Somatic Rootedness: Artists Transform Bureaucracy in Unofficial Art’s Stamps in Poland and Czechoslovakia

• In Event: Tableaux Vivants, Rubber Stamps, and X-Ray Photographs: Transformation and Emancipation in Modern Art

Abstract

Central European artists’ rubber stamps and artistamps in the 1970s and 80s appropriated and ironized bureaucratic practices, transforming them into intimate gestures that carried physicality. Bureaucratic codes became layered with artistic or personal meaning, but also with references to the network of activity where they functioned. At a time when state bureaucracy aided aesthetic and cultural repression, this was a liberatory act for many unofficial artists and mail artists. The difficulty of long-distance communication brought the idea of the transference of touch through the artwork. In the works of Ewa Partum and J.H. Kocman, the physicality of hand-made rubber stamps beckoned imprints of the body itself as ‘stamps’: fingerprints, handprints, lipstick prints. This presentation will stress the corporeality of the bureaucratically-inspired performance of rubber-stamping and examine the meaning of the multiplication of stamps and imprints as a liberatory distribution technique as well. It will also make a connection between rubber stamps and artistamps by examining themes of corporeality in the latter. In the humorous sheet of artistamps, Atlantis Post (1978), Paweł Petasz intervened to allude to the ‘sunken’ value of the postal service. His artistamp images portray various copulating duos: humans, animals, objects, numbers, signs, and texts. The comical bodily dynamic of the sexualized representations satirizes the exalted postal stamp images typical of the time. Comical or serious, both rubber-stamps and artistamps, united by bringing different surfaces together, begin to represent the need for connection, touch, and collaboration in unofficial and mail art networks.

Author

• Margarita Delcheva, Paperbag Journal