PETR DUB / A SURVIVOR’S DIARY

To create a picture using earth from a Moravian orchard is to abandon the modernist tradition of expressionism, fauvism, impressionism, and also what preceded them. For someone who doesn't paint every day, such a decision may seem easy. But it isn’t, as both the painter and the picture lose the joy of a brush sweeping across the palette and canvas, as well as the effects conveyed by colour. For curators and the visitors, the earth pictures, one of which gave the exhibition its title, are a gateway to the most extensive display of Marian Palla's work to date. We enter Palla's oeuvre from roughly the centre of its material sediment, literally crashing, like country schoolmasters, into the middle of a giant molehill. Because, in keeping with the artist's programme, this is neither a complete nor a scholarly retrospective but typically, or occasionally, a taxonomic (exploring the species diversity of the artefacts) and random show.

Palla's very first participation in a public presentation of young Brno artists (1971) grabbed the attention of Jiří Valoch, for whom the Nature picture was "something different at first sight".[1]. This event led to their acquaintance and Palla became an active member and a driving force behind the now-legendary[2] Brno circle. His studio in Kotlářská Street provided the space for countless meetings, debates, studio exhibitions and performances by invited guests. The distinctiveness that had enchanted Valoch was not only visible against the backdrop of the conformist art of the time, it also characterised Palla's work within the Brno circle. It centred around two opposites, seriousness resulting from the experience of land art and drawing performances (I existed in this painting for two days and ate 7,799 grains of rice, 24 hours, Journey to a touch, Drawings with tea, etc.), and humour, or more precisely, naivety, constantly present from the earliest paintings (My parents, Nature, etc.).

Palla actually describes himself as a naive conceptualist.^{^[3]} The starting point for this conceptualism was not Duchamp nor his idiosyncratic interpreter Kossuth, but rather Magritte's painting This is not a pipe. The language, idea and definition of art around which the interest of Anglo-American conceptual artists gravitates has its roots in Palla’s work in fiction, poetry, and increasingly in Zen spirituality. Humour, naivety, self-criticism, empirical observation, description of obvious facts, absurd questions, paradoxes, the great subjects of the philosophy of life. We find all this condensed in every single one of Palla's poems, objects, pictures which are created because the artist wants to "experience intensely" but at the same time "to do things without purpose". Art and Zen practice mutually intertwine.

The concept of abandoning modernity mentioned in the introduction (with the exception of conceptual art) was employed by the artist to move through the history that far predates it. He could view the manifestations of the zeitgeist and modernity with the hearty kindness of a caveman, and painting with sticks or body parts, Neolithic pottery, imprinting and other prehistoric practices hold a prominent place in his work. Perhaps due to his pre-modern perspective, his work naturally constituted itself from the positions of interspeciesism and radical sustainability topical today. He arrived at it not by reading Bruno Latour but through a concentrated meditation on the reality that surrounds him.

For that matter, even the essay Against Interpretation^{^[4]} relevant today draws attention to the simplification (undoubtedly related to conceptual art) committed by art theory when it forgets the qualities that arise in primary sensory perception and assesses the value of an artwork only through interpretation. Sontag notes the "experience of something mystical, magical" that the prehistoric creature had in the Lascaux cave. Palla's conceptualism was aware of the brain's one-sidedness and involved body parts and nature in creating art. Projecting the ideal of enchantment into a remote French cave, as the New York theorist did, was not an option for Palla; in contrast, he demonstrates that it can be experienced by anyone in their surroundings. In his case, also between cities, Brno, a country house with a yard and animals, and cosmic nature.

Note, for example, that the Spoilt picture, Crack and other works by Palla owe their existence to the correction of the insight into the meaning of error; the error of artistic skill or material in the creative process. The consistent concept of doing things without purpose directs the artist not to exclude error, awkwardness, displeasure, or any other option based on the outcome. It grants each variation a potential for intense experience, its own inherent and healing beauty. This may seem a serious error of judgment, a naivety in a society organised around the pragmatic pursuit of success and profit. But once the crack opens, the beauty of error and ruining starts working, as a source of therapy of the imaginary common sense.

