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And So I’m Here... the first line of the filing cabinet I’m Here (1994) by the conceptual poet, essayist and amateur singer of pre-war Soviet songs Lev Rubinstein (1947).


‘... I really wanted to overcome the flatness of the page, to break down the column in which poetry is usually written. To destroy its two-dimensionality and to offer it volume – not metaphorically, but literally, physically...’


Long before his first filing cabinet appeared in 1974, Rubinstein had been an enthusiastic experimenter with poetry, and this had pulled him away from the flat page into three-dimensional space. In the early seventies, his terse verse was written on just about anything – he wrote on matchboxes, wine labels, he inserted his poems in envelopes, wrote them on the wall and took selfies in front of them.

He claims he created his first filing cabinet because as an unofficial writer he could not publish, or at most only in samizdat. Originally it was to have been a one-off gesture, but in fact for more than thirty years Rubinstein has written his poetry exclusively in this genre. From the outset he perceived his filing cabinet as a visual object that would one day lie in the form of a wooden drawer somewhere in a gallery. However, it transpired that this pile of cards is a poetic object that requires action and underlines the volume of the text.