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From trash to trash

International art to fill your walls, backyard or garbage bin
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By Tony Ozuna
For The Prague Post
June 25th, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Among the tamer works: Marcin as... by Polish artist Jan Dziaczkowski.
International Triennale of Contemporary Art 2008: Re-Reading the Future


at Veletržní palác Ends Sept. 14. Dukelských hrdinů 47, Prague 7-Holešovice. Open Tues.-Sun. 10 a.m.-6 p.m.
“From trash to trash” is a self-chosen and appropriate motto for the International Triennale of Contemporary Art (ITCA) 2008, organized by the National Gallery in Prague and currently on display at Veletržní palác.
Visitors are greeted in the cloak room area by a row of 10 white urinals mounted on a wall with texts above each, saying either “This is a piece of art” or “This is not a piece of art.” This unattributed sculptural installation serves as a “manifesto,” and the point (according to National Gallery Director Milan Knížák) is to urge a re-reading of Marcel Duchamp’s infamous artwork.
After this dubious welcome, there are works in all shapes, sizes and media by 200 international contemporary artists. The pieces are organized by 19 themes, all mixed together, though a few of the themes have separate sections.
On the main floor, a maze of artworks keeps the “trash to trash” slogan in mind: for instance, Olaf Brzeski’s six grotesque ceramic busts on destroyed pedestals with a smashed chair, and nearby, the pipe that did the damage. Close by is a fresco by Michal Stachyra, ostensibly from the 1920s, “found” after chipping away plaster. A similar faux discovery is revealed in another section of the show, of murals apparently made by the German Expressionist Otto Müller and found in the garden of fellow Expressionist Willy Nowak (co-founder of the Czech art group Osma).
Nuno Maya and Carole Prunelle from Portugal have a large installation, a multi-room structure on the ground floor filled with found objects or rubbish transformed into grimy gems, as well as photos and media projections on stones — Living Stones — and sand. Maya and Prunelle also make strong contributions to other sections of the exhibition.
Mara Castilho stands out with her videos set in installations — one of a woman seeming to go insane in a decrepit shower stall (Process 5703-2000), and Walking Through Rubble (Sarajevo) (2008), which projects images of destruction and includes a found sculpture of a female mannequin dressed up in burned photos of escalators and passages.
On the upper floors, Dominik Lejman has the impressive video mural Let Us Share the Sign of Peace (2006), and Jae-eun Choi has a state-of-the-art video in a black box, projected on four screens. It’s a performance of an elderly Asian man blending modern dance and kabuki, executed with the force of martial arts to tune of “Pleasure, Anger, Sorrow, Comfort.”
Despite these highlights, ITCA 2008 falls short in film and video selections compared with the state-of-the-art projections in ITCA 2005. There are, however, some impressive low-tech sound installations (from the section “Heavier Than Air”), such as Christina Kubisch’s Magnetic Noise (2007), a room lined with electromagnetic cables carrying sound waves that are picked up through headphones, and Luca Gemma’s Life Support Machine, fish scales on sheets of thick plastic turned automatically by computer, as if they were pages of a book. Their movements make the sound of waves, and the piece, in three units spread along a hallway, smells of the sea.
“Movement as a Message” has a room dedicated to kinetic art from the pioneers of the genre, and some living artists from Italy and France, along with some Czech and Slovak representatives with works from the 1960s. Eye-soothing works by Alberto Biasi (born in 1937) and Toni Costa (born in 1935), among many others, are joined by Czechs Milan Dobeš (born in 1924) and Stanislav Zippe (born in 1943). This section is a fun house, and also a retreat from the mash-up of thematic selections.
The world has neither the need nor the space to keep all of the large-scale works and installations produced by artists over past decades for the seemingly hundreds of biennials or triennials that take place each year, including relative newcomer ITCA. Knížák admits this up-front, and the section he curated, located on the top floor, is filled with student or apparently amateur works, such as the makeshift construction by Stephan Toth titled That Is Not Kippenberger (2007) and paintings by Antonín Votava, known to Charles Bridge visitors as “The Devil Guy.” However, there is also a richly detailed Art Brut panorama of Limpopo Province and Gauteng, South Africa by Titus Thabiso (Handjievol) Matiyane.
Beyond Knížák’s section, another one curated by Tomáš Vlček, the director of Veletržní palác and ITCA’s chief curator, is titled “Somewhere between Re-reading and Recycling the Future.” This includes two walls filled with the fragile photos of Miroslav Tichý, subtitled “Eroticism in the Totalitarian Regime — Escape From Ideology Through Pleasure to its Devastation.”
Altogether, the sea of works by more than 200 artists is overwhelming — but that was the idea. According to the organizers, ITCA 2008 “is a vast project focused on tendencies that remain outside the mainstream of contemporary art.” No question about that. But too many of the works, both the rough stuff and the tame, could easily be swept aside and walked away from without any remorse.

Tony Ozuna can be reached at features@praguepost.com


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