Press Release
SUBJECTIVE ARTPOOL
An Exhibition Of Artpool Art Research Center
The city of Marseille is hosting a huge series of exhibitions and events entitled Poésure et peintrie (Poeting and Paintry) from February 12th till May 23rd, 1993 on Christian Poitevin’s initiative, the deputy mayor of the city responsible for cultural affairs. He is also known as Julien Blaine, an internationally recognized visual-sound-action poet, editor, festival-organizer since the beginning of the 60s. Recently he has established the International Centre of Poetry (Centre International de Poésie Marseille), which is one of the chief organizers and venues of this biennale among the numerous museums, artists’ associations, galeries, theatres, libraries. Each venue has formed its programme according to its own aesthetic conception (film and video projections, readings, discussions, etc.). More than sixty poets/visual artists, to whom a book’s page or a gallery wall means the same from the artistic point of view, are shown at about thirty exhibitions during these three months.
The exhibition does not intend to examine the relationship between poetry and painting or poets and painters. In the frame of the complex enterprise, the organizers wish to enter a special territory of art which - starting from the visual or sound version of the text - opens up the field of invention and experiment This approach to art can already be found in the Italian futurists, represented here by Marinetti. According to the organizers’ intention, the list of the exhibited artists should be as exhaustive as possible from the point of view of art history: from Apollinaire’s calligrammes to Raoul Haussmann’s dadaïst poems, from Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonate to Ezra Pound’s Vorticism.
The organizers have put a special emphasis on showing the historic antecedents extensively, and for this reason artworks had to be borrowed from famous museums all over the world. The list of the artists is long, but one can find such names among them as Fernando Pessoa, William Burroughs, Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux, Sarenco, Joël Hubaut, Charles Dreyfus, François Dufrêne, Raymond Hains, Jiří Kolář, Gil Wolman, Jean-Luc Parent, Nanni Balestrini, Roland Sabatier, etc. (catalogues / bibliography)
[taking group photos of the participants] 
Artpool Art Research Center’s exhibition, entitled Subjective Artpool, is going to be opened on February 13th as part of this programme
(in the Ateliers d’Artistes de la Ville de Marseille — The Artists’ Studios of the City of Marseille).
Sarenco, György Galántai, Júlia Klaniczay, Charles Dreyfus, Julien Blaine
Artpool has chosen seven of its projects from the period of 1980-1992 for this multi-media show.
Homage to Vera Muhina is a symbolic performance dating back to 1980, performed by Júlia and György Galántai at the Heroes’ Square in Budapest.
World Art Post - from 1982 - was the exhibition of artists’ stamps which made Artpool internationally well-known. The 750 stamps from 550 artists from all over the world can be seen on video.
Besides the original stamped sheets, Artpool reconstructs the space and the installation of another action from 1982, entitled Everybody With Anybody. During the exhibition, the visitors have the possibility of using the rubber-stamps on display.
Five simultaneously working slide projectors show a selection from the international network-project of the Buda-Ray University, active between 1982 and 1988.
The drawings of those children who participated at the Children’s Audio-visual And Electronic Workshop, organized by Galántai in Kapolcs, Hungary, 1992, belong to another ”network”.
1992 was the year of the Decentralized World-Wide Networker Congress. The Budapest Session was held by Artpool from August 24th to 26th. This part of the exhibition, with the help of the original faxes, is meant to document these encounters mediated by the fax-machine.
Flux Flag was the title of Artpool’s latest international project, for which 42 artists from 18 countries have sent original works. The complete collection is exhibited in Marseille.
The exhibition Subjective Artpool shows a special field of the relationship between image and text, the possibilities of free and boundless flow of creative information. Artpool Art Research Center in Budapest is an active member, documentator, inspirator and researcher of this field, among others.