Praesens 3/2004
Zora Rusinová
In 1994, the most successful artist of the 22nd Sao Paulo Biennale was the Slovak artist, Matej Krén, who exhibited his six-and-a-half metre high, tower-like object made of books, entitled Idiom (1992). In this work, he used a mirror in a suggestive way to evoke the feeling of infinity forced into an internal space. Krén, a former "unofficial" artist before the fall of the totalitarian regime, became known for his installations which manipulate space. The artist’s creations not only resemble architectural tricks with the perspective of mannerism or the illusionism of Baroque, but also the cyberspace effects achieved by the electronic media.
The current installation, Passage, not only provides proof of the artist's ongoing interest in the building of illusive spaces from mirrors and rejected books, but also shows his great ability to perfectly realise constructions which are demanding from the viewpoint of stability. While the viewer looked into the variants of the tower-like Idiom only through a relatively narrow, vulvae-like opening, the rotunda, which the artists presented in the Czech Pavilion of the Expo 2000 in Hanover (Gravity Mixer) enabled the onlooker to move along the periphery of its outer cover (the feelings of variable space and multiplied infinity were achieved by the internal, rotating, mirrored octagon). Passage differs from Idiom in the fact that it is not an architectural object that can be perceived from outside, but rather the artist’s intervention into the real gallery space and its visual logic. The visitor enters the interior, which is seemingly deprived of the realistic coordinates of walls and edges, and, even though s/he anticipates that the artist has prepared a spectacular experience based on the osmoses of two worlds, the real and the illusive one, initially s/he is not able to separate the physical phenomena from the fictive picture. The only thing that creates solid ground under her/his feet is the narrow line of the pathway in the middle, as if hanging in the middle of a precipice, above which s/he has to walk to the other side. Thanks to the partially reversed reflection of what is "up" and what is "down", the visitor feels startled by fear from the unstable, bottomless depth and from the pulsing energy of the piled-up books, which are reflected in the mirrors placed on the ceiling and on the floor. Krén's installation challenges the process of perception given by the rational evaluation of sensual experiences based on inner experiences and, ultimately, also challenges what a sign is, what a reflection is, what representation is and what the virtual is.
Passage offers an experience which we only rarely meet with in galleries today. It evokes an impression of the return of auratic art and, at the same time, suggests the awe-struck question of "how was it done?" In his preparations, the artist pushed the boundaries of mathematics and physics and relied on the help of an experienced team to avoid improvisation. He also calculated on the fact that we have learned to trust the reflection in the mirror as a sort of "prosthesis" serving to prolong our visual capabilities (Umberto Eco). The final effect of the infinite reflection of the bands of books running in parallel evokes various interrelated meanings - from the Borges' Babylon library through the piled cultural layers of civilisation to the little bricks of knowledge or accumulated "dead information". Furthermore, the visitor walking through the space becomes part of the anamnesis of the mirror and of its deceptive strength in the history of culture. The mirror is a fascinating phenomenon and a tool of art since at least the 15th century, either in the framework of the composition of the "picture in the picture", an image of Narcissis leaning over the water's surface, or in the labyrinth of mannerism. Expressed in the words of G. R. Hocke, the mirror, at the dawn of the Modern Age, became a literary symbol of the problems, which, when the Middle Ages had faded away, discomposed the modern soul. Moreover, in the 20th century, the mirror not only was a preferred means of expression of the avant-garde movement, utilising rational principles (e.g., in constructivism, Op Art), but also a popular metaphor of artistic tendencies, which looked upon space not only as a psychological, but also a philosophical notion, and used illusion to demonstrate the averted side of reality (surrealism) or skepticism towards the idea of knowledge as truth (hyperrealism, postmodernism). From this point of view, Krén's Passage is not accidental. It picks up the threads of the early experiences of the group Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) based on time and space, the confusing pavilions of Dan Graham or the later Athopies of Jean Vercruysse. By its intervention in the given architectural space and its attack on the sphere of the visitors' feelings, Passage also resembles Robert Morris's works (1961), the variants of corridors of Bruce Nauman (since 1969) of the monumental metallic screwing architecture of Richard Serra. Krén's realisation, however, does not evoke a confined feeling due to the walls squeezing the viewers from both sides; on the contrary, it evokes their anxiety by the fact that he sets the dimensions of the space using a mirror, and by doing so, he opens up the depths, rendering them dispersed and ungraspable.
In the artwork of Krén, there are also resonations of Michel Foucault's reflections (Of Other Spaces) on space as an important theme of the current epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. He draws the mirror nearer to us not only as mediation between different forms of space, the real and the virtual, but, at the same time, as a phenomenal threshold relating to the identity of an individual: "I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface... the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction to the position that I occupy." The self-knowledge phrased by Foucault in the mirror had already played an important role in the work of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who, in 1936, identified the "Mirror Stage" as a key moment in the formation of a human being, an inevitable phase in our infant development where, by being brought face to face with the image of the virtual Other, we learn to recognise ourself as a self. According to Lacan, our uncouscious effotrts to incorporate a perceived diffrence between real and virtual result in our becoming an irretrievably split being, a creature always in the process of being divided from itself. We experience something similar when, e.g., the surfaces of Pistoletto's Mirror Works (1961-62) steal our own reflection and integrate it into surprising situations. In the case of Krén's Passage, however, the mirror does not reflect our face, it does not act like a borderline between the real, imaginary and symbolic. Due to the fact that the pathway in the centre covers part of the reflective floor, the mirrors reflect back only the duplicate of the surrounding walls. They do not reflect our individual pictures, only the "walling", or, metaphorically, the geological layers of the fossils of collective awareness. Thus, everything is reflected in the space except for us, which retroactively evokes panic. We do not stand in front of a mirror, but "beyond it", or, as Alice in the Wonderland, "behind it" - where we discover the unknown: the catoptrical world of virtuality. By the heterogeneity between perception and judgment, Krén directs our attention towards the essential questions of the position of our "I myself" in the world. By the structure of his installation, he helps us to realise ourselves anew, beyond the usual and intimately known relations of space and time.
Passage, similarly to many other projects of the artist, who currently lives and works in Prague, provides the viewer with an extraordinary experience, and, by its grandiose shaping, it exceeds the qualitative parameters of the fine art currently being produced in Slovakia. The installation would certainly be an attractive part of the permanent exhibition of any museum of art in the world. Therefore, it is gratifying that the Bratislava Art Gallery has obtained this work of art as a gift from the artist for its collections and wants to make it permanently available for its visitors.
Bratislava Art Gallery, Pálffy's Palace (16.06 - 15.09.2004), curator: Ivan Jančár
Kampa Museum, Prague (08.09 - 07.11.2004), curator: Jiří Machalický