Text (1-1/1)
Wojciech Bruszewski first revealed an interest in text in 1970. After three years as a member of Group Zero-61 (and later Zero-69), he created the work "Text" ("Tekst"). This work consisted of a sheet of photographic canvas covered with a sequence of words and hung on a single hook affixed to a wall. The canvas hung freely, with the resulting folds and bends disturbing the continuity of the sequences of text.
Thus, for the first time Bruszewski combined his theoretical and practical critique
of photography with a reflection on the nature of written language, confronting simultaneously the primacy of the content of text over the material layer; a layer he argued ‘seems to be transparent.’ [1] The artist’s intention was to highlight and strengthen what he referred to as ‘the typographic, calligraphic, or vocal element, [2] without which the text could not exist. This aim involved the radical disruption of the conventional form of a body of text, that is, the linear sequence of letters, words and sentences, written on a rectangular surface. Janusz Zagrodzki remarks that it is form that dominates "Text" as it becomes ‘the cause of the emergence of new meanings. ’[3] Therefore, this work not so much breaks the sequence of the original text, but rather reconfigures it through the accidental arrangement of the folds and bends of the photographic canvas. From this perspective Text can be considered as a precursor to the artist’s later activities based on the idea of randomness.
[1] Wojciech Bruszewski. Fenomeny percepcji, ed. by Janusz Zagrodzki (Łódź: Municipal
Art Gallery, 2010), p. 42.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[Ł. Mojsak, A Work of Chance. "On Text, Combinatorics and Randomness in the Works of Wojciech Bruszewski" in "Wojciech Bruszewski. Across Realities", Warsaw 2014.]
