Prague Biennale 6 - highlights

The well-known fact that no one but a small group of people, mostly other artists, go to art exhibitions these days is a pity, but its no reason to despair completely. There are a number of interesting currents in contemporary art and in Prague there's no better place to gauge the creative climate in Europe than the Prague Biennale, now in its 10th year and 6th incarnation.



First there's the location, an isolated old freight train station a few kilometres from the center of town, built in the 1930s. The approach to the exhibition is on a long train platform next to parked flat cars and the empty space around the labyrinthine halls creates a timeless, floating atmosphere. The exhibition is broken into five sections and the first deals with trends in contemporary photography, mostly focused on abstraction and digital technologies. There are a number of compelling works, somewhat humourous in their approach, such as playful compositions combining sliced vegetables with constructivist geometric shapes, and also a large scale photograph of a mysterious puff of yellow smoke hovering in a stairwell. The collage-based sculptural works by Chris Jones(UK) stand out in their use of densely hand-crafted surfaces, small figures from old National Geographic magazines are trapped in a decaying world of rotten fruit, a broken motorcycle, or a shovel left leaning against a wall to rot away into a kind of gelationous photographic goo.





The next section of the show "Expanded Painting" reflects the origins of the Prague Biennale in Flash Art magazine and the Italian scene as it is curated by Giancarlo Politi, the founder of Flash Art, his wife, the art critic and curator Helena Kontova, together with Nicola Trezzi. They pull together a broad selection of artists, both young and old, whose work ranges from rough-hewn geometric abstraction through to neo-surreal pop figuration. The two Romanian artists on display are quite strong, revealing a dynamic cultural scene around the art academy in Cluj-Napoca. The sharp-edge geometric painting and hanging sculpture by Florin Maxa are shown through the projection of an experimental film documenting his 1980 exhibit "The Garden". The jerky frames, shifting focus, anachronistic clothes of the participants, and icicles and tree branches amidst the sculptures create a kind of mystical synthesis that reveals the avant-garde aesthetics of 1980 Romania to be compellingly relevant today. The work of the youger Romanian on display, Mihut Boscu Kafchin, reflects on the future instead, or the future that never was, through a dystopian retro-futuristic sensibility, which contains parallels with the literary worlds of Stanislaw Lem or the Strugatsky brothers. Another artist highlighted in Expanded Painting is the rising American art star Joshua Abelow. Abelow got his start as an assistant for Ross Bleckner and he creates small process-oriented geometric abstractions overlaid with reductive stick-figure figuration. There's an anti-intellectual strain to the work and I was prepared to hate it, but the simplicity was underpinned by a sophisticated approach to colour. The banality and product nature of the work, however, like a hybrid between Keith Haring and Mark Kostabi, remains off-putting.







On the second floor the Biennale loses some momentum with a confusing section highlighting the work of contemporary Slovak artists. The emphasis seems to be on documents of a conceptual relational aesthetics, but the shift in focus from the rest of the Biennale, which is highly visual and tactile in nature, leaves something lost in translation. Then there is a section devoted, oddly enough in a Biennale, to a single individual, the recently deceased outsider Czech artist Miroslav Tichy. The phenomenon of Tichy's rise in the art market has caused somewhat of a stir considering that his relationship with the foundation that promotes his work was quite murky. Although Tichy's biography makes for good copy, I don't think the work holds up, so I skipped over it. The soundtrack of sustained piano chords in this section of the exhibit was soothing though.

The remaining part of the Biennale, called Flow, is a strong showcase of mostly Czech and German work that fits quite well with the Expanded Painting section. Curated by Zuzana Blochová and Patricia Talacko, Flow examines trends in contemporary art practice that build on Central European Modernist approaches, especially in the use of collage and installations. The visionary Czech artist Čestmír Kafka, represented here by a few small sketches from the 1940s, presides over the other artists on exhibit in the principles of an exploratory figuration, touched by melancholia, resting side by side with an unidealised abstraction. A similar approach can be seen in the primitivist collages by Viktorie Valocká and the drawings and womblike figurative reliefs by Quirin Bäumler. A similar strain of symbolist Modernism can be felt in the photo installation "Sun Galaxy with Ape sunbathing" by Erwin Kneihsl and the more abstract "Postobjects" installation by Matyáš Chochola with its homage to Brancusi. (Romania once again!) The Prague Biennale in its mix of both commercialised interests and experimental reconfigurations of Modernist tropes reveals the extent to which Prague remains a crossroads of Europe where numerous cultural currents from both east and west can come together and cross-pollinate.

