See on Zeszyty Artystyczne

(table of contents, no. 39)

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It is rewarding to consider Composition for Two Hands (1960) as an originary artwork of Antoni Starczewski. Fired in a reduction glaze and appearing like a specially prepared sheet of metal, clay ruffles flourish in this work, eventually accruing a sea of light and dark contrasts to which photographic reproductions cannot fail to do justice. The shimmering effect is luring, to say the least, despite the work’s seeming lack of obvious references. With rows of ruffles nestled in an organically shaped oval, Composition for Two Hands could call to mind Władysław Strzemiński and Katarzyna Kobro’s Unistic teachings: abstract, somewhat geometric, and often textural. But that is not all to the artwork. All rows add up to make a sum of twenty-three, a number that might be arbitrary but is certainly unequivocal. As thinner rows congregate near either end of the oval, Starczewski has projected for the spectators a slightly three-dimensional effect that is additional to the bas-relief quality. The resulting work is a sensual example of calculated structure in visual art.

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The Composition for Two Hands described here is housed at the Library of the University of Łódź, but similar descriptions could apply to two other works under the same title, all created in or near the year of 1960. Each boasts twenty-three roughly parallel bands of ceramic ruffles. Considered collectively, the works demonstrate a sort of almost awe-inspiring consistency that differs from sameness; they are evocative of the discipline of mathematics, music, or any other subject that bases itself more on common denominators of today’s humanity than on specific languages and cultural symbols. In fact, the form concerned here apparently derives from the movement of a conductor’s hands – a kind of musicality is inherent to the work. Therefore, it would be fair to say that the artist favors creative repetitions that might incur rhythms.

 

Between the 1960s and his passing in 2000, Starczewski made several formal adjustments to his oeuvre, which allowed his preoccupation with rhythm to come through more clearly and in different means: for instance, he turned his attention to rows and bands of similar widths (within each work); he shaped the irregular oval into rectangles; and most importantly, he opted for one or two strongly recognizable motifs per work, which he exhausted to create a pattern through repetition. In those respective combinations of letters, food items, and foliage, Starczewski reveals his subtle, multifaceted sense of rhythm and verbal comprehension, which resonate with practices contemporary to his and stemming from a variety of locales.

 

With regard to the particular sense of structure in the work of Starczewski, Sebastian Dudzik has provided an in-depth analysis in the monograph Antoni Starczewski: Artist and the Universe. Discussed in terms such as “notations,” “alphabets,” and “biological signs” and situated in the context of twentieth-century Polish and French art, Dudzik has given Starczewski’s oeuvre a mostly formal evaluation that is rooted in the artist’s own statements and social connections he maintained. While it is sensible to call Starczewski’s art “post-Unistic” (given the teachings that Starczewski received directly from Strzemiński at the State Higher School of Visual Arts), it would also be reasonable to allow juxtapositions of Starczewski’s work with those of his international contemporaries.[1] For instance, as Starczewski visited Paris intermittently, it is natural to take into account Nouveau Réalisme and Letterism, both of which Dudzik has duly drawn into conversations with the practice of Starczewski.[2] However, realms outside Polish and French art in the latter half of the twentieth century remain underdiscussed in the discourse surrounding the Łódź artist.

 

An exhibition curated by Marta Smolińska in 2016 at the Art Stations Gallery, Poznań has temporally and geographically broadened the comparative study initiated by Dudzik. Titled Illegibility: The Contexts of Scipt, the exhibition charts cases in visual art where written signs function less than perfectly in the conveyance of meaning, and it is in this discursive context that the audience encounter two works of Starczewski – Crossed-out Text (1970s) and Vowel Configuration (1981–1983). Although it is not mentioned in the exhibition text and perhaps more or less reflects the nature of the collection behind the exhibition, Illegibility has, on the one hand, helped spawn a Central European sphere for dialogues of text-based art (to which some of Starczewski’s artworks are relevant). On the other hand, some artists with extra-regional backgrounds, such as Irma Blank and Hanne Darboven, and occasional exceptions to the sphere, like Navid Nuur, indicate a possibility to further open up the scope of investigation.

