The Gallery of Fine Arts Karlovy Vary
Authority: The Karlovy Vary Region
Director: Mgr. Jan Samec
History:
The Gallery of Fine Arts was founded on 1 January 1953. Its premises from the very beginning until now are at the former office building of the Trades Association and the Trades Chamber, built, including the exhibition rooms, in 1911-1912. A branch of the Karlovy Vary Gallery was installed in 1966 at the Early- Baroque summerhouse of the dukes of Lauenburg (A.Leuthner) at Ostrov nad Ohří.
Collection:
The collections of 20th-century Czech art contain the turn of the century emotional, symbolist and realist works dating from the period of the birth of modern fine art. Other parts of the collection exemplify the changing trends in the first half of the 20th century – Expressionism, Fauvism, Cubism and Surrealism. Well represented are artists active during the war, who focused primarily on Man, the city and civilization. There are important works from the 1960s by artists presenting their concern with issues of human life in geometrical, informal, imaginative and neo-figurative form. The permanent exhibition of Czech art ends with contemporary authors, whose artistic expression is most heterogeneous
Statement:
GUKV as a Space for Art and Thinking
Policy Document 2009 to 2012
Introduction:
This policy document discusses the profile, activities, position, and trajectory of the future development of GUKV,The Gallery of fine Arts in Karlovy Vary, one of the key institutions in the basis infrastructure in the field of the visual arts in the Czech Republic. It argues how GUKV developed distinct ways of: – working locally as well as in the national and international contexts;- creating a new balance between exhibition-making, research,discussion, production of knowledge, and education;- connecting to critical issues both within artistic practice and theory as well as in the society;- investing itself equally in production and presentation;- working with the public by means of participation;- and connecting to other practitioners and institutions in the Czech Republic and abroad, both in the sector of visual arts and other fields. In the brief history of its existence GUKV became a leading art institute capable of addressing critical issues and themes in and through art ahead of its time and in ways that to a great extent influence institutional practice for the visual art field at home and abroad.
GUKV is a space dedicated to thinking from, about, and through art. GUKV invests itself in the exploration and empowerment of two vital relationships: the link between art and the public sphere, and the alliance between artistic practice and theory. In this respect, GUKV initiates research on diverse subjects of urgency in society that are key to the pursuit of these crucial relationships in art, and together with artists and other cultural practitioners realizes projects such as exhibitions, lectures, education, publications, and productions of new work. GUKV’s examination of the possibilities of art in today’s world is a long-term continuous critical engagement, which is both globally informed and locally committed.
Under my direction, the institution undertook the task of rethinking itself and embarked on a process of reorientation in search of the ideal contemporary art institute. GUKV could be said to be an embodiment of such a trajectory of continuous questioning of the conditions and parameters for a space dedicated to art, and as such, an experimental response to a number of questions that marked this endeavor: Why call this institution to life, and specifically why in the Czech Republic, with its field of art oversaturated with institutions? How can one conceive of an art institution that recognizes the profound international-global even-condition in which we work, and at the same time deals with the issues that appeal to and are relevant for the people in Karlovy Vary and in the Czech Republic? How can one activate the potential of the city of Karlovy Vary vis-a-vis cultural players such as Prague and Brno, not to mention Berlin, Istanbul, or Hong Kong? How can an art institution operate beyond the capitalist imperatives of the cultural industry, entertainment, spectacle, and quantitative visitorship today? How can we imagine an institution that would not be just an empty vessel waiting to be filled with unrelated exhibitions and objects, but rather a body that seriously engages in thinking together with artists and cultural producers, and which speaks only when it has something to say? Can artistic practice(s) and the discourse around it be recognized as equals and dealt with as such? How might we rearticulate the notion of the art institution’s power into one of responsibility? What are the possibilities at our disposal for responding to the urgencies of our times? In short, what is to be done? GUKV is our answer to these questions, exemplified by practices of participation, discursivity, production, flexibility, fluidity, and criticality. It is envisioned not as a number of strictly defined contents or projects, but rather as a way of acting and thinking, not as the discovery or realization of something pre-given, but a process and a development, a continuous activation of the possibility of art. In this process, which we have called “becoming oneself,” GUKV has become a basis; a base, an understructure, a principal constituent, a fundamental support, and a foundation on which artistic practice and discourse activities can rest and develop further.
