Let us therefore now examine space.
There is also a film documenting the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003. Stanisław Dróżdż was then the author of the Polish Pavilion
. The artist created there a situation of play involving concepts and our awareness of the place. The space could symbolise the world, while the billiard table standing in the middle could be a monument to the game itself in the sense I have indicated. The walls are covered with the entire combination of possible arrangements of cubes marked with the values of each face. The table is our playing field, and here we can decide something. What? We will return to this in a moment, but the photograph of this place brings the object to the foreground 
< , which is a sign, so we now know what we will play with — meanings. 
There are rooms in the exhibition: one that you enter and see signs all around you, and one that you cannot enter and view from outside. In the first, the surroundings also symbolise the world and signs; admitted inside, we can look at it in order to think about the subject of the entire exhibition in peace and concentration.
The rhythm of all the exhibits creates excellent conditions for this here too. It is different, however, in the case of the installation entitled “żyłki” (“fishing lines”) 
Now we can only look from outside. But what are we looking at? A network of connections, a system. But what is this system? What if we ourselves are these fishing lines, and the whole room is an image of a morphogenetic totality, that is, the sum of us all? The lines intertwine and fill the entire space. We look at the colour of the room and the air trapped between these strings. None of these lines exists alone: each is connected, each in a different way, though some similarly. It is simply a diagram of this situation.
Beautiful, but still unrecognised, and therefore unsettling. Finally there is a room with door handles, and here lies the key to the meaning of the exhibition. We have a choice of various doors, possibilities that exist–do not exist through the mere presence of handles. 
This is a classic example of the “traps of form”. We supply what is not actually there. The conclusion is that we decide what we are, what the world is and what everything means. The weight of the essence of being has been transferred and now lies within ourselves, in the question of what our own essence is and how far our possibilities extend. Being determines consciousness if consciousness does not determine being. The moment consciousness begins to decide, being becomes material. Concepts are also material. Therefore we also define concepts. Nevertheless, there are fixed concepts that we can model. The games the author materialises are games that never end, and “koło” (“circle”)
is meant to remind us of this. The logical and ruthlessly precise aesthetics of these works freeze the blood and cool the breath. 
The entire exhibition is very interesting, though not only because of its tidy surroundings, or its harmonious sense of form, with great sensitivity and deep insight into its internal and external tensions. The whole is a reminder through what it contains. There, beings really exist and are not imagined at all. It is not mimesis but a grasping of actual life. This life is a relationship according to Deleuzian thought, and thoughts are tangles. Yes, we decide, but ultimately something is revealed–created on the horizon. This eternal circle and the hidden rules of the cosmos, the same continually recurring questions about who we are and why we are, why we have been thrown into this world, into this exhibition, give us no peace. Fortunately we have a game table and the necessary pawns — meanings. 
Let us decide whether we want to remain unaware or begin to co-create, without, however, defining ourselves and shutting ourselves into fixed meanings. What endures gives is alive. For time was an important subject for Dróżdż, and he certainly did not understand it linearly. 
Stanisław Dróżdź left us an anamnesis, which we enter, observing how it exists within ourselves. This structure of a tesseract allows us to take such a pure and transparent exhibition of his insights away with us and carry it within us, sharing it. An anamnesis, that is, a recollection of our place in the world — of ourselves as creators of our reality in which we exist. A reminder, too, that we create together. The poet–artist–philosopher also gave us food for thought about the possibility of opening certain doors onto a corridor beyond reality and beyond death. It seems to me that this direction is ultimate for a full view of an exhibition that has no end within the framework of its gallery walls.
For what is grasped is dead, and only “what is not — is”, as the poet wrote, also here:In the beginning is the end
caught in the — death — net of life
tightening the loop of time, with a boomerang
of being thrown by non-being, with the increase of decrease
we return to where we have never been
being when we were not, we live
by death, die by life, not knowing
time; from someone — one’s own — transformation into something
— not having being, already about not to be