Oblékat kameny / To clothe stones

CITY SURFER OFFICE, PRAGUE (CZ)

Curator Jen Kratochvíl

To clothe stones

Where to seek the origins of art? Where to seek the origins of language? How to find boundaries between living and non-living materials and how to discover their relations? How to capture the genesis and development of rituals? What would things say if they could speak? Or do they speak and we are just not aware of that? And who will translate their language for us? That is what Walter Benjamin asked in his 1916 text “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man“. If such a language exists, can we decipher it through art? According to what was expressed by Elias Canetti in his essential work Crowds and Power, a man began to understand his own limits via contact with his environment and measuring the attributes of objects which were natural for his surroundings. When he was climbing up a tree, he found out that each branch has a different nature – some are weaker, some are stronger. Some branches broke off under him, some endured. The strength ratio between man’s hand and stone had to been tested before it became automatically given. Everything had to undergo such comparison – the living, the non-living, the so-far-undivided. Canetti also thought that we could never understand the objects’ nature if we ourselves had not tested their functionality. The classic story about the first fire having been lit by a lightning, which led to man’s ability to control fire, is allegedly a non-sense. Similarly, we were not able to realise that an empty coconut shell may serve as a bowl. Initially, we had to take water into our palms and only then we understood that this could be done more easily by a found object.

To clothe stones

In Gottfried Semper’s view, architecture from its beginnings (where should we only seek the origins of architecture?) consists of four basic elements – the fireplace (development of metallurgy and pottery), the roof (carpentry), the fence (clothing and weaving) and the mound (ground works). Textile and weaving provide that buildings can be clothed and decorated by façade and numbers of ornaments. We have been putting clothes on our buildings for centuries; this basic need of our existence has been dressed in protective and attractive robes. In this way, we protect the warmth of our home.

To clothe stones

Where is the boundary between the living and the non-living? Are these separated?

To clothe stones

The story of the premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring spread around the whole world and nine days after the performance an article with a large headline “Parisians Hiss New Ballet” appeared in The New York Times. Throughout the whole premiere – from the overture to the final dance during which the ballet-dancer dies from exhaustion in a spring glorifying ritual – most conservative spectators were leaving the theatre expressing loudly their repulsion for the new composition accompanied by disgust and misunderstanding from the avant-garde part of the audience. Jean Cocteau later recalled taking a journey after the premiere with the author, the conductor and the choreographer into the Bois de Boulogne. There they, in a state of sentimental disillusion, allegedly recited Pushkin’s poetry. This story was denied in 1936 in Stravinsky’s memoires. Despite a certain amount of mythologization of that night’s events, the ballet and more importantly the concert version of the composition became one of the milestones of modern art and brought exaltation to a selected part of the audience.

To clothe stones

Hypnosis and dOCUMANTA (13) became an institutionalized embodiment of modern art presentation. Marcos Lutyens’ hundred-day project in Karlsaue park, Kassel, enabled hundreds of visitors go into a trance in which they could experience a non-existent exhibition inserted into their minds.

To clothe stones

The means for evocation of space outside reality are becoming more technical and they are transferred from the spectator’s mind (be it affected by hypnosis, drugs or semi-shamanic rituals) right in front of their eyes. An example can be found in the work of Jina Rafman exhibited at this year’s Berlin Biennale – The University of the Arts (The Universität der Künste Berlin), boulevard Unter den Linden and the Brandenburg Gate sink into an infinite water emptiness alongside anonymous bodies of the passers-by.

To clothe stones

Evoking of a similar state via elaborated instruments is not what Tereza Příhodová aims at; on the other hand she tries to present a cut in space-time, materially deeply-rooted, in a single frame of otherwise running film tape. In The Matrix movie, Neo decelerates the flow of the fictional reality; in Christopher Nolan’s movie Inception, the dream adventurers rearrange both time and space according to their imagination. When time stops and only you can observe its matter and size in a single fragment, you get close to the depiction present in the works of Tereza Příhodová.

To clothe stones

Ritual is not in full swing yet, the participants are gathering round, getting ready for building the bonfire and lighting the fire. They already dream of a breathtaking dance and an absolute ecstasy when time flows but also somehow stands still as if you take LSD and the conventionalized reality loses all of its importance. The Rite of Spring, African tribal dances, the miracle of the Holy Fire in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem; the ancient traditions mix up and bear witness to the fact that people look for the transcendent, for their own spirituality and for answers to the individual existence in a collective experience.

To clothe stones

Fire is one of the basic materializations of such mankind’s endeavours. Findings show that the first controlled fires in ritual settlements date tens of thousands years back, most likely before the evolution of our ancestors into Homo sapiens. The power of fire is seen as cleansing as fire itself cannot be stained – all that it absorbs disappears, all that remains is freed from all negative forces. But how can we find the beginnings of man’s control over fire? Do we have to search for it?

To clothe stones

The supposedly non-living objects open up to life. Stone is breathing, wood pulsates regularly, metal reaches out its arms and connects the unconnectable – all in human mind and all beyond its limits.

To clothe stones

If we are able and willing to feel it, listening to Stravinsky can have the same effect today and tomorrow as it would have in 1913. It would have had the same impact even before the Current Era. It is the suppression of time that is the fundamental resource of Tereza’s works. The examination of archetypes that connect mankind throughout its existence, the symbolic expressing of otherwise ephemeral and unseizable events in the matter – these are the cornerstones for seeking the answers we have not been able to find so far. Answers we even should not ever find.

Oblékat kameny / To clothe stones

CITY SURFER OFFICE, PRAGUE (CZ)

ARTIST

DATES

LOCATION