Notes Press

Esplanade

Esplanáda

Source
Galerie Detail, Prague
Author
Miroslav Pesch
Published

Under the same title, an exhibition of photographs from Jan Kadlec’s cycle Esplanada was presented at Galerie Detail, interesting not only as a specific artistic approach but also from a generational perspective.

When I first became acquainted with his objects and sculptures about two years ago, they seemed to me at once too precise and unsettling, too aesthetic and yet brutal, too straightforward and at the same time problematic for my way of interpreting and perceiving art. I could not find a fitting interior or exterior context for such works. The answer came to me during a study stay in Berlin. On the second day, when I went with colleagues Mach and Perič in search of contemporary architecture, we arrived at the fantastic sci-fi-like architectural projection at Potsdamer Platz, an unbelievable complex of buildings made of daring, colorful constructions. “It’s like being on Mars,” I exclaimed. This slogan of mine, I soon learned, had already been used by Milan Knížák before me. What struck me, once my initial astonishment had subsided, was the vision of Kadlec’s sculptures placed within the interiors of these buildings. As a viewer of the Esplanada exhibition, it is difficult for me to detach myself from his sculptural work (three years of study in a sculpture studio at the Academy of Fine Arts).

In the case of his sculptures and objects, I uncovered the problem of placement and space. It is not that the space around his sculptures is as dominant as in Cubism, but rather that the sculptures themselves are dominant, with an atypical correlation to their environment. This means not only in relation to one another but also in relation to the surrounding space and to the extension of the physical body of the work into its surroundings. It concerns the space stripped bare by the absence of this body, which relates reciprocally to the physiognomy of the work not only through its inverted reverse at the boundary of its surface but also through the way in which the surrounding space is permeated outward from this surface, stripping it of emptiness and, as another existence, harmonizing or disharmonizing with the fullness of the authored work.

In this case, I detected a certain degree of sharpness in execution and expansiveness in the influence of Kadlec’s objects, which, in their one-sided tension, find resonance in the photographs House, Crash, and Gas Station from the Esplanada cycle. I face the same existential and geometric problem here, but this time through the strategy of human conscious activity: related to the metaphor of parody and abbreviation of this activity, or merely abbreviation with a social-existential undertone? Or is it an individual, lyricizing experience of the author himself, supported by childhood memories, nurtured and richly fed by the environment of a well-situated family with its possible and impossible comforts? Even “abbreviation” must be taken with reservation it can just as well be understood as synthesis and clustering. The former concerns an evaluative relationship, the latter a cognitive one, tied to thought, sensory, and emotional contexts, projected onto those objectively given strategies. These are two possible approaches to interpretation; the third examining the unreflected social code of Jan Kadlec himself I leave aside.

Personally, I think it is all somewhat contained and not contained, both internally and externally given, culminating in a kind of extended, intuitively seeing stance. One must and will have to assent. After all, the 1990s in architecture represent for me the most interesting period that exists in this field, even if Gothic cathedrals may fascinate me more as products of mystery. On the other hand, we must deny the analyzed forms of modernity. After all, everything has already been here before, so they can only be used pragmatically or rather as a synthetic correlate of new transfigurations, rather than as something independent.

The foresight of intuition is possible only as the transferability of the functions of human consciousness (the senses, reason, intuition, feeling, will). Robert Steiner in his Philosophy of Freedom identifies intuition with reason, and even with morality, when he speaks of so-called moral intuition. Just as well, it may be identified with feeling. A classical example may be drawn from the European noetic tradition of thought. Sensualism reduces all knowledge to empirical experience (the senses), while intellectualism reduces it to reason, thereby granting thought a Platonic and metaphysical dimension. Similarly, psychology has two theories: one recognizes the functions of human consciousness as autonomous domains, while the other, on the basis of a certain heteronomy, allows for their transferability and interchangeability. Only in this way can intuition, seeing, grasp what it itself does not see, and create such an abstract conception of a thing through which the artist, by the force of invention, may draw from the universe particular examples, listening to the inner voice and carefully observing everything around as a source of eternal inspiration borne upon the waves of being toward the immaterial ideal.