Although envisioned as a process of constant change and renewal in search of an ideal space for art, a number of characteristics distinguish GUKV as a distinct institution on the local, national, and international levels. The projects that GUKV realizes in most cases consist of number of facets-episodes or parts-so that the subject of examination can be looked at from different angles, at a varied pace, with a diversity of required intensities and concentration, and through divergent formats. These are typically long-term projects, involving a phase of research, reading groups, and collective learning that infuses the project with knowledge and impulses on key issues from a number of artists, curators, theorists from various fields, and different cultural practitioners. Characteristically, most of these long-term, multifaceted projects include exhibitions, and although exhibitions are crucial vehicles for us to communicate knowledge and provide a space for imagining and thinking, they are not held in a position of first importance over other types of activity at GUKV.
GUKV places equal emphasis on activities such as lecture series, conversations, teaching modules, and publications. Usually they either belong to the facets of GUKV’s projects, or, if the character of a project so requires, stand on their own. This is analogous to the fact that GUKV does not engage in collaborations exclusively with artists, but rather with a wide array of (international) practitioners in the field of artistic and intellectual practice. When we choose the format of a solo exhibition besides the large-scale multifaceted projects, it is in order to provide an artist with the opportunity to seriously engage in exploring the possibilities of his or her work-including the realization of new, significant artistic production-in ways that would not be readily thinkable in other contexts. GUKV then invests all its intellectual and organizational capacity to support the artist in experimenting with his or her practice. GUKV wants to challenge artists, notwithstanding which
generation they belong to or what their status within the field is (the quality and potential of the artist’s work is what guides our selection) to step over the predictability and repetition of successful formulae, and encourage them to explore other directions.
To the extent possible, GUKV strives to eliminate external obstacles for concentrated work, and to shield the artist, however temporarily, from the fast pace and existential burdens that this profession otherwise requires, and provide time, space, and the necessary funds to invest all his or her attention into the development of the work. We cannot avoid mentioning here that GUKV finds it critically important to engage in rethinking the conditions under which artists and other cultural practitioners labor, and that these individuals need to be ethically compensated for their time and work. Also dedicated to thinking, concentration, and ongoing study, as well as to the exploration of how to create circumstances for such an ideal, is the Research-In- Residence (RIR) program, committed to offering a possibility for international artists, writers, curators, and critics to spend a period of time living and working in the city of Karlovy Vary in order to further develop their artistic and theoretical work.
In a sort of an open source relationship based on trust and akin to understanding the possibilities of art, the residents are active in lectures, screenings, workshops, etc. and contribute to a community that is “internationally local” with immense potential for infusing the environment in the city and the Czech Republic with new ideas, concepts, and energy. The themes and subjects of GUKV’s projects develop from urgencies both in art and in our society and are aimed at creating a space for artists, writers, curators, scholars, and the public to speak about our contemporary condition and ways of living together. Believing that these subjects concern everybody notwithstanding his or her cultural, political, social, economic, or geographic position, we provide a forum for developing a shared vocabulary through which to think of possible ways to address and challenge the present state of things, while seeing art as an element of empowerment in questioning the prevalent consensus and imagining how things might be otherwise.
GUKV understands art as a uniquely open field of possibilities inside society, in which imaginative speculation, experimentation, and the articulation of alternatives, proposals, and models of “what might be” takes place. Art in the expanded sense (i.e. envisioned beyond the traditional art sphere based on the Enlightenment ideals of display of knowledge, power, spectatorship, and the bourgeois public) is thus the field in which various discourses (aesthetic, cultural, political, social, economic, and other) intersect and exchange. Imagination and speculation, the primary attributes of art, are our tools to negotiate the terrain of the public sphere by means of engaging with concerns of ethical and political consequence. The public sphere could be ideally imagined as an empty space welcoming everybody willing to engage in (nonviolent) articulating, negotiating, and distributing the meaning of coexistence. In reality, this space is barricaded by economic and political voices. In this context, GUKV seeks ways to become emancipated from these market- and political dependencies through its projects. In its very ideal, GUKV tirelessly works to become a forum in which self-expression by artists and cultural practitioners can be inserted into society, become a public voice proposing diverse agendas for public discussion. Located in Karlovy Vary, a city both geographically and mentally slightly off the major axis of cultural sightseeing, entertainment, and the concept of art as leisure, there is, we believe, additional room to claim for GUKV in tune with its aspiration to invest in the generation and transfer of knowledge about and via art. Above all, Karlovy Vary is a city home to a university and art school and therefore we think of the possibility for the “slow,” concentrated, and in-depth mode of working of an art institution in parallel with the advantages of higher education. GUKV has undertaken the task of developing an enduring relationship with Charles University, and namely with its Centre for the Humanities. For its key research-oriented projects, GUKV has begun developing education and teaching modules and graduate courses together with Charles University to search for points of intersection and empowerment between artistic and academic research, and co-develop projects (mainly series of lectures and publications) as collaborative efforts reaching towards cultural and academic publics across various disciplines and fields.
