UNPLUGGED13 August – 29 November 2020Galerie Rudolfinum

Exhibition Guide

Unplugged is an international group exhibition whose title is taken from a musical term denoting a performance played on acoustic instruments. We have invited artists to prepare a project on the theme “environmental thinking”. As an institution, we are interested in the possibilities of leaving our comfort zone and reducing the financial resources expended on the production of artificial materials and their transport, while maintaining the professionalism of institutional representation throughout. We wish to point to qualities that we tend to overlook because of the ready availability of machine and automated production. The show’s key elements include an emphasis on daylight and the physical experience of encountering art.

John CageHabima FuchsRinus van de Veldeunconductive trashTomáš DžadoňPatricie FexováTomáš MoravecLenka VítkováNicole Six & Paul Petritsch

John Cage (born 1912 in Los Angeles, USA, died 1992 in New York, USA) is the only non-living artist represented at the exhibition. He has been included particularly because his approach to his art practice, his well-considered resonance and impact on listeners, viewers and the public in general are a model of environmental thinking. He is an example of the fact that the expression environmental thinking is fully perceptible only when seen as holistic, a hypersensitivity to the world around us, that we are a part of and co-create. Cage studied classical painting in the 1930s and Eastern spiritual systems in the 1940s, especially Zen Buddhism. He made an energetic entrance on the contemporary music, dance and art scene in the 1950s with new principles of practice that include taking lessons from classical techniques, a respect for the instruments and techniques passed on to us by our ancestors, as well as their enrichment with overlooked elements naturally present in the real environment where we inhabit. He included ambient noises, static, rustling, crackling sounds that we mostly consider a nuisance in music with standard instruments. Is the whistling of the wind a disturbance when listening to a piano concert? Or – if we perceive the world as a whole so that everything has its meaning and value – is it a natural part of it? Are we able to enrich it, open our sensitivity to accepting the fact that the world is not composed of preselected, elite cultural products established on the basis of a current social contract? Cage was not an anarchist who wanted to demolish order in art, its organisation, structure, values attained so far. On the contrary, he meant to enrich them with elements that are neglected and suppressed, yet are often more natural, shape our world and naturally activate our instincts.The extensive project Ryoanji came about in Cage’s late period between 1983 and 1985. The artist was inspired by observing a garden in the Buddhist temple Ryoanji in Kyoto, Japan, consisting of a rectangular form strewn with fine gravel and arrayed with approximately fifteen aptly placed stones. Cage sat down at his worktable and made tracings of pebbles of various sizes with pencils of various hardness. A cycle resulted comprising one hundred and eighty drawings of a meditative, automatic (or perhaps more appropriately – cyclic) nature, where the main role is played by repeating a hand movement and dividing the drawing into phases by progressively shifting the stone over the paper. On the basis of these drawings, Cage then wrote a twenty-two-minute composition for various instruments and voice.For the Unplugged exhibition we have decided not to present a selection of original drawings from various parts of the word, only some of which are available for loan, but rather to show a monograph representing all of them.

Unlike the originals of the drawings only suitable for exhibition in a museum environment on account of their sensitivity to the physical attributes of the exhibition room or display case, here a publication is physically available to the visitor, who can look through it and view the entire cycle. Concurrently, we are also presenting part of a score whose visuality far exceeds a technical set of instructions for performing the musical composition and represents a direct parallel to initiation drawings.At the same time, we invited experts on Cage’s musical oeuvre, contemporary music composers and the multi-genre singer Petr Wajsar, who took on the task of studying the composition Ryoanji that will be performed by members of the Czech Philharmonic. With a variable ensemble, as called for by the instructions and nature of the piece, the philharmonic orchestra will perform the composition approximately fifteen times in the Great Court of the Rudolfinum next to the gallery entrance. By including a work by John Cage in an exhibition of contemporary art we wanted to indicate that environmental thinking is not only a trend prompted by current phenomena linked to climate change or the criticism of late-stage capitalism, but that it has been expressed by art in various forms for many decades. Cage is one of those cases; he expressed his doubts over the artificialisation of the world many times, as is also apparent from in his literary work. “We're putting art in museums, getting it out of our lives. We're bringing machines home to live with us. Now that the machines are here so to say to stay with us, we've got to find ways to entertain them. If we don't, they’ll explode, butas for going, we're going out.”1 Another important reason for including this work is its multidisciplinary nature, entirely in the spirit of expanding our perception to the surrounding milieu – the co-habitation of the Czech Philharmonic and Galerie Rudolfinum in one building provides a unique and natural opportunity to interconnect fine and musical art in one project.

