Andrzej Partum’s Ontological Nhilism Andrzej Partum was a neo-avant-garde poet, musician and performer. He worked in mail art, wrote concrete poetry, made speeches, published manifestos, created graphic art-works and paintings. He ran his own original anti-institution – the Poetry Office. Since the turn of the 1950s, he treated his creative art as a way towards experiencing the Real. His way to the experience led him through the Nietzschean attitude of the complete nihilist resulting in a weak being, which Gianni Vattimo came to consider as highly potential in post-modernity. Undoubtedly, nihilism had a profound existential significance for Partum. Partum's nihilism was not just his peculiar creative method that centered on negation. He created art in indirect reference to the notion of Nothingness. The analysis of his poems created at the peak of Polish modernity, his concrete poetry and particularly his manifestos – the focal point of his artistic endeavours, originally summarised by his Manifesto for Positive Nihilism of Art – leads to the conclusion that Partum's approach was an expression of an ontological nihilism, consequently realized since the 1950s.
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