Viktor Kolář - Exile's Return

There is an excellent retrospective of Viktor Kolář's black and white photography at the House of the Stone Bell on Old Town Square in Prague this summer. Kolář's work, with its touches of Fellini and Henri Cartier-Bresson, focuses on the human spirit caught within the deadened world of life under totalitarianism in the Silesian mining town of Ostrava. In this dark heart of Europe, Kolář used the camera to find a surrealist undercurrent beneath the constant boredom and despair of daily life near the pits.



Kolář's life work stems from his deep connection with place. Ostrava is the sort of abandoned place that most artists would leave, but Kolář actually returned after a 5 year exile. The city is his home, and warts and all, its what he knows best. The mystery and poetry of the dispossessed drives his art. Kolář emigrated in 1968 to Canada, and though he was forced to accept difficult manual labour work there, he used the money to buy a Leica and made his way to Toronto and Montreal where his talent slowly gained recognition. Despite his growing success, he chose to return to Czechoslovakia during an amnesty, where he faced detention and an uncertain future. Unlike his fellow countryman, Josef Koudelka, who also fled to the West and whose work shares a similar aesthetic, Kolář did not gain a post at the prestigious Magnum agency, he did not travel throughout Europe. The need for his homeland was too strong. It reminds me of a character in Jan Pelc's story "Emigrants" about a man similar to Kolář who has escaped from totalitarian Czechoslovakia to Paris but is haunted by the need to return. He continually imagines sitting on the train, crossing the border, evading the police and seeing his old friends who berate him on his stupidity to return, until one day he actually finds himself on the train crossing the border and caught by the police. Even during times of such repression, the call of the familiar was strong and many returned. The waves of Czech emigrants throughout history is a complex tale, those who had success abroad (Milan Kundera, Miloš Forman, Josef Škvorecky, etc) remain better known internationally of course than those who returned.



I dont think the rule works in reverse, ie that people like me who immigrate to CZ will somehow become known internationally. No, in many regards life in CZ, and many other countries for that matter, remains entrenched in a kind of antagonistic relationship with the outside world. The Iron Curtain may be gone, but the memory of it remains a potent barrier on both sides. I've recently been revisiting the work of Charles Olson, and his Emersonian approach to deep observation, his idea of the "saturation job" in knowing a place, for him Gloucester, Massachussets. Viktor Kolář's work in Ostrava is analagous to Olson's, a sense of deeply relating to place, diving for the "pearls at the bottom" (Perlička na dně), to refer to Bohumil Hrabal, an artist with a similar approach as well. The expatriate/emigré abandons his/her place of origin, and can rarely feel fully integrated in his/her new home. One longs to return, regardless of the conditions, and this longing never truly ceases, despite any logical reasons to the contrary. There are the ones who stay, and the ones who go. And both experiences are enriching in different ways. But I can't help feeling that those who stay live with less doubt, but of course I would feel that way.



Exile is not a material thing,
it is a spiritual thing, all corners
of the earth exactly the same.
And anywhere one can dream is good,
providing the place is obscure, and
the horizon vast.

—Victor Hugo

(all photos Viktor Kolář)

Trip to Dresden

took a daytrip to Dresden with Dan Vlček last weekend

Moon Monkey Candle show

here's a pdf of my exhibition from January 2013, Moon Monkey Candle, at AM180 Galley in Prague

http://www.wells.cz/moonmonkeycandle.pdf

Dorka - Soukup 2

In my last post on Vit Soukup I got a few things wrong. I'm sure there are other things I got wrong that I still don't know about. Of those things I remain blissfully unaware. But a few days after I wrote the post I realised that Soukup's series Dorka has nothing to do with the english word "dorks" (hlupaci) and refers instead to the embroidery magazine, Dorka.



