Time and reality he lives in and reciprocally tries to form in his art exerted the greatest influence on the work of Blažej Baláž. His conviction of the possibility and duty of the individual to interfere in the development of the society is a kind of karma in his work. The span of it, I want to analyse, is by far not as broad as the rich scale of levels of contents and media he works with. My main ambition was to evaluate his work entirely and complexly and to find the basic creative starting point of this not simple entirety.
INSTALLATIONS IN THE YEARS 1991 – 1992
In this period the strategic moments of his work get going, they diverge and multiply with the progress of time, the artist works systematically and programmatically with several components of fabulation:
The Tricolour
– a collection of three concepts of the socially and politically revolutionary epoch.
The Sheet
– fabric, material that protects, decorates and forms our appearance. Complementary material of our corporeality in the same way as birth and death are. This relation is an artificial social construction.
Accumulation
– art strategy that, at the break of the first and second half of the 20th century, reacts to the society based on the pillars of consuming and overproduction. Accumulation is the platform of the trend orientated to quantitative amassing at the expense of quality. The artist uses it to blur and prevent direct original seeing - the carrier of superficial information. To perceive in a deeper and more complex way means to perceive not only by one's senses but to compass also one's own past, experience, genealogy. This makes us different from animals that have a short memory and have instincts as a compensation for it.
"The first question: If all reality is set up of possibilities then it is a deliminated value. Let us consider: Point particles are swarming in the empty space - in fact nothing - and if they cluster, they become something. This means that the denser the cluster is, the more they become something. Reality becomes the function of the density of clustering or delimitation of the "elements" to use computer language." (1)
Kolo, kolo mlynské, za štyri rýnske (The Ján Koniarek Gallery, Trnava, 1992)
(The title is the first line of a children's song) The installation consists of a circle (diameter 7m) formed of waste—textile cuttings. The strongly minimalistic composition uses parameters of individual mythology: de-fetishized material and a circle - the most universal symbol of our existence. When Richard Long worked on his mammoth mandala laid out with stones, the stone was concentrated on the concept that retold the whole range of his ecologically attuned projects and shifted them to transcendental relations. But what happens if a principally artificial and recycled material is applied? The genius of Russian constructivism, Vladimír Tatlin, demonstrated in all his works his conviction to get into a concrete space with concrete material. His minimalistic concept of the circle that looked like an opening from above, solved not only the unity of form and space but he also radically worked with the material. The introductory quotation refers to Flusser's analysis of the new computer reality. If reality is indeed that what we perceive as a field of possibilities, then the artist has a great potential of eventualities to mediate, by the right accumulation of "somehow" defined particles, the immaterial hologram of his artistic message (from its social, historical, political and religious aspects). In contemporary art the circle is often the archetypal model of our appertaining to nature. The strewing of a mandala is the rite that concentrates the energy of the Universe, the symbol is in the end intentionally left to the wind. Baláž has strewn the periphery of the circle and has left the inner space empty. The space usually filled with our repeated experiences, is here changed to the archetype of collective unconsciousness. In the 90ies we can find a similarly tuned-in morphology in the works of Bill Viola, Toshikatsu Endo (representant of the "other possibility" (2) and Magda Jetelová, but Baláž's predispositions are anchored in a different heritage. In his case it arises in the period of the process of transformation, full of encounters of chaos and the new order, efforts to usurp the most powerful positions and endeavours to understand the new system.