 

Why consider Starczewski’s sense of rhythm and dynamic textual interest in a broader geographical scope, when comparative studies that stretch across the globe might strip the work of its specificities? The justification lies in the contribution such comparisons could make to the reception of the art considered circulating outside the “North Atlantic” – a term used by James Elkins to question exactly how uniform art history is and should be.[3] This essay does not intend to essentialize the main location of Starczewski’s activities, namely Łódź and/or Poland, as a locale that is quintessentially alternative to the North Atlantic – North America and Western Europe – and thereby offers utterly different art historical perspectives. Rather, it hopes to probe the visual evidence in Starczewski’s work that could indicate artistic alignments outside the North Atlantic. Once Starczewski’s work gains some distance to the historical avant-garde and (neo-)avant-gardism, the audience could see more clearly modes of creation that belie the rhetoric of an abstract and conceptual practice passing down from, say, Constructivism.

 

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Plant-Based Rhythms

 

After a decade of experimenting with arrangements of abstract elements, which grew from appearing woven together to being individually self-contained and squarely one next to another, Starczewski began to incorporate bread and vegetables into his compositions, usually not by two-dimensional representation but ready-made or sculptural attempts that he termed “bas-reliefs.” As much as one might find a table filled with standing cucumbers cut in halves surreal or even evocative of phallic associations, such an installation still shows Starczewski’s interest in rhythm, albeit in a three-dimensional situation. With each cucumber acting as a variant of another due to slight differences in curvature, color tone, height, etc., the cucumbers do not digress from Starczewski’s prior praxis of creatively repeating individual motifs. Additionally, due to their arrangement at almost equal intervals from one another, the audience could even discern clear rows and columns, causing a possible comparison to the contemporary Minimalist or Post-Minimalist movements.

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Much has been said in art history about the twentieth-century grid as a mediation of modern life and structure, and it is crucial to review the connection between Starczewski’s work and this understanding of the grid before moving away from it.[4] The argument of Rosalind Krauss that the grid is both centrifugal and centripetal could find substantiation in Table with an Arrangement of Natural Cucumbers (1973), since the table-cum-frame that supports the columns and rows of the cucumbers does not necessarily truncate our perception of a system of vegetables proffered by Starczewski. In light of the (symbolic) outward extension of the grid, which renders frames and boundaries arbitrary, the work’s seemingly unbounded regularity becomes a marker of a scientific drive honored by the artist, as scientific tables and graphs are, on a fundamental level, grids that carry insightful information. More specifically, judging by Starczewski’s choices of vegetables, one could perhaps argue that the artist might have harbored an interest in the classification of vegetables: carrots are root vegetables, potatoes and onions are tubers and bulbs, whereas cucumbers belong to the fruit kind. Also around this time in his career, Starczewski “quoted” leaves from nature into his prints, thereby giving expressions to almost all edible parts of plant matter that humans treat as vegetables.[5]

 

This turn to the extra-aesthetic – in other words, vegetables – could also be seen as where Starczewski departs from the rigid taxonomy of plant matter. Starczewski’s gaze on the variety of plants does not merely inspire taxonomical categorization, for he pays attention to individual forms. Aside from being the basis for the rhythm that is characteristic of Starczewski’s oeuvre, the individuality allowed of each (artistically rendered) natural product actually underlines its vitality. Sculpted by forces of nature and borrowed directly by Starczewski into his work, the grooves and dimples of every vegetable are uniquely located, never exactly repeating. Starczewski often paints the carrots and potatoes white or casts them into white ceramics. It is easy to fathom that, with this gesture that maximizes the appearance of shadows, the artist might hope to shine light on those indentations. In Potatoes (I) (1974), the grid formed by the precise placement of individual potatoes, along with the black-and-white visual contrast, aids the appreciation of the scattered “eyes” of the potatoes. Collectively, the “eyes” themselves also constitute a rhythm; its relative spontaneity is a harbinger of the sprouts that would grow from the “eyes” of such potatoes.

