Francis Alÿs has created an installation of hundreds of drawings, which are suspended in enclosed space at the centre of the exhibition. The drawings are the stills required to produce three minutes and fourteen seconds of an animation showing a woman repeatedly tying a simple knot in her long hair that then undoes itself. The massive number of drawings required to form this short animation demonstrate the huge disproportion, on which Alÿs regularly reflects, in much human activity between effort and result, work and labour.
Much of that involved and repetitive activity centres on knotty problems – Catch 22 situations or paradoxes – that cannot simply be unravelled and straightened out. In this work, Alÿs activates a game of opposites - joining and unravelling, arranging and disrupting, doing and undoing, drawing and erasing – while also emphasising the human nature of what it is that we are doing, as knots require the work of our hands and untangling knots is one thing a machine is unable to do.
In Big Series (1983-85), Vladimír Kokolia is showing a large number of fragile figurative ink drawings produced during the final years of the Iron Curtain – when the Communist Party reinforced its censorship of the politically subversive arts as part of a programme of ‘Normalisation’. This programme of censorship included a ban on ‘politically subversive’ exhibitions, films, publications and concerts. Kokolia’s drawings are on display for the first time after more than thirty years in storage; synergies, perhaps, with the ‘Unpainted Paintings’ of Emil Nolde.
Kokolia has described the atmosphere of suppression in which these drawing were produced as being ‘a horrible time’ because ‘your enemy was everywhere and nowhere’ meaning that you ‘could never meet him.’ As a result, these early works acquired a sense of political commentary in the depiction of grotesque stories of cruelty and weakness. They show the wretchedness of human endeavour in which human figures struggle for a glimpse of meaning in absurd circumstances. As such, they hold their own against similar series such Goya’s Disasters of War or Rouault’s Miserere.
This first room of Kokolia’s exhibition, with its deliberately subdued lighting, has significant synergy with the notion of turbulence found in Alÿs’ exhibition. In addition to the surreal horrors of the Big Series, we also find Storm Centre (2001) which draws us, helter-skelter, into a deep blue spiralling vortex. Similarly, we enter the Alÿs exhibition through Tornado (2000-2010), a video projection which records Alÿs’ chasing of “dust devils” in attempts to enter their eye with a camera in hand. He then films their windless core, a monochrome of dust that literally abstracts him from the outside world.
The lianas, mazes, or winding footpaths of Kokolia’s paintings – generally depicting the trucks, branches or leaf canopies of trees around Veverské Nnínice, the small Moravian village where he lives – also resemble the knots which form a central image in Alÿs’ exhibition. In Kokolia’s work, his tangled coils of shifting patterns and colours are skeins through which we glimpse the light beyond. In Alÿs’ work they enmesh us in the repetitive and demanding round of human activity from which we cannot emerge.
While there are many synergies between these two exhibitions, the heart of the difference between the two is found in Kokolia’s sense of wonderment with the natural world and Alÿs’ sense of constraint in the human world.
Both touch fleetingly on spiritual language in their work, demonstrating by this not any sense of personal proselytization, more the enduring strength of religious language and concepts even when secularized. Kokolia expresses his sense of wonderment in his exhibition title ‘Epiphany’; ‘a profound {and unexpected) revelation borne out of everyday experience.’ Alÿs entitles his new animation Exodus 3:14, in which God speaking from the burning bush names himself before Moses as, ‘I am who I am’. For Alÿs this is another knotty paradox that we cannot resolve. Even when we run into the eye of the storm, nothing is revealed. For Kokolia, however, there is light at the end of the tunnel.
Francis Alÿs: Knots’n Dust and Vladimír Kokolia: Epiphany are at Ikon Gallery until 9 September 2018
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Gungor - Vapour.
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