It is right to recall that Baláž's work is inwardly structured to such an extent that as complicated it has been created as complicatedly it will be read and decoded. It is, at the same time, demanding on the acceptance of its genesis and complex perceiving. The moment of filling windows with torn clothing appeared in Baláž's work in various modifications nearly all through the 90ies. He perceives clothing as a cover manoeuvre for his frustration by the imperfection of the human body. Worn clothes become chronicles of our day-to-day lives with certain traces of them (ripping, spots we immediately remove). This mixture is accumulated in windows and in their refined form dress the architectural space. We feel land-art parallels to specificity though here it is more of a conceptual effort. The Mousehole (1992) shifts the message of Beuys's "Fat chair" (1963) to the sphere of new mythological and material conflicts. He substitutes the fat by artificial material we hide in not "to be injured". Here it is obvious how fetishized material can change in dependance on individual mythology, its selection is subordinate to the present-day trend in order to be able to communicate analogously and understandably with the viewer. In his installation Dematerialization (1992) the artist decodes his intention ("For dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return") by a minimalist repetition of term codes. The square of a vinyl sheet integrates the square of knotted cumulations of manycoloured social material. An identical square of natural material (soil) in knots is complimentarily put next to it. The evoking of this concrete spatial situation brings the artist nearer to radical minimalists as was Richard Serra. (In his mammoth steel "Spiral" he evoked the situation of threat, fright and isolation by a visually spheric solution). The bilateral dialogue of two elements, the natural and the artificial, is a reminder of the separation of the directions inside and outside in the installation "Breathing in and breathing out" (1991). The two poles of materiality associate with the change of the condition and identity. To cause oscillation of something as stable as human identity is in the history of mankind, is one of the important milestones in the work of Baláž. The installation composed in this way makes our perception oscillate and decentralise. Nothing is dominant and we, just like the perpetum mobile, absorb the materiality in this hermaphrodite state. In postmodernism pluralization of identity is a state of existence. It supports individual persons who are able to change their own identity even at the expense of loosing their constant parameters. This concavo-convex scheme also conveys the message of the correlation of the male and female principles that harmoniously fit in each other. In "Breathing in and breathing out" we perceive the process of birth and death often related to bed sheets.
"1+1+1=1" (1992) is a numerically and conceptually formed gate constructed of former door-frames from the artist's studio. The title reminds us of Plato's philosophical reflections on the formula "1+1=2" that was for him an unchangeable eternal idea existing beyond time and space, beyond any explicable phenomena. "The pure brain is a machine the wheels of which run idly unless perceptions are put in." (3)
Baláž filled the empty space with material that summarises his percepts and personal associations and creates a kind of Plato atavism by claiming that 1+1+1=1. He uses three colours (white, blue, red) winds textile material round the beams. The doorframes become the conceptual scheme of personal history arranged in its political, artistic and human existence.
We feel a similarly accentuated affinity in the installation Untitled (1991). It is the political overstepping of a conceptually thinking artist looking for a universally valid, chronically known semantics to lead us away from insubstantial "hummings". The flat geometrization that forms a grid is covered with knots filled with cotton-wool. The knots are the basic but rather illegible element if we don't know the technology of wiping out graphic matrices with swabs. A similar knot is used if the paint has to get into almost inaccessible structures. This is also found in the installation "Breathing in and breathing out 1" (1991) in which it is complemented with its own negative cast and both are dipped into lithographic paint. Concrete reality is represented by the sheet and the tricolour. The concept of reproducible technology can be applied on the model of an insensible, violating, mechanical subordination to the dominant system. Something that seems to be absolutely essential (breathing, thinking) is perceived as a process that can be manipulated. Something that we perceive as freedom and truth gets soaked with the flavour of strongly limited order. In this sense the artist's work in the 90ies with his programme to undermine absolutism is a social and political grin. He considers his viewers as witnesses of a certain artificially programmed reality - its virtual form. They should expose it as a cover manoeuvre and inwardly revolt against it. The post-totalitarian and postmodern forms of statements quite unexpectedly overlap in something: restructuring the identity to its group version, decentralisation and destabilisation of the period, politicising art... Baláž is aware of these premises of social transformation without time restriction, he adopts the post-conceptual possibilities of fine art and continually turns to the space of architecture that provides new parameters in its full infrastructural continuity and causalty.
"Postscriptum I" (Trenčín, 1993)
Baláž constitutes the M. A. Bazovský Gallery as a model of bipolar space after the events in the 60ies that led to a crisis about the gallery as an institution responsible for the elitism of fine art. The discours appeared after the crisis of the uniqueness of an original work of art that already resounded in the initial - isms of modernism. As the post-modern didn't find a solution to this controversy, moreover led to its dramatisation and relativizing, the theme appeared again in a cloned form at the end of the 20th century.
