Researching the contemporary legacies of Polish underground printing

The project finished mid-September, however, I wanted to give the research a bit of time to sit and simmer, before I wrote my final post. I also wanted to set up a blog for the future research, found here. This blog will consist of the work I create during PhD study at the Wroclaw Academy of Fine Art, which began on Monday. I am also using the work I created and the lessons to inform teaching at Spike Print Studio, which can be found here. I am currently writing up this experience for Pressing Matters magazine which will be in the Winter edition.
Jadwiga’s email was the second reason for my delay in writing this final blog post. I had asked Jadwiga Tryzno a series of questions regarding the museum and their beginnings, which I had been translating with the help of google. Jadwiga and Pawel were members of the Correspondance des Arts – a publishing house, which began in 1980. They made the first artist book, YEAR OF POLAND, at this time. The book consisted of 13 double pages – the months on which the revolutionary poems of the greatest Polish poets – Mickiewicz, Słowacki, Norwid, and Miłosz. At the time the group consisted of three artists and one poet: Graczykowski Andrzej, Zbigniew Janeczek, Janusz.P. Tryzno, and Zdzislaw Jaskuła(poet). It lasted for five years before the group split up and Janusz P. Tryzno and Jadwiga continued the Correspondence des Arts.

For a short period in 1980, when the CdA began, censorship had ceased to operate smoothly. It was very apparent then. Bibula (tissue paper), underground publications were widely available (the book LITTLE APOCALYPSE – Tadeusz Konwicki sold 5,000 copies off the back of a lorry to Warsawians). Publisher CdA was then a curiosity, being able to get luxury print materials from the Print house, which were unused in the industry. This access to luxurious materials ended quickly, and they had to learn to make handmade paper by hand. At this time Martial Law came into effect from 1981 to 1989, and you could go to jail for working with a printer. There had been no private printing houses in Poland since the Second World War, so during these years of martial law, you could only dream of having your own printing press.
The first machine they acquired was the półformatową korektorkę typograficzą, which was saved from the fire and acquired in 1987. It came from the Graphic Works from Lodz PRESS RSW, the Ministry of Culture had to give special permission for the press to be used for the artistic purposes of Janusz Tryzno. The machine was located on the 11th floor of a block of flats in a studio. It had to be evacuated in 1990 due to the protest of a neighbour.
In her email Jadwiga Tryzno marked the different stages of making books, discussing the very basic beginnings until 1986, when they were without access to any equipment or machinery. Then from 1986 – 2000, the next period involved learning how to draw paper, handwriting text from fonts, using the first computer text sets and mixing printing techniques (typography, screen printing, offset, photography). They began testing the flexibility of the codex form of the book.

I feel like there is a great deal of room for further research, I plan to return to Lodz later this year. I want to explore further how this evolution of print techniques has affected their practice. Working with limited resources has lead to increased resourcefulness. I am beginning to only scratch the surface of this project. At the Book Museum, they are still developing a CNC milling machine which will be able to take digitally designed fonts back to a matrix for lead-casting. During my time, I was able to make an artists book experimenting with embedding basic circuits into the paper. When I return this winter, I will be able to use their papermaking facilities, which were out-of-action on the last visit. All I can say to finish is watch this space.

I left Warsaw, and a quick train-ride later arrived in Lodz, home of the Tryzno’s and their Book arts museum which they have been running since the 1980’s.

They are preparing to celebrate its birthday this October, which I hope to come back to attend. I spent the first week in an Airbnb nearby, as they had said that there wasn’t accommodation in the email. However, they did offer me to sleep on the sofa thing in one of the rooms. I felt like I had to live the true experience of the museums and so I chose not to continue the rental past the week.

The first week was mostly spent getting my footing, talking to the Tryznos, finding small ways to test out their equipment. I met several people coming in and out of the building, various film students, Master Bookbinders – hitting the vodka at 2 pm, yet working through the night. It was not the dusty basement operation I had expected. Well, it was, but it was so much more. I began working on a book I had wanted to make for a long time. The museum is currently undergoing renovations, so I tried to help/ keep out of the way. Kryzstof is the technical wizard technician. Last year they developed a way for a Monotype caster to run off a Raspberry Pi, which was pretty impressive. They were fixing some old Soviet radios when I was there, and I would wander in and ask their advice often throughout the project. They also had a thing for death metal which was amusing.

On the second week, I bit the bullet and moved into the Museum. I say bit the bullet because I am a chicken and I was sure that the place must be haunted. Luckily I had a dog friend with me. He was pretty old. One night I was working late and alone in the basement, and I kept hearing a repeating thud. It took me a while to realise it was the dog scratching himself and not the knocking of a spirit from times past. The house was owned by Henryk Grohman, who was a large cotton factory owner. Lodz was built on textiles, and the place is so reminiscent of Manchester it was incredible.  So, the building in itself is a monument to this time, this industry. The upstairs holds one of the largest collections of Polish book arts and in the basement is the workshop.

During this time, I got to explore not only this incredible building but their collections of type.

