Page 50 - The Black Box Book

This text is an insight into the life of a city gallery during the turbulent
period of the last three years, which have been defined by the pandemic
and the ongoing crisis associated with, among other things, the war in
Ukraine. This is not a tumultuous period in the organization’s history, as
it is not shutting down or severely reducing its operations. At least for
the time being. Thanks to its status as a municipal contributory organi-
1
zation, Brno Galerie TIC has a relatively stable background. In any case,
the crisis has accelerated some of the longer-term trends in the gal-
lery’s management; in addition, novel developments and challenges have
emerged. These include an increased awareness of the social responsi-
bility of cultural institutions, the search for and verification of functional
ways of communicating with audiences, or the abandonment and return
of presentation to the exhibition space. Still, this focus on one particular
gallery is not intended to be a case study; our ambition is to capture
the contemporary development of the production, distribution and, to
some extent, interpretation of visual art in a more general sense.
The following reflection on the current art management focus-
es on the Black Box project , which was created as a response to
2
the Galerie TIC’s sudden lockdown and related operational constraints.
Nonetheless, it also outlines the context within which this curatorial ex-
periment arises, which are selected projects of other Brno art institutions.
Although this contribution is bound to a specific geographical location,
the theoretical framing of transformation of local art and cultural insti-
tutions, caused or accelerated by the pandemic of Covid-19, references
theoretical concepts critically analyzing the state of artistic platforms,
institutions or other actors in the period of the lockdown or before it, that
is not tight regionally.
We do not yet have sufficient distance from these recent events;
they are not events in history that can be processed with already ex-
hausted tools and procedures. Therefore, this reflection is more than
anything else a subjective statement of two curators of contempo-
rary art, supplemented with theoretical references. The first of them is
the imminent actor, a curator from Galerie TIC and the initiator of the Black
Box project that will be discussed here. The second actor has cognizance
of the institution as its visitor, mainly in the capacity of a teacher attend-
ing the institution with her students of curating. She joined Black Box
additionally as a producer of professional symposia and editor of texts
1 For an archive of exhibitions and the accompanying program of Galerie
TIC, including the description of its individual exhibitions,
see www.galerie-tic.cz.
2 Black Box / Černá skříňka. (2020 - ). Retrieved from https://cer-
na-skrinka.cz/. The project was created with the support of Theory of
Interactive Media / Digital Culture and Creative Industries Masaryk uni-
versity, Faculty of Arts; with the financial support of Technology Agency of
the Czech Republic within the programme ETA (project no. TL02000270.
Media Art Live Archive: Intelligent Interface for Interactive Mediation of
Cultural Heritage) and the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic
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that became part of the second phase of this project, which consisted of
an artistic and institutional reflection on the pandemic experience. This
duality of testimony allows for the alternation of the perspective of actor
and observer, allowing for the linking of modes of subjectivity, which can
be beneficial in its authenticity and provide a critical distance and lens
of generalization.
B E F O RE T H E S T O RM
Philosopher and media theorist Boris Groys, in his essay Comrades of
Time published in the late 2000s (Groys, 2009), characterizes contem-
porary art as being mired in doubt, hesitation, uncertainty and indecision,
requiring longer deliberation or postponement of one’s own decisions.
“(…) the contemporary is actually constituted by doubt, hesitation,
uncertainty, indecision – by the need for prolonged reflection, for
a delay. We want to postpone our decisions and actions in order to
have more time for analysis, reflection, and consideration. And that
is precisely what the contemporary is – a prolonged, even potentially
infinite period of delay.” (Groys, 2009, p. 2)
According to Groys, contemporary art is characterised by its repetitive-
ness and programmatic impersonality, which he likens to the futile fate
of Camus’ Sisyphus rolling a boulder uphill endlessly. Post-conceptualism
and self-referential and epistemological strategies were typical of art at
the time, as was the thematization of art’s institutional and technological
backstory. The art of the last decade is characterized by, among other
things, a leaning towards materiality and semi-forgotten hand-crafter tech-
niques and practices. One of the distinctive manifestations of this trend,
which is flavored with the ingredients of mass entertainment, consumer
aesthetics and life in the online universe, is post-internet art. The more
the glow of this comet, which attracted attention in the mid-2010s, fades,
the more the emancipatory claims of oppressed actors and the reflection
of global crises and catastrophes claim the floor. Mainly, the peripeteia
of global North-South relations is addressed, while the complicated re-
lationship between West and East and the persistent self-colonization
of Central and Eastern Europe, so aptly captured by Alexander Kiossev
in The Seft-colonizing Metaphor, still awaits more systematic reflection.
(Kiossev, 1995) The acceptance of the responsibility for the conse-
3
quences of colonization and globalization is demanded, and a postcolo-
nial revision of identities, power relations, and history is underway. These
tendencies are evident in artistic production and interpretation, as well as
3 Published in Czech under the title Metafora sebekolonizace. Retrieved
from http://www.monumenttotransformation.org/atlas-transformace/
html/s/sebekolonizace/metafora-sebekolonizace.html
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