 

Around the same time in Argentina, Víctor Grippo also began to use potatoes in his work, starting with perhaps Analogía I (1970–1971) and in a fashion that is highly worth comparing to Starczewski’s despite differences between their interests and reception. The juxtaposition of Analogía I and Potatoes (I) creates a comparison that is ripe with affinities: both works make use of a grid-like structure, both works feature potatoes (or their analogous proxies), both works mark a turn of the artists from abstract art, etc. These similarities in terms of form and significance bring out a prominent aspect of Grippo’s art that is rarely discussed of Starczewski’s: energy. A diet-staple rich in carbohydrates, potatoes provide the energy needed by human beings to accomplish, for instance, artistic, cultural, and social activities. Grippo the ex-chemist was eager to innovatively recognize that transformative aspect through art. Potatoes are so frequently used in Grippo’s work to an extent that, not only have they become synonymous to Grippo, but they function effectively as a visual metaphor for Grippo’s idea of transformation.

 

This cultural symbolism that is viable through Grippo’s potato-filled installations is often linked by writers and curators to the political climate of Buenos Aires in the 1970s. For example, it could be observed in a major retrospective of Grippo held at Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela; in the brochure accompanying the exhibition, the Argentinean sociopolitical environment in which Grippo created many of his works is summarized in the first paragraph of the English text, enabling Grippo’s work to function essentially as an allegory of the nation in crisis.[6] In addition, at a 2016 gallery talk held at the Harvard Art Museums, Boston about Grippo’s life and work, the event organizer uses “Victor Grippo – Art Under Dictatorship” as the talk’s title, directly drawing attention to a political struggle potential of the work.[7] The social and political reading of Grippo’s artworks, which exceeds the equivalence between potatoes and transformation, is a condition that the work of Starczewski has barely encountered.

 

Curiously, in 1973 and 1972, both Starczewski and Grippo branched into incorporating actual bread into their installations. Needless to say, motivations behind Starczewski’s use of bread probably differ from the community-focused mindset of Grippo (who set up an oven for baking and sharing bread on a busy street of Buenos Aires). By arranging bread of different shapes (e.g. loaves cut in halves and rolls) on a table for the installation Table with an Arrangement of Bread Rolls (1973), Starczewski is likely interested in the visual dynamism resulting from the arrangement. But the transformation demonstrated by the act of turning bread into art – a theme with which Grippo also works, although arguably more explicitly and extensively – should not be neglected. Like potatoes, bread is a basic part of a diet, and if Grippo intends his use of potatoes and bread to refer to the process of food consumption for creative energy, there is no reason to preclude a version of this interpretation from being applied to comparable works of Starczewski. Moreover, as the 1970s political environment of Poland did not see the repeated coup d’états and “Dirty War” in contemporary Argentina, when placed in the Polish historical context, the work of Starczewski lacks a clear political intent similar to the anti-dictatorship sentiment celebrated in Grippo’s work. This should not reflect poorly on Starczewski’s work. Here, what might seem to be a missed opportunity of Starczewski actually could encourage the audience to divert their attention to other roles of art than illuminating or recuperating history.

 

Between the comparable works of Starczewski and Grippo, a crucial difference could be said of Starczewski’s decision to, in some cases, cast his potatoes into ceramic objects. Grippo has consistently used perishable potatoes in his installations, even stipulating, together with curators and conservators, when potatoes should be replaced once they have sprouted.[8] Given their symbolism of life, sprouts form an important aspect to those installations of Grippo. Contrarily, Starczewski’s decision might seem to have rendered the energy reduced or even depleted. Nonetheless, if one does not presume an exclusive equivalence between being organic and energetic, they would be ready to identify a broader definition of energy through the works that incorporate the ceramic casts. The rhythm created by the “eyes” of the potatoes remain captivatingly animated, while the implied transformation of the potatoes from organic materials to inorganic objects hints at the coming and going of the artist’s hand. Hence, this energy manifest in Starczewski’s plant-based works is in part consistent with that in his earlier works, and it has its emphasis on a more classical sense of artistic energy.

 

A comparative study between Starczewski and Grippo brings forth moments when the avant-garde rhetoric surrounding Starczewski’s practice loosens its grip. Starczewski might very well consider his formally intriguing art to be better comparable to Minimalist and Post-Minimalist art, which have been consecrated by the art history that connects them to modernist movements. Yet, such an inclination, if it exists, is not mutually exclusive with the interpretation based on the identification of the arranged objects’ quotidian (and transcendental) quality. The latter is a perception of Starczewski’s art that does not rely on the Western European and U.S. art history. More of this perception would come into shape if we choose to continuously compare the artist to his contemporaries from outside the North-Atlantic.

