Frozen Time. Stories of the new acquisitions in the No Art Today? exhibition Pavel Klusák

Jiří Příhoda
Event I

Only one artefact at the exhibition of new works in the GHMP collections required a wall between two rooms to be broken down; for the distinctive installed object, Event I, there is no other way. Its author, Jiří Příhoda, comments: “I think Event I is my first serious thing. It was created in 1992 on the occasion of Josef Šíma’s exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Šíma’s work was accompanied by a selection of other Czech artists, and I represented the youngest generation.”

At that time, the twenty-six-year-old Jiří Příhoda was beginning to work with objects in a series he called Construction. From the beginning, Event I was conceived as a passage between two halls; originally, a door was also envisaged, which could not be closed due to the presence of the intersecting object, but this idea was eventually abandoned. “You can only see the whole shape if you also go into the other hall. From there, Event I takes you back to the first room. It’s an endless loop, a frozen moment in time.” It is typical of and essential for Příhoda that not one part of the apparent circle is the same: the parameters are constantly changing. “Years later, I am now trying to fathom out why I glued the parts together with a distinctive red glue. I don’t have a clear answer, but the pictorial structure of the soft, sensitive part of Event I reminds me today of Václav Boštík’s works…”

When Jiří Příhoda was working on Event I, he was still a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in the studio of Stanislav Kolíbal. “I think you can see how interested I was in the new British school at that time: Anish Kapoor, Richard Deacon, Tony Cragg… Did the beginning of the nineties somehow imprint itself on Event I? Sure! Look at the monumentality. You need two halls in order to realise it, relatively high, the scale corresponding to a time when anything seemed possible. Even the prices of materials were not so high – and one could live more modestly for a while back then to save up for the realisation of a work. The later real capitalism had not yet arrived then.”

Daniel Pitín
Summer in the City

Daniel Pitín’s work at the current exhibition of new GHMP acquisitions marks the presence of one of the most highly regarded contemporary Czech artists: a painter who has naturally placed himself in an international context and found lasting acceptance there. Not only through exhibitions and critical acclaim: Pitín is the only artist from the Czech Republic to have a monograph published – now sold out – by the prestigious London publisher Hatje Cantz.

The path to Pitín’s Summer in the City painting seems to lead through his works that are inspired by cinematography: Hitchcock’s The Birds, Herz’s The Cremator, Ozon’s Swimming Pool and Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. “Taxi Driver is not a direct quote from the film, nor does it want to evoke the sentiment of a memory,” says Pitín. It provokes the viewer’s memory in a more open, loose way: the image sets visual moments from the film in a transformed environment. And so, if we can tap into the cultural memory of the film, we perceive, standing in front of the picture, that something from the film has passed into it more directly, and something has been recoded through the author’s subjective imagination.

Summer in the City is loosely related to this principle. However, we are no longer breaking into film, but into the environment in which the artist lives, including the housing estate architecture that evokes so much. “I wanted to find an edge between the ‘representation of reality‘ and a modelling of the situation: something I could call a child’s model, a paper toy, a film set.” Indeed, in Summer in the City, the tower block twists like a heat-dried leaf, a stage set, a cheap screen: the scene goes masterfully beyond the space of the “possible”. It is a representative work demonstrating Pitín’s long-standing ambition to evoke the viewer’s real experience through the image of the unreal.

“For me, film images and Summer in the City refer to one thing,” says Daniel Pitín. “To the relationship between reality (which is communicated to us through the image) and fiction, which the representation always has in it. The contemporary world, which is built on communication through images, is constantly on the border between this fiction and reality. Only, unlike my paintings, it obscures this difference. It is important to be constantly aware that each of the images we are presented with daily is constructed. This construction may have socio-economic foundations, it may be based on memory and instincts. Through all this, images can be manipulative without us realising it.”

Daniel Pitín is not aiming at a critique of specific social events: instead, he tries to analyse our perception and the very construction of images.

Michal Kindernay
Calendarium Coeli

What category does Michal Kindernay’s Calendarium Coeli, a large-scale work consisting of thousands of video images, fall into? Curator Jitka Hlaváčková uses the term video painting. The viewer does not need any definitions: rather a guide to decipher what they are actually observing in Kindernay’s flowing and pulsating colour shades of the day and night sky.

“I’ve been interested in atmospheric processes for a long time,” says Michal Kindernay. Alongside video, sketches, prints and paintings are also the output of his interest.  “I work with the calendar year; I am interested in how to process long periods of time. We humans perceive processes very much in terms of seasons, but how to contain a year or even more in the work? That’s why I work with twelve audio channels or twelve prints, structuring my work by months. Calendarium Coeli was one of those works whose material was collected after 365 days: before that, during the year, I didn’t even know what images I would end up working with. You have to wait for the paintings: this process is a kind of slow art.”

