Milan Maur / Uncertain Sequences of Action

We have worked since 2019 under the unconductive trash label, which is an anagram of our home towns - Duchcov (Michal Pěchouček) and Traunstein (Rudi Koval). This fatalism-tinged pun metaphorically expresses the internal aspects of the joint working method. Trash accumulates during every creative process and production. Trash is an important and familiar concept from the landscape of cultural values. The The retardation property of the unconductive rules out the regulation of trash and the control of the direction of creative energy. The brand is therefore our distilled manifesto - in art, we do not consider it important to finish things. What matters is the beginning of creative activity, not its completed result. The purpose of our collaboration is to remove the layers of the past and discover a new artistic identity.

The starting point of our artistic interaction is the easel painting - it proved to be a suitable and accessible means in a joint search for a new linguistic and content identity. At the core of our collaboration is the desire to shed the layers of our own past, i.e. to learn to forget our original artistic handwritings. We explore a new painterly handwriting through different materials and methods, including the space and time dimensions of art. In a pair, it is possible to discover new subjects for artistic retelling and new ordinariness. We experiment with artistic means while trying to "moderate" the intensity and interconnectedness of joint everyday activities. We include in art not only common knowledge but also ordinary experiences, situations that can be planned and experienced together. We focus on one-day and long-term challenges. We try to employ this experience of subtle everyday reality in robust wholes such as exhibitions.

The title of the current exhibition LARGELY OBSERVED is inspired by one of the terms of the European macroseismic earthquake scale. It identifies a degree of critical condition that is widely observed, but need not be taken fatally - for us it is a possible expression of the quality of the viewer's experience, the power of the inner experience of an artwork. The exhibition opens with our first collaborative works, burning daylight (2020), and continues with unconductive chronology (2023), a series of forty-eight paintings sewn together. At the centre are two extensive cycles of paintings, gold tint (2022) and virgin blue (2023), inspired by research into visual evidence of suppressed stories of the past. We have conceived the exhibition as a dialogue between two worlds: past and present, big and small. Through monochromatic work with colour and figurative detail, we attempt to tell real stories of the 20th century that resonate with our everyday lives today.

virgin blue (2023)

This installation of paintings and a monumental work close to architecture, design and large-scale relief painting is inspired by period photographs of one of England's first women football teams, Dick, Kerr Ladies F.C., which was formed during the First World War. Despite achieving considerable popularity and sporting success, the team faced strong opposition from the Football Association which banned women from playing on their pitches and stadiums for fifty years. The reason for the ban was to "protect" women who, according to the association, were not physically capable of playing football. The series of paintings thus refers not only to the pitfalls of women's emancipation but also to the period of the world wars, marked by many structural social changes.

burning daylight (2020)

The first works of unconductive trash were created as an experiment - the artists jointly modified paintings created by Rudi Koval in 2017. The burning daylight series thus captures the moment of the encounter of two artistic personalities and their incompatible handwritings. A dialogue between abstraction and figuration, the painterly approached surface and the drawing of a sewing machine, the removal of a canvas and its stretching onto a different format, the elimination of what already existed as well as the clarification of work with paint were all part of a search for new procedures and subjects.

unconductive chronology (2023)

The continuous series of forty-eight paintings is conceived as a monumental element in space and as a sequence of film frames for a motion picture. The individual canvases show an intervention that shrinks their surface through repeated stitching, thus creating volume. The fabric creases irreversibly even after stretching on a wooden frame. Unconductive trash works on two sewing machines simultaneously, with minimum checking of the result and according to specified conditions that are repeated. In doing so, they capture a personal unity in something that is both work and idleness, that is both festive and ordinary.

unconductive loop (2023)

The subject of this interactive installation is the mechanics of the sewing machine, its magical sound and its unsurpassed contribution to human civilization. It is the stepping mechanism of the machine that made the movement of the film strip in the camera possible. The driving force behind this work is the observing audience - without their presence the work wouldn’t exist.

gold tint (2022)

The gold tint cycle of paintings is loosely inspired by documentary photographs of everyday life of soldiers during the Second World War. For example, a series of reportage photographs taken in 1940 by John Topham while working in the RAF intelligence shows a home guard unit in Gravesend, England rehearsing an entertaining Christmas show - the soldiers performed in female roles and clothes. The rehearsal was interrupted by an alarm and everyone had to move to a defensive position, there was no time to unmask and change into uniforms. The whole story, including the rehearsal, is documented in several telling snapshots. They capture the desire of the British soldiers to forget the reality of war for a while, to have fun and to make present the missing female element - to let the yearning for it sublimate. The images were censored for a long time by the British Ministry of Information to prevent them from being exploited by the enemy as they placed the soldier-hero in a completely new situation.

