FORMS OF IMAGINING 07.02–14.04.14 PROJECT ARTS CENTRE
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A S T L A N Eva Kot’átková and Dominik Lang Curated by Tessa Giblin
Introduction He Do the Police in Different Voices: Kot’átková and Lang’s Collaborative Systems Biographies
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Beneath Prague, the city in which both Eva Koťátková and Dominik Lang live and work, there is one of the largest pneumatic post systems in the world. A live form of relay, the system delivered messages to hospitals, government organisations and businesses throughout the city’s centre via a 55km tubular network. Established in 1889, the system was active up until the European floods of 2002 and has lain dormant since. Communication, institutions and language appear repeatedly in the practices of both Eva Koťátková and Dominik Lang, and this pneumatic post system became the inspiration for their first (and thus far only) collaboration. Wasteland is a fragmented landscape in transition. Littered with found objects and genuine materials that were sourced from parks and archives across Dublin, its realism is contrasted with the surrealism within which it is wrapped and displayed. Each branch, stem and twig from a transplanted tree is painstakingly wrapped in brown paper. A puddle cut out of the asphalt is edged, wrapped and transported as an object. Stones and leaves are boxed and the wrapped silhouette of a cast iron park bench is propped up in the corner of the room. Wasteland was created as the scene of an institution in limbo. Neither in its original terrain, nor ready for reconstruction, the park is in transition. We learn about the background to this transition through a series of letters that are installed on the wall (a correspondence that Francis Halsall delves into for his essay He Do the Police in Different Voices). The language deployed is drawn from the large collection of institutional rules and conditions that Koťátková and Lang have been individually collecting and analysing for years. The increasingly wild bureaucracy in the writing, the absurd Kafkaesque details and (anti-) climax of the transition deal, endorse the formal absurdity of the installation. The rules and regulations that
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Introduction
pepper the writing are echoed in the sculptures, where one package has been torn across its face to reveal the park’s (former) opening and closing times. Koťátková and Lang are both children of the revolution – they grew up in a Czech Republic that was undergoing change, even if that change, as Koťátková is quick to point out, was much slower to arrive than they’d been led to believe (many years after the transition to a democratic state, students were still reading from communist text books). It is this bureaucratic slog towards a new system and the limits placed on the subject and its movement that underpins much of Koťátková’s work. The transformation of society alongside the transformation of a political system are part of a life cycle, one that can be halted (as in the case of the park) by nature’s own laws. In the final pages of their correspondence, the deal comes to a sudden halt due to the weather, and the dismantled park is stuck in limbo. Naked, smooth plaster blocks, archetypal forms with undulating surfaces stand in for the terrain of the landscape. Dominik Lang is fascinated by institutions – their organisation, function, architecture and social dimensions. For Wasteland, the generic, institutional safety lights of Project’s gallery have been wrenched from their sockets, left to dangle over the scene like misty park lamps hanging from the sky. The contemporary art institution too is being implicated in this game of transformation and decay – sculpting forms and compartmentalising things. Commissioned as a new work for their exhibition at Project Arts Centre, Wasteland later started a transformation of its own, embarking on a tour of Ireland. It spent the next year on a journey in and out of galleries, in and out of trucks, shipped from one end of the island to the other, each time accumulating bits and pieces of the places it had been. From Mermaid Arts Centre to Limerick City Gallery of Art, from Wexford Arts Centre to Droichead Arts Centre, and finally to West Cork Arts Centre, each venue contributed something of its own personality to the exhibition, deepening the complex web of associations around the work as it travelled the island. I give heartfelt thanks to Eva Koťátková and Dominik Lang for developing such a rich and generous project with us, and to David Upton – the Assistant Curator who became the tour coordinator and artistic collaborator of the artists – and to all the Directors and Curators of the partner venues who nurtured Wasteland into being again and again. Tessa Giblin, Curator of Visual Arts, Project Arts Centre
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Eva Kot’átková and Dominik Lang, Wasteland, 2014, mixed materials (detail), Project Arts Centre
He Do the Police in Different Voices: Kot’átková and Lang’s Collaborative Systems “The strange, the surprising, is of course essential to art; but art has to create a new world, and a new world must have a new structure.” – T. S. Eliot, ‘London Letter’, published in The Dial Magazine, 1921