Besides her other activities, Habima Fuchs (born 1977 in the Czech Republic; later on in her life she lived in Berlin for fifteen years) is currently studying Tibetan medicine. Three of her artworks from various periods have been included in the Unplugged exhibition and as the artist says herself, through time her work is becoming progressively smaller and more and more delicate, perhaps even becoming abstract. The most expressive pieces are three ceramic sculptures from the cycle Daimonion – Journey to the End of the World. Daimonion (Turn) represents a bizarre predatory mammal or some other being which (for an unknown or unspecified reason) did not develop symmetrically, as otherwise tends to be the case in nature. The creature has asymmetrically stunted front limbs, predetermining it to move around in circles. Daimonion (Rotation) is a reference to the ancient mythological Uroboros, whose curved body points to the cyclical nature of natural processes rather than being a deformation, “a glitch in the system”. The Open Human represents a headless being with only a face or mask supported by the two halves of its body. Although all three of Habima Fuchs’ exhibited artworks evoke aesthetic references to non-European cultures, these three clay beings – characteristically placed on modernist, urban apartment tables from the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – represent easily decipherable references to the curses or threats embodied by European society as contained in pre-Enlightenment mythologies. Evidence of Habima Fuchs’ analytical approach and the thoroughness of her creative methods is provided by the fact that the artworks mentioned were created on the basis of the artist’s pilgrimage-like trips around Europe, when she carefully made tracings and drawings of hundreds of beings from reliefs and sculptural decorations of Romanesque buildings. Another essential inspiration for Fuchs is the lived experience of people in the middle ages who were much more influenced by magic, demons and other entities that unlike our tired, atheist reality, allowed a much wider space for questions of an ontological nature.Several years later she made the series Hanging Cities (From An Acient Civilization) completed in 2015, a symbolic homage to insects, probably wasps. The nests symbolise the dwellings of creatures that humans tend to relate to somewhat negatively on account of their uselessness – they cannot be domesticated – only putting up with them with a considerable dose of mistrust. Their significance is also indicated by the title of the exhibition where they were first presented – Quality of Being. Hanging Cities were made very slowly while Fuchs was on a residency lasting several months

1 John Cage, lecture WHERE ARE WE GOING, WHAT ARE WE DOING at the Evening School of Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in January 1961. In: Silence, Lectures and Writings by John Cage, Wesleyan University Press, 1973, p. 194.

in Banská Štiavnica in Slovakia, and involved the slow drying of clay and its subsequent firing in several phases, with the final patination applied by firing in a camp fire, which became an event that included the other participants of the residency and had an almost ritualistic dimension. The common starting points for the conception and execution of Hamina Fuchs’ artworks include a long-term interest in connecting the Earth and Sky, listening to the elements and to materials, through the initiation of instincts and suppressed senses as well as in rituals, references to a non-linear, cyclical conception of time, whose inspirational power is also harnessed somewhat hopefully by regularly updated ethno-futurist phenomena.2 What other kind of prism should we look through when examining the series of one hundred and eight diminutive pottery bowls entitled 108? The viewpoint of a pragmatic user (as applied design) or a fetishist collector (as in her serial sculptural installation)? A focused look at the disembodied line of tiny objects reveals time-consuming work with just a few natural pigments that differentiate individual bowls through the tonal transitions between different glazes. Shapes modelled on the size and irregularity of the artist’s palm and enhanced by soft, diffused lighting endow them with individual energy and at the same time with an enchanting intimacy.The artist emphasises that her entire oeuvre is one communicating vessel, artworks separated by a considerable amount of time are closely connected, developing one from another. Through her work the artist is thus fulfilling a more general worldview about the interconnection and authenticity of life and art that “is nourished by immediate experience”. With an entirely affirmative approach and in harmony with her own methods, as well as in the spirit of the challenge of producing an exhibition without employing machines, Habima Fuchs decided to undertake twelve journeys, wrapping up one Visící město (Hanging City) for each trip and delivering it together with nine bowls from her depository to the gallery.