Gender parody and cross-dressing common in the theatre are not unique in the military, either as evidenced, for example, in the book Soldier Studies (Martin Dammann, ed., Soldier Studies. Cross-Dressing in der Wehrmacht, Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2019), with amateur photographs showing scenes featuring German soldiers dressed up as women - scenes that were in direct contradiction to Nazi ideology.

The scenes in the pictures captured through specific gestures and situations symbolically touch upon many aspects of today's discussion on gender stereotypes, human desires and various forms of identities. The artists want to emphasise, among other things, that men are capable of absolute empathy and that femininity is inherent to them. The search for normality and everyday ordinariness is natural for human beings, even in the chaos of war.

macroseismic scale, 2022

A figurative transcription of the European macroseismic scale which, unlike the older Richter scale, takes into account the intensity of human perception depending on physical changes. For example, the degree of largely observed defines the critical condition that is largely observed inside buildings. At this level, no one can pretend not to notice anything. Earthquakes inside buildings are felt by many, but only rarely outside.

you have no power over me, 2023

The textual intervention in the gallery window involves the line used to break the curse at the end of the fantasy film Labyrinth (directed by Jim Henson, 1986). Here, it is intended as a possible analogy to the figures of soldiers, or rather, to their experience of chaos and their desire to get out of it.

Milan Maur / Uncertain Sequences of Action

19.10.2022 - 14.01.2023

Fait Gallery, Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno

Curators: Denisa Kujelová, Ondřej Navrátil and Jana Písaříková

Opening: 19 October 2022, 7 pm

Following the Sun was undoubtedly one of the key points of Milan Maur's work. This radical action, documented by an unclosed circle on a map and accompanied by the text on 9 May 1983 I followed the sun from dawn to dusk, anticipated his future direction as an artist. In the course of the 1980s, Maur developed in the Czech milieu unique conceptual practice based on the observation of minute natural sequences and events. This was not, however, a “desk-job” investigation at a safe distance from the observed subject but in situ research, requiring physical involvement and vigilant attention close to meditation. Specific examples include the artist’s numerical series documenting the autumn falling of leaves of various species of trees over several days, or his shadow images in which he recorded shadow shifts throughout the day at given intervals. This individual research was certainly also a personal ritual and self-preservation method of the artist's survival in totalitarian Czechoslovakia of the 1980s.

The first part of the exhibition presents works that convey the artist's natural science interests and at the same time seek to answer the following question: what is actually behind all this endless swarming of nature? Is it a coincidence or another level of order? And is it possible to unravel its system, to relate to it, or to identify with it? We thus enter a world of thought that hasn’t lost its relevance even after all these years but opens up to us further and new meanings in the times of climate crisis and a search for a way out of the solitary confinement of anthropocentrism and its blindness, deafness and arrogance.

By the mid-1990s, Maur's work seemed to have reached its end. However, the feeling that this was one of those short-lived careers is quickly suppressed by the further parts of the exhibition. The extensive body of photographs from the period after the turn of the millennium is linked to his earlier work primarily by a conceptual strategy of recording the environment that works with the principle of a predefined creative process, more exactly, with the experimental adjustment of the optics of a sophisticated Hasselblad camera. The titles of the cycles testify that they were created during expeditions to distant lands, which on the one hand echoes the several-month-long pilgrimages of Maur's youth and on the other introduces us to the new life situation of the artist, who in the 1990s went from being an outsider and a night watchman in the Plzeň cemetery to a successful entrepreneur and an enthusiastic traveller.

An essential part of the exhibition is a new installation related to the artist's recent experience in a hospital environment - a place where every person becomes a constantly controlled and measured subject in the gears of a fixed order. Here, Maur returns to and approaches his own body as concretely as possible. Whereas until now we have only suspected the artist’s external and internal sentiments behind informative and poetic notes in the margins of the paper (...I was tracing the shadow of a pear tree...), we now see the outlines of his body, captured by his son on a hospital bed, and for the first time ever he himself becomes the subject of the record - in an attempt to record the very fragility of human existence and the potentiality of its end. Milan Maur's drawings, photographs and installations can thus be understood as a record of a sequence through which a particular event is singled out from an otherwise cyclic universe. This might be the world, the universe, nature, or a person’s existence.

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