Baláž divided the two basic spheres of the coherent space of the gallery (originally a cloister): the refectory and the corridor leading from the cloister to the refectory. He fills the three windows lining the dark corridor and filling it with light, in a specific way: seen from the side of the corridor he uses a gray selection of textile cuttings, from the side of the refectory it is a coloured one. The window is thus divided into two different chromatic layers. The asceticism of the inside of the cloister is defined in gray, incomplete monochrome painting that denies life the complex range of values. On the contrary, the baroque-like robust, coloured concept of the refectory, linked with consuming and material things, gives the impression of hedonism. The window as the moment of possible contact of the two dimensions is the channel that blocks the common view through paradoxically due to the controversion of their schisophrenic content. By revealing the symptoms of the current situation of things, the artist doesn't give orders to decision-making and classifying. He creates two autonomous scenes that do not see each other and are unable to communicate. The prototype of human behaviour paraphrased in an architectural installation is an open set for Postscriptum II - Can in Can (The Gallery of the Town Bratislava, Mirbach palace, 1993).
Postmodern art begins to be frustrated due to its position of confined mummification, it feels its paralysed condition and is aware of "the age" of its enemy - the history that began in the 18th century when the first museums started with the ambition to reflect art linearly and the development of art chronologically. The late modernist art and the art of the second half of the 20th century try to free themselves of their institutional paralysis. New dimensions (space, movement, time) are admitted, the strategies of the new media make conservation of art impossible at the expense of the loss of its "aura" - the link to the unique "Here and now".(4)
All these interventions resound in Postscriptum II. The model of filling up windows simulates the completing of an institution. The volumes of 30 years of the journal "Art Life" end as a destroyed medium that usurped the right to classify and hierarchize art for 30 years. From this point of view art history has to be perceived as a basically artificial construction, abstract and filtered (art therefore stops to reflect its period, it only reflects its position in this period...)
The confined interior of the jar is built up of seven plinths and seven jars with art reproductions. The implication of the story and its gradation is felt above all in the presence of two not yet conserved and destroyed copies of the "Art Life" and the "Profile". The possibility of changing the predestination of the copies, willingness to consider several concepts, the counterposition of art interpreted by two competitive copies at that time vying with each other are the basic ambivalences of the simulated space. The question of the interpretational rightness and of the destruction of theoretical and critical reflexion is wound in a spiral around the mummified works of an artificial "aura". It is represented by the plinth and the monitored openings in the black jars reminding us of TV screens. The basis of the transpositional skeleton of the spatial concept is the revision of the myth of modernism that claims the right to substitute art history. The museum and the gallery are platforms that do not belong to modernism but take it over with its necessary fixation of works to institutions. Postmodernism shifts this problem to theoretical reflexions in the media and supremely demonstrates its "freedom" and independance. The presence of this kind of artistic expression on the Slovak scene in the 90ies and its "verbalisation" in a mature form must be perceived as trans-generational and very complex. It is difficult to find correlations with a similar conceptual structure. The process of filling architecture with a live content of thoughts and personal relations is closely linked to Joseph Beuys's message, to his concept of "social architecture". Beuys's intention is to broaden the concept of art, to identify it with the characteristic form of the human existence and thus save it from the proclaimed death of art. Every human being is able to behave socially and create his/her social plasticity. It is important for us to perceive this process as a creative movement and accept the scheme of social plasticity as a trinomial: unformed → movement → formed. (5) "Can in Can" is the result of a really organic recultivation of the stony institution (The Mirbach palace) to a living authentic space. There is still the question about Baláž's concrete intention what to do with this building? He didn't work with a formerly unformed material, on the contrary, he expressed his opinion about this firmly formed institution. He even considered his activity to be therapeutical. The closeness of Baláž's idea of "conservation" to Beuys's "isolation" (by means of felt) resounds above all in the effort to transform all layers of the organism of society and through this transformation to find the highest forms of perceiving, thinking and existing.
