Born in 1945, Grodzisk Mazowiecki (PL). Lives and works in Berlin (DE)
1971 - 1973
B&W, silent, 8 mm film transferred onto VHS and DVD
durée: 5'45''
Year of Purchase: 2010
Very early in her career, Ewa Partum developed both a taste for visual poetry and attention to public space. The artist rapidly subverted, for example, the prescriptive discourse governing street signs: in Legality of Space (1971), one of her first works, she “uprooted” street signs from the streets of Łódź and replanted them—as a sort of irony—in Freedom Square. Some of the instructions, modified to create contradictory injunctions such as “_prohibition prohibited_,” translated the absurdity of authoritarian discourse in the People’s Republic of Poland at the time. Similarly, the white letters which she scattered in Active Poetry used an official propaganda tool of the 1970s: ready-mades available in all school supplies stores, often used to compose communist banners.
Partum subverted the machine of political indoctrination and its “ready-to-use” discourse, but also challenged the determinism of a language immobilized by the rules of grammar, syntax, and spelling… By scattering these white letters first around the city, then in the countryside, she opted for a continuous redistribution of meaning. Passers’-by footsteps, rolling waves, or the wind would carry on the dispersal. In 1971, the artist took passages from Goethe, Proust, Joyce, and Kafka, and mixed up the order of typographic characters (An Excerpt from Faust by Goethe, An Excerpt from A la recherche du temps perdu by Proust, etc.). This dislocation resembles Dadaist practices, such as randomly drawing words cut out from a newspaper, as described by Tristan Tzara. However, Partum doesn’t use chance as the organizing principle since the letters never produce any stable composition. The scattering of Active Poetry, realized between 1971 and 1973, generated a wind-blown flux of letters, fated to lose unity and meaning. Literally and figuratively, the artist accomplished the dissemination of logocentrism and its hierarchies, for the sake of the incommunicable and the imagination.
In 1972, Partum created the gallery Adres in Łódź, whose name, “address,” signaled a postal mission dedicated to mail art. “A place, situation, opportunity, offering information, proposals, documentation, speculation, provocation, exposition of every possible presence of art, or reasons for not showing it,” Adres was an extension of Ewa Partum’s artistic activity and the site of some of her exhibitions. It was also a platform for communication and exchange with artists from the otherwise inaccessible West. In 1975, however, the artist abandoned poetry in order to concentrate on more urgent problems and undertake a series of feminist performances.
Hélène Meisel