Jarosław Kozłowski
Rhetorical Figures II

Rhetorical Figures II consists of two very different parts: a box individually designed by the artist using excerpts from political news articles from various newspapers, and a one-meter-long LED light strip. As in many of his consistently humorous and analytical works, Kozłowski explores rhetoric, irony, and vocabulary by taking words from public discussions and the media and reassembling them into a flowing text on an LED sign. In this variation of Rhetorical Figures, he lists the names of 20 capital cities (e.g., Berlin, Paris, Cairo, Johannesburg, New York, Sydney, Tel Aviv, Tokyo …) after the words “NO NEWS FROM.” The expectation of the LED display as a bearer of the latest news is thus disappointed in an absurd reversal of the text content to non-information. By combining different media – printed newspapers and digital neon signs – Kozłowski also refers to their connection with power and politics.
Kozłowski is considered one of the most influential conceptual artists in Poland. He works primarily in cycles as formal variations on recurring ideas, and his multimedia and often text-based work, characterized by linguistic sharpness, humor, and poetry, is closely associated with the Fluxus movement. In 1971, he gained international recognition with his NET Mail Art Manifesto, which he sent to more than 350 artists around the world, inviting them to participate in a non-institutional exchange of ideas and works, which met with an enormous response. The results, as well as the works created in the context of the independent gallery Akumulatory 2 in Poznan, which he founded in 1972 and which existed until 1990, live on today in his “Archive of Ideas.”
Text: Eva Scharrer