CS CONCEPTUAL ART OF THE 70s

The Spectres in the House exhibition marks Bárta's return to the Fait Gallery MEM space after eight years. He has filled this time with work on drawings and paintings, the DNA of which he weaves together from sequences of modernist painting, architectural features, and building and workshop practice. Bárta's new paintings are also rooted in architecture. This time, however, it is as if architecture spawned its own ghosts.

The canvas surfaces of Barta's latest paintings are often conceived as imaginary walls that stand between two spaces. The events in his painterly intentions take place between these three elements: the two spaces and the partition between them. Such pictures inevitably trigger a "reverse course" through the history of European painting, back to Leon Battista Alberti's reflections on the construction of picture space which he put forward in his seminal work De pictura (1435). Yer they might equally be considered in relation to the present.

Instead of a well-organised geometrical fiction of the renaissance pictorial space, followed by a massive cloud of variations on the themes of space and perspective, Tomáš Bárta offers ambiguous spatial relations with a number of internal paradoxes, as well as an illusion of the objects that inhabit these paintings and pass through their plans. By using the motifs of niche and window, or a depression and opening in the surface, he stages an optical interplay with the visual principles of "inside", "outside", "through", "in front of", "above", "below", "over", "in the foreground", "in the background", "between", etc. Although he has one entire wall in his studio covered with brief sketches that make the basic outlines of his future pictures, from the beginning their painting is essentially subordinated to the adventure of immediate construction. The layers and spatial planes of the paintings are created gradually and "unplanned". As a result, they form a relation system; they involve visual paradoxes in a spatial composition.

Bárta's "paradoxical spaces" can be approached as a game with the mimetic aspects of painting. However, they touch upon the most common experiences of the modern man. In the past, Bárta's paintings were frequently reminiscent of the morphology of hi-tech architecture, whose morphology would be impossible to achieve without the massive use of computer technology, or the immersive environment of some computer games, through which we enter worlds that are different in varying degrees from those we physically inhabit. Recently, this area has been enriched by synthetic images created by artificial intelligence. Its potential seems infinite, and that includes a new wealth of possible mistakes that the learning but young machines are making. We usually consider these to be flaws that confirm to vain humans that machine-programmes have not yet achieved our ability to perfectly mimic reality (albeit with the help of other machines and tools). From another angle, however, these new worlds, with all their shortcomings, expand the horizon of the collective imagination about the potential parameters of reality. In a sense, they move the discoveries that visual artists have been making for over a century into the realm of everyday reality. If we focus exclusively on what contemporary technologies bring to our imaginations of space, it is precisely the multiplication and overlapping of perspectives and the loosening of ties to our sensory-bodily experience. And this includes spectres - moments of seeing when we perceive primarily the incoherence and inconsistence of sensory information, moments when perception is inconsistent with our experience, or with "common sense" (sensus communis).

The pictures by Tomáš Bárta (b. 1982) are not paintings "after artificial intelligence" or with its help. Nevertheless, they do reflect the shifts in the perception of reality that the increasingly dominant technologies of visual production are leading us towards.

CS CONCEPTUAL ART OF THE 70s

11.10.2017 - 13.01.2018

Fait Gallery
Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno
11. 10. 2017 - 13. 1. 2018
Opening: 11. 10. 2017 at 19:00
Curators: Beata Jablonská, Denisa Kujelová and Jana Písaříková

The arrival of conceptual art in the mid-1960s was associated with the shift of interest from aesthetic and material qualities of artworks towards personal, social, historical and often also theoreticizing contexts. In contrast to the art scene in the West, the conceptual approach of artists in Czechoslovakia was motivated by a more personal search for the essence of the relationship between artist and art, at the artistic level as well as the political-ethical, social or even ecological level. The turn towards conceptual art was thus not viewed as dematerialization and iconoclastic efforts but, rather, as a utopian escape from the official, state-controlled culture. It provided the artists with a free space which they worked with a wide range of media and subjects.

The exhibition “CS CONCEPTUAL ART OF THE 70s” charts the trends that were first distinctly employed in the art of ideas, records of projects and actions in the late 1960s and faded in the early 1980s. It presents different forms of conceptual work with drawing and photography, conceptual art exploring the relationship between type and image, and also futurological, action and environmental projects.

The exhibition observes, through its interconnected themes, the closeness of the Czech and Slovak art scenes that have been approached, since the breakup of Czechoslovakia, as two separate entities. The exhibition concept is rooted in a quest for their intersections and joint points of departure. Never in the history of Czech and Slovak art was the need for a mutual dialogue cultivated and developed as much as in the 1970s.

WORD AND SIGN AS A CONCEPTUAL MESSAGE

While concrete poetry of the 1960s reduced the semantic component of language to a minimum, the 1970s saw the return to its meaning. Words were placed in contrast with other types of communication in the form of pictograms, pictorial symbols and numerals, which resulted in a tension between different types of representations.

MUSICAL SCORES

Graphic music with its formalized language came to the fore in the 1970s. Visual and acoustic art was produced both by musicians active in the field of new music and artists who observed the visual order and the semantic potential of musical scores.

