Richard Janeček and Nikola Ivanov: Last Call
2. 12. – 21. 12. 2016 
opening: 1. 12. 2016 from 6pm

Where Do Objects Belong
or Why Object Always Arrives at its Destination
and also Objects Lost, and Destroyed and Worn out

It will never stop fascinating me how all things continue to function. I mean usually we start to notice them only when they stop working – when the electricity or wifi is down and we have to find a different source or solution. But I wonder how things keep going on, how do they manage to find their place and their way in the complex process of their extraction, fabrication, distribution, circulation and consumption and recycling (not to be confused with ecology). Why does a package or a letter always arrive? Or does it? How do we actually know about an occurrence that has not occurred, how do we know about the letters that have not reached us?

Yet another problem is when we are considered to be the addressee incorrectly, the letter or the message actually arrives but we were not supposed to receive it, we were not meant to or we simply didn’t want to listen. And here we are bombarded by tons of images, advertisements and products we haven’t really asked for.  Or to repeat the words that Slavoj Žižek borrowed from Barbara Johnson, who derived them from Jacques Lacan, who in turn got them from Edgar Allan Poe: "A letter always arrives at its destination since its destination is wherever it arrives."

The more frictionless our interaction and transfers are, the more we become the universal addressees of more and more meaningless messages. In such a situation, art (and particularly photography) naturally suffers; we may either fortify its romantic tenets of irreducible aesthetic value or the genius of an artist; or we may follow the slippery slope of the (main)stream; we may delve into the commodification, corporate aesthetics, or precarization.

Maybe that is precisely where the resort of contemporary art and image-making (photography) is – following our precarious and ever faster consumption of images and objects. Here we are staring at objects, lost but not found, alreadydestroyed rather than readymade, rigged and worn out objects; indeed, what we see are precarized objects, returning or even mirroring our gaze, since they are counterpart - silent partners of our precarized selves.

That is actually the true catastrophe – we feel to be objectified, to be no longer the masters using instruments; we are the instruments being used by someone else or even something else. And when we take into consideration the climate changes, the power of international corporations and the development of artificial intelligence, I think we should definitely practice this sort of catastrophism. It is not the catastrophism of Hollywood movies, neither is it the utopian escapism, but it represents catastrophism that consists of a dialogue between the objective and an inhuman, horrifying yet intimately close.

¹ Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy your symptom. New York: Routledge 1992, p. 10.

Václav Janoščík

Jeleni Gallery exhibition program is possible through kind support of Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, Prague City Council, State Fund of Culture of the Czech Republic, City District Prague 7

Media support: Artycok.tv, ArtMap, jlbjlt.net and UMA: You Make Art