Rinus van de Velde (born 1983 in Belgium) lives in Antwerp. A masterful draftsman with superb drawing skills, he accompanies his visual artworks with critical commentaries on the contemporary society of excess, the world of media, artists as brands, and thus cogs in the machine of art production. He is the author of coal mural drawings made directly onto the walls of a gallery, extensive pop-up installations always assembled from a large amount of substandard materials, thus creating an ostensibly naïve version of a world that runs parallel to the one we consider “real”. He creates stage-sets and backdrops of epic narratives of the tragedies of individuals more or less successfully trying to find their bearings in the confusion of the surrounding world. Rinus van de Velde took a radical approach to the exhibition’s challenge “without electricity, without machines, without unnecessary transport of materials” – no mural drawing (I would have to use an electric projector, and I don’t want to) and no pop-up site-specific installation (quite frankly, I hate to travel). Rinus wrote: “In the end I’m most happy when I can sit in my studio and draw. When I wake up in the morning and know that I have to travel somewhere, all the happiness vanishes, and stress takes over.” The career of an internationally respected artist naturally requires it, but Rinus decided to participate in the project in a win-win way – to make a new artwork for the show; to be happy; to minimise the use of means of transport. Over several days in his studio, he produced a series of new drawings for the exhibition and made an agreement with his old friend Joe, a passionate cyclist, that would deliver the drawings in person on his bike from Antwerp to Prague. One of the parameters of this exhibition, however, is the intention to maintain professional standards on the level of an international institution, which among other things include insuring art objects and their transport. The insurance company agreed to our non-standard process of producing the exhibition and after carefully stipulating its conditions, it insured the transport of artworks on a bicycle. Joe is planning to make the journey back on a train and his bike will be waiting for transport back in the gallery foyer.

Burning Daylight by the artist duo unconductive trash is a complex painting-installation that includes “the colour tone” of the daylight penetrating the exhibition room through the ceiling. The original invitation to take part in the Unplugged exhibition was addressed to Michal Pěchouček (born 1973 in the Czech Republic) for his aptitude for “moving on from territories that have already been (hard)-won”, his ability to step out of his own comfort zone. In the 1990s, Pěchouček was a highly regarded painter experimenting with using “unartistic materials”, in subsequent years he made a successful entrance into the area of photographic experimentation, becoming the author of much appreciated, innovative videos and short films. Around 2010, when his curatorial practice was well off the ground (mostly in Galerie 35m2), he gradually stopped exhibiting in galleries and devoted all his time to theatre. His collaborative work on scripts, stage production 2 See the interview with Armen Avenessian, Farewell to Linear Times, Rajon #6, p. 3, Praha, 2020, ISSN2336-2049.

