Roman Ondák, do not walk outside this area, 2012. Installation view, Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin. Photo: Jens Ziehe. Courtesy the artist
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Roman Ondák. Photo: Jens Ziehe. Courtesy the artist
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Roman Ondák, do not walk outside this area, 2012. Installation view, Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin. Photo: Jens Ziehe. Courtesy the artist
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Roman Ondák, do not walk outside this area, 2012. Installation view, Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin. Photo: Jens Ziehe. Courtesy the artist
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Roman Ondák, do not walk outside this area, 2012. Installation view, Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin. Photo: Jens Ziehe. Courtesy the artist
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Roman Ondák, Leap, 2012. Installation view, Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin. Photo: Jens Ziehe. Courtesy the artist
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Roman Ondák, Leap, 2012. Installation view, Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin. Photo: Jens Ziehe. Courtesy the artist
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Roman Ondák, Wall Being a Door, 2012. Installation view, Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin. Photo: Jens Ziehe. Courtesy the artist
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Roman Ondák, Keyhole, 2012. Installation view, Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin. Photo: Jens Ziehe. Courtesy the artist
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Roman Ondák, Awaiting Enacted, 2003. Series of 16 newspaper collages. Installation view, Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin. Photo: Jens Ziehe. Courtesy the artist
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Roman Ondák, Resting Corner, 2011. Installation view, Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin. Photo: Jens Ziehe. Courtesy the artist
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It all starts with a
prohibition, with one of the many commandoes and regulations we
encounter every day, so numerous that our eyes graze over them and we
hardly take notice. do not walk outside this area is the title of the exhibition Roman Ondák conceived for the Deutsche Guggenheim as Deutsche Bank’s
“Artist of the Year” 2012. This time, however, the eponymous command
not to step beyond a certain area comes from a place that seems
completely absurd to most people. Everyone knows the demarcation lines
on airplane wings that can be seen outside the portholes while on the
runway or up in the sky. And it’s almost always the same thought that
comes to mind: “How, at an altitude of 30,000 feet, am I supposed to
walk around on a plane wing?” And: “Actually, what would that feel
like?” Paradoxically, this strange prohibition unleashes a series of
fantasies. Although we’re passengers and should normally assume that
the instruction is directed purely at airplane mechanics, we still feel
that it’s speaking to us. Ondák utilizes this mechanism in a very
deliberate way. With subtle humor and an absence of didactic urging,
the exhibition secretly leads the visitor where he normally shouldn’t
be: to the other side of the line, the “forbidden” area where only our
thoughts and fantasies can normally go.
A wall is a door
is a wall: like in a puzzle or a scavenger hunt, the Slovakian artist
places hints that the limitations of the White Cube are merely physical
in nature and that we can imagine or think ourselves beyond them.
For Wall Being a Door (2012), he installed doorknobs on
both sides of the white wall separating the entrance hall and the first
exhibition room of the Deutsche Guggenheim. Keyhole (2012)
consists of a simple keyhole that Ondák let into the wall covering
built over the inside of the window facade. One peers through the glass
to the Boulevard Unter den Linden and a small bright section of the day
with its passersby and traffic. Looking through a keyhole is
stigmatized by prohibitions and taboos; people who do it usually harbor
voyeuristic desires to penetrate the secrets and private lives of
others. In this intervention, however, the relationship becomes
inverted, and one looks from the protected museum space out onto the
public realm, through the confines of art and normal life. The grey
zone that Ondák allows us to enter in most of his works is situated
somewhere between private and public experience, between a personal and
collective scale. The experimental situations he develops in a lengthy
process involving sketches, drawings, collages, and notations have
something very tricky about them: they are precise, analytical, and yet
amazingly simple.
For do not walk outside this area,
he divided the long hall of the Deutsche Guggenheim into three
consecutive spaces that the viewer walks through as though on a journey
through various different events. He experiences the place, the work,
and himself from a multitude of perspectives. The exhibition combines
two major sets of themes that Ondák has been investigating since the
beginning of his career: first, the rules and conventions that
determine our everyday lives as well as the representation and
reception of art; and second, traveling, moving from one place to
another, whether it be physical or in the imagination. The two themes
are closely connected to the biography of the artist, who was born in
1966 in Žilina, which was affected by the dissolution of the former
Czechoslovakia. While the influences of Conceptual and Minimal Art are
evident, his work also frames references to the subversive tactics of
artists from the former Soviet Bloc. The Slovakian art scene, critical
of the system, was forced to work in secret and reacted with subtle
interventions and public actions to officially sanctioned state art.
In
this tradition, Ondák repeatedly worked with a motif associated with
waiting and expectation: the human queue. For his performance Good Feelings in Good Times of 2003, he had extras stand in line in front of the Kölnischer Kunstverein for no apparent reason and in 2004 at the London Frieze Art Fair.