Collaboration always comes with a threat. But this risk is also the source of its richest reward:the loss of identity. By necessity, any working relationship will involve the emergence of a new creative agent that no-one will have full control over. This is the collaboration itself; a system with its own volition, direction and tastes. This system requires its partners to negotiate with it. It asks them to test their aesthetic decisions and justify their choices. By necessity, collaboration forces new ways of thinking and making. It pitches participants into a situation of creative antagonism, in which everyone cajoles each other into producing what nobody is quite expecting. Wasteland by Eva Koťátková and Dominik Lang is such a system. It’s an artistic project born from cooperation in which their identity has been subsumed into a third thing. Collaboration is not only its means, but also its medium and, ultimately, its subject matter. They’ve collaborated with objects, organisation and one another. Eliot and Pound’s Wasteland
Its title recalls that other, famous, Waste Land which was also produced by the creative antagonism of two writers working together. Between 1921 and 1922 T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound worked together on the poem which would become the signal work of modernist poetry. Eliot acknowledged his debt by dedicating the poem in 1925 to “Il miglior fabbro” (“the better craftsman”). The annotated manuscripts make for astonishing reading. They show how the poem developed from a negotiation between the multiple comments of Eliot and Pound (with additional editorial comments from Valerie, Eliot’s wife and editor). Under Pound’s guidance, whole sections were cut, moved around and re-sculpted. The title changes from ‘He 4/5
Eva Kot’átková and Dominik Lang, Wasteland, 2015, Mermaid Arts Centre, Project Arts Centre on Tour
Do the Police in Different Voices’. The whole first page goes – cancelled with a single pencil line. Throughout we can see how the verses took shape by being meticulously crafted into a self-contained world where everything works together with elegant precision. What is left over from this conversation is a poem in which it’s unclear as to who deleted or added what; and who should take full authorial credit. We can’t be sure where one writer’s voice begins or another ends. The manuscript can be seen variously through different perceptual modes. It’s a visual tabula rasa embedded with the multiple scrawled indices of poetic creation and a collage overlaid with the scraps and fragments of reality that have been pasted onto its surface. But it’s also a refrain of multiple voices that sometimes negate each other and yet sometimes reverberate in a brittle chorus. Much like the final poem itself, there is a deep-seated ambiguity of authorship and identity as multiple voices clamour to be heard. What have been rendered uncertain are the relationships between the idioms of: high and low-brow; classical and vernacular; modernity and tradition.
Eva Kot’átková and Dominik Lang, Wasteland, 2014, installation view, mixed materials, Project Arts Centre
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Something of the spirit of the authors’ relationship is revealed in a note by Pound on a handwritten section which reads: “Bad – but can’t attack until I get typescript.”1 It reveals an interlocutor who is eager to engage but also pass judgment and “attack” the weakness of their friend. Pound slashes out Eliot’s use of the word “perhaps” and writes “perhaps be damned” and “if you know, know damned well or else you don’t.”2 A lot of the text is dismissed as flabby or unnecessary, with comments like: “verse not interesting enough as verse to warrant so much of it.”3 Pound both consoles and chastises Eliot with the various “OKs” and “Echts” scrawled through the text. He takes him to task for the “demotic” use of words like “abominable” and challenges him to resist cliché and commonplace. “Too easy”4 Pound warns of a phrase too easily reached. Another is “too loose.”5 Laziness, it seems, is not to be tolerated. Pound takes Eliot to task for using the word “may” with the scathing comment: “make up yr. mind”6 and is contemptuous of the equivocation suggested by the use of the word ‘perhaps’: “perhaps be damned”7 he pithily notes. Elsewhere we can see that Eliot rewrites and rewrites until he gets the comment “OK”. The poem, clearly, would not be anything like its published version without these conversations. In a different context, it would be easy to read such cajoling through the logic of power and authority. Such language could be read as hurtful and unproductive; undermining and antagonistic. However what we can see instead is them both using language to build a new world around themselves which only they inhabit. Much of the vocabulary is incomprehensible to outsiders. For example one comment seems to be about the rhythm of a line: “3 lines Too tum-pum at a stretch”,8 a further comment asks: “Why this Blot and Scutcheon between 1922 and lil’”.9 Another remark warns that the line “Filled all the desert with inviolable voice” is “too penty”10 which is ambiguous and the contemporary reader can only hazard a guess as to what it really means. Is it a recommendation to disrupt the pentamic beats of repeated syllables perhaps? Or is this a warning that the “inviolable” voice mimics the stridency of the Pentecostal imagery of renewal that Eliot used elsewhere, but is rejecting in The Waste Land. We can never be sure. This is the private language of intimate communication. It talks of shared values and practices. It is a new system of communication that is being brought into being through their collaboration. This is the system of The Waste Land; a system that is also a world unto itself.
