JIŘÍ THÝN / THE TWO ENDS OF A DISTANCE – THE PICTURES THAT HAVE NEVER HAPPENED

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.

JIŘÍ THÝN / THE TWO ENDS OF A DISTANCE – THE PICTURES THAT HAVE NEVER HAPPENED

28.03.2015 - 21.05.2015

Fait Gallery MEM
Božetěchova Street 1 (entrance from Metodějova Strret), Brno
28. 3. - 21. 5. 2015
Opening: 26. 3. 2015 at 7pm
Curator: Jiří Ptáček

About the Study, Nonnarrative Photography, Gesture and Poetry

About The Study. The photographer Jiří Thýn held three exhibitions in 2011-2012, called Basic Studies. The term study could have been understood in the way of its conventional use by artists - such as a survey or preliminary preparation. However, we use Basic Studies in various fields of scientific knowledge to gain the first set of relevant data, which is used as a basis for further work. One way or another, by these exhibitions Thýn initiated a phase of work, where it has been noted in advance, that it actually precedes something. The manifestation of the importance of subsequent, yet not completed step, referred to the inherent unpent of seemingly definitive exhibition shape and emphasised the importance of continuity. In 2014 Thýn again felt the need to return to the format of the study and the first of two solo exhibitions of that year called Basic Studies / Nonnarrative Photography.

The Nonnarrative Photography. Thýn found the concept of nonnarrative photography after a few years of exploring the influence of technical procedures to the construction and operation of the photographic depiction. Quite naturally he got close to the avantgarde photography of the 20th century and the theme of abstraction in photography. He was intrigued by the problematic use of this term in the case of medium, the essence of which is always a capture of light leaning into material reality in a specific timeframe. Instead of abstraction as such he proposed to deal with photohraphy, where the boundaries of a story and narration are being tested.

The radius of nonnarrative photography has gradually expanded through all Basic Studies and other Thýn´s exhibitions. Based on this there are also Two Ends of A Distancein both variants: a Prague one from the French Institute and a Brno one, with the subtitle The Pictures That Have Never Happened. During this continuous process, there was a significant, though still almost unnoticed turnover in Thýn´s creative approach.

About The Gesture. First, however let´s briefly stop by the gesture and the two, one quickly succeeding another, exhibitions Basic Studies / Nonnarrative Photography and Consciousness As A Fundamental Attribute I, II in 2014. Thýn showed photographs of magazine reproductions cut through by a few lumped cuts with a scalpel. That brings into the show a physical gesture and a relation between an image and a body. Actually these gestures did not have a nature of unaware, unconditioned movement. In the text Thýn presented the background of these interventions as a result of a wide spectrum of conditionality:

"Precondition of shape, precondition of lie, precondition of emptiness, precondition of space, precondition of desire, precondition of dependence, precondition of emotions, precondition of time, precondition of beginning, precondition of end, precondition of form, precondition of beauty... "

By the long list of presumptions Thýn tried to emphasise the multiplicity of active subjects in being with the image, covered by the consciousness as a whole. Cutting into the photos was their physical "reading" and also factual and semantic flexion. The importance of generalisation / abstraction (as the particular goal and a specific result) can not be – at the nonnarrative photography - questioned.

About The Poetry. The Two Ends of A Distanceis not a study, but one of the syntheses, which continuously build a kind of island of the application. Thýn again intervenes in magazine and newspaper photos, this time by a wider range of methods and materials. Although these are story pictures (scenes), he again eliminates their informative value. A word is dragged into the situation, in which its theoretical basis is articulated as a poem. This fits best to Thýn´s main intention of creating a lyrical transmutation of the epic theme.

The Pictures That Have Never Happened. In his new photographs Jiří Thýn proceeds from specific to general. By his intervention he transforms a particular person in a specific situation into a figure rooted to its place and space of the picture. The testimony of emotion is transferred to the expression of emotion. He proceeds in accordance with the "presumptions" of shape, form, beauty, etc. Instead of analysing the photographic language for which his earlier work was valued, he focuses to the symbolic manifestation of the hypnotic power of pictures, which rises in the irreducible synergy of cultural memory, instincts and unconscious archetypal patterns. Thus the subtitle of the exhibition could be paraphrased as "pictures that have not happened, although they exist."

Jiří Ptáček

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