The Collection

Curated by: Erőss Nikolett

Collection is one of the most frequently used notions in the context of art, even if we do not only consider art-collections. It can mean a number of things, like, for example, if we reverse the formula, it can mean the work of art itself. Collections, above being a way of value-construction, the manifestation of the desire to understand, or the realization of an extended personality, also mirror the actual economic and social circumstances, which occasionally makes them more telling then originally intended. Our exhibition deals with the collections of artists, or collections presented by artists, deserving our attention not because of their rarity or material value, but because they mirror the method of work, sensibility and determinations of the artist, and respond to the value-crises of the recent past and the present as critical tools. Objects detached from their original context and function have a greater power of illuminating the fractures and deficiencies, the conflicts of adaptation, and the contradictions of the art market.

Annika Eriksson met devoted collectors of various objects, as if she herself leafed through the pages of a certain collection in Sweden. That’s the way we picture an everyday collection: its object can be anything from cards to clocks, that has no real market-value or quality, rather features telling of the collector’s personality. Most of her collectors turn out to have a wider range of interest transcending the objects exhibited, and next room probably houses a different collection, thus making collecting a distinct feature of a character, referring not so much to the objects, but to the collecting attitude. It all inevitably leads to the question: is this collectors’ attitude a peculiar symptom of welfare society, is it the triumph of excess, or the illusion created by alienation?

The result of the work of Vladimir Peric Talent – The Museum of Childhood – is a more melancholic and personal collection, a method for recovering from the trauma. Peric chose to collect the Walt Disney figures of his childhood: in the sixties and the seventies, from among the countries of the Eastern bloc, these figures could only be purchased in Yugoslavia, as a sign of the benevolent presence of American economy. They were produced locally from moulding to painting. They were abundant in Yugoslavia, whereas they rated as treasure in other countries. Now they are just forgotten memories of the childhood of a generation, and can be obtained mostly at flea-markets for a song. Indeed Peric is a systematic flea-market goer, with an extensive web of local acquaintances, accumulating hundreds of plastic figures in his apartment leaving less and less space for himself. This obsession however arrives into cold-headed, precisely measured installations, distancing these figures from conveying personal attachments or some kind of retro-romanticism.

Ivan Moudov Bulgarian artist has been led by a kind of fetishistic attitude mixed with respectful cautiousness from exhibition to exhibition inserting tiny parts of well-known pieces of art into his ever-growing portable museum. We cannot really take his action for appropriation, because the artist meticulously records the author of the original work, and the place of origin, excluding the interpretation of irony, appropriation or defiance, and pointing to an invincible desire for art. His homeland being short of museums for contemporary art, and exhibition places where the icons of western art could be presented, the artist carries tiny parts of the sacraments himself to his home. His carefully organized boxes evoke the original source, Duchamp, embedding not only the pieces of art represented by their tiny parts, but the collection itself into the security of the canon.

Undeniably, there is a more evidently critical intention in the background of the collection of Anetta Mona Chisa and Lucia Tkacova – currently working in Prague. The artwork itself is a disruptive attempt, and an admission at the same time of its own futility: the system is ticking well, in spite of all their efforts. The artists pirate western and overseas private galleries for years, pinching everyday objects. The most important galleries defining art market are now represented by irrelevant, worthless objects, ironically reversing the mechanism of the birth of commodity fetishism. Though the absence of these objects might not undermine the hegemony of the galleries concerned, the gesture and this ever-growing anti-collection sheds light on the controversies of the hardly by-passable expectations of the art-market arriving late in Eastern Europe, being still indigestible in a number of ways.