ENGLISH


The Air Between the Walls
by Milena Kalinovska


It was sometime in the winter of 1998 that I was asked by the Independent Curators International (ICI) in New York to curate an exhibition designed to travel to the parts of the world where the works in the show had originated from. Intrigued, I saw it as a opportunity to do something I’d never done before, which was to address the sixties, a period that has played a significant role in shaping our understanding of art. The issues that emerged from this period—the dematerialization of the object, among them, and the view that the idea determines the meaning of a work of art—as well as the varied takes on these of different artists have always depended on specific cultural contexts. I wanted to look at this phenomenon through the work of a small number of artists who remain relevant today.
To do this, I enlisted the aid of other curators and writers—Jana Sevcikova, Jiri Sevcik, and Paolo Herkenhoff, in particular—to help me organize a focused, historically-based exhibition that would use our current interpretation of history to reveal not only conceptual, but visual relationships. Drawing on four different political and geographic regions—Central and Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and North and South America—we wanted to address the work of artists who share histories and values, but who have not been exhibited together before. Inevitably, including works of known artists along with those less unfamiliar to the art public would form an aspect of the project. The perception of whose works are familiar and whose are not would, of course, change as the exhibition traveled to different places, but one thing, we knew, would have to remain constant: the critical view of traditionally exclusive notions of history, especially Eurocentric art history, that the exhibition would incorporate.
Because the subject of the exhibition was the sixties, I thought it would be a good idea to begin in Prague, the city where I was born and where, during the sixties, I had had so many formative experiences. Among these was a trip I took out of the country which, in 1970, led to my being tried in absentia and sentenced to prison, as well as declared persona non grata and stripped of my Czech citizenship. As a result, I was unable to return to Czechoslovakia until the Velvet Revolution. I did, however, keep up with artists from that part of the world whom I viewed as no different from those I was working with in North America or Western Europe. The only difference of any significance was in the dearth of opportunities they had for critical acknowledgment and exposure.
Prague having been chosen, it was then determined that the exhibition—which was to be called Beyond Preconceptions: The Sixties Experiment—would be installed in the city’s Veletrzni Palac, home of the National Gallery, and one of the most spectacular buildings from the twenties and best examples of early functionalist architecture in Czechoslovakia. This would be a challenging task since, to engage the participating artists and public in general, the works in the show would have to be animated by the space, which itself would need to be layered and ramified—like the history of the city it was part of. In other words, to succeed in communicating the openness of the works, the overall installation would itself have to be opened up to allow works to be viewed singly, together, and from many perspectives—all at the same time. This would highlight not only known similarities and differences among the works, but bring to light, we felt certain, hitherto unknown ones. In addition, if the installation allowed the works to communicate the intensity of the ideas behind them here at the formidable Veletrzni Palac, then we were sure it could do so in the other venues the show would be traveling to. The success of the installation, therefore, was key to the success of the entire project.
My collaborator Jiri Sevcik, who is a former director of the Veletrzni Palac and a great admirer of its architecture, felt strongly that whatever installation strategy was settled on, it could not suppress or ignore the features of this landmark structure. It would thus be up to the architect to honor the twenties and transform the sixties for contemporary viewers. I sent slides of some one hundred and thirty works by twenty-one artists to Prague with factual descriptions, including whether the works were to be placed on the walls, pedestals, or in glass cabinets. After much transatlantic discussion back and forth by e-mail and telephone, Jana Sevcikova and Jiri Sevcik finally chose Josef Pleskot, an architect whose work was unfamiliar to me.
Happily, this would soon change. I arrived in Prague in June of last year and the first thing I did was to meet with an artist to see her latest work. It was installed in a private exhibition space that was open to the public and situated in a late nineteenth-century industrial building. When I walked into the building, I was surprised to see how simply its interior had been renovated and struck by a certain lucidity it had—the effect of a subtle combination of materials. These qualities, combined with the light pouring in though the window, made the artist’s show seem to float in and out of focus in the space—exactly the effect I wanted for Beyond Preconceptions.
It didn’t take me long to realize that I was in Josef Pleskot’s architectural studio, of which the exhibition space was only a part (and his way, he later told me, of honoring artists he admires). In no time at all, I knew that a better architect to handle the space in the Veletrzni Palac could not have been found. When I later read an interview with him, I was only further convinced. “The truth,” he told the interviewer, “is that I don’t see the material reality of [a building], but I do feel the atmosphere intensely.... I often say that architecture is the air between the walls, not the walls themselves...[in the sense] not so much [of] what relation the walls bear to each other, but [of] the empty space they create, because that ‘empty space’ is architecture, the most important place of communication.”
I met Josef Pleskot for the first time in November of last year, when I went to Prague to install Beyond Preconceptions at the Veletrzni Palac. At the same time, I also met architect Peter Lacko, Pleskot’s former associate, who worked with us daily on the project. They had already positioned the six principal walls and the plinths in the 8,500 square feet of balconies/galleries we had been allocated around the central courtyard. Pleskot had decided to use “movable” walls made out of simple industrial plywood and treated twice with a pale varnish. (The plinths were similarly treated.) But simple though this strategy was, it had the effect of “revolutionizing” the white cube, not only because it introduced into its midst a warm material—wood—which had been varnished a milky white, but because it involved the apparently random installation of temporary plywood walls. But random though the scattering effect of the installation may have seemed, it was really anything but.
The result was a space in which the works seemed to float and the walls to disappear. In practice, this meant we were able to layer or juxtapose works on several levels because the walls not only gave us enough space, but were positioned in such a way as to encourage interactive installation. Following no rigid geographical divisions or particular thematic groupings, we were guided only by our interest in encouraging viewers to make their own connections. In addition, the excitement of surprise and discovery, which we as curators had shared while shaping the exhibition, we wanted the visitors to the show to enjoy as well, because the work would only come alive through their participation.
When we were installing the work of an individual artist in one area, we were aware that it could be seen from a number of different perspectives, that is, in close proximity to the works of at least four other artists, and from a distance, where it would be judged by how well it held up in the space. Here I would like to quote Josef Pleskot again. Though his subject is the relationship between nature and architecture, he could well have been writing about the exhibition itself: “Yes, I do find content important [but] I don’t want [the] idealization or harmonization of the relationship between man and nature, but more of a consensus, a comparison, a calming, which doesn’t have to have the highest, most noble, aim.”
Summing up the many discussions Jana, Jiri, Pablo, and I had about the exhibition, I concluded my essay for the catalogue by saying: “If we give so much weight to history, we [have to] ask why history is important for the present, why artists did a certain thing, and what was their dream. The past per se should not be a cage to the present; it is up to us to connect it more meaningfully with the present.” I believe that the collaboration between the architect and ourselves aimed at exactly this.





