Forgetting, alongside Między [between], has become Stanisław Dróżdż’s flagship work. Since it first appeared at an exhibition in Wrocław in 1968, it has been included in the artist’s subsequent exhibitions, and in anthologies of concrete poetry. Originally, like all his works, it was in typewritten form; then it took the shape of a picture painted in black ink on white cardboard and displayed on a wall. Stanisław Dróżdż has presented his work as wall installations since the late 1960s, while the three later language versions (apart from Polish) of Forgetting (English, Finnish, German) were first put on display in 2000 at the exhibition curated by Anda Rottenberg, entitled Amnesia. Die Gegenwart des Vergessens at the Neues Museum Weserburg in Bremen. The tightly grouped white letters of Forgetting, written in sans-serif, bolded font, use the strategy of leaving off the last item in the set to create severed right-angle triangles with sides of various lengths on a black background. This heavy figure shorn off some of its parts points toward the mechanism of the forgetting process itself, which, according to Dróżdż, is irreversible. In his sketch for this work, the artist writes: “It transfers the meaning of the word onto its graphic design, the graphic signifies an operation, a lack of particular content. The logical combination of two things with no logical connection—the meaning and its symbol, i.e. the word. A construction ensuring an almost maximum objectivity of reception.” [1] As in most of Dróżdż’s early works, Forgetting joins the figurative with semantics. A key strategy is the reduction of symbols—the removal of letters. In Forgetting the letters vanish, their number shrinks, leaving independently meaningless fragments of words, the remains after the ends have been cut. Dróżdż’s Forgetting is imagined like the shrinking of memory, the changes to its shape, and the impossibility of grasping for its remote regions, the result of the pressure of time—a shift into the misty past. Forgetting is a natural attribute, like remembering, which is why both these acts take place in thought, i.e. in concrete language, in words and through words. Wiesław Borowski wrote of Forgetting: “A word from which a letter has been torn, like “forgetting” for instance, builds an unexpectedly concrete space around itself, initiating the process of rediscovering its full significance, without added contexts and definitions. For the viewer this space is an utterly new experience. It is as though the familiar word is being seen for the first time, as if now one must recall it all over again.” [2] Stanisław Dróżdż (1939-2009) is the most important practitioner of concrete art in Poland; his concrete poetry made him the driving force of this movement in the 1970s and 1980s. In 2003 he represented Poland at the 50th Biennale di Venezia. He was in regular contact with key figures of Concrete Poetry from around the world, such as Ian Hamilton Finlay, Eugen Gomringer, and Vaclav Havel. Since 1971 he worked continuously with Foksal Gallery in Warsaw. In 1979 he published the book Concrete Poetry. Selected Polish Texts and Documentation from the Years 1967-77.   The tightly grouped white letters of Forgetting, written in sans-serif, bolded font, use the strategy of leaving off the last item in the set to create severed right-angle triangles with sides of various lengths on a black background. This heavy figure shorn off some of its parts points toward the mechanism of the forgetting process itself, which, according to Dróżdż, is irreversible. In his sketch for this work, the artist writes: “It transfers the meaning of the word onto its graphic design, the graphic signifies an operation, a lack of particular content. The logical combination of two things with no logical connection—the meaning and its symbol, i.e. the word. A construction ensuring an almost maximum objectivity of reception.” [1] As in most of Dróżdż’s early works, Forgetting joins the figurative with semantics. A key strategy is the reduction of symbols—the removal of letters. In Forgetting the letters vanish, their number shrinks, leaving independently meaningless fragments of words, the remains after the ends have been cut. Dróżdż’s Forgetting is imagined like the shrinking of memory, the changes to its shape, and the impossibility of grasping for its remote regions, the result of the pressure of time—a shift into the misty past. Forgetting is a natural attribute, like remembering, which is why both these acts take place in thought, i.e. in concrete language, in words and through words. Wiesław Borowski wrote of Forgetting: “A word from which a letter has been torn, like “forgetting” for instance, builds an unexpectedly concrete space around itself, initiating the process of rediscovering its full significance, without added contexts and definitions. For the viewer this space is an utterly new experience. It is as though the familiar word is being seen for the first time, as if now one must recall it all over again.” [2] Stanisław Dróżdż (1939-2009) is the most important practitioner of concrete art in Poland; his concrete poetry made him the driving force of this movement in the 1970s and 1980s. In 2003 he represented Poland at the 50th Biennale di Venezia. He was in regular contact with key figures of Concrete Poetry from around the world, such as Ian Hamilton Finlay, Eugen Gomringer, and Vaclav Havel. Since 1971 he worked continuously with Foksal Gallery in Warsaw. In 1979 he published the book Concrete Poetry. Selected Polish Texts and Documentation from the Years 1967-77.
[1] Stanisław Dróżdż, [2012], p. 1, manuscript, archive of the Potocka Gallery in Cracow. [2] W. Borowski, Dróżdż, p. 2,634. The press text uses fragments of Małgorzata Dawidek Gryglicka’s “Forgetting” from the book Historia tekstu wizualnego. Polska po 1967 roku, Cracow: Ha!art, 2012.