Paweł Majerski – Stanisław Dróżdż
Fragment of a Conversation

– Art critics, attentively observing the multi-media experiments of recent years, often consider the next step of the neo-avant-garde. If you had been able to use similar equipment of ‘high technology’, would you have availed yourself of it in the 1960s?

– Most probably I wouldn’t have since I grew up in the culture of written language and not a mobile one. These multi-media actions do not have too much to do with concrete poetry. They do have something in common with visual poetry, but that is a more distant relation. I consider a static language as something perceptible. Language which is moving can be used only for searching a telephone subscriber in a telephone directory. Maybe, if I had been that twenty years younger… The era of concrete poetry seems to be in decline. That is a sad conclusion to be drawn. It’s hard to say, probably we value too high the computer, which is… such a tamed animal.

– However, you did use a computer to prepare your works, didn’t you?

– Yes, I did, but they had been already calculated and printed out as stable texts. As a result of such an action, the text appears and it is stuck to the wall. I tried to achieve text stability in the way which will make the text… mobile at the same time. And I really enjoy this game. If the text moved along the screen, it would be a mechanical toy, which would be a kind of lion hunting. For instance, ‘Kronika’ [‘The Chronicle’] Gallery presents the clocks synchronised with what was happening on the boards. The text is not for moving. That is how traditional I am.

Sławków, 10th February, 1998

Fragment of a conversation: I Am a Traditionalist… Stanisław Dróżdż interviewed by Paweł Majerski published in “Opcje”, 1998, no. 3.