DRAWRITINGS

1-2 White Heels (1989) | 3-4 Egg (1990), details | 5-6 Feet (1989), on the Vistula River, Retrospective at Manggha Center for Japanese Art and Technology, Cracow, 1997

“I write what I cannot draw, I draw what I cannot write.” This was the motto for the installation Skin/Sky – Red/Blue: Drawritings shown in 1990 at Art in General in New York. The room was filled with multilayered scrolls covered with hieroglyphics, charades, initials and images of ancient divinities from countries visited by the protagonists of my novel Century 21. The long scrolls of Feet and Hands demonstrate that inner dialogue is bisexually bilingual. Blue imprints of my right hand and foot are covered with words of “male reason,” red imprints of my left hand and foot with “female outcries” of emotion. In Key West Feet “climbed” a coral sand hill, on Long Island they “rushed” into the ocean and in Cracow they “strolled” along the Vistula.

1-7 Skin / Sky – Red / Blue, Drawritings, Art in General, New York, 1990

In Memory Machine, a horseshoe crab and the computer, found in the street and covered with script, stand for dead memory. In medieval astrology crab, turning red when boiled, symbolized Christ turning bloodred during the passion.

1-5 Memory Machine (1986-9), New York Studio, 1989

In the spring of 1989 fellows of the National Humanities Center in North Carolina asked me and the poet Rita Dove to collaborate on an art work. I designed a permanent installation of two scrolls, one vertical with my red drawing, and one horizontal with Rita’s poem. The title Rive d’Urale (in French, “at the outskirts of the Ural”) resulted from permutations of the letters in our names and alluded to the political changes in the Communist world that were in the air. Soon after finishing Rive d’Urale, after eight years of absence, I flew back to Poland.

In North Carolina a series of Love Letters were addressed to Cat, the protagonist of the novel Cat 22, to be volume II of Century 21.

1-3 Rive d’Urale (1988-9), in collaboration with the poet Rita Dove Collection: National Humanities Center Research Triangle Park, NC | 4 Letter with Crab Shell (1989) | 5 Letter (1989) | 6 Cover of Century 21