GEOMETRY, ORDER AND ITS DISRUPTION

Under the influence of conceptual art, the geometry of the body, space, area and form grew more sensitive and started to involve aspects placed by the modernist order outside its boundaries. It became a platform for interventions challenging the distinctive nature of geometrical compositions, the relationship between order and randomness, while being enriched with a social, anthropological and political dimension.

ART AS A RECORD AND EXPERIENCE OF EXISTENCE, PERSONAL RITUALS, INTROSPECTION

Reflections of everyday activities and gestures, perception of their stereotypical nature and escape from it in the form of ritual and through the intense experience of one’s existence. Reflections of a person’s immediate surroundings and the passing of time.

REFERENCES TO THE RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDE, CONCEPTUALIZATION OF PAINTING, DRAWING AND POINT ZERO OF A PICTURE

Search for the point zero of a picture, a moment when the invisible becomes visible. The picture medium refers to itself, to its area, colour and matter. It makes its elementary properties present or, conversely, induces their gradual dematerialization. Frequent references to the black square, an important symbol of the Russian avant-garde, to the belief that the art experience leads to a more intense perception of reality.

PROJECTS, MANUALS, INSTRUCTIONS, OBSERVATIONS AND COSMOLOGY

The emancipation efforts of art in the sense of exploiting scientific and rational thinking are, to a certain degree, subversive as they apply a pseudo-scientific language even to the phenomena of a personal, spiritual and transcendental character. The artists were inspired and fascinated by scientific progress, by the language of natural sciences and statistics.

NATURE AS A MEDIUM, EXPLORATION OF THE LAWS OF PHYSICS, NATURE AND ZEN BUDDHISM, EPHEMERAL MATERIAL DEMONSTRATIONS, ENVIRONMENTAL SUBJECTS

The natural environment as a place where one can hide from the estranged and impersonal urban space, a territory beyond the state’s control, a place suitable for art activities. Many of them echoed ecological and ethical issues that were frequent subjects of unofficial discussions and meetings.

CARTOGRAPHY AS AN INSTRUMENT OF RECORDING A PERSONAL JOURNEY

Artists appropriated the rationalizing language of topographic drafts, plans and maps, and through them made visible phenomena and spatial relations that cannot otherwise be mediated to the human perception. They emphasise the objective and factual aspect of real phenomena; at the same time, they lend validity to those that have a utopian character.

ARTISTS’ BOOKS

In the 1970s, artists’ books became alternatives for gallery and exhibition rooms. With the post medium, they were among the key ways of mediating and distributing conceptual art. In addition, many artists pushed through their work the very limits of the definition of books. They created books-objects, accentuated the haptic qualities of paper and the principles of browsing, and made the reading process complicated. Conceptual art of the 1970s was often the subject of personal communication between the artist and the recipient, or a group of friends.

QUOTATIONS, INTERPRETATIONS, APPROPRIATIONS

Interest in the analysis of the art medium, its intellectual reflection. The hierarchy between original and copy was disrupted in favour of the concept of art as a changing structure open to interpretations. The majority of artworks produced as quotations are actually visual reflections on the functioning and continuity of art and its lasting values.

Artists represented at the exhibition: Milan Adamčiak, Karel Adamus, Vladimír Ambroz, Peter Bartoš, Juraj Bartusz, Ján Budaj, Pavel Büchler, Robert Cyprich, Hugo Demartini, Milan Dobeš, Ľubomír Ďurček, Rudolf Fila, Stano Filko, Daniel Fischer, Peter Graham, Milan Grygar, Sonny Halas, Olaf Hanel, Vladimír Havlík, Vladimír Havrilla, Pavel Holouš, Dalibor Chatrný, Jozef Jankovič, Ivan Kafka, Olga Karlíková, Michal Kern, Martin Klimeš, Svatopluk Klimeš, Milan Knížák, J. H. Kocman, Július Koller, Vladimír Kordoš, Inge Kosková, Jan Kotík, Jiří Kovanda, Milan Kozelka, Miloš Laky, Milan Lasota, Dáša Lasotová, Otis Laubert, Milan Maur, Juraj Meliš, Karel Miler, Jan Mlčoch, Alex Mlynárčik, Marian Mudroch, Eduard Ovčáček, Květa Pacovská, Marian Palla, Vladimír Popovič, Pavel Rudolf, Tomáš Ruller, Jan Ságl, Zorka Ságlová, Rudolf Sikora, Jan Steklík, Miloš Šejn, Petr Ševčík, Petr Štembera, Ivan Štěpán, Margita Titlová Ylovsky, Monogramista T.D/Dezider Tóth, Jiří Valoch, Jan Wojnar, Ján Zavarský, Jana Želibská

Architecture: Oldřich Morys

Production: Lucie Domorádová

Installation: Gabriela Rampáčková, Tomáš Rada, Ondřej Kotrč, Martin Nytra, Eliška Mikšová, Maroš Belák, Dita Dvořáková, Nela Klajbanová, Zuzana Mrštinová, Kryštof Ambrůz

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