Baláž uses his spirally advancing configuration also in other projects and gains confidence by the systematic genealogy of his art programme. The conceptualists reduced the picture to a symbol, the post-conceptualists filled it anew with disintegrating parallels. Baláž filled up his windows with accumulated material of remembrances and emptied the real video (Dead Video, 1993 - part of the installation), this was accompanied by the sound of wailing whales. The sound is of strongly integrating quality. I witnessed this at the IV.Biennal of Young Art - Zvon, 2002 - GHMP) when Pavel Mrkus infiltrated the whole floor of the DVD with his projection Duo Trans 6 and Sound. The singing of the monks accompanied the apocalyptic dance of the machines and the viewer got absorbed in the atmosphere of the dance transpositions. These are the moments that are deeply engraved and are resistant in our consciousness because we feel them as intimate and archetypal. The essential of death and extinction wasn't only expressed by the video, it also spread from the monitors on the cans and the monitors on the windows. The graining of the screen is of the same semantic value as is the cutting of textile clothing, art magazines and later the filing of coins, or the beheading of the live flower (Artwart, 1997). The destruction of the TV picture evokes the pictorial parallel to the later Mandalas covered with filings of coins.
OBJECTS AND INSTALLATIONS IN THE YEARS 1993 – 1995
These objects and installations belong to a specific field of Baláž's work. The artist's object Postscriptum IV (1993) was presented at the exhibition Object/Object - Metamorphosis in the time (Dům u Černé Matky Boží, Praha 2001). His presence at this exhibition was a kind of satisfaction and relevant evaluation of his contribution to art within the Central European context. The author of the exhibition, Olaf Hanel, wanted to report on the actual situation of the object in its historical contexts and did so by the selection of contemporary Czech and Slovak artists.
"Things disinherited of coherences are single things. It was necessary to isolate the thing in order to be able to define it." (6)
In the object Body and Soul (1993) the inseparable conceptual reflection is closely linked with its material articulation. The fragile empty vessel lies by its own bronze cast, both are on a felt basis. The object gives the impression of a manifest of spiritual opposites with regard to the principles of Christianity and the Chinese taoism, the eastern and western religions. The counterposition of the body - the empty vessel and the opaque cast — the soul is a prediction of the artist's perceiving the soul as a dwelling. (Good day, Mrs Koppel). He worked with a similar confronting scheme and symbolism in the installation "The Past Overlaps the Future, the Future Returns to the Past" (Powerstation of the Tatra Gallery in Poprad, 1995, The Synagogue, The J. Koniarek Gallery in Trnava 1996). He situated a cross formed by four tables ( 720 x 720 cm) into the space of the Synagogue. The language of the symbols is clear: the equilateral Greek cross as the symbol of Christianity impairs the inner space of the Jewish synagogue Coloured bones are laid on the set tables as rare insignia. Every arm of the cross almost dogmatically refers to its own higher principles by means of the colours and orientation of the cardinal points. The white and black colours are colours of mourning, the white colour is part of the eastern civilisation, the black colour of the western one. The blue colour is the colour of the male aspect and the cosmological view of the world therefore oriented to the north. The southern red colour is the colour of blood, of warm biological energy and of the female principle. Bones and skulls are remains we ascribe to our physical passing away. All world religions solve the relation of life and death and link them with different correlations and messages. Recent history claims absurd numbers of victims of religious confrontations. This fact makes the model of coexistence situated under one roof in its simplicity almost appalling. The change of the paradigm of the synagogue leads to a temporary appropriation of the architectural object because its significance lies in the narrowly utilitarian relation. By changing these functional relations he managed - only at the intellectual level - to rebuilt the building that he identifies with the soul of the man. Considering Beuys's principle of social plastic art we classify this installation as "religious plastic art".
One of Baláž's predicaments of working with texts is the installation WOODA (1993). The title is a conglomerate of words referring ironically to the metalanguage of Central Europe. When I quoted E. Petrová who grasped the main device of the object in its isolation from other objects, it was because I wanted to point out the diametrally different situation in the linguistic aspect of the artist's handling the word. Leaning on Plato's contemplations on the disability of an isolated word to name the truth, it is interesting to notice the influence of metatexts on us (accustomed to think in sentences). In this case it isn't the question of primary searching the linguistic code and discours but it is the prediction of the artist's later interest in getting the text oscillate. (The cycle The Sound and the Fury, 1992). Is it the silhouette of a tree trunk and its lying shadow, or the denuded inside of Central Europe - from outside solid and mature, inside torn to pieces by the stigma of blood and burnt out by fire? In any case the text wooda doesn't allow us to forget these parallels, the particular text subjects do not form a logical message, it is only a sign code. The various languages in words that stick together can be compared to a collage in which the original picture is no more important.
