105
Natalie Czech, A poem by Repetition by Emmett Williams, 2013

Writing like Picasso paints
The 2013 photographic works of Natalie Czech belong to her series Poems by Repetition. The title refers to Gertrude Stein’s play Saints and Singing, which ends with the warning: “Do not repeat yourself.” The statement is, of course, ironic. For one of the best-known phrases associated with the American art collector and avant-garde writer is “A rose is a rose is a rose,” a line whose poetic force lies precisely in repetition. Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) was a pioneer of “literary cubism.” She sought to write in a manner as abstract, multi-perspective, and deconstructed as Pablo Picasso or Georges Braque painted. While the painters visually dismantled everyday objects, Stein dismantled language itself, treating it like form and color and focusing far more on the sound and materiality of words than on meaning or syntax. She approached her texts as if they were images or music.

Repetition of repetition
The strategy of collage and repetition remains central to mass culture today. Natalie Czech, who studied under photo artist Thomas Ruff in Düsseldorf, works, like Gertrude Stein, at the boundary between text, image, and poetry, using photography alone as her medium. She brings this modern strategy, which is equally at home in jazz, cubism, Andy Warhol’s silkscreen prints, minimal art, as well as sampling, hip-hop, techno, and internet memes, into the twenty-first century. Here she “repeats” poems by three American poets and artists who themselves used repetition as a stylistic device: Hart Crane (1899–1932), a visionary of modernism; Emmett Williams (1925–2007), a Fluxus artist; and Gregory Corso (1930–2001), a poet associated with the Beat Generation.

The nostalgic aura of punk and wave
Czech draws on various media for her motifs, such as magazines, record covers, books, iPad editions, or, in the case of A poem by Repetition after Hart Crane, Kindle readers. A pencil is deliberately placed next to the Kindle stylus. Czech is concerned not only with the repetition of images or texts but also with media repetition, from analog to digital and back to analog again. Many of these poems carry the nostalgic aura of punk and wave, montage and copy art, and the late 1970s and early 1980s, the heyday of postmodernism. In all three works, the artist makes poetic quotations visible by marking or highlighting fragments of poems within found texts or inscribed objects. In all three works, the artist makes poetry quotations visible by marking or highlighting fragments of poems in found texts or on inscribed objects.

A Man. A Woman. Amen
In the case of Emmett Williams, the work features an amplifier for electronic sound distortion for electric guitar, bearing the brand logo “American Woman.” Czech photographs the mint-green box in three variations, framing it differently each time and digitally removing different letters from the logo. She then places the three images, which show the same lettering edited in different ways, one below the other. The remaining letters form Williams’ minimalist poem: “A Man. A Woman. Amen.” Czech’s work itself resembles an echo, a beat or rhythm, a stutter, text and image perceived and read simultaneously.