ALŽBĚTA BAČÍKOVÁ AND MARTINA SMUTNÁ / CARPE DIEM

The early work of Jiří Hilmar (*1937) was marked by the art trends of the time, especially the principles of Concretism^[1] (whose club^[2] he co-founded in Czechoslovakia in 1967), as well as by the activation of the viewer, the processuality of perception and the thematization of movement. Kinetic objects in the form of mechanical machines and objects working with light sources and shadow effects^[3] were followed by several years of the artist's thorough investigation of the phenomenon of mobile procedural perception in paper reliefs folded into optical structures. These mostly square formats of various sizes produced an optical illusion through the movement of the observer and the change of his or her position in relation to the work, thus transforming the visual qualities of the surface.

In the square, whose shape the artist saw as an ideal anonymous form^[4] referring to the ideas of Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich or Victor Vasarely, he created structures in various systems according to mathematical principles and seriality from horizontally, vertically and diagonally arranged monochrome or multicolour strips of folded and, in many cases, also incised paper. The opto-kinetic principle was achieved by varying the height of the strips, their shape, the method and degree of their bending, the method of perforation, and also the shape and colour of the tempera used for individual fragments (most often circles and their sections). The variation of contrasts and intersections continued after his emigration to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1969, where he settled for more than 40 years.

The active involvement of the viewer was also part of the next cycle of works which were defined by a system of overlapping vertical strips or strings. In this new structural plan, in which one of the elements was always firmly attached to the base and the other hung freely above it, the works could again be set in motion, now literally, by the participation of the observer. Parallel to this, in the 1970s the artist created monochromes from layered tracing paper, fixed to canvas or wooden boards, most often also in square formats. The individual layers of transparent paper were only recognizable by their deliberate distortion with various types of creasing, perforation, rippling and gradations or variations of the repetitive regular patterns of the collaged fragments.

After moving to the Halfmannshof art colony in Gelsenkirchen in 1974, located in the heavily devastated landscape of the Ruhr area, Hilmar naturally moved towards environmental issues. In addition to paper, he began to incorporate into his reliefs natural materials such as jute, wax, kaolin and also wood, in the form of sticks and matchsticks. In the 1980s, when nature became an equal co-agent in his work, and creative intervention in natural processes started to prevail in his work, he turned permanently to a single material - wood. He partially dismantled the original autonomous shapes of branches and trunks and then reconstructed them by rejoining, tying or crossing them into new units of wooden objects and installations. He deliberately interfered in the originally round found fragments of trees in an invasive and openly completely contradictory square manner followed by a final gesture of re-rounding, in order to manifest the oneness of man and nature, which he sought in his work and life.

Literature:

HILMAR, Jiří, VÍCHOVÁ, Ilona, HIEKISCH-PICARD, Sepp. Jiří Hilmar/ Adagio. Praha, Museum Kampa – Nadace Jana a Medy Mládkových, 2015.

POHRIBNÝ, Arsen. Klub konkrétistů po dvaceti letech. In: Revue K, 1988–89, nos. 32–33.

“Optické reliéfy“ Jiřího Hilmara, Rozhlas, ČRo 3 – Vltava, Mozaika, 24 February 2011.

[1] The principles of Concretism were defined in interwar art by Theo van Doesburg, who first used and coined the term in 1930, and later in the 1930s by Max Bill, the main promoter of this art movement. De Stijl, the Bauhaus, and also the Russian avant-garde were followed in the 1950s by the activities of the Swiss neo-concretists led by Richard Paul Lohse, and partly by kinetic art in the Düsseldorf Zero movement, the GRAV group in Paris, the Gruppo N in Padua and the Gruppo T in Milan.

[2] Together with Tomáš Rajlich, Radoslav Kratina, Miroslav Vystrčil and the art theorist Arsén Pohribný he co-founded the KK/CC - The Concretists’ Club (9 May 1967 - ca. 1972), whose activities were followed by the new KK2 in 1997 and KK3 in 2007.

[3] In this context it is also worth mentioning hydro-kinetic objects from 1974.

[4] “Optické reliéfy“ Jiřího Hilmara, Rozhlas, ČRo 3 – Vltava, Mozaika, 24 February 2011.

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

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