Fundaments & Sediments

Fundaments & Sediments

The project entitled Fundaments & Sediments / Toys’ Mutiny, 2011 encompasses an assortment of paintings, drawings, objects, sculptures, installations and projections by twenty-six artists of different generations. The selection of exhibits involved the use of a reference key devised by the curator, with an emphasis on pared-down, reduced form, and a focus on seminal or rudimentary pictorial and threedimensional forms. Each of these FUNDAMENTS provides a terrain wherein can be revealed a SEDIMENT of content, that is, something which has remained encapsulated within, and which has its variable relevance in the sense of communicating a specific situation (related to space, content, relation, function, meaning, etc.). On a parallel plane, these forms of expression are observed at points of transformation, or reconstitution of their inner structure. They thus produce an internal record of the processual quality of change, elements of integration, “readiness” for communication, ambivalence, states of transition, softening, organic growth, as well as elements of mutation or destruction.

The show’s design conceives the exhibition as a whole along the lines of a single structural field which is divided interactively – in terms of both concept and layout – into two mutually complementary sections: not dissimilar to the flow of a river stream, the exhibition comprises a dynamic stage (stream), as well as fairly static meanders (or dams).

Thus the aspect of the stream corresponds to the exhibition’s continuous, linear element, progressing from one point to another, albeit without following a chronological order. What one sees here is a display of forms in fluent motion, with transitions from one world of forms to the next, where structure undergoes a gradual process of rearrangement, progressing from seminal forms (fundaments), to a higher degree of formal refinement, and eventually, to the phase of the birth of organic situations and narrative rudiments. The various works representing the individual artists in the show guide the spectator along a definite route, assuming the role of “trail signs”, or of a “riverbed corridor”.

The exhibition’s second section, interposed within the previously outlined linear, “guided” component, consists of five platforms (or “dams”), each represented by a distinct cluster of exhibits that slows down the installation’s “flow”, at the same time offering a specific clue, different in each case, to redefining and reassessing the various works on display, this time through the prism of immediate intergenerational confrontation (replicating the natural process of sedimentation). These five platforms – Quantity as an Instrument / Motives and Stories / Black-and-White, Filter / Dematerialization, Light / Neoprouns, Extreme Format – disturb the linear pattern of the spectator’s reading of the exhibition, in a way resembling as many metastasis-like outgrowths at various points along the principal nurturing artery. Five out of the ideal infinite multitude of alternative installation patterns were chosen, using a method involving the principle of randomness, coupled with an imprint of spontaneous intuition, both of which, however, were instantly transformed into binding rules of the exhibition’s overall structural makeup. Each of the five platforms is defined by a different code determining the subsequent selection of mutually related works, while singling out the sets of similar constituent features. Thus, these “lagoons” are not focused on themes; rather, they are devised so as to capture the mutually permeable open-ended processes and ways of thematization embodied in the select groups of visual art works, deriving from their interrelations and interactions.

Underlying the prime criterion for the choice of the works on display was the ambition to pin down the kind of works which attest to the artist’s detachment from the subject matter per se, a de-personalization embraced with a view to finding a common platform of expression, some sort of an Esperanto of forms, without the need to resort to anything like an unconditional bracketing as regards the categories of meaning (and consequently, ideology). The sole work with ideological content here, one that stands markedly apart from the rest, is the postwar antifascist animated film, Toys’ Mutiny, of 1946, whose thoroughly unambiguous message stands in stark contrast to the keynote of the project. At the same time, however, it offers an insight into a “workshop”, a place where “something comes into existence”. For the actual workshop setting does play a major part in the short film medium. Here, the film’s underlying plane, an area divorced from its ideological overtones, offers background information about an art form in the making, a genre “peek into the kitchen”. This aspect is still enhanced here by the film’s separation from its historical temporal structure as well as from its natural projection site (cinema), and by its insertion into a new context governed by a different concept, namely, that of an art exhibition.

In historically-founded (evolutionary) art history, each fundament is regarded as corresponding with a sediment of content which in its turn is the result of variously set contexts and connotations (art-historical, political, generational, aesthetic, literary, etc.). The purposeful elimination of chronology as the conventional constituent of a group exhibition, and the equally purposeful skepticism towards any definitively set range of subjects which would encapsulate the show excessively within yet another conventional framework, open up before the spectator an alternative choice of reading the art works on display. The project approaches art works as a mutually interactive fluid structure which respects the individuality of each visitor. It is within the spectator’s mind that ultimately takes place the integrating creative process of cognitive absorption of the exhibition. Consequently, the spectator becomes the show’s definitive cornerstone. The project lifts the veil cast over the common world of artistic expression cutting across different generations of artists. The language of forms is thus suddenly captured in its autonomy, free from an engaged servitude to conventional meaning, irrespective of its content. In a context construed along such lines, art works will most likely deliver a message on the inner structure of objects, regardless of their historical evolutionary determinedness. This will bring to the fore all the more insistently the occasional critical aspect or appeal embued within the various forms. The installation gives preference to the experimental approach of pulsation between the opening and closing of two- and threedimensional form. The film Toys’ Mutiny serves merely as an auxiliary clue, introducing an analogy between forms and toys. A play, like the process of artistic creation, generates and develops (through the process itself) an autonomous story. Viewing the film shown here with “different eyes” will pierce through the ideological screen, right into the backstage of the birth of narration/story-telling.

Petr Vaňous