It seems that the young generation often intends something that can scarcely be described. What they build upon has already been built (modernism), but here and now it is about something else and that “something else” cannot be worked out solely by reason. All functions, the entirety of consciousness, must be set into motion. Modernist avant-garde movements were, in my view, possible and discoverable only thanks to a methodological framework built upon the analysis of artistic forms. Without an analytic method, I cannot imagine their emergence even though I do not deny that modernist artists also employed feeling, the senses, and intuition, just as today’s artists also use analysis, but within another context of perceived reality. The analytical pointillist placing of complementary colors side by side, Cézanne’s sphere, cylinder, and cone, or the minimalist asceticism of basic gestalts as a priori patterns of human perception and fundamental building blocks of reality all these have very little in common with Damien Hirst’s bisected pigs and quartered bulls, Jiří Georg Dokoupil’s candle paintings, or Mona Hatoum’s dining table with a plate and viscerally disgusting delicacy projected onto its surface. To create such work, it was necessary to analyze the digestive process in the sequence: plate, morsel, digestive tract, rectum. Similarly, in her Cradle shown at the exhibition Angel Angel in Prague’s Rudolfinum, it was necessary to create an associative synthesis between the ribs of this protective child’s bed and the dangerous glass laboratory tubes that alchemically evoke the sterile origins of life in the disinfection-laden environment of gynecological clinics followed by substitution.

The same holds true for other methods. The deductive platform of minimalism, empirically confirmed among other things through induction from the structure of crystalline lattices, has no equivalent today unless we consider algorithmic procedures for solving tasks and problems to be such a system. Yet man is not a computer with an unlimited number of programs; the neurophysiological processes in the brain are elevated by human consciousness into a spiritual dimension. Comparison, too, plays a new role in art today, especially in multiplication (Burden, Kafka, Vincourová). In the case of Esplanada it is no different: the multiplication of technical objects creates a kind of clustering based on similar (comparison as synthesis) as well as different (definition as analysis) functions. The connections are established not only among the objects themselves but also outward, in relation to social functions (entertainment, rescue, mobility, nourishment, efficiency, etc.).

If we were to appeal to reason, we would find that the formal language of logic was the same for Giotto as it was for Picasso, or today for Gerhard Richter. In this sense, there is no artistic evolution. This Platonic fixation theory of thought (Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) is entirely legitimate (as creation in the studio of Prof. Zdeněk Beran at the Academy of Fine Arts). Yet there also exists an evolutionary theory of thought (J. Piguet, Psychology of Intelligence). Whether it can ever manifest in art remains a mystery to me.

The cybernetic algorithms of transitively grouping sequences into ever more complex forms (as Piguet himself defines evolution terminologically in relation to human intelligence) do not yet have an adequate counterpart in art. The entire realm of virtual reality (that which does not belong to the world of art?), as a direct product of the evolutionary theory of thought (artistic ensembles created through extremely complex mathematical procedures in the computer), is merely a multiplication of fundamental artistic patterns. It lacks the interchangeability of reason and intuition, and functions instead as an optical hallucinogen wallpaper for the interiors of the architecture of the future. If in the distant future it were possible to develop an artificial intelligence capable of creating that deductive algorithmic system of problem-solving (see above) as a kind of meta-language, which would select the optimal language and specific mathematical solution for the emergence of an individual work in place of human structure, it would mark the end of the artist-creator. Current computers do not allow this. Such a computer would have an otherworldly scale, for example in today’s England. The only plausible candidates would be the biological neuro-computers of the future, with highly complex parallel connections (not linear as with today’s machines). Yet let us hope that matter, soul, and spirit form an impermeable sieve within the unified architecture of the world, and that the extensiveness of mathematical entities is not identical to the intensity of intuitive spiritual time-flow. Geometry and mathematics relate to the material world, that is, to space, and they are the principle behind today’s computers, whereas emotional experience within ourselves has no extensiveness, but is only more or less a flow in time, related to time itself (H. Bergson, Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness).

For artistic evolution, the only possibilities currently present themselves as either the material metamorphosis that generates a new type of industrial and artistic design, or the very insight of intuition into newly organized wholes. Both positions are contained within the photographic works of Esplanade: the first immediately visible, the second the very prerequisite for the creation of an artwork. Yet the awareness of fragmentation of ever larger wholes may irretrievably vanish into the genre of the information network. This Trojan yoke then becomes an easy and seductive trap for young artists. The solitude of intuition and its essence remains veiled in mystery. It begins at the elementary level of the micro-world, in the infinitely rapid changes of nuclear interactions, and ends at the boundary of the expanding universe. We are merely a link, gifted with its tiny shard. It is the offspring of the primordial singularity before the Big Bang, our meta-mirror. Thus art without intuition is not art. Even in an ordinary lightbulb there is intuition the intuition that passed through Edison’s reason. It is not oriented only outward, but also inward, materializing the intangible states of the human psyche into objectified forms. This sphere of art today is often subsumed under boundless social personalism, drawing on instincts, drives, sexuality, and various organic perceptions, rather than on a true return to the essence of our intersubjectively conceived existence. And yet intuition descending from above seems to whisper that man was created for life in dignity, not in animal boundlessness. For the dignity of human technology embodies the dignity of human thought. Here again I refer to Esplanade and in its ethical connection to reason. In this case, I draw on Steiner’s concept of moral intuition, conceived as rational moral intuition.

