FOOD

One of the myths about videoart tells that the first art video was created in 1965 by Nam June Paik, when he was going home from a shop by taxi and was enthusiastic about his new portable portapac. Similarly thrilled was probably the architect David Kopecký when he bought a camera, this time a digital one and tried it out in his studio in Zborovská street for the first time. Enchanted both by the technology possibilities and himself, he simply filmed himself having a snack. 

He was surely familiar with Andy Warhol’s antifilm Eat (1964) in which the pop-artist Robert Indiana keeps munching for 45 minutes. Likewise the performer Vito Acconci he also used his camera as a mirror. With a fair amount of exhibitionism he looked up at it and made a mockery of whatever. The film shows a relaxed moment and at the same time it is also a record of a studio where the architect paid attention to the space disengagement. We can feel his enthusiasm about new possibilities: „Shooting things is a new category“, the author says in the film and regrets not having filmed the studio ksa in Vienna. He also plans to film the Venice Biennale for which he prepared together with Jan Studený an exhibition about architecture without architects. Then he filmed on video camera or mobile phone other buildings of their architectonic studio and moments from his life. Putting the videos by David Kopecký into the context of art films could appear on the edge but yet I think they bear a curious sensitivity of space perception that should not disappear.

The architectDavid Kopecký(1963–2009) studied at Emil Přikryl at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and in 1995 he founded together with Jan Studený a Czecho-Slovak architectonic studio ksa (kopecký-studený-architects). Ksa represented the Czech Republic at the 8th Venice Biennale (2002) and they particularly realized many detached houses (in Senec, Stupava, Černošice, Mníšek pod Brdy etc).

Terezie Nekvindová

Special thanks to Bára Kopecká for the work bestowal to the VVP AVU video archive.

In the Window to the Archive programme the AVU Research Center in Prague (VVP AVU) in conjunction with Artyčok.tv is regularly releasing works from theVVP AVU video archive. The selection for Artyčok.tv focuses on older works (materials from the end of the 20th century), works bordering on video art, film and documentation, or on purely documentary materials related to the recent development of Czech and Slovak visual art.