The term graphic object is new in the Slovak terminology. It is the linking of the process of graphic print with the creation of the object itself. The "Delusion" (1993) is an ironical, a little relieved message. The glass object for money in the form of a little pig is filled with water, at the bottom lies a 5 Kčs coin, above it the cast of a 5 DEM coin is floating. This is the birth of the "Bucks" (1993) a later work about the system of values in a capitalist materially orientated society and the filing of coins to dust (Mandalas, 1997/2000). The Delusion foretells the later rigidly demonstrated resistance to this standing. If these efforts hadn't continued and hadn't led to radical (even illegal) forms, from today's point of view they would appear as tendential gestures.
It is obvious that the objects and installations of this period reflex the direct assault of the social and political reality on the artist. All here identified roots are linked up with Baláž's work and form an extraordinarilly consistent artistic statement.
GOOD DAY, MRS KOPPEL (The Koppel House, Ján Koniarek Gallery, Trnava 1997)
The infrastructure of the whole project is based on the realisation of several interactive installations within the frame of an open and pulsating environment. The eminent task of such a unit is to evoke a suggestive existential situation and - simultaneously - to make the viewers feel it. It is the experience of space. The mansion house, the former seat of Mrs Koppel, is not perfectly reconstructed but more or less, by a kind of cloning, manipulated into the stony institution used to conserve and present art. This is an important point: the change of a closed intimate milieu of a subject to an object that principally exists outwards. Space extracted in such a way is an incubator of paradoxes or parallel interpretations of equal values. The artist approaches it by perceiving his own person that is doubled in order to get hold of all aspects of the offered megasphere and because he needs the concept of his alter ego to unsettle the attractive original skeleton and to penetrate into it even deeper.
The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard compared the human soul to a building. (7) He was looking for a pictorial explanation of Jung's metaphor in which he explained the building in its historically horizontal structure and applied this to the soul. He finds a lot of traces in the building and by them the soul is gradually set up in the immaterial space. We can use this interpretation while explaining the project "Good day, Mrs Koppel". In the building of many layers all traces with their transcendental overlappings are deposited, they are specific relations between the parts and the whole. In coherence with Bachelard's division of the soul — the building for further types of inner spaces, the artist divided and perceived the mansion autonomously. Every type of such a place in ourselves is real in an other period of life. In the same way as rooms are linked up with doors and common walls our soul is a structure in which everything is related and gives sense.
The megainstallation disposes not only of several spatially differentiated components but also of philosophical, historical, social and familial determining levels. Its outward and inward milieu is heterogeneously composed of a covering and a kind of matrix (inner space) that is divided into several mutually dependent but permanently autonomous organs:
Windows
A symptomatic installation of accumulations the context of which follows up the tendencies evoked at the beginning of the 90ies. The window begins to exist as a metaphysical symbol of breaking out, the possibility of anticipating and of contact with the outer worlds. By cumulating destroyed textiles the artist evokes the essence of the negative terms: uselessness, waste of our wrappings, the passing nature and relativity of values. He stuffed the firmly symbolically anchored material into the windows in order to isolate the inside from the surface (similarly as Joseph Beuys, in the intentions of his individual mythology, fetishized felt and wrapped his objects with it in order to react to the stigma of war and to isolate the ritual fragments of society).
Here I can't avoid mentioning a certain physical coincidence that spontaneously shifted the substance of the windows: time and dampness that caused the reduction of space in the mixture of cuttings and not planned views through which sunlight gets in. Time shows its infiltrating superiority working adamantly and systematically changing something we want to be constant.
The black room is a mystical milieu beyond time and space. The only scenic (strongly domestic) component is the dressing table. The presence of Mrs Koppel, the artist's female alter ego, refers to the fact that under the unitary entity of the surface there is a great number of different beings who are able to coexist. By repainting the mirror in black he reaches the basic paradox - he ritually admits the woman's presence and ritually refuses to meet her (the mirror is covered with a black sheet after somebody dies to prevent his soul to wander about). There may be also fear of a new self identification. It isn't the acceptance of a new role, it is the matter of getting closer to the historical consciousness of this space. Baláž wants to draw attention to himself without evoking a reaction from the other side, and to transcend the course of the mansion's history.
