ALŽBĚTA BAČÍKOVÁ AND MARTINA SMUTNÁ / CARPE DIEM

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.

ALŽBĚTA BAČÍKOVÁ AND MARTINA SMUTNÁ / CARPE DIEM

28.01.2015 - 13.03.2015

Fait Gallery PREVIEW
Dominican Square. 10, Brno
28/1 – 13/3/2015
Opening: 27/1/2015 at 6pm
Curator: Martin Nytra

Carpe Diem: a dance on the ruins of a museum

Returning to the recent past is not unusual in the practise of contemporary art. The effort to cover the period immediately preceding their own lived experience has become an observed symptom of the art work of the generation that knows the reality of the normalisation era only indirectly, but grew up surrounded by its artifacts. The fragments of the past in everyday life miss their original context, are irritating by their nonconformity and therefore they provoke to a new interpretation.

The ceramics by Olga Hudečková was largely created at this time - in the 70s and 80s of the last century - and its relative availability in the stores of Dílo has made it a common decoration of households built in the times of real socialism. That is where our experience with her objects begins – by looking at the shelves in the living room. When visiting a gallery you can leave and forget, but the motionless presence of a strange object in the family household will gradually become a part of personal history.

Therefore, we went beyond the lines of our own past, but the generational gap was still kept in front of us. First, we regarded Hudečková‘s vases and candlesticks awkwardly, with a light touch of antipathy to the demonstration of a specific period taste. In order not to slip to quick resolutions, we firstly tried to understand the work in an historical context. The absence of any critical discourse from its time (there are available only a handful of non-critical articles in journals about applied arts and housing about the author) led us to search for a more current art history reference of her work. In the collected works about applied art the author’s name is not mentioned among the important authors of her time. In the collections of The Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague Hudečková is not represented, in the deposit of the Moravian Gallery in Brno only one vase, donated in 1984 by the Ministry of Culture of Czechoslovakia, rests. In the archive of Czech Television, you can find a few TV clips, but they are rather personal lyrical portraits, in which she always appears alongside her husband, the sculptor Miroslav. The main topic is always the tragic fate of the creative couple - a painful loss of both children. The materials we found spoke about the author's life, but not about her work. There is currently no clear institutional establishment approved opinion on Hudečková’s work. Maybe it's too soon, maybe she will forever be lost in the junkyard of the history of Czech normalization art. Because of the author being completely forgotten by history she is in our eyes a subject to which we relate much more personally. We visited the artist in her studio. In the interview, she avoids any judgements of her vases other than through the 'timeless' aesthetic criteria. Neither is our request for a time indentification of each ceramic object fullfilled. They are all very similar to each other and Hudečková‘s memory fails to recall. In her studio, they are all together and therefore they together become a metaphor for a type of timeless zone that surrounds Hudečková - a metaphor for the grey zone for art works that are beyond any interpretation.

With our learned need to have a distanced look at our own work and its context, we face a completely different approach. The author's resistance literally "moves us out of our concept". Instead of abstract evaluation we rather try to reconstruct Hudečková‘s world from the inside.

Martina Smutná starts to study formal components of Hudečková’s ceramic objects. She tries to find the roots of the morphology vases. She examines the the folds, that make folded flags from the objects, she explores the erotic (or a lyric?) crinkles and multiple layered plates. Martina's main interest is a vase from the 70s, that she always observed in her family household, just being on view, without ever been used. She tries to copy her in ceramics several times. Sitting behind the potter's wheel, where she competes with Hudečková in an uneven contest in which she fights not only with clay, but also with the perfection of the original. The heat of a ceramic kilns is swapped by the warmth of dissolved wax and the fear of failure becomes replaced by playfulness.

Menawhile I take the original of the vase from Hudečková into Prague's Museum of Decorative Arts, where they are about to finish the preparation for reconstruction of the historic building. A permanent exhibition of decorative art is already closed and the last show ends in a few days. The offices of the museum staff are emptied and collections are packed into boxes. The archives lie neatly packed in wooden boxes and wait to be moved. After many years of residence inside the museum the collections are moved. In the musem a turntablist Petr Ferenc puts the vase on a gramophone. It rotates in a circular motion, that, once in a ceramics workshop, allowed its creation. Gramophone records with recordings of Smetana's My Country from the years 1963 - 1990 serve both as a physical and musical background for the ceramic object. The musician deconstructs a pathetic melody of Vltava River and connects it to playing a vase itself. Instead of the nostalgic playing of records, that were in our home, always placed on the shelves of living room furniture, emerges edgy sound journeying across their circular tracks. Everyone needs to get out of their interpretative comfort zone sometimes, even the authors of what is in fact a slanted exhibition.

Alžběta Bačíková

On behalf of the authors

Go back