Language Labyrinth and Ideological Pitfalls – CVJ Residency – INI Project

Věra Jirousová Award Residency: Viktor Čech: Language
Labyrinth and Ideological Pitfalls

September and October are the months at INI Gallery that belong to the Věra Jirousová Award (its ceremonial handover will take place on 9 th October), during which the premises will look like an interim reading room and provide space for workshops of Viktor Čech, Noemi Smolik and their guests. The umbrella theme is inclusive criticism.

Viktor Čech: Language Labyrinth and Ideological Pitfalls (workshop)

As any discerning reader may notice, the language art critics use to express themselves is full of conventions and reiterated clichés. It has a life of its own, where even such notions as “form” or “meaning” need not denote the same thing to everyone. Quite often subjective expressions in this discipline prevail despite a number of theoretical models of interpretation, borrowed mostly from literary and philosophical fields. Incessant efforts of responsible art critics
to strike a dialogue with the artwork on the one hand and the reader on the other are thus a never-ending battle with the possibilities of language, its understandability, and the critics’ own indolence, in order not to succumb to a standstill using just conventional formulations and conclusions. Do such efforts still make sense today? Is it possible in this era of immeasurable ocean
of language of the Internet capture the idea of an artwork just in a few standard pages of text? Or shall we do just with the Internet memos and related referential framework? In the Czech context the contemporary art criticism is especially difficult to define, being a diversely understood discipline whose priorities, ends and purpose are imagined quite differently by many of us. Surely there are
advantages to this amorphousness – hypothetically, everyone can find their own way to propound an explanation, interpretation or judgment of contemporary visual art. In fact the current situation is rather sad and what one party takes for as a self-evident common ground, is often seen as a mere chimera by others. It probably makes no sense to attempt what seems unworkable – a consistent dialogue between those who define their theses by a differently structured language, yet we may at least try a less binding form of
a game, when possible starting points can be mapped out. And it is these contradictions, pitfalls and (im)possible solutions the first part of the workshop is going to explore.

Host: Lenka Sýkorová