and dramaturgy enhanced the reputation of highly recognised drama projects in the MeetFactory, Studio Hrdinů and HaDivadlo. The reply from Michal Pěchouček to the challenge to prepare a project for the Unplugged show was surprising, and at the same precisely in the spirit of why he was invited in the first place: “…my work with theatre has just come to an end, I’m starting to do ‘painting’ again, but with a young painter, a fresh graduate of AVU, Rudi Koval (born 1991 in Germany), we collaborate under the pseudonym unconductive trash.” Expectations are met more quickly when two artists collaborate on a collective project: one of the essential elements of environmental thinking is the ability to suppress the individual ego and work together, the ability to reach compromises not by making concessions compromising one’s artistic objective, but by creating new values that could not have been conceived without collaboration. Unconductive trash is presenting a series of paintings with the poetic title Burning Daylight, taken from the eponymous 1910 novel by Jack London set in the milieu of the gold rush on the Yukon River in Alaska. The cycle is not inspired by the harsh nature of the storyline of the novel, but rather by its title, where light has an ambiguous, fateful quality. Here and there on a background of water-washed abstract patterns, we see embroidered contours of the fragments of bodies of girls and boys melancholically turning away from us, so our eyes do not meet. Is it a reproach more than anything else, a motif of refusal or on the contrary a hopeful motif of liberating oneself from the clutches of the past and heading in a direction that promises hope for a more idyllic future? The artists have the following observation about the non-figurative artworks: “Yes, human beings and their relationship to the macrocosm and the microcosm are the theme, but even within most abstract things a fairly easy to understand and more general conflict is taking place, between the drawing and the smudge, which are equal in value, between rational understanding, exerting an influence, and irrational, uncontrolled and ungraspable reality.” The effect of the resulting installation may now, a month and a half before the final selection of paintings and the installation, only be guessed at. In any case it seems that experience with abstract, monochromatic and painted surfaces – in combination with Pěchouček’s sense for narration, concentrated into the diminutive gesture of the outline of a figure – a new, more complex creative expression.

Tomáš Džadoň (born 1981 in Slovakia) is a sculptor, teacher and demiurge (here meant literally in terms of Plato’s dialogue Timaios as an “architect-craftsman, who builds the Universe according to the model of Ideas”) of collective relations to the past. Džadoň is well-known primarily thanks to the project Památník lidové architektury (Folk Architecture Monument, produced 2013, dismantled 2016) when he had three folk, log barns transported onto the roof of a concrete high-rise building. Many of Džadoň’s projects in public space are influenced by the problematic, dated aesthetic of high-rise concrete apartment blocks, as well as by the obsolescent aesthetic of traditional log architecture. For the Unplugged exhibition, Tomáš Džadoň came up with the most didactic reaction possible to the call to take part in an exhibition with an environmental theme. He changed the dimensions and materials (he drew over them by hand) of the drawings by Fero Jablonovský (born 1956 in Slovakia), the initiator of the anthology Čo ťa páli, has! (If something makes you smoulder, put the fire out!)3, creating an environment he has called Dědictví (Inheritance), through which visitors walk as if they were among stage sets. The moment of the intergenerational dialogue between Tomáš Džadoň and the author of the original drawings underscores the authenticity of working with historical references – it is not just about the general theme of transferring an “environment” from one generation to the next, but about a personal creative bond reflecting the strong autobiographical trait of Džadoň’s practice. Visitors may be taken aback by the descriptiveness of the themes depicted on the panels – the critical, now historical anthology of drawings with an environmental message was an indictment of the establishment wrapped up in humour that was quite evidently damaging the environment through central planning (strip mining of coal and other natural raw materials, insensitive housing and road construction, centralised industrial zones). The paradox of Džadoň’s “transfer of the untransferable” is that over the last thirty-five years almost everything has changed (the political system; economic system; land ownership structure; manufacturing tools; technology; and the complexity of information, as well as the possibility of its dissemination), the only thing that hasn’t changed is the heavy impact of humans on the environment. Parts of the drawings on display are heightened in relief, having been carved out of their original background, and lie on the floor like abandoned shells. The motif of dancing on the ruins of one’s own world has been materialised here, with the visitor invited (in fact compelled by the flow

3 Čo ťa páli, has! (If something makes you smoulder, put the fire out!), publishing house Príroda, Bratislava 1985.

of the exhibition) to move between the stage sets for a play they would rather not have a role in. Perhaps this irritating feeling is exactly what the visitor will remember most about the installation.

