21ST CENTURY CZECH DECADENCE
review / Tony Ozuna
Gaspard of the Night
Futura
March 2—June 9, 2010
21st Century Czech Decadence
The Czech curator Václav Magid tackles some heady topics in the show “Gaspard of the Night,” inspired by the French romantic Aloysius Bertrand (1807-1841). “Gaspard of the Night” was an influential prose-poem on writers like Charles Baudelaire, and Joris-Karl Huysmans, i.e. poet and prose icons of the French Decadent movement of the 19th century, still to this day, among the most splendid conjurers of darkness, fantasy, terror, death, and evil with a romantic yet cynical artistic sensibility.
For his exhibit at Futura, Magid has selected eleven contemporary Czech artists to explore this theme. The artists are Daniela Baráčková, Jiří David, Marek Meduna, Markéta Othová, Michal Pěchouček, Jiří Skála, Sláva Sobotovičová, Pavel Sterec, Ivan Svoboda, Jan Šerých, and Roman Štětina, and the works include phtography, video, sculpture, drawings, and sound installation, including live radio pranks.
Overall, “Gaspards of the Night” is a monochromatic show—lots of black, white and varying shades of grey, best explored by the photographer Markéta Othová in her singular photo at the entrance to the show. “Art Institute” (2006) is a shot of a pterodaktyl suspended from the ceiling of a natural history museum, with a dinosaur tryptich in the background, and beckoning the question, how can God exist?
The mysterious power of the night on our behavior including our anxieties and fears (especially of death), but also emphasizing fantasies, dreams, and lack of inhibitions is dominant in the other works, and possibly best exemplified in the next room's creature by Marek Meduna, “L” (2010). Meduna's creature is only waist-high, yet it seems like a lone and towering phantom or more accurately, a tar monkey, since the creature has a shadow by its side of a harmless monkey in color reproduction.
Nearby, there is a conceptual piece by Pavel Sterec, “To Shake with a Lifeless Hand” (2010). For this, the artist approached artists from the Czech Union of Caricaturists and analogous Italian caricaturists from Milan to create visual jokes (cartoons) on an imagined scenario: a pole is adjusted horizontally two meters above the ground, into the wall in a gallery, and the loose end of the pole is slightly bent downwards, protruding into the space. The image is inspired by the artist's own hanging, lifeless hand. Monochrome posters are available for free to forever share the humorous results with the public.
The next room could be referred to as the room of dreams or nightmares, dominated by more caricatures. Here, Daniela Baráčková has collected 13 texts (dreams) contributed by fellow Czech artists. The dreams are printed (in Czech texts only) besides illustrations of the scenes, or rather caricatures of the artists (the narrators of the dreams) in their dream, done by the curator (and artist as well) Václav Magid. Baráčková's own dream of her getting seduced in rancid conditions by a nude Mirek Topolanek (the openly sexual libertarian, and former Czech Prime Minister) is a highlight.
Something like a dream is the intriguing film in an upstairs room by Ivan Svoboda, titled, “I have met the same child twice,” (2010). This features a male narrator of a story sitting, standing, sometimes smoking while recalling how he twice walked passed a genius toddler, one day while walking alone in the snow through a forest. The story being told by the narrator is also projected on an overlapping film, so that its playing in the background, and reenacting the meetings and reciting the mystical dialogue he had with the child, who was also walking alone, and who could hardly have been more than a year old.
Another mystifying scene is a video projected by Sláva Sobotovičová, “Fischli & Weiss” (2010) showing children and their parents watching a performance, but it is never shown what they are watching. The kids seem to be more captivated than the adults, but no one laughs or smiles very much. Weird noises play in the background almost like a horror-film soundtrack though distorted and gargled.
If Sobotovičová had also inter-weaved or floated extracts of the haunting composition for piano, “Gaspard of the Night” by Maurice Ravel into her mix of distorted noise, it could have been heavenly.
The centerpiece of the exhibit, “Nocturne” (2009-1010), by Roman Štětina is in the gallery's main video room. However, there is no video projection in the dark room (besides the English translation of the dialogues). This is a sound installation playing late night talk radio programs from Czech radio including “Marketplace” where callers offer items on sale for auction, “Nightline,” which is a talk with a psychologist, and “Telefonoteka,” a music show which featured a special guest Czech opera singer.
