Record: The Success Is Ours, the Failure Is Her Secret of the Path of Light
August 7 – August 26, 2018
opening: August 6, 2018 from 6PM
guest: Petra Čiklová
What Petra Čiklová and Record group share is a decision to study art in the studio once called “Intermedia Morass”. I recommend spending time in a morass; especially when it is finely ground. At that place in Ostrava, this studio is still free and available for enrollment. The idea of intermediality is to be understood constructively here, more in the head than on paper and, above all, collectively. Among his students, a macho teacher prompts the boys to form groups and the girls to adopt material individualism. He doesn’t recognize the situation (often present in Czech art schools) called psychological help. The unregulated content and form of the discussion series are accompanied by the irony in between the lines in the spirit of intellectual refinement. It is more than obvious that many of the children of the graduates and of these four authors won’t be artists because their parents present them with the capability to make business and the general creativity is natural and self-evident.
Not making exhibitions and a creative “pause” is not perceived as tormenting because these artists are not so much under the pressure of the “Prague game”. Mere coming up with titles of a show is often a sufficient and entertaining form of relaxation. The title of this exhibition “…Secret of the Path of Light…” is unclear to me. I heard that the artists that had had the previous exhibition in the gallery had left holes in the gallery walls. Also, I have recently taken part in two of their meetings. In the first meeting, a new version of the Spanish table football played one on one was invented where you can play with only one hand while smoking a cigarette with the other one. Taking place in a fitness centre, the second meeting turned abruptly into hard brainwashing, all against all, in the darkness (using only UV), with half-inflated balloons and no limits, heading wherever, using whatever that contains a fluorescent liquid. One more special historical event connects these four artists. It concerned smoking a very old cigarette once upon a time in the evening spent in the school’s studio. The cigarette had been produced in the very same year the two members of Record group had been born (1979). The brand was Petra.
This is not copied from the accreditation file of AIF FUOU (Studio of Intermedia Forms, Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Ostrava). I think it’s a potential mix of accounts in Jelení Gallery enacted by Petra Čiklová and Record group.
Petr Lysáček
(transl.: Palo Fabuš)
The program of the Jeleni Gallery is possible through kind support of Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, Prague City Council, State Fund of Culture of the Czech Republic, City District Prague 7
Media support: ArtMap, jlbjlt.net and UMA: You Make Art