Patricia Fexová (born in 1975 in the Czech Republic), a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts (AVU) and the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design (UMPRUM), recently presented an extensive series of monochromatic paintings under the title Sklad krajin (Stockroom of Landscapes).4 The show consisted of paintings on strips of canvas in the same panoramic format paired together, exhibited one above, one below, with something akin to a horizon emerging in between. Individual canvas surfaces really were assembled one above the other, their colour gamut evoking a water surface, the sky, a field, or a meadow. Paradoxically, several dozen such diptychs, installed identically at the same height, did not at all feel schematic. Delicate gradations of the colour applied on each surface and the combination of blue, yellow, brown and red tones was enchanting with its diversity of emotional impacts achieved with such a minimalist and yet variability-enabling method. For Unplugged, Patricie Fexová chose a radically different course of action – she decided to make one extensive site-specific artwork, created at and for the location. In choosing her format and outline, she set herself a fairly difficult task. In order to resist a “commission-type” setup, however, she selected the theme of detachment, seeing things from a distance – a well-known phenomenon thanks to the film The Overview Effect – as the specific inspiration for her abstract painting. It was first described by astronauts after seeing the Earth from a distance, consisting of an emotional response that could be described as empathy, a sense of belonging, a caring urge awoken on the basis of having experienced something tremendously immense. This led to a large abstract painting entitled Overview that continues on from her previous theme of landscapes, but at the same time reflects Fexová’s log-term interest in the portrait and the motif of the circle. Overview depicts a meta-landscape, its considerable dimensions evoking a theatre curtain. Upon approaching the piece, one experiences a change in scale and transformation of detail, of elements that may have been reminiscent of something in particular. Close-up, what remains are expressive brush strokes of colour paint, leaving the viewer to make his or her own associations.

The work Manuport by Tomáš Moravec (born in 1985 in the Czech Republic), currently a doctoral student at the Academy of Fine Arts (AVU) in Prague, is a composed sculptural installation with a performative element. The installation’s central motif is a rock weighing one and a half tonnes, the granite stela from the Karel Aksamit monument that Moravec saved when the Lokomotiva Holešovice sports complex adjacent to his studio was being demolished. Karel Aksamit was a sports promoter during the First Czechoslovak Republic, a naïve Communist whose life was brutally terminated by the Nazis under the occupation for being an active participant in the resistance, as were the lives of other members of his family. The monument was built in the 1950s and the sports ground bore his name. In recent years, the complex has fallen prey to the aims of developers and the monument’s torso, like other elementsof the complex, would have ended up on a waste dump.“We can hardly imagine a more eccentric enterprise than was the erecting the longest and heaviest stones. Only rarely was so much ingenuity and energy spent in order to gain something clearly so metaphorical and foolish. I suspect that what at first was a deviation, quickly became a kind of blind competition that probably led the authors of such crazy projects to hew and erect stones of ever more spectacular dimensions, something that required more and more courage and sweat. The need to overcome others or oneself and the desire for great heroic deeds has deep roots and is independent of its subject. The discovery and testing of new techniques, a more effective economy of work, the necessity to apply as yet unknown tricks, all forms of progress whose reward was on the contrary everything but imaginary, all this can be put down to crazy competition. Not counting the significant achievement: intense human violence convinced of its immeasurable demand.” 5 As the quote from Roger Caillois’ Stones and Other Texts indicates, encountering a fallen stela opens deeper and more ancient civilizational themes than the troubling issues regarding monuments in Prague revealing the collective inability to come to terms with one’s own past. However, Moravec introduced his own social and kinetic energy into an instillation of the residua of the past, metaphorically representing a wasteland: he placed an enormous stone, including part of the bedrock that it was wrenched from still in place, onto a roller bearing, thus enabling the stone to move not unlike

4 Galerie Václav Špála, 1 February – 17 March, 2019.5 Galerie Václav Špála, 1 February – 17 March, 2019.

a compass needle. He thus hints at the potential of seeking a direction for the continuation of the narrative. The entire installation is then activated by the presence of a person, the performer, who from time to time turns the stone, in order to then take his place on the throne of the “empire”, another remnant of the sports complex, and to read aloud a referee’s texts, even though here he is a referee without a game to preside over. By emphasising the narrative nature of the installation through the reading of the text, of which visitors will probably not catch either the beginning or the end, the work shows its reluctance to be read didactically and anchored in the here and now.