 

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Alphabetic Arrangements

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At the late 1970s, Starczewski has made another artistic transition, this time shifting his subjects from (representations of) natural products to alphabet letters. Despite the ostensible unrelatedness between vegetables and alphabets, if one heeds to some of the forms that Starczewski mobilized around this time, it could be argued that the artist remained fascinated by the grid, along with its abilities to interlink components, create rhythms, and incite chances of comprehension. Given the consistency of the interest in the grid, one could perhaps understand the transition as translation, a process in which elements of nature become “deciphered” by lettering and come infinitesimally closer to existing human cognition of the world. Simultaneously, the opposite interpretation, “ciphering,” could be made as well, since Starczewski’s combinations of letters are by no means readily comprehensible as fluidly written passages. It is in this sense that the letters share an affinity with the vegetables and that the idea of translation is applicable. Here, translation digresses from the more common understanding of it – a process that facilitates crosslinguistic communication ­– to be inclusive of other forms of transformation akin to, yet different from, those between human languages.

 

The relative incomprehension evoked here refers to the lack of immediate intelligibility of Starczewski’s final chosen letters or signs, but that does not mean Starczewski’s work from this period has to stay opaque. In his series of work titled Text-based Vowel Arrangement (1978), Starczewski dissects words in Polish (arranged letter by letter in a grid) into their component vowels and consonants, so that further simplification could be achieved by replacing vowels/consonants with pluses/minuses or slashes/dashes. When viewed by themselves, these signs might not make much sense, but knowing the process of distillation to which the signs owe their existence would facilitate one’s understanding of those signs as referring to vowels, or the lack thereof. Additionally, the process of distillation prompts the viewer to sense an analogy of the process to Starczewski’s less clear-cut but equally, if not more, transformative exchanges between vegetables and letters. Hence, as much as the general idea of translation and the sort of relative incomprehension of signs appear to be at odds with each other – in the context of Starczewski’s branching into alphabets, they could be understood as connected, at least metaphorically.

 

Despite that one could draw correlations between Starczewski’s choices of natural products and letters, it is worth noting again that a linguistic and rational sense of clarity is not the goal intended by the translation in concern. Such a deconstructive approximation to the translation between human languages could also be seen in other artworks from the period. Take Lettrism for example: In Antoni Starczewski: Artist and the Universe, Dudzik has already eloquently compared Starczewski’s work to that of the Lettrism movement pioneered by Isidore Isou, in particular noticing their differences in “artistic origins” and “the role that text was to play in the piece created.”[9] Certainly, Lettrism could prize itself in its efforts to deconstruct and refashion poetry by mobilizing Dadaist and Futurist legacies, and for that reason, Starczewski’s alternative emphasis on unified compositions involving letters and other subjects should distinguish the artist from his French counterparts. Meanwhile, one could still connect Lettrism and Starczewski’s work by way of more than their common interest in text at large. The fascination of Isou and other Lettrists with metagraphics – signs and compositions collaged from existing texts and other forms of communication – channels Starczewski’s interest in appropriating, selecting, and morphing letters and, more importantly, the analogy between the letters and natural products. Since Isou considers metagraphics as “post-writing” and “[supplementing] the means of expression,” a certain translative process that one could identify in the later work of Starczewski might likely be also present here.[10] In similar ways, somewhat contrary to Dudzik’s argument, this essay also considers that links through creative translation could be observed between Starczewski’s text-based practice and, say, concrete poetry. One practice might not have exerted any direct influence on the other, but they share the attentiveness to the written/drawn form of text, along with its potential to transform into alternative methods of communication vis-à-vis merely plastic manipulations.

 

Xu Bing’s text-based work from the 1980s stands in this context as a suitable comparison to Starczewski’s transition to concentrate on letters and other forms of writing. As one of the more recognized artworks stemming from contemporary China, A Book from the Sky (1987–1991) has been widely read as having culled from a national writing system but in turn emptied the system of its meaning (since the resulting characters are not readable). In terms of its implication, the artistic gesture is claimed to have “[called] attention to the ongoing crisis of modern China,” to quote Alice Yang, an early advocate of Xu.[11] The politics of modern and contemporary China have taken precedence in the mainstream interpretive strategy used by scholars of Xu, while such a prioritization of the cultural/political has not been the case for Starczewski. This section hopes to emphasize that both Starczewski and Xu have shown through their work first and foremost a dedication to retooling signs that carry information. Not unlike what Xu has later done, in works such as Deleted Texts (1970s) and gr/2/g (1975–1976), Starczewski also ventures into total unintelligibility, in a sense defamiliarizing his audience from the alphabets with which he has worked for a period.

