Depicting the words Roma Sendyka

Until recently it seemed that a word and an image are in discord. A text and a visual representation were regarded as two competing channels of information and they have been described as antagonistic rivals or two forces unable to co-exist. One of them (and it is easy to guess which one) was to be condemned to total destruction. Even the cautious optimists predicted that the excess of images will push the Gutenberg Galaxy into depths of social oblivion. Meanwhile, things became complicated in a very interesting way, as it is shown by the authors of the recent issue of "MOCAK Forum".

Literature begins to think about itself more daringly as having a "body” and not just spirit. The physical shape of a letter, the printing techniques and typographical thinking affect the perception of the text (Jan Tschichold’ lesson recalled by Łódź publishing house, Recto verso, and discussed by Magdalena and Artur Frankowscy), of which we will probably learn more with the development of cognitive science and neuroscience.

A book, as a physical object, has been treated in a much more conscious way since we started to use text editors and e-books. Sensuality of reading: touching a volume in a form of a code, turning pages, the smell of ink – it slowly becomes something festive, special and something associated with the liberation from the continuous "I have to" of the post-modern acceleration of life. Since the electronic readers of books began to imitate the sound and sight of pages being turned, by pressing the “scroll down” key on the keyboard, we already know how much we miss the real experience. The pleasure of reading a text turns out to be not the only joy of the reader, which was already proven by the participants of the action Return of the Book! / Powrót książki which showed different possibilities of interaction with the traditionally printed books (details in the texts of Emilia Pawłusz and Elżbieta Sala)

By watching the emergence of new and hybrid genres, as if dusted out of oblivion, we may predict the end of war between text and image. This phenomenon is referred to in Hanna Marciniak’s article about Jiří Kolář’s avant-garde collage, and in two texts about graphic novels by Sebastian Frąckiewicz and Łukasz Gazur. Paweł Susid, in an interview with Zofia Kerneder and Anna Sulich-Liga, talks about his "semiotic painting." He also recalls the Russian folk luboks (isn’t it here, in the East, where a proto comic book was created?) and ROSTA propaganda windows (Russian handmade posters made by using templates, which recently became an exciting discovery for avant-garde historians).

Simon Morley, the author of one of the newest monograph work on the use of text in painting argues that the electronic medium, which is more and more commonly used by the authors in their artistic installations and works, produces – justly and democratically – both an image and a text with the use of the same pixels. Formal distinctions disappear, as well as the functional ones: an infinite freedom in shaping letter fonts brings closer the letters to other products of artistic imagination. On the example of Stanislaw Dróżdż’s work, Maria Anna Potocka shows how productive is the use of text in art. (In)Between/ Między is one of the most famous Polish installations, still capable of eliciting this unprecedented surprise when one literally "enters" the poem. It also seems that a text ceases to be a pasted, printed, covered or attached to other – more structural – media of materiality. The examples of architectural use of signs given in Celina Bukowa’s article remind us that a text becomes part of design, leaves its functions as an "ornament". This "ornamental", at first glance, use of sentences and overheard conversation in the works of Grupa Ładnie, also turns out to be something more than simply a "caption," says Magdalena Mazik.

The more we are open to the text-image “undifferentiation”, the more fascinating items we see around us. Piotr Rypson discovers, as usual, a treasury of overlooked objects. As he once talked about the baroque poems-suns, reminding about the carmina figurata and their Sarmatian descendants, he created a wonderful album (reviewed by Szymon Maliborski) that is a collection of examples of Polish graphic designs (from this moment on anyone who wants to write about the futuristic period in Aleksander Wat’s works, will have to take into consideration Wat’s advertisement of Plutos chocolate). In the text from the section of reviews, Łukasz Zaremba discusses Michał Rusinek’s development of the tradition, which was initiated half a century ago by Roland Barthes in Rhetoric of the Image.

This issue of MOCAK Forum provides, as usually, an educational inset and various texts about the actions carried out by MOCAK, a graphic essay (or a micro-novel) by Ola Cieślak about a sad student of medicine. As a cherry on top of the cake, there is Jaś Kapela’s essay on a medium that clandestinely governs our public reality – a prompter, a terrible television made of letters only... Just read on.

Roma Sendyka (born in 1973) – is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology of Literature and Cultural Studies at the Jagiellonian University, Faculty of Polish Studies. Her scientific interests are the theories of literary and cultural studies, genealogy and "trans-disciplinary" phenomena (relationships between text and image, visual culture studies). She is a scholar of the Kosciuszko Foundation and Erste Stiftung, Endeavor Scholar at the University of Chicago (2011). She authored the book A modern essay: a study of historical consciousness of the species (2006) / Nowoczesny esej: studium historycznej świadomości gatunku.