Materiality of Poetry: Words and Bodies/ Words and Pictures (Ewa Partum, Andrzej Tobis, Adam Kaczanowski)

Abstract

The article discusses the possibilities of the emergence of a neo-materialistic aesthetics of the poem. Each of the analyzed examples—Ewa Partum’s active poetry, Adam Kaczanowski’s toy-art and Andrzej Tobis’s photographic archive—reveals different aspects of this aesthetics. The case of Partum shows that the material concreteness of poetry—today also associated with virtuality— requires other ways of perceiving / commenting / documenting the “poems” happening between the media. Active poetry consists in drawing the text (which eventually turns out to be a jigsaw made of letters) out of the formula of the finished object and making the medium of writing/language the material from which the object of artistic attention is “made”. I call Tobis’s project neo-materialistic, since it shows how we move from the human hybrid level we move to normalization and stabilization (and vice versa). Tobis seems to reach the moment when this normalization is actually happening and, at the same time, he shows levels of transformations, mutations and deviations. Kaczanowski “invents” for his poetry a medium different from the traditional record and the traditional form of the book. This principle of “invention” turns out to be very important, because it decides whether some materializations are poetic objects or not, without specifying any initial aesthetic, political and ideological criteria. In the most general terms this new-materialist aesthetics has been linked here with the transmedia horizon of art and the transformations of materialistic thinking made under the influence of the non-anthropocentric imagination.