In the last exhibition room, Lenka Vítková (born in 1975 in the Czech Republic) has made a painting and sculpture-based intervention entitled When. Unlike the other participating artists, Lenka Vítková primarily drew on inspiration from the site itself. Galerie Rudolfinum was built in the Neo-Renaissance style for the salon-type presentation of paintings. Vítková has a long-term interest in the theme of the classic wall-mounted painting. She often comments on it by radically reducing the size of her paintings on the canvas, often painting outside the canvas or replacing the visual experience by using text on gallery walls. A Neo-Renaissance picture gallery is quite something to deal with, and it did not allow Lenka Vítková to disregard the theme of the wall-mounted, “hanging” painting, but her deliberations reached a point where they developed into an act of subversion – she empowered the impression of a traditional picture gallery by painting the entire walls with Terra Pozzuoli pigment that is typical for the Renaissance and geometrical shapes at the level where one would expect wall-mounted paintings, as if someone had taken them down many years ago, thus making the picture gallery both present and absent at the same time. And because colour is one of the essential components of painting for Lenka Vítková, she worked with the pigments themselves, dissolving them in plaster of Paris and leaving behind other residua of the painting process – small objects like the remains of colour gone hard in a tin or a disposable cup. However, thanks to their warm colours, these objects evoking aliens, ulcers or fungi do not give the impression of mementos from the past, but on the contrary of the flowers of neo-plants, the embryos of neo-animals, still developing amorphous neoplasms. The conditional form used in the title testifies to Lenka’s subtle and delicate use of language as an integral component of her practice, anticipating a condition, hinting that the objects do not merely consist of their shape and colour, but that they represent a message of something future, perhaps a threat, perhaps hope, as well as other interpretative levels that may be found in the installation. Restraint, gravity and at the same time the openness of the in-situ installation is partly illustrated by the interview with Lenka Vítková conducted by Markéta Lisá:

LV: The colour range in which I’m kind of at home is somehow less European now;but does it even make sense to put a label on it like that?ML: I suppose not, in fact we have a sneaking feeling that it’s almost over, this labelling, we yearn for that end. Colours and sounds will persist, the world.Could your paintings be called acts, or are they executions?LV: Thanks for asking. With paintings it’s about half and half, when plaster is setting it’s an event.ML: The setting process is interesting. What follows after maybe points in the direction to where the paintings have vanished.

The Austrian conceptual sculptural artist duo Nicole Six & Paul Petritsch (born 1971 and 1968 in Austria) decided not to take up one particular exhibition room of the gallery, but to work with the building as a whole, as well as its immediate environs and to include in their project the social aspect of the way that both employees and visitors make use of the building. The project Lascaux – Parallel Worlds is composed of two parts. Over a period of several weeks before and during the exhibition, Six and Petritsch will gather various items and objects testifying to life in the Rudolfinum building, whether they be bits of plaster from the walls or the smallest articles dropped by accident by the building’s occupants, such as paper clips, buttons found near the cloakrooms after a concert, and the like. With the meticulousness of criminal investigators and an interest in the most minute residua, the artists will gather “samples”, the traces of movement, activities, the most ordinary evidence of those of us who visit or work in the institution. Their project can be placed in the category of the so-called archival turn in art that is accompanied by cataloguing and an analysis of the elements of the selected spatial situation or phenomenon. The artists intend to make the result of their survey tangible on charts displayed on the walls, assemblages whose compositions are conspicuously reminiscent of clusters of stars in the night sky.

