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A staré night

Around Town

By Benjamin Thomas Cunningham
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
August 20th, 2008 issue

Your average art gallery event has several things in common: hiply dressed people in funny glasses, fruit and cheese plates, stylized music and lots of wine.

The “If you can’t make it, fake it” exhibition Saturday evening had all these things — pleasantly done for sure — but there was also a man dressed in an astronaut suit who then paraded through the streets of Prague.
Yes, you read that correctly, and more on that later.
Galerie Nová síň hosted at least the initial part of the evening, which included the aforementioned gallery standards as well as some genuinely thought-provoking art.
The piece “On His Way to Nirvana” portrayed a dress-wearing monkey riding a tiger. “Hanumann relaxing on the Moon” pictured a Jaba the Hut–looking primate (a deity figure from the Hindu epic Ramayana) playing a mandolin, wearing a halo and emerging from a flower like Botticelli’s Birth of Venus.
The creator of these curiosities was the Slovak artist Daniel Denes, and, while it would be nice to say more about him here, he proved surprisingly elusive on the night in question for reasons that may or may not relate to an air-tight helmet.
All but three of the 15 or so paintings on display were already part of private collections. One of those still on the market was “Last Tango Somewhere Close to Paris” showing a Velcro shoe–wearing woman in an orange grove. In the foreground sat a 1980s-style boom-box stereo. In the background, Mickey Mouse danced with a cat standing on its hind legs.
What is that saying, one had to wonder?
“It is communicating with the absurdity of a Disneyland somewhere near Paris,” said the presenter.
Fair enough. I tipped my wine glass in the hopes that Denes would not have to cope with the absurdity of a copyright-infringement lawsuit from the fine folks at Disney.
The title painting of the event, “If you can’t make it fake it,” was also for sale, featuring a masked woman in a giant birdcage, with a rooster on her lap and a pet dog at her feet. In the background, astronauts marched about on a lunar landscape. The painting pointed to overarching theme of the evening, which was billed as “parody” of the Apollo 17 moon landing.
It was right around this point that the astronaut — or Mr. Abrakadabraka, as the announcer called him — showed up. The coup de grace of the exhibit had this spaceman make his way out of the gallery in full space suit and walking through the streets of Prague — in slow motion, mind you — from the gallery near Národní třída to Prague Castle to plant a U.S. flag in one of the presidential gardens.
The actual Apollo 17 mission took place in December 1972. It seems an odd choice for an exhibition, as is it much less famous than Apollo 11 (the first moon landing) and Apollo 13 (the one that became a Tom Hanks’ movie). However explanations do emerge, mainly that the leader of the Apollo 17 mission was Eugene Cernan, son of a Czech mother and a Slovak father. Apollo 17 was also the final mission to land on the moon or, as this exhibition seeks to argue, to allegedly land on the moon.
The paintings and the parade ventured to raise the possibility that this 1972 moon landing was a fake. The real philosophy underpinning the work was, according to the description near the entrance of the gallery (take a deep breath should you try to read this aloud):
“To show the foreign spectator that the thinking of a Slovak is no longer bounded only with the problems and issues of a local importance but knowingly reflects and reacts to the problems and issues worldwide thus breaking the traditional boundaries of Slovak thinking.”
Well, with tigers, lunar landscapes, a birdcage, Hindu gods, Mickey Mouse and Saturday night slow-motion moon-man parades, there is only one thing to say about this larger goal: mission accomplished.

Benjamin Thomas Cunningham can be reached at bcunningham@praguepost.com


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