[…]
Let us look closely at the newest project by Stanisław Dróżdż
which is entirely based on the concept of the game. The
installation presenting the game of dice was developed by this
author to represent Polish art at the Art Biennale in Venice in
2003. All the walls of the rectangular hall are covered by the
dice adjacent to each other. The principles of this composition
are imposed by the probability calculus. There are 279,936 dices
forming 46,656 combinations. In the middle of the hall there is
a table with the cup and the dice. Each of the
viewers-participants can cast once these six dice and then find
the same combination at the wall. If we interpret the game by
Dróżdż according to the intentions ascribed to this concept by
Derrida, the viewer-participant would be a completely
unnecessary and foreign element originating from the outside
reality. However, in the project by Dróżdż this
viewer-participant is the main character whose actions initiate
the course of meanings and a great metaphor of metonymic
character which are actually the true content of this entire
installation. The game participant is on the one hand
overwhelmed by the game structure and becomes a part of its
intrinsic reality. On the other hand, however, by annexing the
elements of the real world such as the walls of the specific
room and actions performed by really-existing people the game
itself by the rule of metonymy becomes the part of an outside
reality constituting another object within the borders of this
reality.
The game by Stanisław
Dróżdż entitled ‘Alea iacta est’ takes place not only inside its
own system but also in the final instance between the sign
inscribed in the system and its outside reality for which this
entire system comprises only a fragment. The game is played
between the language and the object, between the word and the
item. In this game, each of us is the viewer-participant given
with only one possibility to cast the dice and this possibility
symbolizes the life of every human which is given only one to
each of us. Where should we look for the sense then? The
response to this question given by the Venetian project is that
we just ‘should look for it’.
This answer is of greater
importance than all the considerations about modernism,
post-modernism and their interrelation. ‘Modernism’ and
‘post-modernism’ are only two dice adjacent to each other among
this inconceivable multitude of possibilities which could be
realized.
The fragment of the essay Stanisław Dróżdż: Love to the
Word, Love to the Things, ‘Parergon’, no. 1, 2003