The gloomy and occult articulation is exchanged by the white bedroom, the bed and the sheet are the media that make the artist's aura visible. The visually utmost suggestive fluorescent cast of the body speaks about several themes in several languages. The trace on the sheet is absolutely authentic, it bears our smell, sweat, the form of our body, it is our biophysical photography. It is information about our surface that is too ephemeral and vanishing for us to pay the least attention to it in the time of X-ray and ultrasound... (In his latest works - 2002 Baláž returns to this theme. He cumulates quite naturally and with little manipulation his biological and existential waste on immense canvases. Due to the gentle structures on a monochrome canvas he doesn't evoke the feeling of decadence or repulsion. On the contrary, we only perceive the symbolic character of this waste and the poetic parameter of the picture). He makes himself present in the bedroom, the body in its physical correlation.
I want to dwell on the colour symbolism of the multimedial space. There are four basic colours that codify the contents of the particular rooms. At the beginning of the 20th century and in the 50ies Kazimir Malevič, Yves Klein, Ad Reinhardt started monochromy and a revolutionary discussion ensued about the crisis of the picture. "If we speak about abstractly monochrome "pictures", we get into a conflict of meanings as the term "picture" comprises the reproduction of visible and imaginable phenomena in the first place, but pure painting defined only by colour is excluded from that.(8) The optic of a monochrome picture is strongly dependent on the structure of the applied paint, of the priming material, the consistence of the paint... If we shift to the 90ies we see that monochromy changed by post-modern transmutations to an inter-medial space installation in which several carriers of a single colour oscillate in cumulation that brings monochromy to a deeper inner structuralization. In this sense the Koppel House is a space with four monochrome pictures - neo-pictures to which the two-dimensionality is not sufficient. The artist gives them time and space so that we are able to move in absolute monochromy and use for its perceiving all senses, metaphoric and associative apparatuses. We therefore stop considering only the "wavelength" of the white colour and incorporate it in the coherence of cleanness, terra-incognita, beginning, naturalness, entirety of existence.
The blue room - an antique clock with the dial painted in blue. Time has stopped referring to the endless repetitions of human failures in the history of man. The blue colour is the colour of freedom (keeping in mind the French Revolution), and maybe due to this link we feel the cruel toll always paid for freedom. Baláž's nature and principles of behaviour marked this room with a personal stigma of infinite efforts "to change the state of things" in the regional and Slovak contexts. I've already mentioned a certain familial background of the megainstallation, the blue room gives evidence of the male, rationally constructive objectivising aspect of how wars influenced the course of history. None of the strategical changes in mankind's history could make it without wars. (In the blue twilight, listening to the tones of C. Orff's "Dies illa" I descretely moved on to K. Kieslowski's film - "Three colours - blue" in which the leading heroine, accompanied by Zbigniew Preisner's music, struggles to survive the oppressive losses in her life. It is significant how symbolist visualists of related quality perceive the message of the language of colours).
The red installation says about the soul: a circle, one of the most universal concepts of the events in the Universe, glows on a small round table. We perceive it as the symbol of warmth and light or as hope and faith (soul) in its religious aspect - At the transcendental level the horizontally divided circle is the symbol of the bipolarity of the cosmos (instinctiveness versus spiritualness), the circle divided by the verticale associates the two hemisphere of the brain (rationalness and emotions). The division by the sigma conceptually describes the joining of the male and female principles. The circle is the paradigm of all closed natural and civilising forms. Red is a very emotional colour and placed into a closed circle brings the concept to an end.
A precisely integrated space was presented in the performance Artwart (art like a wart). The artist's double, dressed in a four-coloured costume, entered without saying anything and beheaded the beautiful exotic plant on the four-coloured table (from the inventory of the artist's studio). The pathetic act of killing predicts the end of living works of art that either in deposited or exhibited forms become relics of the past. The flower fell rigidly in the same way as the space of the mansion turned to stone (originally full of people's destinies) in its new function as an institution — a can. The material that started to unwind in the year 1993 (Postscriptum II) presents the initial context of the megainstallation absorbing the post-conceptual approach in a radically minimalistic construction. Confrontation of the present and the past, resistance of architectural predetermination yielding to the present state resounds over all partial texts.
