Page 59 - The Black Box Book

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do not have cultural institutions that could employ performing artists . We entitled the initiative simply Black Box. The association with
Contemporary art galleries are ideally suited to manage their awarding, a car crash reveals, among other things, our fear of the then-unknown
as they have a direct relationship to the artistic community and are there- threat of an impending pandemic. We assumed it was art that would be
fore able to respond quickly to its unforeseen requirements and changes. able to both reflect and process this experience effectively. It is art that
The funds for the scholarships were drawn both from sources that we can act as a black box in which to seek a record of the course of a former
could not use at the time to ensure our own regular cultural activi- catastrophe. What use will the daily numbers infected be to anybody or
ties, and from a special governmental subsidy to support culture during the sensationalist media news in a few years?
the pandemic. A total of thirty-three artists responded to the call but given our
We formulated an open call: Galerie TIC wants to support the cre- limited resources, we could only support eight of them. We selected
ation of art at this pivotal time. We are looking for artists or collectives artists of a rather diverse aesthetic nature to collaborate with, includ-
who will process and document their experience of the Covid-19 pandem- ing students or recent graduates of art schools, as well as experienced
ic, quarantine and the related social collapse, but also the new wave of artists of the middle generation. We have tried to select compelling
activism and solidarity. For example, they may focus on current forms of projects that were a consistent part of the artist’s previous artistic
social practice and communication, visual trends, media criticism, exis- practice and that also related in some way to the current pandemic
tential crisis, demands on the future, etc. We are aiming to capture our experience. It was also important to us: not a single one of the select-
new reality through artistic research directly. The material, technical or ed projects was created on purpose, but the authors had already been
conceptual conception is entirely up to the artists’ discretion. 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
10 Among artists of all disciplines, 85% are freelancers and only 15% Tomáš Moravanský, sound artist Ladislav Mirvald, as well as a chemist
are employed. This ratio was published in connection with the initiative and art activist Vojtěch Kundrát. These were primarily local artists with
Status umělce (Status of the Artist), which should lead to legislation and whom we have often collaborated in the past and prepared a joint exhi-
related anchoring of the profession, which is still “floating in the air” in
the Czech Republic. 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
Figure 4: Max Máslo’s illustration accom- archive, which we had previously used only for communication and doc-
panying the open call for Black Box published in
April 2020. Archive of Galerie TIC 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.
11

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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