.by Jana Sevcikova

Biggest among the challenges of the exhibition project Beyond Preconceptions was the question of how to present art personalities together from very different cultural and historical contexts, from respected centers to little-known peripheries. In meeting this challenge, the project could not be allowed to fall apart nor could the leading, codified names be permitted to overshadow those that had been forgotten. Additional challenges lay in deciding what purpose the exhibition was, in fact, meant to serve; was it to add more names to the list of those already known, thereby making their historical roles more precise? or was it to suppress the historical problem to some extent and confine itself to relating the exhibition to the present only.
Having worked with historical material for a long time, I am well aware of how difficult it is to present a historical line with any degree of objectivity, and of how difficult it then is to defend, since omitting a measure of subjectivity from one’s approach can never be fully achieved. Exhibitions conceived of from a strictly historical point of view always serve the professional public most, and communicate with the public only with difficulty because of the closure implied in their being historical material. The expectations imposed on them—for historical completeness or the inclusion of celebrated artworks, for instance—are also different.
The exhibition Beyond Preconceptions, however, has managed to avoid such demands thanks to its more topical and experimental character. This is expressed in a certain transgressiveness of ideas—extensions beyond the specificities of given regions—which most likely reflects the spirit of the times, and by a certain digressiveness of ideas and conceptions—deviations from the norm which are often more significant than the canon of the great centers, and which bring with them invigorating “mistakes.” To me, that this exhibition has come along at a time when so many of the younger generation are tackling similar issues is extremely important.
During the installation in Prague, two seemingly incompatible objectives needed to be paid attention to. One was to proceed—in accordance with the architects’ wishes and with respect to their layout (panel walls in a completely free-floating space)—in such a way that the installation of individual artworks could be read as a continuous “flow” within a natural dynamic. And the second was to fulfill the aim of the curators to create a productive tension and, if possible, as many possible mutual interconnections, among artworks that had never been presented together before. To do this would mean pointing out both the connections and differences between and among the works, a circumstance that could only occur within a balanced constellation of effects. Thus, for me, the basic precepts for an exhibition of this kind were: 1) to encourage viewers to stop in front of individual works for which unconventional settings had been created for them to be noticed, settings that supplied a supportive confrontation within their proximity; and 2) to create a feeling of unity with the whole.


