21.02.2024 - 04.05.2024
Fait Gallery, Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno
Curators: Denisa Kujelová a Vít Havránek
Opening: 21st February, 7 pm
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.
[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.
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Fait Gallery MEM
Božetěchova Street 1 (entrance from Metodějova Street), Brno
Curator: Jiří Ptáček
It would certainly be interesting to carefully investigate how the photographic work of Alena Kotzmannová meets storytelling. Her portfolio includes cases of direct emphasis of the relationship between the pictures and the (accompanying) text, as was the case with the Fish People in 2010, and also the cooperation with Lenka Vítková, who added pieces of her own literature among the photographs in the Hunt Kastner Artworks gallery. Kotzmannová has also illustrated a story by Tomáš Pospiszyl (published in the magazine Umělec /Artist) and later, when transforming the story into a video, she added her photographs to the same template. In addition to these factual examples in some of her work we can discover direct or hidden film references – a medium strongly connected with storytelling and last, but not least among her work we can find pieces that refer to the time as determining factor of the content (and the time dimension is an essential condition to any narration). As there isn’t enough space to thoroughly develop the above ideas in the text about the joint exhibition with Jan Šerých, let's take the mentioned examples as slightly unstable foundations for the hypothesis, that the questions of narration and narrative play an important role in Alena Kotzmannová‘ s thinking, and quite probably they - as a sort of inarticulate sci-fi – stand behind the collection called Undated.
Being next to the the works of Jan Šerých, however, is that rare moment when there are more than any other time revealed other implicit aspects of her work. This time it, undoubtedly, highlights the formal aspects Kotzmannová’s way of photographing. Central symmetry of her still lifes and yellow striped frame are reflected in Šerých‘s strict drawing structures and the photo installation Tornádo /Tornado inspired by a found picture of a woman posing for the photographer far enough (?!) from the trunk of a whirlwind. Šerých used two captured axes – the first one is a woman standing in the ideal center of the frame and the other one is a twisted column of dust spinning around its eye. By spinning the photo printing around the vertical axis Šerých emphasised this principle and in accordance with the tone of the installation of his drawings it seems he is claiming that the adjustment is more important than the depiction (despite that it is the adjustment he uses to relate to the exhibited works).
And this fact brings us back to the photographs of Alena Kotzmannová. Not only that yellow stripes along the edges of the photographs change the perceptual quality of the pictures, they also - as well as adjustments - are actually a commentary on what is captured in the pictures: objects are variously "adjusted" and shown this way to the viewer (and the lens of the photographer).
The Chiliagon by Alena Kotzmannová and Jan Šerých could be compared to the two punch cards laid over each other. At first glance, there is an obvious formal kinship, that actually brings the theme of "proximity" (ad-juxtare), including the contrasting opposite at long tables covered with Jana Šerých drawings, that actually "recede" from the viewer, because he/she can actually not properly inspect them, could then be considered as the adjacent holes in punch cards. However these aspects should not cover the last metaphorical evocation, I have noticed in the combination of their work. In a Chiliagon Šerých as well as Kotzmannová create an environment referring solely to artistic problems. But the impression of selected pictures evokes a strong affective as well as associative response, and also the kind of laboratory atmosphere of the exhibition, create together a generally understandable key also for the audience prefering emotions and ideas. And this brings us – althought from a different side - very close to the storytelling, where we actually started.
Jiří Ptáček