The photos from these magazines are so dorky though that I jumped to that interpretation, and I think Soukup meant the images to be funny and poignant at the same time. As an artist he was mining a rich vein of material that had been ignored by other Czech artists - the forlorn and slightly ridiculous images from children's magazines (abc) and these women's magazines. Lifestyle magazines from the totalitarian period suggested an echo of life in the West, and also fit well with the DIY ethos (and I use the term here ironically) of making things oneself. In a country where there was little access to foreign goods, many women made their own clothes, based on the few photos they could find in old fashion magazines sent by relatives from abroad. The closest analogy to Soukup's Dorka series can perhaps be found in the work of Tomaš Cisařovský, specifically his series Promlčená doba, also from 2003, which dealt with imagery from life before the revolution, specifically using photographs of singers and entertainers from that period. But by using Dorka, Soukup speaks more directly to the mundane day-to-day life of most Czechs, and also reflects the melancholy both of life under totalitarianism and also the continued uncertainty after the revolution. It is this continuing post-revolutionary ennui that Soukup addresses most directly, the sense that all ideologies are suspect. We are trapped just like the "dorky" people in the photos from Dorka. As I said before, Soukup focuses on the fragile humanity of the figures, and this empathy overcomes the other conceptual frameworks surrounding the work.



Norské svetry (Norwegian Sweaters) is a video piece Soukup made at the same time as the Dorka series and it features the artist Michal Pěchouček as a kind of sensitive aesthete who only wishes to help others. The work is reminiscent of Fassbinder in the way the main character makes sacrifices which go unnoticed and unrewarded. Lurking within his heart of gold, however, is a death wish. The suicide attempt, presented here as tragicomedy, becomes much darker now considering the artist's own suicide. Vit Soukup's death is his last work. It may artificially elevate the prices of his work, but it also holds a mirror up to the weakened and fragile role of the artist in contemporary society. Here we have an example of a deeply sensitive and complex artist who was overcome by the contradictions of his time. His last series was An Army for the Republic from 2007 which uses George Lucas's Star Wars and the cosmic battle against the Empire as a metaphor for the artist's struggle. Here he created an army made up of plastic children's toys, but these small figures are imbued with great power. In this series Soukup tied together all the strands of his previous work in a powerful group of images. A video from the opening can be seen here.

Soukup's own theoretical writings make up another important aspect of his work. Some of the texts have been translated into English and can be found on the Divus site here. There is also an artist's website: http://vit-soukup.cz

Dorks - Vit Soukup retrospective

The wide-ranging retrospective of the work of Czech painter Vit Soukup, which closed in mid-March 2013 at Divus in Prague, was a unique glimpse into the mind of this talented artist. The show reflected the melancholic weight of history that pervades life in Prague, and also the bittersweet irony and dark humour that flourished like mushrooms in the dark soil beneath the offical facade of the former regime, and which continues to be relevant today. Soukup's work stands as a beautiful warped reflection of his time and place, finding inspiration in the detritus of childhood and cheap media filtered through a love of Old Master painting (especially El Greco) and presented in the sophisticated idiom of postmodern Pop Surrealism, although Soukup's work transcends labels. The exhibition ranged from his early teenage works to his last works before his suicide at the age of 36 in 2007.



Seeing these youthful self-portraits is reminiscent of art monographs on painters from the early 20th century, and its refreshing the way that Soukup, though he worked in video and performance art as well, was a committed figurative painter in a scene that often values a conceptual, overly-intellectualized approach. Soukup worked in series, the early paintings from the 90s reflected on life in exotic locales (Life in the South) or adventures in the forests of Canada (Adventure Holidays). The novels of Jack London, for example, are still popular for young Czech readers, and this fantasy of a free natural world peopled by independent rugged characters holds a strong sway over the imagination here, as a symbol of living free beyond the bounds of the state, or to escape this small country and roam the world.



And yet for all their yearning to be free, Soukup's figures are conflicted and trapped by power struggles or existential dread, yet presented knowingly, in a tongue-in-cheek way, as we laugh together wuth the artist through the tears. The figures are distorted as in El Greco in a kind of Mannerist/Expressionist shorthand, but there remains something tactile about the material of the flesh and objects, a nod to the old Dutch masters, which gives the work the feeling of a feverish dream. The flesh is like modelling clay, or the figures seem carved from wood; poor humans with their fragile concerns lost in the world.



Soukup moved on from these works to examine the kitschy everyday objects that surround us and come to define us. Our material possessions presented as still-lifes: extension cords, lace pillow, candles, sweaters .. all this detritus from the interiors of Czech panelak apartments and country weekend homes. The sense of ironic distance remains, and yet the love for these simple things can be felt as well. There is a beautiful humility in Soukup's work which elevates the crap one can find abandoned in a cheap bazaar to the level of the ideal, as if to say that even the lowest cast-off is valuable, that it deserves our respect. Another series, UFOs, took this logic to an extreme and presented small paintings of minor fragments of old plastic toys, door knobs, broken buttons or other "garbage", yet mysteriously transformed into something alien, something compelling. Soukup's power in these works stems from the way he invests the physical world with a spiritual presence, the way he invests the world with meaning.



