Notations and Paraphrases
Ostrava Days, far and wide the most important event now, devoted to new music, have won me as a listener already long time ago – but it is so because it has been since the same time as Petr Kotík that I am active not only as an artist but also, similarly to him, as an organizer – in my case of exhibitions, for change… I did the first „notations“ exhibition still at the end of 1960s in the Brno House of Arts and it included a really full spectre of the then new types of scores: literally from John Cage to George Brecht or Ben, from diagrams of electronic music through graphic music as far as verbal instructions, the most often from the Fluxus movement artists (we have met those in Ostrava once, too). Since that time I monitor all this sphere as one of the forms of that new sensitivity of the 1960s in which the emergence of intermedia (as they were labelled by Dick Higgins, one of the Fluxus protagonists, in 1962) took such a big part. And immediately we knew what we were doing: visual or phonic poetry, graphical music, or more complex actions for more senses – events or happenings… Also, gradually, at least several predecessors in the interwar avant-gardes were detected. In our country, it was Zdeněk Pešánek with his colour piano, visual parallels of music of Zdeněk Ponc and the Erwin Schulhoff’s ensemble as probably the closest to the later graphic music…
And because, according to my deepest belief, it is a sphere that is still alive and still rich in discoveries, I have tried to choose my friends from the Northern Moravia. I started with those who were fascinated by the phenomenon of newly conceived notation and went as far as the newest „seekers“ of new ways how to relate music and picture. I believe that it is a really variegated scale of high quality authentic works. Both the new aesthetics protagonists active in the Třinec isolation, created at that time very original works, starting from the most basic element that used to be at the beginning - the staff. Karel Adamus belonged to the Prague circle of new poetry and soon, in his extensive cycle, he made structures of multiply repeated identical typewritten signs absolute as communication is concerned – and following a plan, he made the staff lines special, within his aesthetically very impressive 2D structures. Jan Wojnar created an almost exact opposite: a strict conceptual relation of two forms of the staff linear structure and its relation to a transformed form of this linear structure, transformed through following certain rule and he confronted both in two sequences separated by a vertical line. Also he was captured by the possibility set into a relation the action of dripping paint traces and the rational order of a pre-printed staff. Similarly pioneering were also the works of the only Czechoslovak life-long letterist, the Ostrava native Eduard Ovčáček. He still keeps innovatively applying new „tools“, in the last decade he has been pioneering the computer graphics that he congenially combines with his starting point – letters, texts and, naturally, notations as well… And exactly computer allowed him to transform found printed notations into new structures, aesthetically and communicationally specified . Martin Klimeš, the Opavian pioneer of analytical painting in our country, also realized in the 1980s cycles of drawings which we can perceive as sui generis notations instructing how to realize ensuing drawing „actions“ – by most minimal but clear rules the drawing action on the paper surface was clearly defined as a maximum fast connecting of designated points, sometimes simplified to a large degree, another time more complex but always thematizing the relation between the rational „game rules“ and their interpretation.
In the Opavian circle, already since the 1970s, also Dušan Chládek has been creating unique drawn structures, a kind of „hand-drawn geometry“, too. With him, the relation to a musical piece is carried first by forming certain syntactic order in a deliminated area. However, exactly the „Opavian context“ lead Dušan Urbaník from extremely literary contents of his graphics to absolute autonomy of a composition – starting with monochrome paintings and ending with linear drawings often conceived by the artist as notations sui generis: free repetitive compositions of lines drawn by a non-traditional „tool“ such as a flower shank. The subtle differences in the record are therefore understood by the author as a possible stimul to a musical interpretation in its braodest sense, in harmony with the experience of new music and non-traditional types of notations. It is also in Opava where the subtle works of Stanislav Křížek were created. He also starts from the new aesthetics of the past decades in the form of almost minimalist drawn records of music perception as well as processual work with non-traditional materials. 2D assamblages of metal elements leave in the course of rusting their unique new aesthetics as well as their reporting character which conceptually relates to processuality as an elementary, generally valid phenomenon as well as to a result of respecting the concept of an artefact as a kind of notation. One generation younger, Tomáš Skalík has captured attention already as a student in Jan Ambrůz’s studio at the Brno Faculty of Visual Arts at the Brno University of Technology. With a beautiful duchampesque gesture, he transferred into the art world completely utilitarian materials that originally used to, as colour or sound signals, advice, warn of real transgressing limits. His installations did on one side valorize the new aesthetics of these facilities – and at the same time they served a really new manner of delimiting definite geometrical forms in space. The computer drawings could then be exhibited from the beginning as notations of these new, space and sound disclosing situations. The newest types of this artist’s scores (because those are already evidently scores of a new type), visualize the Skalík’s new, more subtle designations that allow us sooner to choose our behaviour in a defined geometric spatial formation, deliminated by the author and, naturally, again minimal, …Slowly, the circle gets closed as we continue to the works that are more or less connected in their stimuli with the current Ostrava Days. Dáša Lasotová, formerly lyrical but in spite of that, basically conceptual already since the 1970s, relating herself to natural situations and materials, recently paraphrases in the usual ready-made staffs some situations from the surrounding nature and using them, she intervenes by paraphrasing traditional musical notation with her own one – either using natural „materials“ (12 tones of an apple-tree, 12 tones of hellebore) or with shape constellations of aquarelle pain traces. Using natural elements from her environment, she even got quite close to the already internationally recognized protagonist of the Czech conceptual photography, Jiří Šigut who has gradually worked through from strict, conceptually verified records to „exposing“ large format photographic papers to a directly chosen natural situation. From these he then logically derived the possibility to create a pregnant notation directly somewhere where it is still typical for Ostrava – he chose one heap and on a paper with drawn-on staff he let fall the March leaves one full day long… And then he completely exactly fixed them (Na haldě, November 24, 2010). And for me, the subtle drawings of Vlastimil Krčmář were a real surprise. He is an enthusiastic visitor of Ostrava Days Festival from its very beginning but he also discovered his own, new concept consisting in him, an inconspicuous man sitting in a corner, trying with his scriptural records to transform all the compositions that have sounded there back to the visual shape. He has the records so exactly registered that without any problems we can see this new visual interpretation, starting with the compositions of Petr Kotík, some of which we will also exhibit, for sure! It is not an accident that Krčmář was active in 1988-1989 in the „Měkkohlaví“ [Softheads] circles. This ingenious aegis has been invented by Marian Palla for the artists who formed the opposition to the preferred „Tvrdohlaví“ [Hardheads] and their post-modern programme because, correctly, he understood that it is still possible to further develop conceptual stimuli (Karel Adamus, of those exhibiting today, was the Softheads’ philosopher, Martin Klimeš, Jiří Šigut as well as the author of this brief exhibition summary were active members. I hope that this exhibition will again serve as a kind of link between the visual and musical thinking in the nowadays really extraordinarily culturally active Ostrava).
Jiří Valoch