The notion of the publicness GUKV invests itself in must not be confused with the question of visitorship or audience. To stress the distinction, early on GUKV adopted a “zero visitors” policy (which does not mean zero public), aimed at suggesting in an outspoken way the irrelevance of the quantitative managerial requirement of a number of visitors for the type of work and engagement of GUKV. Instead, GUKV developed a complex way of working with the public on several levels. Our first public, so to speak, consists of cultural practitioners involved with and participating in the development and realization of the projects at GUKV. As mentioned before, GUKV’s projects are developed as a collective practice through long research trajectories with artists, writers, curators, theorists, etc. The second public is constituted by people attending exhibitions and discourse activities organized by GUKV. The more (physically and geographically) remote third public consists of those people with whom GUKV communicates through its publications, including newsletters and handbooks (instead of invitation cards or other marketing instruments, GUKV publishes small booklets containing a significant body of knowledge on issues at the center of each project, which are distributed free of charge to a wide range of recipients internationally), critical readers (instead of catalogs for exhibitions, GUKV publishes readers as platforms for parallel explorations of particular ideas through a series of texts by artists and theorists), and our web site (which includes a well-visited video archive of all GUKV’s lectures, conferences, conversations, and panel discussions, as well as background references such as recommended reading lists on the issues GUKV engages with, and other research information). The fourth public is formed through the discourse that evolves internationally around GUKV itself through reviews and analyses of its projects and institutional approach. One can argue, of course, about the different sensitivities and receptiveness of remote publics and GUKV’s local constituency, but for the type of work GUKV engages in, the notion of access to ideas and knowledge articulated through its activities is of much greater importance than the body count at the physical threshold of GUKV’s premises.
Despite its relatively brief history, GUKV has achieved a unique position as an art institution on local, national, and international levels. In implicit and explicit ways, GUKV’s practice has come to influence the contents, modes of working, and the institutional terrain for the field of contemporary art. In the discourse around art institutions, BAK is regularly quoted amongst most progressive and critical art institutes capable of instigating change across the field of contemporary art. Yet it strives to use this accomplishment as a means to invest back into the field by encouraging collaboration, collegiality, and solidarity with other art and cultural institutions. In this context GUKV has initiated informal collaboration among visual art institutions in the region and regularly contributes a decisive voice to discussions about the cultural field in the city as such, as well as in connection to the ambition of the town to become the Cultural Capital in 2018. Charles University, and namely its Centre for the Humanities, are GUKV’s key partners for future development in sync with GUKV’s concept of art intervening in fields other than the traditional art field, touching upon such areas as philosophy, sociology, social science, political theory, and so on and rethinking the distinction between “theory” and “artistic practice” not as separate but rather mutually reciprocal.
Besides a partnership on the level of content and projects, GUKV shares with Charles University the aspiration of local commitment (Karlovy Vary), national significance (the Czech Republic), as well as conceptual consequence and relevance in the international and global context. In the Czech Republic, together with TranzitDisplay in Prague and House of Arts in České Budějovice, GUKV belongs to the triad of the key contemporary art centers, and as such actively engages in discussion with them on issues of common interest in public, exchanges information, and collaborates on an effective and visible scale. In concrete terms and in this vein of thinking, GUKV, House of Arts, and TranzitDisplay have developed plans for joining forces for international marketing and communication and have outlined a visiting program for art critics.