His understanding of the space is strongly related to Rachel Whiteread (1963), the British artist who casts imprints of architectural cavities in order to preserve, mummify the original of the building she works with.(9) Her strategy of a kind of architectural expressionism simulates the artistic articulation from inwards to outwards. The strongly recessive stand to the prevailing urban policy or manipulation is another theme of the same programme of analysing the space. Baláž works with the past of the building and visualises it by the model in which he is authentically present. Seen from the course of history it is in a certain sense a constant appropriation of the building that is only the stony clothing of a functionally differently determined space. By placing dress cuttings in the windows to destroy the history and filling the windows up with this material — he demonstrates the temporary recycling of the mansion. He wrapped up the whole process with a padded building to isolate the matrix — alive in a phase of reincarnation — from outside cold.
The whole project has very broad contexts similarly as Daniel Buren's work has. His perceiving of the building of a museum resounds in some symptoms in an inverse relation with Baláž's commentaries on the space.(10) Buren creates a non verbal commentary in the milieu of the museum — the result of his radically refusing and degrading projects. His latest work was created on this premise — the space of a fictitious museum without artefacts, its optics and composition solved in a not standard way, denying even the "host" himself. In the Ján Koniarek Gallery Baláž creates a no more existing household (in the real world) of his alter ego in reduced form. In order to make the identity of this space insecure he blurred its predestination and by a set of single units of the infrastructure smashed the contents of the space.
He himself experienced the background of intrigues and mechanisms (of even a political tinge) that accompanied any effort to build a firm basis of artistic activities in the region. Things perceived as self-evident by the public become struggles for power concealed by the term "public interest". This project cannot be perceived as an introspectively and authentically built act. It is an act of the denial of submissiveness (simultaneous with the beheading of the flower) that used the host (recent gallery) to offer a new content that can be read by using the synthetic, post-conceptual, critically reflexive articulation. It is not a commentary on the gallery, it is the commentary on the act of turning the whole space inside out (as a glove) due to that we meet temporarily the transcendental level and can only guess the material, knowable and empirical world behind it.
It is a work of art built as a spiral, unwinding linearly and horizontally but always in a slightly different course. In this way we have to read not only the installation "Good day, Mrs Koppel" but the whole work of the artist as well.
In connection with the performance Artwart, I must accentuate that Baláž's efforts to engage himself in the field of actions is a logic outcome of his complex work. The important dimension of time and the direct contact with the viewer enable him to attack with his work, like a missionary, and intensify his communication with the viewer. The action Scarabeus (on the symptomatic day 25th of March 1997) can be seen in a different light. The artist, pedagogue at the Trnava university, organised a crowd of about 2000 people who were pushing a large white round object of paper as a manifestation of revolt against the decision of the government to stop supporting culture and against the institutions who accepted this decision. The procession stopped at the monuments of Ján Koniarek and Milan Rastislav Štefánik to honour them but stood with their backs to the county office. This socially political gesture demonstrates the correlation of life and art. The artist's whole work is the result of a creative transformation of ideas to visible and materialised works of art. Not only thinking coherently but also creating continually - these are the qualities that prove that Blažej Baláž's life is at one with his art.
Anna Vartecká
Notes:
1. Vilém Flusser, In: Moc obrazu – Výtvarné umění 3-4/96, p. 39
2. Vlasta Čiháková – Noshiro, In: Archetypy, 1993
3. Vilém Flusser, In: Moc obrazu – Výtvarné umění 3-4/96, p. 118
4. Walter Benjamin, In: Umělecké dílo ve věku své technické
reprodukovatelnosti, Praha Odeon, 1979
5. Andreas Hochholzer, In: Joseph Beuys´ Experimentality – Výtvarné
umění 1/92, p. 48 – 53
6. Eva Petrová, In: Katalóg výstavy Objekt/Objekt – Metamorfózy
v čase, p. 11
7. Vladimír Macura, In: Projekt otevřeného domova – Slovenské pohľady
1991, p. 62
8. Wolfgang Hilger, In: O samoúčelnosti barvy – Monochromie jako
princip, 2002, p. 4
9. Olga Wewerka, In: Prostorový paradox, Ateliér 2/ 2002, p. 8
10. Etiene Cornevin, In: Patří komentář k muzeu ještě muzeu?
Ateliér 22/2002, p.9