This not only disturbed the art business, but also the relationship
between supply and demand. People often joined the back of the line
without exactly knowing why. Of course, the idea for these works was
inspired by the eternal queues at grocery stores that Ondák knew from
childhood, but despite this, the image has entered the collective
memory of all social systems. Today, the long lines at check-in
counters of discount airliners belong to everyday global life. And for
many people, standing in line conjures up an uneasy feeling of economic
depression. In Awaiting Enacted (2003), on view in the
first room of the exhibition, Ondák plays upon these implications: in a
huge showcase, he displays 16 pages of various different Slovakian
newspapers of a single day, whereby the pictures have all been replaced
with motifs of human queues found in newspapers in a variety of
different countries and times. People of every age, every skin color,
and in every conceivable style of clothing are standing in front of
stores, counters, schools, offices, and tourist attractions, in
anonymous corridors or on the street—in Ondák’s fictitious newspaper
edition, there seems to be one thing only to report: the whole world is
standing in line.
Installations and drawings that reflect
“inside” and outside,” people waiting: one could perhaps interpret the
first room of Roman Ondák’s exhibition as something akin to an
imaginary waiting or departure area, because there is an astonishing
transition awaiting the visitor to “do not walk outside this area”: in
the next room is the actual complete wing of a Boeing that visitors
then use as a bridge or dock to enter the final part of the show. And
of course the path leads over the diagonally installed airplane
fuselage to the demarcation line with the sign “do not walk outside
this area.” “The sculpture is installed in such a way that people
naturally walk right over it, without any special invitation,” Ondák
explains in a conversation shortly before the opening. “You walk
through the exhibition and suddenly you’re standing on this wing. This
prohibition that you read is directed at you, at everyone. You
automatically ask yourself, ‘is this about my mental limitations, or my
behavior?’ But it’s not me who invented it; I merely appropriated the
sentence, adopted it, and transferred it into the exhibition.”
In
the setting of the museum, a warning against walking on a certain area
also broaches other fears: please don’t touch. In the case of Ondák,
the opposite is the case. For his huge sculpture, he deliberately chose
an object that is both spectacular and completely unspectacular: “At
first, a plane’s wing looks like this huge, bombastic object. But it
isn’t, it doesn’t look like anything at all. In reality, it’s
completely ordinary. In seeing the form, everyone will be reminded of
their own travel experiences, which leaves room for an individual power
of imagination.” For Ondák, the sculpture wouldn’t work without people.
The wing, he says, is a kind of platform on which one perceives oneself
differently. It’s only complete when the exhibition visitors walk over
it: “The room is empty. There is nothing in it besides this wing, the
visitors that walk over it, and those that have to wait. Unfortunately,
it can only carry a limited number of people. Some of the visitors
might need some help or explanations from the museum guards, and this
is part of the idea. It’s a performance. That’s what I mean with a
changed perception. You don’t have to perform anything, or entertain
people. Everyone who walks on the wing is a performer.”
In the
last part of the exhibition, the journey ends with a journey, or rather
a semi-fictional travel report that seems like a mirror image of the
newspaper reports from the first room. In Balancing at the Toe of the Boot
(2010), Ondák talks about a trip he took with his wife in a Fiat Panda
through Calabria. Hung in glass frames and visible from both sides are
seven postcards with common Calabrian sights that the pair always sent
with the same message: “We are still alive.” It’s an allusion to the
work of the Japanese artist On Kawara,
one of the most important Conceptual artists. Between the years 1970
and 1979, Kawara sent telegrams at regular intervals to friends and
acquaintances with the same message each time: “I AM STILL ALIVE. ON
KAWARA.” At the same time, Ondák’s version contains an ironic reference
to the dangers of the southern Italian province: organized crime and
total traffic chaos. The rift between real event, personal perception,
and news coverage also becomes evident in the 16 framed fictional
newspaper articles reporting about the trip in journalistic style. The
snapshot-like pictures show the Ondáks as tourists in situations that
are glaringly uneventful and random: standing next to a cactus,
visiting a glass blower’s workshop, on a beach promenade.
As
an overall installation, it’s precisely this interface between event
and non-event, the spectacular and the banal, between the public and
private that do not walk outside this area addresses. Like
the fuselage, which is the focal point of the exhibition, the other
works are not solemn art fetishes, but vehicles or aides to spark our
thinking and imagination and to question our perception, also of
ourselves. Many aspects of the exhibition, such as waiting in line and
the rules according to which we move through public spaces and in
museums, the news that we experience second-hand, are all parts of our
everyday lives. We have absorbed them like the white walls on which the
“art” is hung. Ondák calls on us not to accept these limitations
without resistance—either in life or in art.
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