NATALIA! (7 factorial)

A 55-element pyramid of words printed out on white pages and set in simple frames constitutes only a part of a large-scale visual poem which emerged from the artist’s play with language and word formation. In her personal commentary to the work Natalia! (7 factorial), Natalia LL wrote: “There is something mysterious in the internal order of a word, which consists of separate letters. I noticed this while looking at my own name, which consists of three letters A and single letters N, T, L, I”. Treating letters as independent elements of this structure, Natalia LL was changing their order and creating new arrangements until she constructed a set of 5040 words. Her exploration was, in effect, close to mathematical calculations. 5040 is the factorial of number 7, that is, the number of all the possible permutations of seven letter elements comprising the name Natalia.

The work Natalia! (7 factorial) can be situated in the framework of the neo-avant-garde explorations in the field of concrete poetry, or it can be perceived as an effect of an act of unmasking the conventional nature of language. It can also be seen in the light of Natalia LL’s conception of art and of her artistic stance. From the early stages of her career, Natalia LL has consistently identified herself with art; in doing that, she, on the one hand, treated art as a incessant process similar in its nature to life processes and on the other, perceived it in intellectual categories, as a gesture permitting an insight into the nature of those processes.

Natalia LL’s debate with language often consists in transforming her own name. Hence, Natalia! (7 factorial) is not an odd case in her oeuvre. In 1971 she produced a work consisting in the act of transforming the word mutanty (“mutants”) into the written form of her name, and one of the shows of “Sztuka konsumpcyjna” (Wrocław, 1973) included placards with a multiplied inscription “Natalia”. Some of her works combine the word “Natalia” with photographs of herself. By playing with words (the name) and images (the self-portrait), Natalia LL investigates the relations between the established external form and everything that is internal and essentially impossible to grasp. By studying words and images, she looks primarily at herself/art/the artist, thus performing a vivisection on identity as demonstrated though body, word and image.

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translated from Polish by Klaudyna Michałowicz