In each broadcast, there is a strange caller who disrupts the host's program with for instance, inappropriate personal longings or ominous promises to commit suicide on the spot. These calls were all staged by the artist using radio actors, and in at least one case, using a radio play from the 1960s, thus, inserting unsolicited radio plays from the past onto live, contemporary late night talk shows.
The effect can be chilling, and particularly in the radio play “It was a reverse charge call” (1964) originally by the exiled Czech writer and radio journalist, Ludvík Aškenázy, which is used to interrupt a banal talk with an opera singer with “the most lovely voice,” Martina Janková.
At one point an anonymous male caller in a very relaxed voice, says to Janková and the host, “a person has a spring voice and a summer voice, an autumn voice and a two winter voices – warm and cold. They have a main voice and a secondary voice. A blossomed-out voice and resurrected voice. A cracked voice and a pasted voice. A frozen voice. A woman has a male voice, and a man has a female voice. And all of these voices rustle with the voice of the executioner and the chirping voice of a prostitute, and under all of this is the tender voice of a child. And the voice of those they have hurt and those that they have loved. A person has all of these voices at once.”
The women, live on air, are left flabbergasted, then quickly recover and go into a tailspin of blabbering counter-charge to compound the heaviness of the situation. And this is a performance of a lifetime.
Programme: Telephonotheque – Czech Radio 3 – Vltava, 11 May 2009
Actor: Vladimír Brabec – character: Jarínek
Radio play: It Was a Reverse Charge Call (1964)
Written by Ludvík Aškenázy
Dramaturgy: Jaroslava Strejcková.
Directed by Jirí Horcicka
Host – Hv
Vladimír Brabec (Jarínek) – J
Programme guest, opera singer Martina Janková – G
H: Hello friends. Welcome to Telefonotéka, broadcast live on the Czech Radio 3 – Vltava. On this show we talk about music and listen to recordings brought in by our guests, who are also ready to respond to any questions or comments you or I might have. You probably all know who we have here in the studio today on Czech Radio 3 – Vltava, at least from announcements on the air or from our Czech Radio magazine. And if you follow us on the Internet you can also see who the lovely voice in our lead-in piece belongs to. The song by Joseph Haydn was sung by the long-time soloist of the Zurich Opera, an artist who appears on principal stages around the world and at prestigious festivals, works with world-class conductors and soloists, and devotes herself to opera, old music and, last but not least, lyric repertoire. But I won't stretch it out any longer – our guest today is Martina Janková. Hello Martina.
G: Hello, it's nice to be here.
...
G: That's what probably angers me the most…that's what probably angers me the most, that I'll never sing Winterreise by Schubert, that's what probably angers me the most, I guess…
H: Because otherwise I just don't know…
G: Because my repertoire is so broad and new things keep appearing; I'm such an enthusiast – I go through life collecting these pearls.
H: Well, maybe you'll never sing Libuše.
G: But I don't miss that one.
H: Who knows? But you don't miss it…
G: I really don't miss it.
H: Seriously?
G: No.
H: Ok, let's move on and take another call. Hello, are you there? Go ahead, please.
J: So…
H: Hello.
J: ...a person has a spring voice and a summer voice, an autumn voice and a two winter voices – warm and cold. They have a main voice and a secondary voice. A blossomed-out voice and resurrected voice. A cracked voice and a pasted voice. A frozen voice. A woman has a male voice, and a man has a female voice. And all of these voices rustle with the voice of the executioner and the chirping voice of a prostitute, and under all of this is the tender voice of a child. And the voice of those they have hurt and those that they have loved. A person has all of these voices at once.
G: Lovely.
H: Yes, that was lovely and, at the same time, downright…why was that anonymous?
G: That's too bad.
H: It's a shame; We would at least like to know from the programme production or from the sound engineer what...
…
G: It's lovely and right now I'm thinking how that whole Journey, The Voyage was some kind of collection of what that man was reciting for us here; when we began with that Kinderstube and went up to those Bible songs, and one went through various corners of the soul and their various development stages. Through those love songs, the philosophical songs of Othmar Schoeck and the Persian philosopher Hafiz. There are so many corners of the souls, so many of those chambers, so many of those thirteenth chambers that one doesn't know about.
Edited version first printed in the PRAGUE POST
▵ 12/04/2010 [299]
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