21.02.2024 - 04.05.2024
Fait Gallery, Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno
Curators: Denisa Kujelová a Vít Havránek
Opening: 21st February, 7 pm
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.
[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.
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Fait Gallery PREVIEW
Dominican Square 10, Brno
29/5 – 13/9/2013
Opening: 28/05/2013 at 6pm
Curator: Tomáš Pospěch
Congratulations on your newly born fruit. Vendula Knopová takes the aesthetics of humor to the line of embarrassment. She returns us to what we used to find funny, but that was overwritten by adulthood. She arranges staged slapstick humour, makes it present - sometimes through a picture, sometimes through text. Anyway, the need to come across as not serious, the need to make fun out of her own serious effort has always been Vendula’s characteristic. It would seem that you can find plenty of similar cartoon jokes on the web, so why to carry coal to Karvina. Personally, I was attracted to these pictures rather because of intuited layers behind the surface of the photographs. I imagine how Vendula uncovers memories of children's games, she hunts in a parallel world of their baby sisters, solemnly carries the archeology of childhood, to dig out fun. She rediscovers the world of special orders or only the statements from the adult world, all of which are in the minds of children becoming just ridiculous rhetoric, lacking any sense. Vendula‘s photographs illustrate this bizarre thing, children discovering different structures, how to relate to the outside world and social conventions.
When we are talking about photography, we should specify what we mean. Photography is a very diverse range of strategies, as if it were a variety of media. We can hardly interpret the photographs by Vendula Knopová using quotes from Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag and John Berger, whose thoughts are referenced on any photographic exhibitions here. Although in this project Vendula borrows from many different sources - from photo blogs, humor of her younger sisters, childhood memories or traditions of Czech jokes - the important thing is how she manages to weave this diverse material into an exhibition as a relationship between picture, text and space. Girly whispering on the bench at the village bus stop, pictures doodled on the walls of school toilets, wisecracks stated over dirty pub tables are changing here in strange aesthetics mixed from memories, banalities and awkwardness.
We usually do not cry in front of a painting, and mostly do not laugh either. Usually we stay at a much finer scale in between. And why not. But Vendula tries to pass at least some of the emotions on to us, a weird blend of humor, uncertainty and perhaps even embarrassment. She serves them to us as something very familiar. Also this text carries strangeness and embarrassment. To write about these photographs just somehow does not suit them from the beginninig.
Tomáš Pospěch