This method based on stubbornness, an almost obsessive mania for counting, gathering, sorting and writing down a list of ostensibly insignificant materials, stems from the conviction that taking a peek at the whole requires unexpected impulses that are the opposite of rational, pragmatic and efficiency-focused human attention. This form of attentiveness is on the contrary something like “surfing” for the true nature of reality, a kind of surfing that smoothens the surface, making it less penetrable, more closed and inimical. The result, then, is always about a form of social work converted into sculpture, installation or a mounted picture whose basic mission is not to aesthetically enchant visitors, but to awaken in them an unexpected empathy, as well as being an incentive to reflect on one’s own routine activities. The second part of their intended participation in the Unplugged show is even less tangible – the installation and operation of a GSM and Wi-Fi jammer. At first glance an almost adolescently literal and crafty reaction to the title of the exhibition, this activity, illegal in practice (the use of jammers is prohibited under the Telecommunications Act), is however a conceptual materialisation (notional, because it is a social sculpture that our senses are unable to detect) of a serious theme anticipated by the Unplugged show in its broader sense of the relationship to environmental issues: what are the boundaries between being connected and disconnected from systems, rules, social conventions? What recourse do I have against the fact that when I turn on my Wi-Fi signal search, fifteen networks pop-up that I had not invited to my flat? Is the right to produce a signal (electromagnetic waves) greater than the right to refuse that signal? Is it a situation established on the basis of social consensus, or is it a one-sided laying down of rules, whether under the guise of progress, or a simple expression of the power of the stronger?

One of the impulses behind putting on the Unplugged exhibition was a review of Serotonin, the most recent novel by the French writer Michel Houellebecq, called “No One in the West Will Ever Be Happy Again” .6 The reviewer attributes the outcome of the novel, as expressed by the title of the article, to the burnout syndrome affecting individuals unable to maintain meaningful interhuman relationships and the consequent collapse of one’s own relation to society, predicting the downfall of Western civilisation through exhaustion stemming primarily from the permanent stress caused by our awareness of the way we are destroying our environment and how this awareness is destroying us. Houellebecq frequently describes a situation that is a metaphor of the mythical Uroboros, the snake devouring its own tail.It would be foolish to expect art to come up with instruction manuals on how to resolve specific social problems, but we decided to call on the artists to express themselves with regard to a set of issues that we consider highly current.Environmental Thinking is an attitude that asks questions about the relationship and equilibrium between natural and artificial (cultural) entities. It is thus not a scientific discipline, such as ecology, that identifies a problem, analyses it and conducts studies proposing possible solutions. It is more a set of questions to which there are no definite answers, but ones that are fundamental for us to call to mind when going about the business of our everyday lives. For this very reason, environmental thinking was chosen as the theme of the exhibition, rather than the climate crisis or the crisis of identity of the inhabitants of the Western world, even though they are very closely related and tightly interwoven themes.Each of the artists represented at the exhibition reacted to our challenge differently and we thus experience diverse artworks and approaches. The work of the artists selected is more often motivated by stepping out of their comfort zones than tends to be the norm for expositions at institutional, exhibition spaces. Much in terms of the preparation and execution of this exhibition was done differently than is usually the case, with preference given to work done by human hands rather than the routine and tried and tested commissioning of industrially made products. We were perhaps somewhat foolish at times in the interest of revising the routine approach, for example when we transported Tomáš Moravec’s stone with a horse-driven cart, when we had the drawings by Rinus van de Velde delivered from Antwerp by bicycle or when we had a special handcart made for transporting paintings around town. We were led to the decision to illuminate the exhibition only with daylight more by a desire for naturalness and the changeable nature of the experience, as well as an appreciation for the qualities of the exhibition space that was designed for just such a purpose, rather than by saving kilowatt hours of electricity. By turning down the air conditioning to a point that does not damage the building, yet does not correspond to the standards of a museum-type institution, we wanted to provide light similar to that outside under the sky and point to the phenomenon of “living in caves” when a dwelling no longer serves as protection from

