Untitled (Forgetting)

- Untitled (Forgetting)
- Bez tytułu (zapominanie)
1967
typescript on paper
30 x 21 cm

Forgetting is one of the most brilliant, simple, and typical of Dróżdż’s early visual poems from the 1960s. It combines semantics with suggestive design, and as the artist himself pointed out, it was his first concretist [concrete] text. He wrote it one night in 1967 when he woke up in his flat, took a notebook that he always had on the shelf close to his bed, and made “a drawing of forgetting—in order not to forget it.” Forgetting [Zapominanie] forms the shape of a triangle and was described by Dróżdż as follows: “It is a triangle scheme going to zero.” It starts with the whole word “zapominanie” and ends up with single letters “z” and “ś,” depicting process of forgetting via the logical reduction of signs in each line. The initial version of the work was simple and typical of Dróżdż: typewriting on a piece of paper in the Polish language. Later on, he developed it into a work that was larger in scale and also written in other languages (English, German, Finnish). As Wiesław Borowski notes: “A word from which a letter has been torn, such as ‘forgetting,’ for instance, builds an unexpectedly concrete space around itself, initiating the process of rediscovering its full significance without added contexts or 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 one must now recall it all over again.” On the sketch for this work, Dróżdż noted by hand: “It transfers the meaning of the word into its graphic design, the graphics signifying the operation, a lack of particular content. The logical combination of two things with no logical connection—the meaning and its symbol, that is to say, the word. A construction that ensures near-maximum objectivity of reception.” B.P.