Launch of the catalogue I Tried to Tell Ya Something Through the Phone

At the beginning of March, painter Antonie Stanová will present a brand new series of written paintings. The exclusive week-long exhibition at the Kvalitář gallery will open with an opening on 1 March, during which the catalogue I Tried to Tell Ya Something through the Phone will be launched, explaining the original motives behind the work of one of the most talented young Czech artists.

The publication I Tried to Tell Ya Something Through the Phone has been published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at the Kvalitář Gallery, which presented paintings and a poem by the painter Antonie Stanová alongside a radio play by writer, poet, and translator Bohumila Grögerová, an author associated with the concept of experimental poetry. 

The basic theme of both the exhibition and this publication is the visuality of writing and the use of language in contemporary visual art. To a certain extent, writing’s form and content are both influenced by new technologies, non-stop access to the internet, and the overabundance of digital text. This subject is addressed in the catalogue by Kenneth Goldsmith’s older essay Why Conceptual Writing? Why Now? (2011), which posits the concept of uncreative writing to describe conceptual art’s crossing with poetry through the use of new techniques that had previously been outside the field of literature. Pavel Novotný explores these techniques along with the phenomenon of the “language crisis” and language’s capacity to disinform, i.e., to lose meaning, in Man, Language, and Machine: On Bohumila Grögerová’s Play “Only Breathing Left.” Another of the catalogue’s authors, Travis Jeppesen, presents a philosophical meditation on the wild, unfettered, and object-oriented writing of the future and the failure of language to be a true bearer of meaning. All these texts, including curator Monika Čejková’s introduction to the exhibition, aim to provide at least a partial overview of the complicated issue of writing in relation to art.