The future of GUKV will develop around five key propositions: inquiry, imagination, collectivity, commitment, and continuity. By inquiry we mean bringing the world, including the art world and ourselves, under permanent scrutiny, making it a subject of our study and exploration. This involves continuous articulating and disclosing what the prevailing consensus about the state of things is, as well as tireless efforts to call this consensus into question. However, no oppositional voice is relevant without acknowledging that we ourselves are part of the condition we critically engage with, and thus GUKV will continue striving to provide circumstances in which the constructive, speculative possibilities of art can find their place by activating imagination and suggesting other visions and possibilities about how things might become. Collectivity suggests both our way of developing projects at GUKV through shared, participatory undertakings as well as the principle, root condition for the existence of a democratic public sphere.
GUKV extends enduring commitment to this task through a willingness to bind itself intellectually and organizationally to the pursuit and course of the direction it embarked upon since its inception. The endeavors of GUKV are underlined by one main principle: continuity. GUKV avoids cheap answers to the demands of today’s democratic capitalism such as innovation, trends, the cult of youth, short-term excitement, feeding the market, superficiality, quantity, entertainment, and spectacle. Instead, it practices long-term, enduring engagement with artistic and intellectual labor. In fact, GUKV ultimately engages with the one and only question that needs to be explored in-depth-albeit through many angles, attitudes, projects, practices and debates-that is our relationship to the world we live in and imagining what else could be made possible.
In this vein of thinking, in the period 2009-2012 GUKV will continue developing projects in a way not dissimilar to how its work has evolved thus far. GUKV’s activities and their formats derive from the content and react to present urgencies; therefore there is no strict scheme such as an annual program to present. Keeping in mind the flexibility that is essential to the way GUKV operates in determining what kind of projects will take place in this period, one can imagine approximately the following: One to two solo exhibitions per year involving significant new production of works of art. These exhibitions are on view for up to three months, in order to allow for related educational activities in collaboration with art academies and universities to evolve and for discourse to deepen the understanding of the work within the public. We follow the development and practices of diverse group of artists, with whom we are exploring the possibility of collaboration in the near future.
Further, a long-term, multifaceted project takes place within such a yearly program, consisting of a research trajectory of a key subject at play in both contemporary art and contemporary society in collaboration with the University including a large-scale exhibition at GUKV and in public spaces in Karlovy Vary, a series of public lectures, conversations, workshops, and a critical reader elaborating on the significant analysis and production of knowledge of the subject at hand through artistic and intellectual contributions.
This involves the active and participatory commitment of an immense number of cultural practitioners who develop the project as a collective endeavor, for which GUKV offers itself as both an organizational basis and an articulate intellectual framework. In the past, GUKV focused on subjects such as immigration, war as a new organizing principle in the society, etc.
The themes GUKV will explore in depth in the future include: the return of religion to the public sphere; the legacy of the year 1989 in the West and an examination of what impact the shift of the notion of the “West” had on artistic production; and the culture of protest and opposition and the possibility of its existence in times of global capitalism, in which critique is nothing but a commodity to consume (including an examination of the possibility of artistic, cultural, and political activism in this day and age). Internationally, it is GUKV’s ambition to develop and inspire projects in other contexts, such as in the case of the coming Czech Pavilion in the Venice Biennale (2009) or the Documenta in Kassel (2012). GUKV intends to initiate projects from the content perspective by providing theoretical stimuli for large scale international collaborations with key and avant-garde visual arts institutions and art practitioners abroad, in which GUKV functions as a research center guiding a network of partners through multifaceted projects, activating the potentials of different places and different contexts in a consequential, significant way. One example of such an undertaking is the project entitled Former West, initiated by GUKV. It explores the developments in arts in the West after the fall of Berlin Wall, i.e. in the period between 1989 and 2009. A large-scale, traveling exhibition with key works of Western art from this era by a diverse group of artists will take place in early 2010 in a number of venues, currently being negotiated.
Conclusion:
It is precisely in this line of continuity that GUKV envisions itself in the period from 2009-2012. We have dedicated a good portion of this policy paper to articulating GUKV’s philosophy both in terms of its content and mode of work and suggested where our focus will continue to be. Yet if GUKV’s achievements encourage us to strongly believe that we have to continue this work, a radical change is absolutely necessary and vital: it is in significantly increasing the volume of funds that need to be made structurally available to GUKV in order to stabilize, professionalize, and further support its promising potentials as one of the key constituents of the national basis infrastructure.