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Playing with Modernity


Modernity has not been sufficiently delved into or amply understood by our generation - despite its widening historical distance, its place in history and its becoming passe with the passage of time. Yet, it is still present, often unrecognized, popping and out of our lives. To a certain extent, we continue to live in modernity. In the last hundred years, we have paid a high price for the debts of the 19th century. Ideas of enlightenment and romanticism had turned into monsters, defining the destiny of Europe, doomed to be shattered by Nazism and Bolshevism. The fall of empires and creation of nation states has led to bloodshed of two world wars (providing a breeding ground for future military conflicts) and ended where it began - in the Balkans. Modernity was not an easy game. But the unavoidable fate was slow to reach Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, Serbs, Slovenians, Ukrainians and other nations, who entangled in unrealistic objectives often forced upon them, tried to skip a stage of the historic development known as "nation building". There nations were like bad students, who had to repeat a grade, left behind to pass an exam while others happily graduated. They did it grudgingly, but they could not avoid taking the tests. Although we know that it is impossible to escape history, we still make the same mistakes; repeating, on daily basis, words and phrases, which have long since lost all meaning. Zygmont Bauman once noted that the Nazis tried to accomplish pre-modern tasks using modern means. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, the US government is exporting democracy to the Middle East, trying to carry out a modern task by applying post-modern methods.
Modernity is all around us. It can be glimpsed in the cityscape of New York, which today looks touchingly antiquated as a monument to a future which never came. It can be seen in the concrete monstrosity of the capital of the Brazilian utopia. It is the return of mediums of modernity, important a century ago, and unexpectedly penetrating these days, often overlooked, like two powerful laser beams perforating the night sky of New York in the days of sorrow after the destruction of the Twin Towers. We've seen them before on the Zeppelin field in Nuremberg, where in 1936 Alfred Speer created his Cathedral of Light.
The beginning of the 20th century knew many "modern" mediums which were courted by both modernism and anti-modernism, but which never fully incorporated into high art. Sigmund Kracauer defined one of these mediums as "human ornaments". Being distantly related to the live sculptures of the epoch of Baroque, it turned into the pan-European fashion at the end of the 19th century, when the cult of the body and gymnastics spread and flourished across the continent. However, the epoch of the well-built mustached members of sports clubs, concerned not solely with physical health but also with national purity, ended in 1914 when the human pyramid of Europe fell apart, only to remodel itself into a different shape: the figure of the red star. At the newly created bolshevist society of spectacles, communist youth theaters were constructing endless human pyramids on the cold squares of revolutionary Petrograd. Soon the new "ideological" pyramid was exported to the West German Spartacist, and other members of the Communist International stood on each other shoulders, sacrificing not only their souls, but also their bodies, to the ideological common cause.
The beginning of the 20th century could aptly be described as "the time of crowds". The horror of those crowds was hunting intellectuals and was appreciated by the tyrants. A metaphor coined by Joseph Stalin, who compared human beings to "cog wheels", was a perfect description of the new role of the individual in the social pyramid of the society, as well as the human pyramid constructed on the parade grounds.
The human pyramids of Communism stood in competition (at least in Germany) to the legs of the Tiller Girls, deprived of any ideological charge, However, their mechanical eroticism was related to the no less mechanical zeal of their proletarian counterparts. The girls were nothing more than the same "cog wheels", but in a different machine. Kracauer made the mistake of believing that "mass ornaments" reflected the mood of capitalist production and capitalist alienation. They reflected the spirit of the crowds, the fear of individualization at the moment when the old order, having survived centuries, now disappeared, leaving humans to their own devices. Being afraid to face themselves, they tried to escape either into the future, as Russians, or into the past, as Germans. The Tiller Girls lost the contest but not to the Spartacist agitprop. They lost it to human ornaments created of the bodies of young men in brown uniforms marching in formations, creating a gigantic swastika.
But if the Nazi "human ornaments" had a tendency towards horizontal composition (like Nazi culture in general), their Soviet counterparts were tirelessly constructing the Tower of Babel. Human bodies were treated simply as good material for construction. Hierarchical human pyramids became a tradition, decorating the Red Square at every parade. In the mid 1930s, when Stalin decided to construct in Moscow the highest building in the world - the Palace of Soviets - a pyramid depicting the future architectural triumph of communism graced the May Day celebration in Moscow. Some scholars compared both the pyramid and the project itself to the old cartoon depicting the class structure of the capitalist society published in 1911 by the American unionist newspaper The Industrial Worker. They made a valid point. However, the new stratification of Soviet society was more reminiscent of the "Celestial Hierarchy" of Dionysius the Areopagate than relatively uncomplicated structure of capitalist exploitation.
After WWII, human pyramids continued to exist in the communist world, which day by day was becoming more rusty and outdated. In the West, they were exiled to stadiums and circus tents to die a natural death. They were not needed anymore by the world, which finally understood that standing on each other shoulders would not save people from the alienation of the final individualization.
Anetta Mona Chisa and Lucia Tkacova, two young Slovak artists both active in Prague and Bratislava, portray modernity and modernism in the raw materials they use. At first their artwork seems strange, but soon it reveals a readily recognizable world where fortune tellers are predicting the future using Karl Marx's "Das Kapital". Keys, ashtrays and wire brushes stolen in the "respected" galleries are turned into Duchampian readymades, and young revolutionary artists are writing their credo, dreaming about the glamour of the art world. The irony here is soft, but sharp. Their description of the post-modern fetishism of modernity is hilarious. In contrast to previous generations of Socialist block artists, who made fun of Communism falling into senility, Mona Chisa and Tkacova are not trying to deconstruct the world around them. Their art is a sarcastic reflection on the absurdity of cultural attitudes a la mode. At the end of the day, the contemporary American or British Marxist criticism, or even the tired and dogmatic fetishism of Duchamp, are more absurd than anything young artists could create.
Participating in the Journey against the Current, Mona Chisa and Tkacova are determined to address the semi-forgotten medium of "human ornaments". Using as their source of inspiration the aforementioned 1911 cartoon, they will construct in Bratislava - a city delapidated by socialism - a human pyramid depicting the new class structure of the capitalist Slovak society. However, the artists decided not to limit themselves to one device. They have incorporated into their art the shadow of another antiquated representational medium popular in the beginning of the 20th century - the statistical chart. Of course, statistics never fall out of fashion, but those gigantic, mendacious charts, which previously decorated every second wall in Moscow and excited Walter benjamin, who naively saw in them a new powerful art form, disappeared from public view long ago. Faceless human figures were depicted in those charts (sometimes designed by such champions of modernism as El Lissitsky) coded in different colors signifying their social status. The ornaments of these tables were the best graphic equivalent of "human ornaments", proving that if the death of one mane is a tragedy, the death of millions is simply a statistics.
The ghost from the past, which these two young artists will evoke in Bratislava, will combine both mediums; the human "cog well" creating the pyramid will be dressed in different colors signifying the social composition of the Slovak society.
Anetta Mona Chisa and Lucia Tkacova are skillfully playing with modernity, reminding us of the words which they presumably learned from their favorite fortune teller: "Traditions of all dead generations are weighing upon the minds of those alive as a horrible nightmare."

Konstantin Akinsha
2006


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