White Psyche
Entrance Gallery bears its indelible mark of being premises unsuitable for showing contemporary art. Its architectonic layout is far too dominating and disconcerting when compared with conventionalised conditions for perceiving works of art. The prototype of a white cube – still a valid ideal of any exhibition practice – and a former orangery situated in the middle of a park with a view of a neighbouring Baroque monastery are miles apart. The presumable neutral, right-angled, white space has been criticised in art theory as well as in practice since the 1970s. Although there were efforts to design authoritative exhibition premises in the 1990s and at the turn of the millennium, we keep coming back to the white cube. What does the model of neutrality actually mean? Extraction? Isolation from the surrounding context? Or preservation that Brian O’Doherty assimilated in his book Inside the White Cube to an old Egyptian tomb?
We analyse the problem using psychological comparison. Human mind has the tendency to isolate itself into a specific contextual vacuum at the times of big problems and turnabouts in life. That is in situations that are milestones of the entire history of psychoanalysis and its ambition to eliminate such isolation and penetrate the very core of the problem. Our exploration is carried out inversely, instead of opening Entrance Gallery, we close it, turning it into a temporary white cube, a precious model of the desired exhibition space. However, all is but a temporary stage set. In these architectonically “asymptomatic” conditions we present works by Czech and foreign artists that were created during complicated stages of their lives. We do not aim at morbid accentuation of specific painful situations or literally psychologising interpretation of their works. Events during which (or on the basis of which) the works were made remain concealed. A viewer may only assume what circumstances accompanied the genesis of each of them. The exhibition thus has its psychological dimension as a whole: neutral space full of unuttered emotions. Therefore, the core of the problem lies in revealing isolation only in the viewer’s mind.
- White Psyche00:00:02.781
- ENTRANCE00:00:02.781
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- Curators: Tereza Jindrová and Jen Kratochvil00:00:04.482
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- Dealing with the space was from the very beginning much more important than the selection of artists.00:00:06.701
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- Tereza Velíková and Tereza Severová, the founders of Entrance Gallery, offered us long-term collaboration00:00:13.138
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- within the framework of their exhibition dramaturgy.00:00:25.372
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- Me and Tereza work as curators here, working on projects which - as the title and the ten-year-long history of the gallery suggest -00:00:28.646
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- respond mostly to work by young artists who are given the opportunity of solo exhibitions in the gallery.00:00:38.317
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- and that´s why within the framework of a joint project which we decided to launch here,00:00:47.934
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- we chose a slightly different approach and decided to disrupt, to blur the borders of the gallery´s space itself,00:00:53.055
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- as well as the gallery´s borders from the viewpoint of architecture, its context.00:01:05.366
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- Because the neighboring Břevnov monastery and this garden with the fountain - into which kids keep falling -00:01:11.518
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- are quite binding for any kind of project.00:01:19.147
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- And everybody, or ninety percent of artists working in this space, have reacted somehow to everything that surrounds us.00:01:23.609
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- But this exhibition doesn´t, although of course it does, but our ambition was to create completely different conditions,00:01:37.188
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- some kind of system that will create a different context.00:01:54.844
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- And this is where the link to the white cube comes from00:02:01.847
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- and to some kind of reflection of history, exhibiting and also to the significant text by O´Doherty00:02:07.632
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- which we also included in the exhibition in a secondary interpretative level,00:02:23.002
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- within the frame of the voiceover that can be heard at the exhibition.00:02:31.196
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- What we finally found important was a certain paradox00:02:50.823
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- or dispute between what the exhibition should look like and how the visitor should feel about it,00:02:57.037
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- because, as Jen had already said, we tried to create a clean space in the Entrance gallery,00:03:09.045
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- which is a former Orangerie. We created clean in-built spaces and a clean white wall00:03:16.010
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- according to our budget and other possibilities.00:03:26.432
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- So this was the formal framework into which we fitted works with some kind of a story.00:03:32.673
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- We selected artists across two or three generations and we asked every artist to chose his own work.00:03:48.760
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- We didn´t want to interfere with the selection of works.00:04:06.489
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- They could chose a work or a series of works that originated during a difficult stage in their lives.00:04:09.489
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- Later, some of the artists gave us more information about the selected work, others didn´t.00:04:20.912
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- But this wasn´t important, because the entire presentation in contrast with the neutral installation00:04:29.042
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- forms a contrast with the viewer´s perception or with what we would like the viewer to feel,00:04:36.694
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- because he gets the initial information about how the artists were supposed to chose a work from a dramatic or negative period in their lives.00:04:42.503
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- The viewer, on the basis of the absolutely clean reception, can then interpret the works himself.00:04:58.499
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- This way we wanted to refer a bit to classical art history,00:05:08.399
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- to a certain method, which is based on the psychology of the artist,00:05:13.515
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- and to a certain myth according to which the artist creates his art from his heart and soul,00:05:18.600
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- his psyché and according to which everything that he is going through or thinking about is embedded in his art.00:05:26.346
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- We didn´t want to turn all this into a parody but we did want to include the cliché00:05:34.422
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- which many people today still regard as the only right key to understand a work of art,00:05:41.190
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- and so we wanted the visitor to create the story himself.00:05:48.799