The exhibition I Tried to Tell Ya Something Through the Phone introduces the work of painter Antonie Stanová complemented by an audio work by Bohumila Grögerová, a poet and translator closely tied to experimental poetry. Although both artists never met and they are several generations apart, their approach to language and writing, particularly in the temptation of regrouping, is very similar. Stanová’s paintings are more written than painted and are created as poetic diary entries. Grögerová stepped beyond the boundaries of literature to create image-based or audio works. The exhibition presents canvases and a poem by Antonie Stanová accompanied by Bohumila Grögerová’s radio play Už jenom dýchat... aneb Dum spero, spiro (Only Breathing Left... or, Dum spero, spiro), an almost Kafkaesque drama from 1975.
The intensity of writing and the dynamic acceptance of literary forms in contemporary art are explained in various ways. These include attempts to regain authenticity in the prevailing aesthetic of post-production, the narrative turn in art, or attempts to renovate the language used to talk and write about art. Debates about the borders of literature and art (and poetry and painting in particular), however, have a long history. Horace’s De arte poetica and the famous comparison of the painter and the poet “ut pictura poesis eris” (around the year 13 CE) served Renaissance theory in its struggle for the rehabilitation of visual art and can be described as the beginning of reflections on the unclear relationship of these two highly regarded disciplines.
In the case of the young artist Antonie Stanová, the works are close to diary entries in which the sign and writing do not necessarily create meaning. The paintings are created by inscribing letters, short slogans, graphic signs, typography, loosely conceived pictograms, fingerprints and handprints. She touches the canvas and draws in a manner that is often reminiscent of automatic writing or meaningless doodling. The works bring up associations of Cy Twombly or younger artists born in the 1950s: Albert Oehlen, Christopher Wool, Jonathan Lasker, Clem Crosby, but also – closer to the artist’s generation – Zombie formalism and artists connected to it, such as Kerstin Brätsch, Florian Meisenberg, and David Ostrowski. In the case of some of the artists mentioned above, asemic writing or signs are closely tied to drawing, which becomes a key element in the hierarchy of the image – Stanová ascribes a similar meaning to drawing in her work.
At the exhibition, paintings are complemented by a single poem presented through the medium of an iPhone. It is composed of fragments of various texts – lyrics by the Japanese musician Joji, the poetry of Alice Cary, Carl Sandburg, Philip Larkin, and Rachel Sherwood, quotes by Angelina Jolie, lists of work titles from artsy.net, or quotes from classified ads for luxury properties. Stanová searched for her materials using the keywords “view of the window”, which is the subject of the poem. She structured the text visually through the use of various fonts and line spacings. The American poet Kenneth Goldsmith calls this type of writing uncreative writing or antiwriting, reflecting the crossing of conceptual art and poetry, which is manifested in the use of techniques that are traditionally considered to exist outside the field of literature,2 such as the use of the Google search engine to write poetry, generating text through the use of software, work in the environment of a text editor, repeatedly resending an empty email, or copying the numeric code of JPEGs. The text is thus created by methods of editing and montage, copying, and transferring documentary and archival methods from the digital sphere into the literary environment.
We can only guess how Bohumila Grögerová would make use of today’s advanced technology in her poetic works oscillating on the borders of audio works, visual art, and highly original philosophical puzzles. Grögerová was a representative of the international artistic movement of experimental poetry that gradually gathered steam in the 1950s in various parts of the world. It loosely continued the broad area of text experiments inaugurat- ed in the 1920s by avant-garde movements including futurism, Dadaism, constructivism, and, later, surrealism. Dadaism, for instance, applied the method of cutting up a text and editing it to create new, not necessary meaningful contents. This method was popularised in the late 1950s by the American writer William Burroughs and artist Brion Gysin, who called these works cut- ups.3 In Latin America, experimental poetry was developed by the Noigandres group in Brazil. Their interest was founded on a conception of the image sign as a primary form of graphically inscribing human ideas, comprehensible even to the illiterate and across cultures and languages. The Latin American author Eugen Gomringer worked from similar premises. He settled in Switzerland and played an important role in the formation of the artistic movement known as concrete poetry. In France, it was the lettrists and sound poets (François Dufrêne and his crirythmes). Then there was the Vienna Group, the Stuttgart school, which often applied computing technology to generate stochastic texts, Italian poets who developed the optical character of poetry, or, in the Czech environment, the experiments of Jiří Kolář, Ladislav Novák, the pioneers of concrete poetry Josef Hiršal and Bohumila Grögerová, and many others.