“What would a picture of the weather look like over a whole year? A picture of the natural drama that affects us so much?” We can track the answer to this question along with the interviewer. In Kindernay’s images of the sky, it is easy to see how the day shortens and lengthens: the dark frame of the day shrinks and then bites back into daytime again. One column in the vast “video painting” is dedicated to a single day. Michal’s calendarium is a Czech one: “I would like to do the same thing in Iceland one day – the climate would make the whole picture look completely different…” The Calendarium Coeli is loosely linked to Michal’s residency at the Czech Hydrometeorological Institute in Komořany as part of the CirculUM / Art in the City programme; an output on the theme of “weather in art” is currently in progress.

Petr Štembera
Štěpování

Štembera: I grafted a twig from a bush onto my arm in the way this is usually done in orcharding.
Chalupecký: “What he does not say is that blood poisoning followed.”

In documenting Peter Štembera’s demanding and physically risky actions from the 1970s, the viewer almost feels guilty for not exposing himself to similarly liminal situations as Štembera, who unhesitatingly made his body the unmediated material of his art. The path to his body art led through a stay in Paris where Štembera spent ten days without food: his encounter with fasting showed him the enriching possibilities of extreme bodily experiences and inner states.

Štembera began to organise private performances in Prague, during which a small circle of invited friends watched his clandestine actions. Grafting (1975) was one of the confrontations between man and nature, similar to Sleeping in a Tree, which took place the same year after three nights without sleep. An ascetic surrender to thirst, actions with an uncertain course, influenced by the involvement of fire and acid… Štembera’s performances were a free gesture in an unfree world: their existentialist tone also transcends the situation of normalised deprivation of life with which they were associated at the time of their creation.

What is attractive about Štembera’s actions even after all these years? Surely it is the fact that viewers (even a contemporary one, exposed to the action on the spot), despite all their keen observation, fail to see the essential component of the work: the transformation that the performed action leaves inside the performer. The performance seems to move forward as well as backward from the time in which it takes place: into the past, when its impetus originated, and into the future, when the experience of the bodily action reverberates within the actor and inscribes itself into the open structure of life. In the end, Petr Štembera, like his close colleague Jan Mlčoch, survived all his demanding actions, which is probably good news for this kind of art and for the audience.

The enigmatic quality of his work remained because he never commented on it much. Even in his extensive testimony for the Memory of the Nation public archive, he focuses more on facts than on “illuminating” the liminal acts that viewers still have to confront for themselves.

“A dancer and an actor, even a musician or a virtuoso during a concert, also make use of their own body as a vehicle for art. But they take on a role, they enter into it, they transform their body into an instrument of that role. (…) This is not possible in performances. The performer has to remain in his individual existence, but he has to leave only what is general about it to make it also an example of the life situation of others, and it is this very presence of his own through which he makes an impact”.
Jindřich Chalupecký: The Story of Petr Štembera and Jan Mlčoch (from the book On the Borders of Art)

Stano Filko, Alex Mlynárčik
HAPPSOC I.

What can be considered a work of art? The twentieth century has shown us that the will and vision of the artist can be decisive in this matter. The gesture of the Slovak neo-avant-gardists, Stan Filko and Alex Mlynárčík, who in 1965 declared the entire city of Bratislava a work of art, still has charm, originality and powerful questions.

The joint project of Alex Mlynárčík and Stan Filko, HAPPSOC I, is now considered a landmark not only in Czechoslovak art, but also in the avant-gardes of the countries east of the Iron Curtain. At the GHMP exhibition, we can see a contemporary documentary among the acquisitions: Mlynárčik and Filko enumerate all the things that belong to their work of art, which was to last between 2–8 May 1965 (that is, in between two bank holidays): in the statistical summary there are women, men, dogs, houses; later on in the list are water pipes, stoves, fridges, typewriters, radios, cinemas, chimneys, wine bars, trolleybuses, hospitals, cemeteries… The Danube is not left off the list; Bratislava itself, within itself, is also listed here, somewhat unsystematically.

The distributed invitations and the manifesto show that Filko and Mlynárčik wished, above all, to stir the consciousness of those who let “their artefact” come close to themselves: to open up the perception of everyday reality and offer anyone and anything from everyday life through a new prism: Let’s view everything as part of art. Mlynárčik later wrote in a letter to Jindřich Chalupecký: “Art (…) has created and should create even today a kind of shimmering over the fire (our ancestors would say; I will say a shimmering of air over a tarmac road), something that always escapes us.” It is as if it is against this eternal elusiveness that the young Mlynárčik and Filko wanted to “enclose” the entire capital city in an artistic object – and thus make it easier for their audience to put on glasses that see everything blessed with a touch of creativity, imbued with value, internally charged with the possibility of interpretation, endowed with an aesthetic, communicative, perhaps even magical function.

How many waves of updating have similar events, happenings and performances, which emerged from the specifics of the sixties or seventies, already experienced? The exhibition of new acquisitions allows us to ask this question again today.