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Eva Kot’átková and Dominik Lang, Wasteland, installation view, mixed materials, Project Arts Centre, 2014
E and D’s Wasteland
Like Eliot and Pound, Lang and Koťátková have also brought a new world into being through their system of collaboration. Their Wasteland takes the form of an installation of wrapped objects – a fence, a bike, a postbox, some other things – and an accompanying narrative of letters between ‘E’ and ‘D’. The objects and correspondence seem to pertain to the transportation of a park through a postal system. The objects are all wrapped up waiting be sent. The letters track the fractured, frustrated, passive-aggressive to-and-fro of trying to get this done. The absurdity of this leaks out through daft or impossible requests between the collaborators. Objects like rocks, birds and benches get damaged in transit, or go awry. “Please tell your staff to carry [the rain puddle] with attention, as previously discussed it has to be carried in a horizontal position protecting the puddle from leaking” reads one. E and D go through a form of communication in which dialogue never really happens. For all their attempts to build a system, their own “unreal city”, it’s breaking down. Through talking to themselves they miss one another. Yet for all this absurdity there is something very familiar in these actions and exchanges. They mimic other recognisable forms of social
Eva Kot’átková and Dominik Lang, Wasteland, 2014, installation view, mixed materials (detail), Project Arts Centre
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Collaborative Systems
All artists collaborate by using systems. They must do so whether they know it or not; by choice or obliviously. On the one hand, systems are a means to work with other people through common vocabularies, objects or practices. And on the other, systems are something to be collaborated with themselves. Every time something is exhibited, published, photographed, printed, written about, insured, sold or whatever else happens to art these days, it is circulated within systems of distribution and display. Artists use systems because of what they do. After all, mediums like painting and sculpture can be considered systems with their own patterns of interconnection and self-organisation and histories. But other systems are also mediums readily available for artists to use: technology; architecture; language; styles; objects. These are all systems too. Sometimes these systems are in plain view; other times hidden. Koťátková and Lang give some of these structure and form. Systems will mean different things to different people. Ask a librarian and they might tell you that the books they work with are arranged according to a particular taxonomic system. A musician, on the other hand, might have a system that allows them to improvise. In 2012 the U.S. AntiDoping Agency issued this statement in the aftermath of the cyclist Lance Armstrong’s doping allegations: “we believe that allowing individuals like the riders mentioned today to come forward and acknowledge the
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interaction, from the forms of negotiation that are required to work with institutions in the public sphere to the more intimate back and forth of conversations between individuals. It’s also a metaphor for how, as artists, Lang and Koťátková have used their Wasteland to collectively manoeuvre between their two very different practices. In a straightforward sense, they’ve done this manoeuvring by wrapping up objects. And this too is another metaphor. After all, wrapping things up is what art does. It envelops the objects of the world in its own perplexing systems. Through a three-way collaboration between artist, world and medium, art wraps up things in texture, language, symbol and surface. This might all sound very serious, but it’s not really. Let’s not forget that collaboration can often take the form of a double-act. Here E and D enact a mischievous subversion of systems that are oblique, playful and generous. It is, I think, the counterpoint to T. S. Eliot’s cynical defeatism in the face of a world that is nothing more than a “heap of broken images.” That is a world perhaps not knowable in itself. Instead, their Wasteland offers the optimists’ promise that art is a way of making different worlds and new systems.