Working with old photographs from cheap magazines from the 1970s, Soukup focused on the common-place but absurd shots in fashion magazines of models modelling sweaters. In his series Dorks, he instills the same sense found in the UFOs series, that the value of each lowly man shpuld be considered, should be elevated. The works stem from an equating, sympathetic gaze which compells the viewer to understand that we are all dorks, we are all in this (shit) together. We laugh at these goofy fools, and we see ourselves in them too. As paintings of photographs, the works also operate within the realm of nostalgia, but rather than longing for a forever-lost childhood, I feel Soukup was using the reference to photographry to heighten the sense of the passing of time. This gulf of a different age is more prescient in the former Eastern Block, where the dividing line of 1989 marked Soukup's generation just as they came of age. In this way their childhoods are held forever in a kind of dirty amber, what some people refer to as "minuly život", the past life.





The works also represent a tragic masculinity, but one that deflates its own sense of self-worth. A masculinity that laughs at itself, overcoming tragedy through the comic, which is typically Czech. The power in Soukup's work stems from the way he channeled these specific cultural themes into something more universal. The tragedy surrounding his death is that of any suicide, and yet in this case one feels the loss of a great artist, the loss of the unmade, the cutting off of the flow of his work. Another tragedy surrounding the work is that it remains little known outside the circle of the Czech art scene. Lets hope that will begin to change.

De Chirico's Gladiators

We took a trip to Italy a few weeks ago and in Verona I bought a monograph on De Chirico. De Chirico is a peculiar case in that his early paintings were highly successful, but then in the 1920s he moved to Paris to join with the Surrealists. He quickly came to feel that Breton was overbearing and that many of the Surrealists were fakers and he went on his own highly iconoclastic way from then on, painting Neoclassical self-portraits dressed in historical costumes, or copies of various old master paintings. He was also known for making copies of his earlier work, like Dali would do as well. In some ways it appeared he had gone off the rails and lost his way.



In the late-1920s De Chirico turned to the neo-classical and changed his style. He began a series of gladiator paintings, perhaps as a reaction to the rise of Mussolini, and also perhaps to Picasso as well. Italy was always central to De Chirico's work, the piles of accumulated junk and objects in his work symbolised the archaeological accretions of history in Italy. In a way De Chirico's use of static figures in his Metaphysical painting was a rejection of the cult of speed, power and technology in the proto-fascistic Futurists. And it has been argued that the elongated flacid interlinked bodies of his gladiators was again a kind of tongue-in-cheek response to the cult of masculinity so prevalent in Italian culture.



The gladiators were produced for the Casa Rosenberg, the Parisian apartment of the Rosenberg brothers, art dealers and connoisseurs, who supported Max Ernst, Francis Picabia, and many others, and commisioned series from these artists to fill their home I wonder what became of their collection and these gladiator paintings after the German occupation of Paris. Did the Rosenbergs escape to the USA? I'm not sure. There is a pdf online detailing letters between De Chirico and the Rosenbergs which focuses on art dealing and the looming economic crash of 1929. Dark days indeed .. the end of the interwar era.



Its not a simple issue for artists to change their style. Chagall, for example, became burdened by his popular style and was forced to churn out his idyllic charming work for collectors. Still a pretty good job, but he was fearful to change his approach too radically. De Chirico'a figures are handled quite roughly, there's a purposeful naivete in the work, it looks very much like a precursor to Philip Guston's paintings from the '40s of school children doing battle on the street. The homosocial undertones are also quite risky for the artist. Anyone working this way today would be labelled as queer, or at least stereotyped. It seems the late 20s/early 30s was in many ways a high point in Modernist experimentation, culturally and socially, much like 1917-1925 had been in Russia. All this was swept aside by World War II. Now these paintings that survived are like relics of a distant age. De Chirico strikes me as an anti-modernist, in a way, in his penchant for Old Master painting and his dandified, aristocratic style, But he also faces into the future as an early post-modernist who was willing to take great risks in his work. The later De Chirico remains problematic because it is hard to classify, but in retropect that becomes a strength. A strength born out of tenderness, a strength that bends and is flexible, not rigid and unbending like a cannon. He represents an alternative Modernism, one that adapts and reflects on history and the mysteries of time and experience.

links on De Chirico:

essay on De Chirico's Gladiator series on Google Books here

good article here

a New Yorker article here. Scroll back to page 67