This is where they store their Matrices. Which they acquired from the Warsaw Type Foundry. Like many Letterpress museums, the equipment has been pieced together and the many collective histories unknown. They worked previously to digitise the Brygada font. I used the experience to make a small book, it was inspired by the building and the industrial patterns. I integrated papers speakers and magnets and built an amplifier into the book. This was used to play sounds collected around the building. During my time I was able to ask Jadwiga Tryzno a few questions about how the museum began, how the publishing group ‘ Correspondence des Artistes’ ran, especially during censorship. She emailed me some further answers in Polish, which I will be translating and writing up for the final blog…

I arrived in Warsaw, coming directly from Kielce. There, I was to be host by Gwido Zlatkes, a poet, librarian and Polish-English translator, Gwido was active, writing during the times of censorship. He is auther of Duplicator Underground, – an extremely useful book on the Underground Print Movement. He was part of the Freedom and Peace movement, worked in Poland’s experimental theatre. He was a journalist for the Solidarity movement; later he briefly worked as a foreign desk editor for the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza. In the 90s he moved to America working in UC Riverside as a librarian. He is currently a collector of rare artist books when we met last year; he was running the Gallery of Beautiful Books, in the very heart of Warsaw. However, he was in the process of moving, due to the recurring story amongst artists of the rent being put up. He kindly hosted me, and I was hoping that during this time I would assist with the manual work of setting up the new studio, but the floor had not been put in (oh drat). He did show me around his intriguing new site. It is in the basement on a typical Soviet estate, below A Georgian Orthodox Church- something which I had never been inside before and was painted with brilliant blues and reds. Then we headed underground into the basement of the building. It was a number of hidden artists’ studios, buried in brick tunnels. Long and dimly lit, the kind where you flick a switch, and it takes a few momentary hums before the ballast kicks the fluorescent tube into action. That musty smell which infiltrates and lingers. It invoked the underground movement. There was even a hidden room, through a wardrobe with a mimeograph – one of the most powerful tools of the underground movement. The mimeograph was obsolete and unused in many other countries since the fifties, but during censorship, the poles embraced it to create their own publications; telling their own stories.

That evening we got into conversation about Alexander Wat; Gwido is currently producing a compendium of his work and life. I asked him how his interest began. He talked about his first encounter at a flea market, where he found the book ‘In the 1980s everyone collected books, books aligned you with being part of the intelligentsia, books showed you were outside of the state.’ He had originally intended to purchase a different rare book, but the stall owner had insisted that he buy two books – as it was the end of the day and to make up for his time. ‘It was a funny time; the state was producing books in their thousands. These were not just propaganda, but other books, books on social sciences, inoffensive books. Books were everywhere, and books were nowhere. I remember people queuing for Lord of the Rings…’ So, he picked up the first book he found and within the first few pages of Wat’s poetry, he found something which profoundly resonated with him.

It sounds like a scary time for publishers, you were able to produce work, but it had to be state approved. If you wanted to produce independently, as Radosław Nowakowski had told me, it had to be done in a run of under one hundred copies. ‘Anything to do with Polish history was banned’ – the Russians had played a huge part in the extermination of many Polish officers during the first part of the second world war, as well as putting many of the Polish intelligentsia and landowners into Siberian work-camps. So of course, it was crucial for the state to keep this out of mainstream media. I wondered whether there could be parallels drawn with the current actions of the Polish government, who have not only banned all acknowledgement of any Polish involvement with the Holocaust but are currently rewriting history with themselves in the spotlight. Not to mention that the media law that took effect in January, this empowered the treasury minister – not an independent body – to appoint the managers of Poland’s public television and radio broadcasters. By April, over 140 public media employees had resigned or been fired. The difference is, currently we are still able to have these conversations without the fear of being overheard.

After a few days, it was with a heavy heart that I left Warsaw.

After arriving in Poland I quickly made my way to Krakow, probably the most well-visited cities. Being mid-August it was packed, so I directly made my way to the International Print Triennial.

Honestly, it was pretty impossible to find and I almost gave up at one moment, but luckily came across a poster with some clear directions. Eventually, I came across the arts bunker in which the main exhibition was held. I think it was worth the mission.
The event dates back to 1966 and now is both a global competition and presentation of the complex nature of the printmaking process.

I was particularly drawn to the graphically striking work of Kamil Kocurek. Then Zuzanna Dyrda‘s work Slob, (having spent a great deal of time in Sauna’s around Estonia, it captured the experience and printing onto bodies). I also loved the multi-media games of Natalie Lamanova.

It was also fantastic to see Tracy Hill’s work winning the European print prize, having met her during a Print Symposium at UCLan a few years ago. Mindblowing work, I think she definitely deserved this.

As I had little motivation to remain in Krakow, bustling streets, stag do’s and the realisation that a central hostel was not the best of ideas. I still have no idea what its smell was, and ‘that guy’ on the bunk below. no no.

So I caught the next bus to Kielce, a town between Krakow and Warsaw. Here was Radosław Nowakowski. He kindly took me to his house where he has his workshop and a small gallery/reading room. He makes books which describe the world, fantasy worlds, tubular worlds, the world of the street in Kielce, map worlds. He spent the afternoon showing me his work, diving in and out of these multiple worlds. If you want to see more of his worlds, digital worlds, book worlds. Check out his website here.

It was also great to see a book which he produced in the 80s, with limited access to print, inks, paper. He was still able to play with form and structure of books in his work even with the imposed limitations of censorship. He made an edition of 5, hand drawing all the little houses. ( I think I might prefer the Book Then)…