Peter Demek / Status

Jiří Kovanda’s work is typified by several trademark aspects which manifest themselves continuously, from early actions and installations through postmodern drawings and paintings, collages, assemblages and objects of the 1990s to the current interventions, installations and performances: inconspicuousness, efforts at contact, humbleness, simplicity, spontaneity, sensitivity, humour and manipulation with ego.

The austere rendering of low-key, almost indiscernible installations and interventions is already apparent in Kovanda’s early actions in which he examined the most elementary possibilities of nonverbal communication. Back in the 1970s, the philosopher and art theorist Petr Rezek pointed out an interesting fact, saying that Kovanda’s actions signified, above all, a desire for contact. At the same time, they are set not to be fulfilled: they were often conceived so that they forced the artist to work with his natural shyness and to go beyond this mental barrier. The participants were placed in unknown situations outside the framework of art, or situations which through their non-diversion from normal behaviour remained invisible for viewers, and were only made visible by their subsequent documentation by means of photography and presentations in gallery contexts.

Photodocumentation was crucial in the next phase of Kovanda’s work in which his physical presence was gradually replaced by mere records of his activity. With installations intervening in private and public environments without the presence of viewers, photography presented the only possibility of recording the artist’s traces in the form of various objects of daily use and trivial materials installed completely inconspicuously in different places, both outdoors and indoors, also regarding the indiscernibility and ephemerality of these interventions. The artist already articulated his completely natural strategy of creating an unexpected context for an object and leaving a trace of his activity in his early works such as fallen leaves stuck to the ground with a sellotape, wooden wedges inserted between cobblestones and a pile of pine needles and nails in the forest, or interventions in interiors, for example, a flower pot hidden behind a pillar^{^[1]}, a string tied around the same pillar two months later and a white string stretched across a room in Kovanda’s home.

Kovanda’s actions frequently involved banal situations, ordinary activities and mundane tasks that we do automatically, yet acted out in a shifted context. Likewise, in his installations and interventions the artist shifts ordinary, routinely used objects to a completely new, unexpected level by removing them from their original situation and taking away their primary utility function.^{^[2]} Thanks to his work in the National Gallery depository^{^[3]} Jiří Kovanda first started to use in his installations material related to installation practice in the everyday gallery run, for example strings, paper, glass and wooden wedges. He also employs things of daily use and household objects including foods in his current installations and interventions, along with objects typical of a particular place^{^[4]}. Through them he makes a space more visible and defines its individual parts, and thus also slightly manipulatively determines how a particular space and its layout is perceived by viewers and sets a new manner of movement in this space. Jiří Kovanda’s installations are not rooted in an idea of a certain place suitable for or adjustable to a particular work; instead, he executes an idea and the preparation of a situation which is to make up the base of a new project, or of the employment of some of his older works, directly on the spot. This is also the case with the central installation Gold Ring which, perhaps most of all the works on display, prompts a reflection of values, in a metaphorical comparison of a string and a ring, an ordinary thing and an exceptional object. Everything has the same value, all depends on context and interpretation.

A virtual tour of Jiří Kovanda's exhibition - Ten minutes earlier can be found here.

[1] It was a provisional gallery space in Provaznická Street. The basement room of the Odeon publishers where Jan Mlčoch worked from 1978 was originally designed as an archive, and until Mlčoch’s resignation in 1980 was used by three Prague body artists (Karel Miler, Petr Štembera and Jan Mlčoch) as a meeting place. They staged there their own performances as well as those by their close friends, including Jiří Kovanda.

[2] In this respect, a key role in Kovanda’s art was played by Marcel Duchamp’s exhibition in the Václav Špála Gallery in 1969, prepared by the chief curator Jindřich Chalupecký in collaboration with the Milan art collector, gallery owner and art theorist Arturo Schwarz.

[3] In 1977 Karel Miler got Kovanda a job in the National Gallery in Prague; he was responsible for a depository housed in the Municipal Library. Kovanda worked there until 1995 when he became an assistant professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, in a studio headed by Vladimír Skrepl.

[4] Not surprisingly, the artist’s installations tend to be confused with ordinary things accidentally left in a space, and as such must be carefully protected from the over-enthusiastic cleaning staff.

03.12.2015 - 28.01.2016

Fait Gallery
Božetěchova 1, Brno
3rd December 2015 - 28th January 2016
Opening: 2nd December 2015 at 7pm

Curator: Michal Novotný

Photo: Martin Kacvinský

The word “reality“ in Czech contains “action“. Reality then is not something neutral and independent, but on the contrary it is a matter of action, strength and work. The fact that the reality is actually torn out of the world confirms also the word concept. In Czech the root of the word concept suggests a physical grip, separation and perhaps connections, such as the case with "accepting a husband or a wife".

In the same meaning, as reality is connected with action, Peter Demek’s work is related to realism. The Slovak word used here (realism) is not chosen because of the nationality, but because of its better sound. Re-a-li-sm reminds us of the sound of the slitting saw cutting the iron. In realism you can not separate the "what" from "how".

The matter in realism, just because it’s realism, always flows with the idea. The ability to see the ideal form, "how it’s supposed to be," is indeed a matter of years of training, the growth of synaptic structures of neurons in the brain. A sudden understanding, a flash, as the word again suggests, is a release of energy, the reaction of electrical nerve impulses to the seen. A shape or rather a form, that Peter Demek sees in this flash in a specific every day life situation (such as the girl folding paper on the train or a speaker cord rolling down the stairs, or otherwise endless testing on paper or in a workshop), forms fundamentals, foundation for further work. One could almost say, that Peter in this flash peeks into the invisible structure beneath the surface of things. Realism can indeed be very mystical, just because Peter‘s objects are somehow more than just what we see – they have some sort of essential pre-matter aura. However the understanding of each man is always a sudden flash, that can never quite be replicated and simply expressed. Peter then, thanks to the years of training of sensitivity in compositions, forms and shapes, for a moment seems to understand how things forming the reality, which we don’t really notice most of the life, really are.

This inseparability of matter from the thinking and thinking from the matter continues also in the emphasise of processuality on the work. Fundamentals – theme – shape – a form that was abstracted, or rather made real, because in realism we can not speak about abstraction however was not fully grasped even at the moment of insight, and thus can never be made completely and permanently real. The tool helping to get closer becomes for Peter Demek on one side a sheer perfection of processing, which always faces the boundaries of material and tools – mediums, or vice versa – a certain roughness and brutality of the material used. The energy and time used for the object‘s creation then only further highlights the tension – like "revenge of the surface." However, the process must, because of the clear unavailability of the final outcome, continue outside the object. The motive materialised in the medium that Peter always places into a certain context, which is always a specific environment, whether it is in the gallery or the exterior, and at the same time into a physical mount, a platform, that helps to place them in this space. The situation created is then manipulated by performative actions. This leads to what might be called a "meeting" of an object with human activity or other objects. Because the never fully available result is just in the tension between the surface and the inside, the emphasis may take place both by covering and revealing, by changing of a part or the whole, or outlining or sweeping into and in all cases by an action irrecoverable or unrepeatable. All three steps however do not need to necessarily be present or implemented as it is not important, and not always entirely possible to distinguish them. They all rather just refer to what happens between them, or rather in the middle of a circle among them, like the invisible electrons that shoot by create the shape of the nucleus of an atom, which is not possible to see in the wavelength of light.

Michal Novotný, curator

Go back