Modernism temporally coincides with the rise of major discoveries in nuclear physics, the theory of relativity, and organic chemistry. It ends roughly with the beginnings of the development of cybernetics and information systems, accompanied by the effect of virtual reality as another kind of reality (not unreality). That fact itself speaks volumes.

Let us now turn to the photographs of Esplanade themselves. The Pump. Technical and social strategic codes are objectively given: a blue Aral pump, a red fire truck, a yellow Caterpillar digger, a police car, a white Aral tanker, greenish-blue surroundings. This ordered cluster appears almost textbook-like. It is a condensation of the far more dispersed networks of the metropolis. The links are shortened, and the very displays of technical devices and vehicles have crystallized into a single design polymer. Kadlec then encloses the entire so-called social scene in an aluminum blue frame, thereby shifting it from the observation of objective facts to the aesthetics of the human interior. Not that what is seen is not sufficiently human quite the opposite. But these grouping socio-technical informations must be transformed into aesthetic information. The blue of the frame also adds a psychological dimension. Technology and nature find their common resonance in blue. And why not? For many, blue is the color of spirituality, the color of meditation, the color of solemnity.

The second photograph, Crash, has as its central motif an injured cyclist and a multitude of things surrounding him. Again, the Caterpillar digger this time in two versions an ambulance, a silver Honda with a blonde passenger and a driver, a bicycle knocked to the ground, a yellow ABA tow truck, and black-and-white traffic posts form a kind of rescue network while also providing the compositional foundation of the entire scene. This determined the red frame of the work. In this case, red functions as an orientation-informational traffic sign. Esoterically, however, it can also be understood as fire. Fire is, after all, the principle and driving force of all vehicles. The injured cyclist points directly to this terrible force that slips out of human control.

The third photograph, House, represents a kind of idyllic pastoral in a figurative sense (I am reminded of Boucher’s pastoral paintings). The green frame emphasizes this and acts as both a threshold and an introduction to this world. A yellow Family Frost ice cream van with a cyclist and vendor, a yellow Telecom car, firemen again (in case something happens), a silver Honda in the background, and of course, the central green house with a garden and swimming pool, a surfer, two lawnmowers, a sunbathing woman, a grill, and manicured greenery. An oasis of calm and comfort. Humanity’s return to nature, though bearing the technical fruit of progress and alienation. Abortion apparently will not be necessary, if only man behaves reasonably. Everything seems simply said, but in truth is highly speculative, deliberately constructed, so much so that this apparent simplicity stops being simple. Are these wormholes into other worlds, other perspectives, other types of experience? I believe Honza Kadlec is not alone in his generation in thinking and feeling this way.

Looking at these works, I begin to realize not only the change in the Czech climate of young-generation art, but also a shift in how art itself is to be understood. The spherical network of art interweaves its threads and encloses itself in a hermetic shell. One can still leap elsewhere, or contract or expand along the waves of this shell. There must exist boundaries of which we are still utterly unaware. Yet every boundary is also an entry gate into another dimension. The final answer dissolves in the labyrinth of the continuum, in its many antinomies and paradoxes. A paradigm is always just an ordinary fixation, a mere imitation of primordial archetypes. The paradox of eternal returns and innovations.

These works have their own individual stories, yet also a common denominator. The organic corporeality of man, together with his technical foundation, creates a horizontal network of endlessly complex ties between the inorganic and organic worlds. Roles are distributed within the ever-expanding system of progress. This world has its logical permanence, but at the same time it crystallizes in more and more layers, intersecting with vertical impulses of spiritual origins into ever more diverse and perfected material structures. Technological development thus becomes the most representative image of spiritual embodiment on the material level. Unity in its diversity is given by the power of creative spirit.

Our everyday contact with this human-made world dehumanizes it, strips it of wonder, and renders it mundane. Mundanity becomes the extreme pole of man’s existential fate, bound within the social cage of interpersonal hierarchies. To step out of this world into a world of freedom and independence cannot be done physically, for the human body is limited by this very world. The return to freedom is only possible if we accept this world along with our destined necessity. Such acceptance, however, again requires the strength of spirit, which divides itself into a creative spirit and a receptive spirit. Only then can they merge back into one.

And finally? At present, the Municipal Library Gallery in Prague is hosting an exhibition of Group 42. Their program was a form of “civilism,” inspired by the technological development of the city. Afterwards there was nothing for a long time, unless we count those artists in whose work this theme is implicitly present. Let us at least name Jiří Kolář, Stanislav Kolíbal, or Jiří Lindovský. Recently, Detail magazine published an interview with three young artists from AVU and UMPRUM (Dolejš, Kadlec, Salák). It seems that their program, too, is a certain kind of civilism—though this time without adjectives.

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