Cyril Blažo (1970) has never been an ex-nihilator, an artist creating from the blank slate. Even in past he often used to prefer working with a found reality, appropriating it by shifting and diverting. He reacted to situation, improvised, and enjoyed the reality, creating a kind of visual form of slapstick – animation or disassembly of reality through the form of seemingly innocent gag or joke.
In his last collaborations with Martin Kochan, but also solo, Cyril Blažo becomes an object of mutually shared public art photo performances on the topic of sculpture in city. Kochan and Blažo comment, cast themselves as sculptures, divert or adjust their (non)sense; they themselves become living sculptures.
These “artist lectures” of sorts aren’t however the first case of Blažo’s commentary to the public space. Improvisation capabilities and duchampian sensibility of Cyril Blažo were used by documentary director Jano Šebík in his 1999 movie Sculptures!? This approximately four minutes long film (available at: http://vimeo.com/19742475) has double identity. It’s a document or rather a mockument about “art” and at the same time it is a record of Cyril Blažo’s guide performance about “weird sculptures” in Bratislava being directed by Šebík. It truly touches serious topics: the institutionality/institutions of art (What, where, under what circumstances and by whose authority IS art?), the phenomenon of Ostalgy or the issue of sculpture in city – that is, phenomena that will start to resonate strongly only some ten years later.
Petra Hanáková
