Page 58 - The Black Box Book

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do not have cultural institutions that could employ performing artists .
Contemporary art galleries are ideally suited to manage their awarding,
as they have a direct relationship to the artistic community and are there-
fore able to respond quickly to its unforeseen requirements and changes.
The funds for the scholarships were drawn both from sources that we
could not use at the time to ensure our own regular cultural activi-
ties, and from a special governmental subsidy to support culture during
the pandemic.
We formulated an open call: Galerie TIC wants to support the cre-
ation of art at this pivotal time. We are looking for artists or collectives
who will process and document their experience of the Covid-19 pandem-
ic, quarantine and the related social collapse, but also the new wave of
activism and solidarity. For example, they may focus on current forms of
social practice and communication, visual trends, media criticism, exis-
tential crisis, demands on the future, etc. We are aiming to capture our
new reality through artistic research directly. The material, technical or
conceptual conception is entirely up to the artists’ discretion.
10 Among artists of all disciplines, 85% are freelancers and only 15%
are employed. This ratio was published in connection with the initiative
Status umělce (Status of the Artist), which should lead to legislation and
related anchoring of the profession, which is still “floating in the air” in
the Czech Republic.
Figure 4: Max Máslo’s illustration accom-
panying the open call for Black Box published in
April 2020. Archive of Galerie TIC
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We entitled the initiative simply Black Box. The association with
a car crash reveals, among other things, our fear of the then-unknown
threat of an impending pandemic. We assumed it was art that would be
able to both reflect and process this experience effectively. It is art that
can act as a black box in which to seek a record of the course of a former
catastrophe. What use will the daily numbers infected be to anybody or
the sensationalist media news in a few years?
A total of thirty-three artists responded to the call but given our
limited resources, we could only support eight of them. We selected
artists of a rather diverse aesthetic nature to collaborate with, includ-
ing students or recent graduates of art schools, as well as experienced
artists of the middle generation. We have tried to select compelling
projects that were a consistent part of the artist’s previous artistic
practice and that also related in some way to the current pandemic
experience. It was also important to us: not a single one of the select-
ed projects was created on purpose, but the authors had already been
working on them before the call was announced. Our selection included
the photographer Polina Davydenko, painter Markéta Filipová, inter-
media artists Ondřej Homola, Juliana Höschlová, Johana Merta and
Tomáš Moravanský, sound artist Ladislav Mirvald, as well as a chemist
and art activist Vojtěch Kundrát. These were primarily local artists with
whom we have often collaborated in the past and prepared a joint exhi-
bition. Especially on the level of project implementation, in which case, in
the situation at the time, we were left with social networks or an online
archive, which we had previously used only for communication and doc-
umentation of our program. Nevertheless, it should be noted that mixing
the implementation levels and documentation was already a pre-pandemic
practice, consisting of the fact that artworks exist primarily on the level of
documentation because they are typically installed and stored temporar-
ily and resemble props in their provisionality. In other words, we allowed
ourselves to present and interpret “only” a record of art that we would
probably not be able to convey in reality. The role of the gallery as an art
mediator was suppressed or rather neglected, to be replaced by the role
of a co-producer of art.
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11 This transformation was not limited to the lockdown, but persists
beyond it, as evidenced by the initiative Status umělce addressing
the working conditions and social status of the artist at the level of in-
dividual EU Member States in the framework of the so-called National
Recovery Plans, which was launched in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
For comparison see https://artalk.cz/2022/10/17/status-umelce-a-
umelkyne-se-sam-nenapise/
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