Contemporary Central European Art [Volume: 7(1988), pp. 138-154]

144
VICTOR H. MIESEL
Morning hours,
true hours,
of fear,
of death,
of love,
And hours that do not exist at all.3
Reading this poem, at least while under the spell of the exhibition,
one may sense a time that is being emptied-the old notion of the "fullness
of time" no longer holds-"hours that do not exist at all" are not the hours,
bitter or sweet that have slipped away into the past but the empty time
ahead, for the rest of the day, for the rest of one's life. Perhaps one would
rather join Van Hoddis' workers as they slip from roofs to their death?
But the "hours that do not exist at all"-they confront the "true hours"
of feeling and though Gustowska does not add hope to her list perhaps
she implies it. As for NepraS, it is safe to assume that anyone who takes
his inspiration from compatriots like Kafka and Capek, as he acknowledges,
has more in mind than yet another joke at the expense of true believers
who are forever spun about by the twists and turns of party truth.
I am not insisting that the exhibition was untouched by calculation
and trendiness. I believe, however, that what really mattered in the exhibition had very little to do with being up-to-date or "cool." Nor were shopworn ideas absent. It is just that things like that did not seem at all important.
Take, for example, the wall given over to three sets of Stations of
the Cross. Some viewers, whether they cared in a religious sense or not,
noticed the symbolism of Andrzej Bielawski's dry point series-Christ
tormented by soldiers and policemen-what could have been more familiar
and predictable? On the other hand, Jinr Kolar's quasi-cubist fracturing of
(I believe) Durer woodcut reproductions caught people's eye favorably.
It was very effective. The third set, by Zlatko Atac, turned out to be
"merely" photographs of the originals which were in a Yugoslavian church.
That discovery, far from being a disappointment, pointed up the fact that
the works in this exhibition actually, as well as metaphorically, could occupy
and sometimes best occupied spaces other than gallery spaces. In those
other spaces what mattered was how the works related to the needs of those
spaces-how they served in this instance the religious needs (but not solely
the religious needs, of course) of the "receivers" but also the "senders"
of such "messages," messages sent sometimes in relatively familiar terms
and sometimes in rather unexpected ways. In both cases though, whether
things looked old or new, the awareness of context became an invitation
or a challenge to ask fundamental questions about religious feeling. Does
that seem quaint? To make matters more uncomfortable, when the official
teachings of the regimes of "real existing socialism" were taken into account,
Andrzej Bielawski, The Station of the Cross (1984).
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