by Josef Pleskot and Peter Lacko

At the time it was built, the Veletrzni Palac, or Trade Fair Palace, was the largest and most radical constructivist structure in Europe. In the field of Czech architecture, it represented the first large-scale building of the new style, and it was intended to serve as an exhibition space for modern products made in the newly-established Czechoslovak Republic.
Following a competition in 1924, the proposal submitted by two Czech architects, Josef Fuchs and Oldr[hacek over ‘r’]ich Tyl, was selected. It called for a building with two large halls, one of which (called the Small Auditorium) was to be surrounded with airy galleries on all six storeys. The style of the building was connected to the program of the scientific wing of Czech functionalist architecture represented by the leading figure of the Czech avant-garde between the wars, Karel Teige. During this period, Le Corbusier made several visits to Prague and was an enthusiastic supporter of the building, which was completed in 1928.
A fire in 1974 eventually led the government to give the Veletrzni Palac to the National Gallery. The reconstruction of the building was headed by architects from the progressive SIAL group, and work on the exhibition spaces was finally completed in 1995.
Beyond Preconceptions was held in one of the Small Auditorium galleries. To prepare the gallery, we initially spent time on analysis and conceptual considerations. We then independently sketched different variations of how to work with the space in ways that connected the permanent, and very impressive, architectural space of the Small Atrium in the Veletrzni Palac to a space temporarily fashioned for the creation of site-specific artistic works and for the artworks themselves. We resolved not to emphasize one at the expense of the other.
We excluded the possibility of slavishly following the structural system of the Veletrzni Palac, with its rectangular division of space. We also ruled out formally symmetrical solutions, and eventually agreed on an arrangement that while not in conflict with the structural integrity of the building, would evoke an autonomous space within it without excessively delineating it. The basic structural elements of this arrangement were three-meter-high panels freely installed (even on the diagonal) in the rectangular framework of the structure.
We then spontaneously agreed to reject conventional white for this arrangement and, in the end, decided to exclude any color at all. Though a silvery gray was considered for a time, we finally agreed to use plywood board treated with a pale white varnish. The resulting surface texture was that of wood, but with a milky haze to it.
The installation itself was the collective effort of many like-minded people and, as it progressed, the concept of the exhibition became more precise and exact, as unexpected connections emerged. The artworks were given their own space, within which they could either stand alone, or interact with nearby and distant works. It was therefore not a museum, but a living gallery that they occupied.

[Bios]

Milena Kalinovska is an independent curator who served as the director of The
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, from 1991 to 1997. Before that, she
was an adjunct curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, and
associate director and exhibitions director at Riverside Studios in London.

[Jana Sevcikova to come]

[Jiri Sevcik to come]

Josef Pleskot’s architectural offices, known as AP atelier, are located in Prague and where he creates structures designed for a wide range of purposes. He has organized exhibitions for his private exhibition project called The Space for All Media since 1995, and is a regular contributor to the professional press.

Peter Lacko is currently a freelance architect working in Prague. He has worked with Josef Pleskot, with whom he has participated in a number of design projects and realizations, and in Austria, with Hubert Riess at his studio.
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