Curator´s words

Performative/Materiel

On the pictorial object and social space in the work of Zuzana Križalkovičová

Synne Genzmer

Ever since its inception, the close connection to illusion has been a constitutive element for painting: it was developed on a technical-artisanal level based on the standard of optical deception, legitimized theoretically, rated according to its correspondence to reality and was equally deconstructed again. Painting was conceived as a “window to the world” [1] and at the same time was supposed to epitomize ideals, tell stories, express emotions, be representative and decorative and ultimately call itself into question. Centuries-old depictions have been preserved through painting; it provides us with opportunities to immerse ourselves in the ways of thinking and living of times long past and to reflect on our present. But to what extent is “what we see” [2] actually looking back at us?

With her background in academic painting and mastery in the craft of representational depiction, Zuzana Križalkovičová is in my view following an anti-metaphysical impulse with her artistic practice when she states that “my artistic research is not staged.” [3] Correspondingly, the autonomy of the materiality and bodies – one’s own and those of others – play a significant role as points of reference in her work and are also respectively subject to research. At the beginning of her work stood the intention to add further dimensions to classic painting – space, time, body, movement – yet not by using the means and effects of trompe l’oeil but the concrete material, which occupies a place in real space and therefore intervenes in the social space. Drawing on this relation to reality, which the artist also refers to as the “impulse of significance” of the artwork, is what she calls “performativity at the level of experimentation”. Or, expressed differently, what matters to her are the “chains of events” that connect people, materials, effects, space, time and events with each other. In this way, the medium or material serves to refer to the social in different contexts and to establish concrete connections to it; for, as Križalkovičová puts it, artistic work and social reality consist of “dynamically interrelated elements”. Her approach follows artists who by employing an abstract form language had already previously emphasized the space in which art takes place and the reception by an audience as crucial in terms of the significance of the artwork. [4] In her work she uses relief-like surfaces, i.e. glass slabs arranged on the surface that protrude from the support medium into the space, or mirrors, where the observers facing the object have their reflections thrown back at themselves. Again and again she experiments with material that can be moved mechanically or possesses dynamic properties, such as magnetic dust, with which the object retains an interactive malleability. In the work Ferrofluid, the dialogue intensifies with paint-like material and its properties: a black ferrofluid responsive to magnets takes on different shapes on the body through movement and magnetic effects, seemingly growing from the skin like plants. Direct interventions in a social structure are carried out by Križalkovičová as a performer, who makes a contribution – unscheduled and unsuspected by the ensemble – to the events on stage: in her intervention Applause, in which she takes a bow along with the actors and actresses, she subtly introduces a minimal change to the conventional procedures of the theatre and in doing so alludes to a “fourth wall” [5] in real life. In order to refer to specific social issues she draws on the strategy of the re-enactment, whereby she also includes historically developed conceptions and structures – as in her work Barge Haulers on the Volga, which refers back to the eponymous famous painting by Ilya Repin from the 19th century. Here, in the medium of staged photography, a social issue is brought in close proximity with the history of painting. If we take the denial of the staged seriously, the reactivation of a scene is to be considered as a gesture that intends to oppose the ignorance of power relations with regard to aesthetic questions with something else.

Since any interpretation of art is easily influenced by other readings that are present while engaging with it, I see in the artistic practice of Križalkovičová against the background of Karen Barad’s Agential Realism also an attempt to learn something about the constitution of being by creating resonances between artistic and human bodies, between different states of matter; specifically in the sense in which “humans are part of the world-body space in its dynamic structuration”, where “practices of knowing cannot fully be claimed as human practices, not simply because we use nonhuman elements in our practices but because knowing is a matter of part of the world making itself intelligible to another part.” [6] Hence it would also mean that what we see is indeed looking back at us, but that we see something that contains ourselves but is not exclusively us alone.

[1] cf. Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, translated by Rocco Sinisgalli, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

[2] “What we see becomes alive and more important in our eyes only because of that which looks back at us, concerns us”, according to George Didi-Huberman, continuing that “vision always collides with the ineluctable volume of human bodies”, “… that seeing can ultimately only be considered and experienced as a tactile sensation…”, and “…the act of seeing sends us to, opens an abyss that watches us, concerns us, and somehow constitutes us.” George Didi-Huberman, What We See Looks Back at Us, Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1997.

[3] All quotations marked as artist statements in this text are taken from personal conversations with the author between May and August 2016 as well as unpublished notes provided by the artist.

[4] The most recent examination of abstract-concrete tendencies in Austria after 1945 took place in 2016 with the exhibition Abstract Loop Austria at the 21er Haus of the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna, which also referenced the connections to Eastern European countries. See: Abstract Loop Austria. Kunst und visuelle Forschung seit 1950, editedby Agnes Husslein-Arco, Axel Köhne, 21er Haus, Vienna, 2016. At this point I would also like to mention Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942/43), inspired by the city of New York and its structure, as an important reference point for the artist, as well as the publication Performanz und ihreräumlichenBedingungen by Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein, in which the author locates the significance of space for art of the 20th century with works such as Black Square (1913) by Kazimir Malevich among others. See: Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein, Performanz und ihre räumlichen Bedingungen. Perspektiven einer Kunstgeschichte, Vienna – Cologne– Weimar: Böhlau Verlag, 2012.

[5] For the concept of the fourth wall and potential relations to art, see: Behind the Fourth Wall: Fictitious Lives – Lived Fictions, edited by Ilse Lafer, exhibition catalogue, Generali Foundation, Vienna; Nuremberg: Verlag fürmoderne Kunst Nürnberg, 2010.

[6] Karan Barad, “Agential Realism: How material-discursive practices matter”, in: Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2007, pp. 132–185.