Erratum

Compensation Portrait: Does Art Travel/Thinking Realism, Text from Frieze podcast "Does Art Travel" and catalog text Thinking Realism in The State Tretyakov Gallery
Original Author: Ekaterina Degot, 2007
Notable Changes: This particular text was adopted due to the nature of the historical collection in Náchod, which was instructed to collect Russian art. The original text is a collage of several texts, adopted for this publication.

Introduction

The Representing the Nation publication was prepared in relation to our participation in the International Triennial of Contemporary Art (ITCA) organized by Tomáš Vlček and Milan Knížák at the National Gallery (NG) in Prague in 2008. We were invited to create a new work.

We wanted to characterize the NG in Prague as an institution. In 2008 the NG was a member of the Association of Czech Galleries. We decided to visit all of its member institutions across the country during a six month period. This gave us an overview of topics, complications, facilities, and staff issues, including an understanding of the challenges the respective institutions face, in respect to the regional, economical, and historical collections of art for which they are responsible. How do they think about and reflect on their own practice? What kind of functions, positions, roles, or ambitions do they articulate?

Despite being dissatisfied with the research material, we made a decision to maintain the project’s original framework. We had anticipated more substantial visions or statements, so we applied an improvised strategy of so-called Compensation Portraits, inspired by a concept from the exhibition catalog First Papers of Surrealism held in New York in 1942. In this case, the surrealist painters were asked to bring photographs of people other than themselves to represent them in the publication. In this spirit, we selected theoretical texts on institutional critique from a range of international writers, translated these texts into Czech and presented them as texts from Czech institutions and their representatives.

The project as a whole was self-financed. The sponsors or partners whose logos are printed on page 59 at the end of the publication are all imaginary sponsors, themselves unaware of any seeming participation. Thus, the publication falsely takes on the form of a serious international cooperation between the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Practices (eipcp.net), the EU Education and Culture D6 Framework Program, the Association of Czech Galleries, the National Gallery Prague, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Prague, the Office for Contemporary Art Norway, and funded by the Austrian Raiffeisen Bank. This parody reflects the trend of corporate sponsorship supporting critical, progressive, intellectual, and autonomous initiatives within locations of their respective markets.

The Representing the Nation publication was immediately distributed to all of the represented institutions. The project was not appreciated by the organizers of the ITCA / NG, generally disappointed in not understanding the basic conceptual framework. They refused to cover production costs or to further communicate concerning the project. In addition, part of the publications went missing from the NG depository. Few institutions encouraged further dialogue, and there was limited interest by other representatives and researchers from various institutions in Prague.

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The Gallery of Fine Arts in Náchod

Authority: The Hradec Králové Region
Director: Mgr. Jan Kapusta

History:
The District Gallery of Fine Arts in Náchod was founded in January 1966 and in the same year the Náchod District Museum transferred to the Gallery all works of art from the former Municipal Picture Gallery. The Gallery was housed in the Náchod Chateau, but had to leave these premises in 1972, as a result of reconstruction to the chateau grounds. In 1978, however, the Gallery acquired the rather dilapidated chateau riding school, which it adapted – since 1983 these premises house both the administration and exhibition rooms.

Collection:
In addition to its traditional focus on 19th- and 20th century Czech art, the Gallery specializes in Russian art.

Statement:

In the 19th century, various schools of Realist painting took shape all over the world, in places even including Africa and Japan. With the exception of the realisms of France and Germany (though the latter are considered important only in the early 19th century), they are for the most part today silently understood to be derivative styles that deserve no more than a fleeting local interest.

The regional gallery system is probably the most vivid expression of our current view of art in the Czech Republic. It tries to construct a non-linear, democratic, “global” history that excludes nothing. Yet 19th-century art may be the only form that has not been admitted to this celebration of diversity. Local realisms are still understood as kitsch, as in Clement Greenberg’s “Avant-garde and Kitsch” (1939), where kitsch is personified by Ilya Repin and its staunchest bastion is the Tretyakov Gallery. Any allusion to a local realism in contemporary art is read as a postmodern gesture, which in turn is already painfully outdated. So if an artist or curator wants to do something really scandalous today – to the point of being denied entry into an exhibition – he might try working in the styles and media of 19th-century Realism.

Few people remember that in many countries 19th-century realisms were the language of modernization. The Wanderers or called Itinerants were Russia’s first modernists. In Russia, secular painting was imposed on society by Peter the Great. Up to the 1880s, artists perceived naturalism as a philosophical problem rather than an ordinary technique. Realism was still a new form to its practitioners (since many of them were trained as traditional icon painters). Similarly, many Czech contemporary artists were educated as Soviet “icon painters” who had later to redefine for themselves what Great Art really is. In this sense their situation is like that of artists in the 19th century.

Today, we see naturalism as a hallmark of accessible art, while abstract symbols indicate that art is “smart.” But this was not always the case: It does not hold true for folk art, for example. In many cases, naturalism was practiced as a highly theoretical science by a small elite.

