Roman Ondák, The Stray Man, 2006. Performance / video. Private Collection, Basel; Collection Kadist Foundation, Paris. © Roman Ondák. Courtesy the artist
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Roman Ondák, SK Parking, 2001. Slovakian Škodas were parked behind the Secession building in Vienna for two months. Installation view: Secession, Vienna, 2001. © Roman Ondák. Courtesy the artist
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Roman Ondák, SK Parking, 2001. Slovakian Škodas were parked behind the Secession building in Vienna for two months. Installation view: Secession, Vienna, 2001. © Roman Ondák. Courtesy the artist
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Roman Ondák, Enter the Orbit, 2011. 96 versions of Sputnik 1 made by the artist and his friends. Installation Collection Kunsthaus Zürich. Photo: Oliver Lang. © Roman Ondák
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Roman Ondák, Catch, 2010. Installation. Courtesy the artist and collection La Gaia, Busca
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Roman Ondák, Loop, 2009.Installation Czech and Slovak Pavilion, 53rd Venice Biennale, Venice. © Roman Ondák. Courtesy the artist
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Roman Ondák, Loop, 2009.Installation Czech and Slovak Pavilion, 53rd Venice Biennale, Venice. © Roman Ondák. Courtesy the artist
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In 1974, the Parisian writer Georges Perec
sat in a café on the place Saint-Sulpice and recorded his experience
over a period of three days. The author was in search of something
fleeting: the grammar of the everyday. According to his theory, this
structure is comprised of so-called micro-events whereby everything
that happens while nothing is happening must be precisely written down,
including buses and taxis driving by, deliveries made, passersby, even
the form clouds take or the number of pigeons nearby. In this way, time
accrues during the writing process, and a workaday location becomes
legible. His thoroughness proved worthwhile: today, Perec’s small
experimental book Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien (An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, 1975) is considered a classic of French modernism.
The artist Roman Ondák,
who was born in 1966 in Žilina, also makes the prosaic, quotidian
experiment and time the center of his artistic activity. Parallels to
Perec’s method can be found in the work of the Slovakian artist, who
studied at the art academy in Bratislava from the late 1980s to the
early 1990s. Ondák’s art is characterized by the heightened attention
required to break through to the poetic core of everyday life and
otherwise fleeting perceptions. However, the artist does not leave
things at the level of observation and verification, but is himself the
author of shifts and microevents through subtle interventions that make
the present appear mutable. This is the humanitarian, utopian core
around which his art revolves.
This approach becomes apparent in the early, oft-cited work SK Parking (2001), which Ondák realized for his contribution to an exhibition at the Vienna Secession:
over a period of eight weeks, seven used Škodas with Slovak license
plates were parked behind the museum. One can only surmise the kind of
speculation several long term–parked Škodas with license plates from a
neighboring country can induce in the minds of hurrying passersby in
Vienna’s city center. What is going on here? And why has nothing
happened for such a long time? Connections to the used-car trade,
fantasies of small economies difficult to understand, or mysterious
collective sales might have come to mind. Suddenly, an unspectacular
urban location seemed—for those who registered the change in the first
place—mixed up in a complex affair. How the work even occurred became
secondary: in order to realize his idea, the artist convinced friends
and acquaintances to take part in the piece. They made their cars
available for the duration of the exhibition and were compensated
accordingly from the production budget.
On another level, SK Parking
can also be read as a discreet form of institutional critique, as an
artist’s clever sleight of hand to extricate his work from the
possessive clutches of the institution. Entirely without pathos, Ondák
resists both trendy spectacles and the pressure to render art worthy of
museums by shifting his action into the city’s space, thus
incorporating passersby and creating a piece that is independent of
visitors, opening hours, and admission fees. And it works: seven Škodas
parked for eight weeks or a half-hour performance of a man staring into
a gallery window (The Stray Man, 2006) suffice to let art and life collapse into one another.
This
recurrent moment between an interior and exterior view, the ability to
change one’s position with regard to the art system, is part of Ondák’s
modus operandi. Although his work certainly has connections to East
European Conceptual art, the artist does not proceed from a position
within the art world, as Tate Modern curator Jessica Morgan once described his strategy in a 2007 catalogue for the Galerie im Taxispalais,
Innsbruck, Austria. Rather, in Morgan’s view, he often articulates his
work from the perspective of an intruder: “Because it reveals both the
artificial nature and established rites of the art world, Ondák’s work
is firmly anchored in the context of daily life and goes hand in hand
with the rules and orders of the everyday, not only to deconstruct
these or to take them on in satiric manner, but to show their
relationship to other forms of life and work.” Cultural production
appears here as something from the immediate present, nonelite, and
imbedded in everyday life.
This makes it difficult, of course,
to speak of individual mediums such as drawing, sculpture,
installation, performance, or photography, although all of these play a
role in his work. The artist’s collaborative projects repeatedly call
into question the concept of authorship, which is so fundamental to the
art world. For Enter the Orbit (2011) at the Kunsthaus Zürich,
he presented, among other things, 96 versions of a Sputnik model that
he partially created himself, but also commissioned from friends who
remained anonymous. The original unmanned rocket that the Soviet Union
launched into outer space in 1957 became a symbol of the Cold War arms
race between two political systems. With these small-scale objects made
from common materials such as coconuts, light-emitting diodes, or
rubber gloves, Ondák imbues his work with ambiguity, for example, in
its reference to both “Sputnik,” which means “companion” or “attendant”
in Russian, and “space,” or “cosmos,” which playfully connotes worldly,
international sophistication.
According to the Slovenian curator and cultural theorist Igor Zabel,
many of Ondák’s works can be described as “situations”: The viewer is
confronted with constellations of things, people, and spaces that
deviate in their very essence from what is expected and taken for
granted.” Ondák’s work for the Czech and Slovak Republic Pavilion
during the 2009 Venice Biennale
is one of the most impressive demonstrations of this working philosophy
to date. Through the duration of the biennale, the artist opened the
exhibition space to foot traffic by removing the doors from the
pavilion’s shorter sides, modifying the structure that was originally
built in 1926 according to the plans of the Czech Cubist Otakar Novotný.
The interior was adapted to the style of the surrounding Giardini by
adding landscaping such as banks of earth planted with trees and
bushes, and to the left and right, a slightly winding path crossed the
space.
In place of the art the visitor expected, there was
nothing more than a staged landscape—acacias, rhododendron, and a mix
of various perennials—in a gesture through which the biennale itself
became work’s subject. Ondák’s intervention not only ran counter to the
tough and frequently criticized logic of the international competition,
during which countries strive to outdo one another, and the obsolete
patriotism that characterizes the layout of the national pavilions to
this day, but broke through it in a surprising way. One should note
that the word “Cecoslovacchia,” the pre- 1993 Italian name for the
formerly united republics, appears above the entrance to the pavilion,
a reminder that Ondák's transformation of the building is presented in
a state of ideological emptiness to the largest possible degree. Thus,
in Loop (2009), we see a rare case of a site-specific work that
transcends a functional reference to the architecture and the
historical, sociological, and political conditions prevailing there: in
his contribution to the biennale, Ondák called the pavilion as such
into question in an elegant but fundamental way. The grammar of a
biennial—indeed, in Ondák’s hands, the grammar of the everyday—is not
static, but highly mobile.
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