T: Vít Havránek

[1] VALOCH, Jiří. Marian Palla: Ticho, čekání a dech (kat. výst.). Galerie Na bidýlku, Brno, December 1987.

[2] Let us note here the publications and exhibitions of Barbora Klímová, long-term research of Jana Písaříková and Ondřej Chrobák of the Jiří Valoch Archive in the MG in Brno, the similarly focused research of Helena Musilová, the catalogues of the works of Vladimír Ambroz (Tomáš Pospiszyl), ČS koncept 70. let by Denisa Kujelová (ed.), Akční umění by Pavlína Morganová, etc.

[3] Marian Palla, Naivní konceptualista a slepice,2014.

[4] Susan Sontag, „Against Interpretation." In Against Interpretation and Other Essays, 1966.

PETR DUB / A SURVIVOR’S DIARY

24.01.2015 - 19.03.2015

Fait Gallery MEM
Božetěchova Street 1 (entrance from Metodějova Street), Brno
24/1 – 19/3/2015
Opening: 22/1/2015 at 7pm
Curator: Ondřej Chrobák

Petr Dub is a (post) conceptual artist. He systematically examines the medium of hanging painting, or rather the current position of painting. Dub's paintings are indeed indisputable results of manual, and let us add, often very challenging and sophisticated activity, yet the used verb "examine" is not a meaningless synonym for "painting" in his artistic practice. It primarily refers to the conscious mental activity that precedes the actual process of painting. Petr Dub is also the author of one of the few, if not the only Czech written theoretical study, which reflects the local post-conceptual painting in the context of the current discourse of art. The book, published under the title Selected Post-conceptual Approaches in the Contemporary Czech Painting, was the output of his PhD. studies at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno. Studying in Petr Kvíčala and Milan Houser‘s studio in Brno as well as a one-year internship at the Prague Academy of Arts Architecture & Design of Jiří David and Milan Salák were not in Dub’s case only a formal fulfilling of duties. Petr Dub managed, in confrontation with outstanding, but artistically and humanly different personalities, distill for himself a personal lesson, which forms a compact foundation of his current artistic trajectory. In gastronomy, which was actually the artist's first career choice, it would be an analogy to the format of "fusion cuisine" combining the strong background of Brno conceptualism and the heritage of Prague postmodernism.

The title of the exhibition, A Survivor’s Diary, offers as one of the ways to read it, a commentary on the current situation. As the Survivor, for the reading subject is kept secret, we may appoint the Painting. The conceptual thinking and painting are in local stereotypes considered to be antagonistic directions. The defenders of paintings blame the conceptual approach not only for "incomprehensibility" of contemporary art, but also from the direct participation in the proclamation of the "end of painting", which was mainly understood as an attempt to destroy the competition. In 1997 in Prague's Rudolfinum Gallery there took place a program exhibition focused on the current situation of painting called The last painting. Post-apocalyptic jargon is, since than, a mandatory part of the rhetorical arsenal used to reflect the current status of painting. For Petr Dub, who exists on the tectonic breaking point of two irreconcilable worlds, similar references make flirtatious game. He winks to both sides, but he has already decided to remain single. He acts similarly in his artistic practice. He does not leave the field of traditional hanging painting on purpose. At the same time, however, he applies the strategies that in the history of at least the last fifty years, gradually led to its questioning and rejection. Sci-fi literature works with the possibility of time travel, the intervention in history could change, or rather reverse the present danger. Petr Dub does not seek a revision of history. He knows too much for that. It seems that he rather tries to use the potential that remained fallow in the past on the altar of rapid, avantgarde method. Hybrid status, when an art work contains also the genetic code of its own end and (re) birth represents for us, the survivors, one of the relevant reasons to continue to seriously deal with art.

Ondřej Chrobák

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