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Just as the juxtaposition of Starczewski’s and Grippo’s work could encourage the viewer to untie their preoccupation with art as illuminations of history, a similar tendency could be deduced from the paring of Starczewski and Xu. The established affinity between Starczewski and certain text-based practices could help dislocate Xu from his current isolated position, placing his work in a realm where visual artists raise writing system-related concerns that are not necessarily always contingent on cultural specificities. Indeed, in order to print A Book from the Sky, Xu has carved thousands of moveable type printing blocks in a Song-style font, arguably deliberately exploiting a traditional Chinese form; the fact that the characters printed on paper are collated into books bound by traditional Chinese bookbinding techniques accentuates this association. But the viewer is not obliged to only see traits related to China in this work, when one does not necessarily pinpoint Polishness in the hand-printed work of Starczewski that reinvents the Polish alphabet.

 

In an essay, Stanley K. Abe considers the U.S. critical reception of Xu’s A Book from the Sky an instantiation where the liberal democratic ideology penetrates the reading of the artwork.[12] Hence, to tightly associate the post-Tiananmen political atmosphere with the “meaningless” characters painstakingly created by Xu is to risk a kind of gross reductionism that disregards the work’s other creative potentials. In contrast to that position criticized by Abe, when viewed from an angle that appreciates the textual alterations done by either artist, the works by Starczewski and Xu collectively demonstrate an interest of the artist-intellectuals in radically divesting from the languages that allow the genesis of their works.

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In analyzing Starczewski’s alphabet-based body of work, that fact that vowels and consonants are extensively replaced by symbols elected by Starczewski is key. As linguistic representations of a handful of sounds that could be uttered without having to interrupt the airflow in any significant way, vowels are rather distinct in the pronunciation of words. Therefore, by separating the few vowels from the plentiful consonants using the plus/minus or slash/dash designation, Starczewski highlights that distinction. In the meantime, other minor translative processes are also taking place to emphasize the distinction while rendering it somewhat perplexing: vowels and consonants are removed of their phonetic dimension to become readily written signs; discrepancies within either vowels or consonants are wiped as well. When considering this visualizing simplification in conjunction with the fact that Starczewski reproduces his mutations of letters (through printing, bronze casts, and embossing) in relatively large quantities, one might come to suspect that Starczewski has intended his simplification for propagation, perhaps hoping to reach many viewers and demonstrate how one could deconstruct our daily speech and writing in a unique manner that lets go of verbal meanings.[13]

 

Also produced in a large edition of 126, A Book from the Sky consists of made-up characters that by no means result from simplification, but the process is also translative due to Xu’s reinvention/recombination of existing radicals to make up the characters.[14] Seemingly antithetical to simplification, which is the underlying idea of leftist- and communist-led Chinese script simplification movements, the unreadable glyphs designed by Xu resemble Traditional Chinese characters instead.[15] This characteristic constitutes the ground on which both the Orientalizing and the politically polarizing reception of the work rely. Yet, when considered along with the edition number and the visual spectacle of the floor-to-ceiling installation, the artist’s decision to invent a system of complicated characters points out a sort of grand futility; it could feed the interest of certain audience to brand the work as anti-government, but it would also not be an exaggeration to state that this production of futility is geared toward historical writing systems of China. The title, “A Book from the Sky,” means in contemporary Chinese “nonsense writing” even though it derives from Taoist scriptural contexts, and it is likely that Xu has suggested the futility by adopting this title. From this perspective, this work participates in the Chinese modernist debate regarding the abandonment of Chinese characters in favor of, for instance, total romanization. At the same time, because of the intimacy that the work maintains with writing and printing traditions, this work adopts a rather equivocal stance in that debate.

