Wanders through .....Warsaw.

OF FRONTS AND FONTS

Whether fascia boards or fonts, hand-painted advertisements or glass-case extensions like the one below at Cepelia, there's something undeniably special about Warsaw's neon semiotics be they of a drugstore or drapery, hairdresser or grocer. As David Crowley remarks in an essay Life after Dark incorporated into Ilona Karwinska's retrospective Warszawa Polski Neon: 'The value in these bright symbols lies in their capacity to cast a distinctly local light on the tidal wave of global advertising which has washed over the city.' Moreover, and as these photos show, the ubiquitous helvetica seems happily absent, and, it needn't be 'after dark' to appreciate this old-world beauty.

The Varsovian hairdresser shop front is always particularly endearing. In this part of Stary Mokotow, this one is on Ludwika Narbutta Street, there are several fryzjers all vying for the most aesthetic shop frontage. Walking though this part of Warsaw, one soon realises that the sombre subdued tones and the absence of any garish in-your-face industrial colour, endows the surface of the city (if not also that which lies beneath it) with a wonderfully earthy quality. The Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky noted that the spiritual growth of man began with the study of colour. One could do a lot worse than wandering around the streets of Stary Mokotow.

Sunlit 'owoce' (fruit) and 'warzywa' (vegetables) on the corner of Kielecka and Rakowiecka at the end of a cold March day.

Silk - Wool - Cotton (Jedwab, Welna, Bawelna). A drapers shop on the corner of Pulawska and Antoniego Malczewskiego.

In a city of slowly dissapearing neon this is my absolute favourite, mostly because of the deep blue colour (which the camera does not do justice here) and the white double underscore. Technically of course, this is not neon, since neon is of an unmistakeably bright orange colour. All other colours, this one included, are created using a mercury vapour discharge which excites a phosphor via fluorescence. The 'apteka' signs had one design all over Warsaw, and there can still be seen a great many like this one with small variations.

A florists in Kolo.

A jeweller's in Ulica Dabrowskiego in Stary Mokotow.

Pre-amble

It has always struck me as enjoyably peculiar the orthographic similarity between the words ‘wonder’ and ‘wander’. Peculiar because despite their completely distinct etymological roots it might be said that they are still in fact nodes of the same plant.

In both cases, it is movement that is the stem from which both words diffuse. With wonder, in its capacity to marvel and wind out the possibilities thrown before it, it is a turning of the mind; with wander, in its power to gather ground, a turning of the foot.

The following blog, then, in its 3 years of stravaigs between Octobers 2006-9, presents something not just of a wandering of Warsaw, but of a wondering of this thing we call 'the city'. In the inimitable words of the cinematographer and traveller Wim Wenders:

Adventure, space and time.

spacers

Wandering from the strangled lanes and the tall thin houses of the city’s old town to the vast inglorious squares, runway avenues and wide-rises of the Socialist Realist Srodmiescie, and still further, to the open green spaces of Powazki Necropolis and Pole Mokotowskie, Skaryszewski and Lazienki Parks, Warsaw’s species of space are almost as varied as the life that inhabits them. From the perceived inhumanity of a discordant Centrum (and the ultra Palace of Culture) to the verdant ‘skwers’ of squat-block courtyards and the quiet compositions of Stary Mokotow and Saska Kepa, there is in Warsaw, from one quarter to another, and like no other European city, an ever-changing and pervasive sense of space.

To the avid wanderer, this often conspicuous melding of space is one of the city’s greatest attributes, for, in upsetting our normal rhythms of spatial interaction, the city brings the space itself to the fore.

In wandering the city (in ‘spacing’ it and engaging its space) the poems I have placed here effectively begin at this fundamental level. From here, they radiate outwards and encompass all aspects of the city, and whatever else, however distant, that may lie out there.

In broad daylight

In the widest daylight
in certain parts of the city
the human element
completely disappears
there is only a vague sensation of man
a few cracked tyre tracks in the earth
the sound perhaps of an airplane overhead -

This city
is the solitary city
the silent city
where all the flurry of talk has dissolved
into the air
into the earth
where the denizens
are dispersed
subterranean,
into iron and steel,
behind brick walls,
insinuated
into the integument of the city.

The city, rid of its self,
has become something else.
It is still the city
only not bigger not louder,
but quieter,
more alive.

Gradually,
the empty waste ground,
the weeds growing through the window,
the suddenly silent street,
in broad daylight,
smash the mind to pieces -

Extract from the song of space

…all these paths and tracts, interzonal,

Archived in the undergrowth,

Fugitive from the life that exhibits itself,

Draw the mindbody in

Draw the mindbody out,

Piece together a new city

By parallax, extract,

A city of space, that hides, accidental,

from all the standards hitherto published,

From purpose, profit, aversion

Harbouring petals of the unseen mover,

the flows overlapping,

enlarging,

Evolving

like flowers on a great chestnut

all these paths and tracts

The tree within a single leaf

drawing poetry in the earth.

KANDINSKY IN KABATY

The spirit, like the body, can be strengthened and developed by frequent exercise[…] for this reason it is necessary for the artist to know the starting point for the exercise of his spirit. The starting point is the study of colour and its effects on men. Wassily Kandinsky

Arriving at the end of the line
so tempted to keep going
I exit into Kabaty
the form-filled fringe of Warsaw
the precipice of city
cutting sharply into country.

Yet form in Kabaty is singularly suffering.
There are no pinnacles, no peaks,
no crags.
Simply blocks and cubes of
pulseless planes,
unfertilised space.

At the city limit,
the sharp teeth of humanity
stare at the brink of a world
from pastel-coloured blocks.

Red here
yellow there
green over there.

Blocks, ‘spiritually unsympathetic’,
(Kandinsky’s words not mine),
separated by canyons
of non-colour.
Blocks sometimes compounded,
fenced in,
by peach perimeters -

Buildings too far
buildings too near,
it is a riot of colour and non-colour,
a great spatial battle
of sound and echo.

When talking of the motion of colour
Kandinsky tells us, yellow -

can never have profound meaning […]
may be paralleled in human nature with madness,
not with melancholy or hypochondriacal mania,
but rather with violent raving lunacy.

There is madness here in Kabaty.

To try and displace the concrete grey
so profuse
in Warsaw,
the Kabaty colourists,
with their greens and reds,
blacks and whites,
have inadvertently uncovered grey
again.

(Delacroix sought to express rest
and the immobility of grey
through a mixture of green and red)

In The Language of Form and Colour
Kandinsky notes:

Two great divisions of colour occur to the mind at the outset:
Into warm and cold, and into light and dark.
To each colour there are therefore four shades of appeal -
Warm and light or warm and dark,
or cold and light or cold and dark.

Kabaty and Kandinsky
mull on the last
a seething spatial drama
a motionless discord
both cold and dark.

Wanders through .....Warsaw.

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Avian architrave

Pre-amble

ARCHIVE

PLEASE LEAVE BREAD FOR THE BIRDS

spacers

TODAY OUR GOAL IS MOVEMENT

RESPECT WOMEN OR THE BITCH GETS IT!

THE POSSIBILITY OF SPACE

This is no Warsaw

Looking onto ulica Goszczynskiego one white wintry morning

In broad daylight

The Pine Trees of Kampinos

The Mazowiecki Mindscape Park

Extract from the song of space

A moment of repose

Atop the tell kopiec powstania warszawskiego

by jezioro kamionkowskie in june

warsaw intra muros

the heart of an architect

KANDINSKY IN KABATY

In a Warsaw Winter

fort zbarz

fortress warsaw