6 „Na Západě už nikdo nebude štastný. Houellebecqův nový román brzy vyjde česky“ (“No One in the West Will Ever Be Happy Again”. Houellebecq’s New Novel Soon To Come Out in Czech.”), ČTK, Aktuálně.cz, 3. 1. 2019.

adverse weather conditions, but with increasing frequency creates a laboratory environment with unchanging conditions, which most certainly isn’t natural for the human psyche.We are not going to compare the carbon footprint of individual projects, for that is more in the category of the methods of technocratic thinking that led to the overproduction of things and emissions in the first place. We have reduced the exhibition catalogue, the normal part of the professional accompaniment of an institutional exhibition, to a minimalist bibliophile edition produced by hand in a workshop one hundred metres from the gallery. Our endeavour aims to stir our senses numbed as they are by the routine professional activities of institutions, posing questions to ourselves as to what makes real sense, and what does not really do so. Doing so with the knowledge that we will not find answers to many of the questions; the hope that self-denial and self-doubt do not have to be a form of self-flagellation or an expression of weakness, but rather a journey towards greater empathy and understanding of the relation between one’s own work and “the rest of the world”.The text and production of the Unplugged exhibition bring more questions than answers. It is important that these questions are posed by renowned and well-established public institutions representing a certain cultural and social “power”, because as un-alternative environments they are the norm-setters. And that despite the danger that by doing so they are establishing another form of academism in the area of art activities and representation. You can read more not only about how power functions and how it manifests in the text Reality Devalues, Percentages Increase by Ladislav Šerý whom we asked to write something on the theme unplugged-disconnection precisely because of his critical thinking and non-academic literary style.

David Korecký, Exhibition CuratorFebruary 2020

Unplugged, Galerie Rudolfinum, 13 August – 29 November 2020

Exhibiting Artists: John Cage, Tomáš Džadoň, Patricie Fexová, Habima Fuchs,Tomáš Moravec, Nicole Six & Paul Petritsch, Rinus van de Velde, unconductive trash, Lenka VítkováPerfomance of John Cage‘s Composition Ryoanji by members of the CzechPhilharmonic: Vladislav Borovka – oboe, Naoki Sato - flute, Petr Wajsar (guest) –vocals, Štěpán Hon (Orchestra Academy of the Czech Philharmonic) –percussion, Adam Honzírek – double base; many thanks to Tomáš Františ

Exhibition curator, texts: David KoreckýAdministration: Lenka HachlincováEducation & Public Events: Zdenka ŠvadlenkováPR and Marketing: Maja Ošťádalová, Tereza ŠkvárováAssistant curator: Šárka JendraššákGallery assistant: Oxana Ondříčková

Essay: Ladislav ŠerýTranslation: Marek TominEditor: Kateřina KeilováGraphic design: Petr Bosák a Robert Jansa (20YY Designers)Letter painting: Dan PlaveckýDesign of wooden information elements: Matyáš CíglerArtwork installation and exhibition design: VetamberCityLight poster manufacture using environmentally friendly paint: Jakub Stýblo,(Analog Bros screen-printing workshop)Paper for catalogue: Handmade Paper Mill Velké Losiny (A.D. 1596)Printer’s plates for reproductions produced by Davex, ZlínHand printed and bound: Academy of Arts, Architecture & Design in PragueTransport of Rinus van de Velde’s drawings from Belgium by bicycle: Joe BradleyTransport by horse-driven cart: Stáj TrojanTransport of artworks by hand carts: Artex Art ServicesInsurance of artworks by non-standard transport methods: AonBanner hand-made by CZECH TENTS s.r.o.Banners hung by climber Jaroslav Jepe PoduškaUnplugged catering: Musa Catering

We thank the artists; Svit Praha; Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp; and König Galerie, Berlin for kindly lending the exhibition artwok. The copyright for performing John Cage’s work provided by John Cage Trust, NY.

Admission to the exhibition is free thanks to the Avast Foundation.Media partners: RESPEKT, Forbes, Radio 1

Photography without flash is allowedShare your photos @galerierudolfinum #unplugged