Eva Kot’átková and Dominik Lang, Wasteland, 2015, Droichead Arts Centre. Project Arts Centre on Tour
truth about their past doping may be the only way to truly dismantle the remaining system that allowed this “EPO and Blood Doping Era” to flourish”.11 Just recently, I had a conversation with a telecommunications engineer about whether systems are a useful metaphor to understand contemporary society, and she looked at me puzzled. “But of course”, she said, “everything is a system; why wouldn’t you see that?” Talk to a conspiracy theorist and the system is something to blame. For some time now I’ve been collecting systems to work with. It’s compelling, and once you start you’ll find them almost everywhere you look. The clothing company The North Face is currently selling “Zip and Snap-in compatible jackets [that] let you pair or subtract a layer from your winter system for ultimate versatility.” Gillette produce the Sensor 3 system for shaving that promises a: “blade system [that] actually works with – not against – your face.”12 And the yoghurt drink Yakult has the following claim on the homepage of its website: “You may not think about your digestive system when you think about your overall well-being, but that’s where good health and proper nutrition begins. Drinking Yakult daily may help balance
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Collaborating with the World
In perhaps the most famous line of The Waste Land, Eliot promises the reader he’ll show them “fear in a handful of dust.” This is the dust of the wasteland that blows around the desert of the real. Eliot’s wasteland offers a pessimistic view of the modern world in which structure is disintegrating and relationships between things, people and traditions are dissipating. And collaboration with each other or this fragmented reality is nigh-on impossible. But art need not merely passively participate in this disintegration or reproduce its effects. Perhaps the world is a wasteland. But it’s also a wasteland populated by myriad little collaborations which continually resist entropy through modest acts of worldmaking. A more optimistic proposition, I think, is presented by E and D’s Wasteland. Despite its somewhat sardonic tone, it presents a model not only of what art is and how it can work in the world, but also how that model of art is a way of understanding consciousness itself. It shows how the world can be constantly unpacked, re-wrapped and remade in our daily interactions with it, as we re-wrap it with language, technology, custom and love. The world itself is not merely a wasteland. It’s a landscape that invites collaboration: between ourselves, each other and its countless puzzling objects. Francis Halsall
1 T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts, Ed. Valerie Eliot, (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), pg. 55 2 Ibid. pg. 45/7 3 Ibid. pg. 45 4 Ibid. pg. 45 5 Ibid. pg. 39 6 Ibid. pg. 47 7 Ibid. pg. 45 8 T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts, Ed. Valerie Eliot, (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), pg. 11
9 Ibid. pg. 13 10 Ibid. pg. 11 11 Statement From USADA CEO Travis T. Tygart Regarding The U.S. Postal Service Pro Cycling Team Doping Conspiracy http:// cyclinginvestigation.usada.org/ (Statement released 10-10-12 at 9:30 AM Mountain Time) 12 http://gillette.com/ [17th March, 2015] 13 http://www.yakultusa.com/why-drink-yakult.php [24th August, 2013]
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your digestive system.”13 Systems are ubiquitous; inescapable. Banking systems; health-care systems; furniture systems; air-conditioning systems; clothing systems; we are surrounded by them. E and K’s world is constructed from ramshackle replicas of these ubiquitous systems of communication and distribution. We can still recognise in their bureaucracy and their slowness some of the networks that we have to work with in our own world. Despite being defunct and anachronistic, they’re familiar all the same.
Eva Kot’átková and Dominik Lang, Wasteland, 2014, installation view, mixed materials, Project Arts Centre
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Eva Kot’átková and Dominik Lang, Wasteland, 2014, installation, mixed materials (detail), Project Arts Centre
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Eva Kot’átková and Dominik Lang, Wasteland, 2014, mixed materials (detail), Project Arts Centre
Eva Kot’átková and Dominik Lang, Wasteland, 2015, Limerick City Gallery of Art. Project Arts Centre on Tour
Eva Kot’átková and Dominik Lang, Wasteland, 2015, West Cork Arts Centre, Project Arts Centre on Tour
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Eva Kot’átková and Dominik Lang, Wasteland, 2015, Wexford Arts Centre. Project Arts Centre on Tour
Biographies Eva Koťátková has exhibited in the recent international exhibitions of Venice Biennale, 2013; Moscow Biennale, 2013; 18th Biennale of Sydney, 2012; and 11th Biennale de Lyon, 2011, as well as making solo exhibitions at Modern Art Oxford and Kunstverein Braunschweig in 2013, amongst others. She studied at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts, Prague Academy of Applied Arts, San Francisco Art Institute and Akademie Bildende Kunst Wien from 2002–2007. In 2007 she became the youngest artist ever to be awarded the Jindrich Chalupecky Award for young artists in the Czech Republic.
