Jiří Kovanda
Galerie Výtvarného Umění v Chebu/Gavu Cheb
The work of Czech artist Jiří Kovanda involves a continuous struggle to overcome boundaries. This is apparent not only in his well-known performances of the 1970s, but also in his later paintings, assemblages, and installations from the mid-’80s to the present. Performances such as Attempted Acquaintance or Contact, both 1977, dramatize the artist’s very personal fear of embarrassment and apprehension in communicating with the outside world and can thus be understood as a form of personal therapy that aspires to break down borders between the self and the other.
A similar strategy is also evident in Kovanda’s nonperformative— that is, object-based—work. His aim to dissolve the line between art and life brings him to manipulate familiar objects from the outside world and incorporate them into works that, outside of the gallery context (and sometimes even within it), could easily be overlooked. This near invisibility resonates with Kovanda’s efforts to escape artistic trends and avoid any reductive framing. Although it could be argued that his oeuvre hovers on the border between kitsch and high aesthetics, his goal is to test the possibility of their equivalence and thus to deconstruct the distinction between art objects and utilitarian objects. It is exactly this endeavor that brought Kovanda to use the occasion of the publication of a catalogue to transform the book into an art object and make it the subject of his latest exhibition.
The show was simply yet poignantly titled “Catalogue.” It lived up to this title on many levels: The viewer was presented with the catalogue on a white pedestal, and its printed pages were organized around the space in what at first glance resembled a chronological run-through of Kovanda’s work. Only after closer inspection did the spectator realize that form in this case does not follow content, and that the conceptual essence of the publication opposes chronological or, for that matter, any other kind of ordering. The catalogue and the exhibition have a greater ambition, namely the formation of what might be called a democratic archive, in which the power of interpretation is handed over to the reader/spectator. Sources such as photographic documentation, invitations to exhibition openings, letters, and exhibition reviews, combined with formal and informal texts that deal with the artist’s personality, all included in the catalogue, are set against the real works of the archive. The spectator thus takes the position of an archivist—he is offered a double perspective: on the one hand, oriented toward the past and rooted in the documented image of the work; on the other, toward the presence of the work itself. Through this gesture, Kovanda not only points to the fragile border between documentation and presentation but also, and most importantly, overcomes it. Work and its documentation have here become equally important. The border between outside and inside has been erased. The catalogue has become the actual art object, which has in turn been dematerialized. The process of interpretation and the subjective stance of the spectator suddenly emerge as the new subjects under scrutiny.