Tag Archives: collage

Madness & Restraint: Eva Kotátková at ISCP

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Eva Koťátková Error 2015-2016 Collage on paper

Installation view from Eva Kotátková: Error, 2015-2016, collage on paper

I was intrigued by the work of Czech artist Eva Kotátková when I saw her small objects and collages arranged across a broad horizontal pedestal in the central pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale. More recently, the artist was represented in the New Museum’s Triennial exhibition through an installation of metal restraints, furniture, and collage across a yellow wall. The artist materializes how we are socially and psychically bound, and this remains true of her new work on view in the solo exhibition Error at the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) in Brooklyn. The archives of an asylum inspired Kotátková in collages, metal sculptures resembling medical apparatus, and performative objects meant to be worn on the body, all of which display the artist’s recurring concern with constraint and institutional systems.

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Installation view of Eva Kotátková, Anna (from Theatre of Speaking Objects), 2016

Of the works on view, Anna (pictured above) was one of my favorites. This surreal and unwieldy marionette visualizes the psychological barriers that can separate us from others–that muffled sense of isolation that Sylvia Plath referred to as the descent of the bell jar–and is based on a record of the asylum. A psychiatric patient had drawn herself wrapped in a rug, believing that no one could see her inside. Kotátková reinvigorates the pathetic fallacy with new life, as Anna becomes a vehicle for communication rather than isolation. Anna is part of Kotátková’s Theatre of Speaking Objects, a series in which she tries to make objects function as vehicles for communication. Detailed wall text and titles clue the viewer into the historical inspiration. This familiarity is useful when encountering the video on view in the other room, which deals most elaborately with the records left by a past patient.

Eva Koťátková The Judicial Murder of Jakob Mohr 2015-2016 Theater performance and video based on the drawing Justiz Mord (1909-1910) by Jakob Mohr

Installation shot of Eva Kotátková, The Judicial Murder of Jakob Mohr, 2015-2016. Theater performance and video based on the drawing Justiz Mord (1909-1910) by Jakob Mohr.

The artist also used records from the asylum to create The Judicial Murder of Jakob Mohr, a new video work that features an inmate defending himself in a patently artificial setting of cardboard and paper crowns. Filmed at the Bohnice Psychiatric Hospital in Prague, the video presents a staged trial performed in the hospital’s theater with professional actors, staff, and patients. The artist was inspired by a drawing in which a patient had depicted himself as a defendant on trial in a courtroom of masked doctors or fellow patients who are conspiring to betray him. Does such a drawing or video represent the patient’s perception of real events in his life, or does it suggest a personification of his mental struggles?  An alternative is to ask whether such paranoia forms an apt, if Kafakesque, lens for human experience.

Eva Koťátková, The Judicial Murder of Jakob Mohr, 2015-2016

Installation shot of Eva Kotátková, The Judicial Murder of Jakob Mohr, 2015-2016. Theater performance and video based on the drawing Justiz Mord (1909-1910) by Jakob Mohr.

Kotátková creates so many objects that imply the body that it is especially rewarding to see her imagination come to life through the performances in The Judicial Murder of Jakob Mohr. In the video, like all of the works on view, her focus on the relationship between human bodies and the oppressive institutional structures that surround and regulate them is both playful and disconcerting, theatrical and earnest.

Eva Kotátková: Error is on view at ISCP until April 8.

Collaged poetry: Robert Seydel at the Queens Museum

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Collaged poetry, or poems via the pictorial medium of collage? Robert Seydel confuses distinction between the visual and literal in his works on paper. When Queens-based artist Robert Seydel died in 2011 at age 50, he left behind of corpus of pages older than he was–taken from vintage albums and books, thick and yellowed with age, to which the artist added found images, paint, and words. Now many of these collages line the walls of the Queens Museum as part of the exhibition Robert Seydel: The Eye in Matter while pages from his journals and typed poems fill cases in the center of the room. Playful, dense, intimate–this is a show that rewards careful attention and voyeuristic complicity.

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I characterize the act of looking here as voyeuristic because the intimacy of scale is combined with the intimacy of the diarist’s musings. The first-person viewpoint of Ruth, an alter-ego Seydel adopts in these quasi-fictional accounts, creates a framing narrative to these fragmentary poems and paragraphs. Seydel tells an inaccurate story of Ruth and Saul, people who in real life were siblings–his aunt and uncle. Pages might describe Ruth’s obsession with artist Joseph Cornell. Seydel knew Cornell, working as his studio assistant, but the one-sided love affair was (probably) his own invention.

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To a great degree, his own concerns blended with those of his fictional aunt, to the point that he said in an interview:

She’s so taken over part of my art-making function that I don’t really question her authenticity anymore. I thought originally I wanted to inhabit another person; now she inhabits me.

What keeps the interest of the viewer in such elaborate, personal arcana is a strong sense of humor, like in the work pictured above. The protagonists are pictured with Ruth’s emblem–the hare–like respectable 1940s space aliens having a family portrait made.

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Seydel uses text in highly visual, nuanced ways. Even when typing up pages of poetry, the artist carefully spaced the words and allowed room for the insertion of stars or painted hares. “A picture always wants to be something else” Seydel said, and one has the sense that in his hands pictures and words were mercurial, amorphous vehicles for expression.

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Robert Seydel: The Eye in Matter is on view at the Queens Museum of Art through September 27, 2015. Plaid Duchamp Recording in Magenta, a complimentary event featuring photographs, poetry, and 8mm short films inspired by Joseph Cornell, is happening this Sunday, August 16 from 3 to 5 pm.

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Charlie Chaplin: Icon Behind the Wall

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This screenshot shows Charlie Chaplin in his most famous persona of “the tramp” in the 1914 film, Kid Auto Races at Venice. At this time, Chaplin was 25 years old and then was his second film. His fame and iconic look–baggy pants and bowler hat–spread quickly. Not only did they spread fast and quickly, but he endures as an avant-garde icon in parts of the world far from Hollywood.

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My friend took this picture on the street in Tiblisi, Georgia two months ago–100 years after Kid Auto Races. To be familiar with Chaplin today is hardly surprising. But Chaplin has a life as an avant-garde symbol dating from his first film. Despite two World Wars followed by a Cold War, Chaplin infiltrated deep into Russia and Eastern Europe, becoming an avant-garde icon even as access to films was limited and sporadic. Chaplin comes up surprisingly often in avant-garde journals, designs, and collages–adding an often-lacking bathos and humor.

Barbara Stepanova, Kino Foto, 1922

Barbara Stepanova, Kino Foto, 1922 (Russia)

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Evzen Markalous, Laughter, 1926 (Czechoslovakia)

M. Berman, Charlie III, 1928 (Poland)

M. Berman, Charlie III, 1928 (Poland)