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Fine Arts / New Media | Bratislava | by Antje Mayer | 2007-11
FUTUROPOLISThe obstacles to a joint east-west approach, or why Slovak artist Roman Ondák does not want to be noticed.Slovak artist Roman Ondák (born 1966) has succeeded in achieving something that not many of his generation and origins have managed: he is described as an important contemporary artist. Have you noticed what is missing? The suffix, “from Eastern Europe”, that is to say he is important, even in the 1st western league! Are these the first signs of normalisation of the stuttering dialogue between east and west? It is about time. That art criticism, dominated as it is by the West, ,leaves out the attribute “east“ when referring to Ondák is not without a certain irony, as hardly any other artist so intensively reflects the tedious obstacles to the joint cultural approach of east and west, which includes his intensive reflection of forty years of communist-dominated post-war art history in his native country Slovakia that was originally negated by Western art critics due to their arrogance and ignorance and later, due certainly also to their inability, hardly communicated at all. And so Roman Ondák’s broad definition of art includes, for example, appearing as kind of documentor and curating an exhibition about his role model, Slovak artist Július Koller (1939–2007) in the Cologne Kunstverein (“Universálne Futurlogické Operácie”, 2003). Without Ondák this important Slovak artist, who was a significant pioneer for innumerable colleagues, would probably not have experienced such a comeback after the collapse of Communism. And so we have arrived in medias res for if one knows Koller’s work then the approach to Ondák’s -oeuvre is not so distant Both share a fondness for the “anti-happening”. “Unassuming, minimal interventions in the every-day as an artistic gesture or aesthetic operation“ as Koller likes to put it. So, for example, at the opening of the Vienna exhibition “Kontakt – aus der Sammlung der Erste Bank” in MUMOK (2006) Roman Ondák asked twenty people to untie their shoelaces (as he did himself) and to mingle with the public; in the general bustle it was probably mostly the people involved who noticed this, along with a few attentive persons who, however, would never have guessed that this was an art action, and probably thought it was unintentional. For his performance “-Lucky Coin” Ondák threw a coin into a puddle in a wood in Slovakia and made a photographical documentation of this unspectacular poetic action. A further strategy pursued by Ondák is that of the “anti-pictures”, even if he does not explicitly mention this term of Koller’s and employs it differently. Ondák uses this term to mean art works from which he completely removes his authorship. For example in the fine work “Passage”, which was made in 2004 during a visit to Japan as artist-in-residence. Ondák asked 500 steel workers to eat chocolate and to form sculptures out of the silver wrapping foil, which he subsequently exhibited in an art space. Among the “anti-pictures” are also the works in the series “Futuropolis“ (2006), which can be seen in this issue of “Report” and which were produced especially for the magazine in a new form as a memory game of the kind that Slovak children can buy for just a few cents in newspaper kiosks. A small selection is presented of a total of one hundred mostly amateur drawings that visualise visions of a city of the future, which friends and relatives made at Roman Ondák’s request. The framed works were shown at the Biennale in São Paulo (2006) as well as in the Galerie Taxispalais in Innsbruck (2007). It is interesting to see now strongly they remind one of the well-known Utopian urban designs of the British group “Archigram” or those of the Austrian architecture collectives “Haus-Rucker-Co” or “Coop Himmelb(l)au” at the end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s. As Ondák removes his own authorship but exhibits the drawings like important artworks at well-known art locations he questions established rites of the art business that nowadays are rarely reflected upon but which recently have been manifested in the manically driven cult of names, labels and persons. His images also raise the question to what extent processes that directly affect the daily life of the individual such as architecture and town planning are decided together with the citizens instead of ignoring their wishes. This is a highly topical theme: the capital cities of the young democracies in Central, South-eastern and Eastern Europe are at the moment involved in a process of discovering their own urban identity – and the Slovak capital Bratislava has a particularly difficult role as sister city of Vienna. This development, which is taking place at top speed and has been initiated to some considerable extent by western investors, in many cases massively ignores the developed structures and the needs of city dwellers. By using these images (in a kind of second casting) for the memory game in “Report” Ondák again deprives them of their uniqueness, their character as an artwork, to give them a new identity as goods, pictogramm or label in a -double and varied sense This is also a typical Ondák approach: recycling art works after many years and giving them new contexts and meanings.. The tactics of this clandestine, secretive approach, the concealment of single authorship, and the changing of things, which Ondák’s -predecessor Koller has used from the 1960s, were originally born from an artistic and personal survival strategy, as at that time there were no public spaces for alternative art, and the artist and his or her public were subject to state censorship and its penalties – which in the CSSR were relatively severe. Apparently amateur art produced by a number of authors made it difficult for the authorities to attribute blame and to censor particular persons. The Czech artist Jiří Kovanda (born 1953) was also a master of subtle action in the late 1970s. He minimalised the minimal even further, for example by elevating and attracting the glance of another person on a escalator into an artistic gesture. Czech art theorist Jiří Ševčík interprets this as a political act: “Kovanda’s poetic interventions represent a political stance of aesthetic distance to official institutional art.” And this brings us back again to Roman Ondák. Why would a contemporary artist withdraw from the general competition for attention? Precisely. For the very same reason as Koller and Kovanda: to express an “aesthetic distance to official institutional art”. In this sense Ondák’s art is a political act. Roman Ondák, born 1966 in Zilina, Slovakia, works and lives in Bratislava.pictures
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