 

Not dissimilar in spirit to Starczewski’s simplification of Polish letters in exchange for universal-seeming symbols, the debate evoked by A Book from the Sky is not unique to China but has occurred to Vietnam, Turkey, among other nations that did not use Latin alphabets prior to their modernization movements. Hence, both artists show a leaning toward examining the transformative potential of local languages despite their varying formal approaches. The viewer is unlikely to arrive at this insight if they are bound to locating Starczewski in Western European and U.S. art contexts, where (artistic challenges to) Euro-American literary conventions and verbal meanings might take precedence over linguistic history. Simultaneously, it is through looking closely at Starczewski’s alphabet-based artworks that one could find an opportune moment to glance sideways and reinterpret the politically overdetermined work of Xu.

 

Rhythmic, energetic, translative, and linguistically attentive – these are some of the characteristics of Starczewski’s work that this essay has hoped to evoke by connecting the artist with his two contemporaries. When it is not considered from perspectives that prioritize influences from or confluences with the popularly identified canon of modern and contemporary art, the work of Starczewski gets to disentangle from the avant-garde rhetoric. This rhetoric is not always suited, since it sometimes gives prominence to an oxymoronic combination of evaluations: deriving from a lineage of rarified artists and surpassing the same artists in terms ingenuity (so to remain avant-garde).

 

Lateral connections that outstep the bubble does risk being accused of jettisoning personal connections and preferences of the artist too easily, but it also opens up a sphere for different knowledge. One significant advantage of this sort of comparisons is that it gives up the influencing/influenced dyad, allowing an assessment of works on a relatively level ground to encourage less predictable findings. In this condition, variations in historical contexts continue to play a vital role in determining connotations of the works, but they do not necessarily overshadow the readings that could stand relatively independently of the contexts. Having showcased multiple areas of interest in terms of both forms and systems of knowledge, the art of Starczewski could benefit from this variety of comparative analysis on its path of receiving due appreciation.

 

 

[1] Sebastian Dudzik, Antoni Starczewski: Artist and the Universe (Poznań: Fundacja 9 | Art Space, 2014), 242.

[2] Dudzik, Starczewski.

[3] James Elkins, The End of Diversity in Art Historical Writing: North Atlantic Art History and its Alternatives (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021).

[4] Rosalind Krauss, “Grids,” October 9 (Summer 1979): 50–64. https://doi-org.proxy.artic.edu/10.2307/778321.

[5] Dudzik, Starczewski, 211.

[6] Miguel von Hafe Pérez, Víctor Grippo: Transformation (Santiago de Compostela: Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, 2013), 8.

[7] “Gallery Talk: Victor Grippo – Art Under Dictatorship,” Harvard Art Museums, accessed December 18, 2020, https://harvardartmuseums.org/calendar/gallery-talk-victor-grippo-art-under-dictatorship.

[8] The information is gathered from consultation with museum staff at the Art Institute of Chicago, which co-owns one of Grippo’s installation works featuring perishable potatoes, Analogía I, (2da. versíon) (1970–1977).

[9] Dudzik, Starczewski, 217.

[10] Isidore Isou, “Selections from the Manifestoes of Isidore Isou,” thing.net, trans. David W. Seaman, accessed December 18, 2020, http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/lettrist/isou-m.htm.

[11] Alice Yang, “Xu Bing: Rewriting Culture,” Why Asia? Contemporary Asian and Asian American Artists (New York: New York University Press, 1998).

[12] Stanley K. Abe, “No Questions, No Answers: China and A Book from the Sky,” Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field 25, no. 3 (Autumn 1998): 169–192.

[13] The edition numbers tend to be set to the forties or more, despite the fact that Starczewski might not necessarily complete the editions during his lifetime.

[14] Xu Bing, “The Making of Book from the Sky,” in Tianshu: Passages in the Making of a Book, ed. Katherine Spears (London: Quaritch, 2009): 51–63.

[15] The Traditional characters are no longer used officially in China. They remain in official use in some other Sinophone areas and countries, including Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. Simplified and Traditional Chinese characters differ in that many of the Simplified characters have fewer strokes; Simplified Chinese also uses fewer characters in total by using one character to represent two or more Traditional Chinese characters. Many Simplified Chinese users also read and/or write Traditional Chinese, and vice versa.