01:01:39
Aleš Čermák is an artist outstepping the borders between art, literature and intellectual activities. His work in such related creative field has a form of exhibitions, performances, books and theatre. He is the founder of the Ausdruck Books publishing house. His approach often includes situation arrangements based on accenting relational structures. Text and intellectual tradition became for him the base for building up new contexts and presentation forms. He comes from both tradition of modern and post-modern drama or experimental poetry and work with found material – belonging to tendencies referring to so called “archive expression”.
His work can mean for many people a certain paradox. His authorial publications may appear to be a culturally-social research and his editorial work to be a common work of an editor, his stage situations can be classified due to their external features as an experimental theatre but his genuine theatre presentations can be regarded as a dramatised politically-critical dialogue. But for all that, it is still evident that it is also something else.
In his work we can often feel a certain form diversion. The resultant realization is not always what it appears to be. Of course we cannot avert his starting point – declaring Aleš an Artist – perceived in the conceptual tradition of such activity example. Permanent avoidance of places where his creative position would stagnate in a conventional model of “artistic activity” is a feature that cannot be overlooked. At the same time every other medium or form alternative he uses to present his work becomes rather a container which makes his work so original because of his attempt to touch a new form.
One of the most essential moments in his work is his concern in analysis and construction of a narrative structure which is subsequently placed into the context, oscillating on the border between an informal reality and a gallery institutional setting. His books enter the world in a similar way. They are “just” books – plain objects, but at the same time they bear an auratic tinge of an artistic artifact. In case of “situations” mentioned we can often feel the author’s urge of reference to the source material (mainly texts) which is as a form retrospectively incorporated into the staged “reality” of given work. The circle between the interpreted source, the situation that is built up around and the surrounding reality is being closed and lasts just within the moment of the work existence in the place and time given.
Viktor Čech