In the 1960s, themes of cybernetics and new technology began entering the work of Bohumila Grögerová. In Kafka’s Castle, written with Josef Hiršal, they connected the computer and language directly. The text was created in collaboration with Professor Max Bense, then active at the university in Stuttgart, and was generated by a computer on the basis of the input of sixteen adjectives and substantives selected by the authors from a German edition of Franz Kafka’s The Castle.4 In 1969, the text was turned into an audio piece.5 The radio play Only Breathing Left... or, Dum spero, spiro from 1975, presented at this exhibition at Kvalitář Gallery, is, in comparison with the work mentioned above and the context of the other radio plays by Grögerová (including compositions written in collaboration with Hiršal), of a more traditional character. It presents a narrative whose theme is the manipulation of a human being through the telephone, with the anonymous caller extorting the receiver of the call. The play is inspired by experiments with methods of identification in criminal forensic science arising from a conviction that “the voice print is just as characteristic of a person as a fingerprint”.6 It explores the motif of the telephone answering machine and the artificial voice that automatically reads a pre-written message. The conversation, neutral at the beginning, gradually transforms into a highly unpleasant conversation on the borders of threats, sometimes escalating into a police interrogation in which the strategies of manipulation are reminiscent of the tools and oppression of the Communist regime. It is no coincidence that the title includes the reversal of the famous Latin phrase Dum spiro spero (While I breathe, I hope) into While I hope, I breathe.
I Tried to Tell Ya Something Through the Phone, the title of the exhibition, arises from Grögerová’s radio play. The tension and unrest which the receiving party experiences in the play is also referenced by the exhibition’s installation approach, which is situated into an artificially created room that denies the real architecture of the gallery. The result is a confined space containing three paintings by Antonie Stanová. Heard in a slightly muffled form is the dramatic narrative of the play that makes looking at the paintings even more unpleasant and totally controls the rest of the gallery space.
Text by Monika Čejková
1 Greenberg’s text picks up from an essay by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing published in Berlin in 1766, Laokoon oder über die Grenzen der Mahlerey und Poesie (Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry). Lessing’s ar- gues that painting and poetry are, in essence, two different media that should never mix.
2 See Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing, New York 2011.
3 Kenneth Goldsmith, ‘A Brief Overview of Anti-Writing’, in Mathieu Copeland, Baltazar Loway (eds.), The Anti-Mu- seum, Fribourg 2017, p. 642.
4 Pavel Novotný, ‘K auditivní tvorbě Bohumily Grögerové a Josefa Hiršala’ [On the Audio Works of Bohumila Grögerová and Josef Hiršal], in Hana Nováková, Pavel No- votný, Ladislav Šerý (eds.), Setiny, Bohumila Grögerová, Prague 2021, p. 124.
5 Pavel Novotný, ‘Man, Language, and Machine. On Bohu- mila Grögerová’s Play Only Breathing Left...,’ text for the exhibition I Tried to Tell Ya Something Through the Phone, Antonie Stanová / Bohumila Grögerová, Kvalitář, 2021.
6 Bohumila Grögerová, Už jenom dýchat... aneb Dum spero, spiro, 1975, available online: https://soundcloud. com/user-783047307/bohumila-grogerova-uz-jenom-dy- chat-1975.
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Curator:
Monika Čejková
Full exhibition
17/9–12/11 2021, Kvalitář, Prague – Czech Rep.