Fact or fiction

In Czech culture, "hoaxer" is an honorific term. Telling tales is a practice that ranges from the fictional Czech genius and Renaissance man Jára Cimrman to the nonexistent Czech Dream shopping mall. Chalupecký Award laureate Jiří Černický works firmly within this revered tradition in the main part of his exhibition "Gagarin's Thing and Things I'm Not Sorry For" at the newly reopened Václav Špála Gallery.

Černický presents what looks like an extraordinarily well-documented examination of an unexplained phenomenon from the history of the Soviet space program. Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became a shining hero and a symbol of Soviet superiority as the first human being to orbit the earth in April 1961.

As a young boy in Czechoslovakia during the Cold War, Černický (born in 1966) certainly would have been exposed to plenty of propaganda glorifying Gagarin, and likely also conspiracy theories about the Soviet space program and Gagarin's famous flight.

The thing at the center of Černický's exhibition is a white metal broom-shaped object, which leans against a wall in the main room of the ground floor. Černický spins an elaborate tale of how this strange object was found in the Vostok 1 after Gagarin's return to earth - it had not been there when the spacecraft was shot into orbit.

Where a broom's bristles would be, there was once a device that emitted radioactive rays. Its energy source degraded and detached (the artist displays a "reconstruction" of the radioactive part) and became a pawn in Cold War-era political intrigues ranging from the Prague Spring to Watergate. Černický follows the object's trail from Moscow, to a clandestine hand-off from Khrushchev to Kennedy on the island of Bermuda, to the White House.

Next to the thing is a row of CD players relating the story of the object (one plays the recording in English). It is a long and complicated yarn, and those who don't wish to stand tethered to the wall for a long time can pick up the bilingual edition of Černický's book Gagarin's Thing (issued by Meander Press in 2006) at the gallery's reception desk. The object's back story further unfolds in authentic-looking period photographs and official documents installed in large old display cases on the walls.

As viewers pore over the mocumentation in the gallery's main space, they hear a combination of what sounds like a rocket blasting off and a beautiful piano composition - a Schubert piano sonata from the poetic film Enigma, which plays in the back room together with the film Dad.

In Dad, Černický works with a home movie of his father as a young boy - at the same age as the artist's son was when Černický created the video - filmed by the artist's grandfather. The boy in the film is increasingly obscured by black lines. In a second version of the film, the artist focuses on the scratches that had accumulated on the film's surface over time and eliminates the original imagery of his father, keeping only the scratches. The piece is in the same lyrical vein as works by experimental filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage.

Together, these films - somewhat like the Gagarin's Thing installation- examine memory, its transmission and mutation from one generation to the next, how truth is obscured or uncovered with the passage of time, and personal as well as political myth-making.

Upstairs in the gallery is Černický's video installation Psychogravitation. The video shows a young woman superimposed with an outpouring of text (in English) looping from her mouth and around her head like a diagram of an atom - a literal stream of consciousness that becomes increasingly profuse as her body fades away and only her face remains, smothered in a swarm of words. Finally, the words start shooting away from the woman in a rapid-fire stream of text static. Twenty pages of text from the video are displayed in a lightbox, but the imagery in the video works well enough on its own.

In the gallery's basement, it becomes clear that what sounded like the roar of a rocket is actually a speeding metro train. For his installation Things I'm Not Sorry For, Černický asked random passers-by in a metro station to give him an item they did not value. Some of the things donated from people's pockets and purses are displayed in an acrylic box in the next room: lip balm, an interdental brush, a tube of instant glue, a cotton swab.

A film projected on the back wall documents this collection and then shows the train pulling out of the station, increasing its velocity until it is a speeding blur. At this point, the individual "worthless things" begin spiraling toward the viewer. While taking a sociological approach, this conceptual piece presents a snapshot of the almost iconic detritus of contemporary throwaway society.

Jiří Černický is a versatile artist who works in a range of media with a good deal of finesse and social commentary. In the show's centerpiece, Gagarin's Thing, Černický creates an elaborate hoax that cannily re-examines an entire spectrum of political, historical and social circumstances; a fiction exposing many truths.

Mimi Fronczak Rogers can be reached at
Features@praguepost.com