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A renewed sense of purpose

Václav Špála Gallery aims to recover its distinguished niche
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By Tony Ozuna
For The Prague Post
March 26th, 2008 issue

In an otherwise strong show, poor placement hurts Boris Ondreička's text piece.
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Absence Recorded


at Galerie Václava Špály Ends April 17. Národní 30, Prague 1?New Town. Open Tues.?Fri. noon?8 p.m., Thurs. till 10 p.m.
This group exhibition of 14 artists — mostly Czechs, but also the internationally renowned Bruce Nauman and Liam Gillick — is the second at the recently reopened Václav Špála Gallery on Národní třída.
In the past, the gallery was one of the most important progressive art spaces in Prague. Founded in 1957, it had its heyday in 1965–70, when it was curated by the famous Czech art theoretician Jindřich Chalupecký, who aimed to engage the general public in the exhibition program. During the Normalization period of the 1970s and ’80s, however, Chalupecký was banned from art activities, and only state-sanctioned socialist art was shown at the gallery.
After 1989, the gallery regained its status as an important space for contemporary art. It also began presenting the winners of the Jindřich Chalupecký Award, given each year to a Czech artist under 35 years old — a prize established by Václav Havel, Jiří Kolář and Theodor Pištěk, with Chalupecký’s assistance. After 2002, the gallery took a turn for the worse under the direction of the Czech Art Endowment Fund, which leased out the space for exhibitions with no particular focus.
The local art community railed against this arrangement for years. Finally, last year a new tender was announced, and the gallery’s management changed hands once again. It now looks to be on track toward recovering its former prestige, both locally and on the international scene.
“Absence Recorded,” curated by Lenka Lindaurová, involves empty spaces, blanks and invisible or overlooked details of our day-to-day lives, or records from the past. It is also about artists’ often-failed attempts to communicate a particular meaning in their work to the public, and the acquiescence artists make to this situation.
In the first room on the ground floor of the gallery, visitors are greeted with Studies for the Project ‘Bonjour Monsieur Courbet’ (1986), 88 black-and-white photos by František Lesák (born in 1943 and now based in Vienna). The photos show the artist in various poses, engaging with a mannequin — a 3-D model of a long-bearded wanderer, a figure from an 1854 painting by Gustav Courbet. A small replica of Courbet’s painting is also on display across from the wall of photographs.
At the other end of the room is A 10 (2003) by Jan Jakub Kotík (1972–2007), a Czech-American artist who died in December after a long battle with cancer. A 10 is a huge work consisting of 240 pieces of toast, with the browned surface of the tiled slices scratched away to reveal an image of a General Electric TF-34-100/A engine, which is used in the A 10 Thunderbolt aircraft the U.S. military employs to provide air support for ground forces.
In the back room there is an untitled installation by Jaroslav Prokeš (born in 1977) that consists of a large open box in the middle of the room whose interior glows in alternating colors, from a luminous blue to purple, pink, orange and lime green. The glow, created by a light source on the ceiling, is mesmerizing upon entering the room and its aftereffect lingers once you’ve left.
In the basement of the gallery, Kateřina Šedá (winner of the Jindřich Chalupecký Prize in 2005) has a video titled Her Mistress’ Everything (2007–08), which records a day in the life of a dog that belonged to her recently deceased grandmother, a German shepherd named Ajda. The Šedá family pretends that the grandmother hasn’t died by playing the radio or TV at her regular times, because otherwise the dog would howl all through the night, driving the family and neighbors crazy.
A centerpiece of the exhibition, also in the basement, is by the American artist Bruce Nauman (born in 1941). Nauman’s Violent Incident — Man/Woman Segment (1986) is a video of a man and woman in a domestic struggle, set at a candlelit dinner table, which begins with a cruel practical joke and ends in a violent battle to the death.
Upstairs on the gallery’s first floor is another piece by Kotík, titled Study for the Dispersal of Information, an overly complicated system for getting electricity to a water cooler — and it works.
Jan Smejkal (born in 1948) contributes an untitled wall painting that contains letters and words in Czech, along with some English or nonsense words. With the wall painted brown and the letters in silver, it is like a neater, more decorative version of Jiří Kolář’s works on paper.
Another text-based work, 10x10x10 by Ján Mančuška (born in 1972), is made from 10 framed sheets of white paper, each with a typed sentence in English about memory and reality, progressively deteriorating.
There is a poetic text painted on the large first-floor window above street level. But this one (also in English), by Slovak artist Boris Ondreička (born in 1969), is easily overlooked from inside and out, and thus fails to engage either the viewers in the gallery or the public on the street below.
Perhaps that is the crux of the dilemma for the artists in this show: Art can be read, literally or not, in many different ways. In the worst case for an artist, it is never read at all. Does this have any impact on society? The curator of “Absence Recorded” and the rest of the team behind the reopened Václav Špála Gallery believe it does, and this second exhibition in their re-launched space is a concerted effort to make this point.

Tony Ozuna can be reached at features@praguepost.com


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