It seems, we have much to reconsider. In the late 19th century, the thirst for “lifelike veracity” in art was replaced by the thirst for “the truth of art,” which dictate that the painting is flat, a spot of color is a spot of color, and a line is a line. This truth expressed the fact that paintings are things and commodities that put themselves on sale like Edouard Manet’s Olympia. Painting was the honest truth about the commodity, expressed in the language of commodities. Contemporary art developed along these lines and continues to do so today. This is its norm.

From the very outset, Russian artists have been reluctant to take this route. When Ivan Kramskoy painted his own Olympia, his heroic prostitute, the Unknown Woman of 1883, he had no desire to flatten or simplify anything. Quite to the contrary, he tried to paint her fox furs and satin with an illusionism that bordered on obscenity. Even if Kramskoy was one of the most successful portrait painters of his time, this was something that weighed heavy on his conscience. The Russian Wanderers – and Kramskoy was one of them – were very much aware of the problem: the painting had become a commodity. Little has been written on this since the near-death of Marxist art history in our country. Be this as it may, in contrast to their contemporaries in Western Europe, the Wanderers did not attempt to solve the problem by demonstrating it in the most candid terms, but through the utopian belief that art could have another dimension. They followed the path of resignation, which is not the same as reconciliation, but a refusal to make simplifications and to pass judgment prematurely. This is precisely why their paintings – paintings made in a country as it entered the industrial, modern world – clearly belonged to the epoch of modernity in terms of content, though they were not considered modernist in terms of style.

For a long time this route seemed like a dead end. Planarity and the simplification of form seemed to have triumphed. But this victory proved Pyrrhic as soon as the devices of the avant-garde entered the mainstream. Planar paintings and self-referential, minimalist objects are just things and commodities, and not critiques of commodities. This is why more sensitive contemporary artists are again turning their gaze toward utopia. Only this time around, it is not the Great Utopia of the avant-garde, but the far lesser-known utopia of 19th-century Russian Realism, which is actually where it all began.

This is why it is interesting to question the so called inclusive qualities in the contemporary art scene, with its global approach. Is it really more including, more tolerant? It reminds me more of what for many is considered propaganda from the Soviet art, let me give some illuminating examples from the period of late 20s, beginning of 30s, the period after the futuristic romantic avant-garde, and before the totalitarian and Stalin glorification official style.

Soviet art was as we know based on different sociological backgrounds, basically rooted in economy, and this economical alternative does not anymore exist; the 3rd world is merging with the 1st, the 2nd is out of the “game”. This makes Soviet art hard to understand for many. However, it’s rusty critical machinery is still working and we need and have to use it in this way. Realism and Soviet 19th century realism was initially related to criticism of the commodity, and its historical role was to point at capitalist shortcomings and limitations, and this is interesting when considering today the politics of exhibition making. We are talking here about the less known, but committed anti-capitalist art, several group-shows, where this character of art was presented. These group-shows included several kinds of media and kind of paintings, like the “struggling for the banner”, (struggling revolutionaries, the idea of conflict was important…) but included was as well murals, slogans, posters, photographs; in short, it is resembling today’s “installations”.

These installations (Ustanov) was of course for propaganda, political agitation, but formally speaking interdisciplinary, always with topics, was divided into chapters, and managed by a group of curators. Visitors was often strongly involved, asked for which works they preferred, there were discussions and so on. What I want to get at, is the question what did these shows include which we do not normally include today? The following list may answer this and bring light to our perception of inclusion and tolerance in contemporary exhibition making.:

1. Included was art they disliked, e.g. 19th century social classes they didn’t like, exhibited on a black wall, as a gesture of dislike. This raise the question of today’s politics of exhibitions. Can today’s art exhibitions be that directly critical, we know that the artists and the work of the artist may be critical, but is the exhibition critical? In my view, our exhibitions is more something like a “vitrine” for us, or like a shop window.

2. They could include in the show not originals, but poor reproductions, from works they could not get access to, it was not a problem with “aura”, not like Walter Benjamin, like the unique cost more. This attitude would be something like “market terrorism” today.

3. They were showing “non-professional artists.” Showing non-professional artists, political paintings, “amateur art”, not Sunday painting, but painting from the work place, and that was acquired in the galleries. Challenge of division of power was accepted in the museums, and was acquired by the museums. (Later they got rid of these from the collections, e.g. in the Tretyakov museum.) Is there today such a thing as non-professional contemporary art, and if not, why not?

Today, we still somehow retain the ideological “linearity-progress” in art, similar as in the 19th century but the vector is today the exact opposite. Dominant is that we have the idea of a “French evolution”, from Naturalism, to Cezanne, to Impressionism, to Cubism, to Geometric Abstraction and so on. In a sense, we live in a modern academicism, where flatness and modernist form serve as commodity critique, while in the 19th century, academicism of naturalist painting and optical illusion was playing a similar role. Manet was the first painter to say that painting was a prostitute, and going toward flatness. Rodchenko, for example, rejected painting at all and this flatness served as a commodity critique. I am not favoring realism, but what we see today, is the tendency of going into time, how the French would formulate as “devenir”, becoming formation, involving…to be disturbing, involving time, like film, sculpture, photography, and bringing the questions of realist approach can be a fruitful polemic in this regard.