Dominik Lang exhibited in La Triennale, Paris, 2012, and has presented recent solo exhibitions at Secession, Vienna, 2013; Kunsthaus Dresden, 2012; and the Pavilion of the Czech Republic at the 54th Venice Biennale, 2011. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in 2008, and has studied at Cooper Union in New York and the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague. Currently he is head of the sculpture studio at the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague, together with Edith Jerabkova. In 2013 he was awarded the Jindrich Chalupecky Award for young artists.
Francis Halsall is Lecturer in Visual Culture, and Director (with Declan Long) of MA Art in the Contemporary World (www.acw.ie), National College of Art and Design, Dublin. He’s also Research Fellow at the Dept of Art History and Image Studies, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein,South Africa. He mostly works on the theories and aesthetics of systems. More details about his work can be found on his blog: www.alittletagend.blogspot.com
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Eva Kot’átková and Dominik Lang, Wasteland, 2014, installation view, mixed materials, Project Arts Centre
Eva Kot’átková and Dominik Lang, Wasteland, 2014, mixed materials (detail), Project Arts Centre
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Wasteland Eva Koťátková and Dominik Lang Published as an edition of Forms of Imagining, a series published by Project Press based on the exhibitions programme of Project Arts Centre, Dublin. Dublin, March 2016 ISBN 978-1-872493-53-4 Editor: Tessa Giblin © The Artists, Writers and Project Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission of the publishers. Text: Tessa Giblin, Francis Halsall Designed in Ireland by WorkGroup Sub-Editor: Kate Heffernan Series Editor: Emer Lynch Wasteland Eva Koťátková and Dominik Lang 7 February – 14 April 2014 Project Arts Centre, Dublin Wasteland nationwide tour Mermaid Arts Centre, 13 February – 21 March 2015 Limerick City Gallery of Art, 3 April – 15 May 2015 Wexford Arts Centre, 14 June – 25 July 2015 Droichead Arts Centre, 6 August 18 September 2015 West Cork Arts Centre, 26 September – 7 November 2015
Curator: Tessa Giblin Assistant Curator and Tour Coordinator: David Upton Tour Manager: Sarah Ling Production Manager: Joseph Collins Artistic Director: Cian O’Brien Project Press Project Arts Centre 39 East Essex Street Temple Bar Dublin 2 Ireland + 353 (0)1 881 9613 gallery@projectartscentre.ie www.projectartscentre.ie Project Arts Centre is supported by The Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon and Dublin City Council. With warm thanks to Eva Koťátková, Dominik Lang and Francis Halsall. The artists and Project Arts Centre would like to extend special thanks to David Upton, Sarah Ling, Kate Heffernan, Rachel-Rose O’Leary, Chris Clarke, Jose Miguel Jimenez, Robert McDermott, Cian O’ Brien, Noelle Brown, Sarah Pierce and Hugo Byrne, Annette Devoy and Jasmin Maher. Further warm thanks to Christy Maher and Eamonn Dunne at Dublin City Council Eamonn Ceannt Park, Joan Comiskey at An Post, Ger Inbush at Limerick Civic Trust, Helen Bresnan at Bus Éireann, Joe Murphy at Irish Art Couriers, the Irish Museum of Modern Art and Galerie Hunt Kastner, Prague.
Lastly Project Arts Centre’s nationwide tour of Wasteland would not have been possible without the support of all the staff at the five tour venues. Special thanks to Niamh O’Donnell, Director at Mermaid Arts Centre; Catherine Bowe, Visual Art Manager at Wexford Arts Centre; Una McCarthy, Director, and Siobhan O’Reilly, Care of Collections and Exhibitions, at Limerick City Gallery of Art; Marcella Bannon, Director, and Tony Conaghy, Visual Arts Officer, at Droichead Arts Centre; and Ann Davoren, Director at West Cork Arts Centre.