Adam Vackar

As agreed, I propose we start the interview in the form of an arbitrary trial (for artistic intent). I shall question you like a public prosecutor and you will be like K, the groundlessly accused character in Kafka's novel The Trial. I am certain you are familiar with its absurdity. Having looked closely at your work, I have identified some grounds for the accusation. I should like you to explain and justify them, and clear your name, or refute, reject, deny them. It is up to you. For the moment you are still free.

The defendant, Adam Vackar, born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1979, a transversal artist who works in photography, video, installation, and performance, living in Paris, Prague and Japan, you are hereby accused in the first instance of updating, in a discreetly subversive way, certain forms of authoritarian and dictatorial organization.



Grounds: Your video, A Minute of Silence (2006), a slow, lateral journey showing diverse, real-life characters observing a minute of silence, which you have imposed on them.



Grounds: Your performance, Silence in the Palais de Tokyo (2006), in which you achieve the same effect in a public space by demanding silence over a megaphone.



Grounds: The tradition of 'a minute of silence' has always struck me as ambiguous, because it is emotional and authoritarian, intimate and consensual, voluntary and mimetic. It is always a 'pseudo-collective' event, forbidding direct dialogue and exchange even when meant to be collegial. Finally, there is a centrifugal celebration, possibly selfish and subjective, closer to prayer than to joint commemoration.



Grounds: These performances, which are formally (and acoustically) impressive, mean 'keeping silent' and 'observing silence' for obscure reasons that are never clarified. It's as if it were about arbitrarily measuring the degree of the public's submissiveness when faced with a minority that has a megaphone.



Grounds: Lastly, your cultural background (from a country of the former Soviet bloc) constitutes an aggravating circumstance.

One might actually believe this accusation, since I do invoke and claim certain symbols of Communism. In fact, however, I am against any ideas about organization. The very notion of dictatorship reminds me of the experience of Communism, which is traumatizing for me. The problem with Communism is that it resulted in a hierarchical system, while the initial idea was about abolishing that in order to create equality and sharing.

By means of silence, I want to discover a lost utopia without a hierarchy. Silence is a blank spot, a pause, a neutral space. Imposing silence on 1,200 people can only happen with their participation. This idea of group activity takes us back to another utopia. It's a poetic utopia because it adopts an artistic form. It's in opposition to the political utopia of Communism, which failed.

To achieve this utopia of participation, I use the same language as dictatorship. Imposing silence in an authoritarian way involves exactly the same contradiction as when it's imposed in a dictatorship. But beyond this context, I need to be involved in society, to address myself to the public and to include the public in my work.

Your rhetoric skill leads you to use poetic utopia to oppose political utopia (the ideal of sharing as opposed to the denial of individuality), but in the logic of an echo or the reflection of a tightly held mirror, like a counter-utopia in perspective, like inverted reflections of similar movements. It shows a certain, critical mimicry that - I will remind you - still reveals as much fascination as accusation. None the less, your video-performances about imposed silence still strike me as being more about the representation of fixed silence - as if silence were suspended making it seem neutral and devitalized - than it is about shared time. These mute people seem stupefied and emptied of all will, like laboratory rats whose spinal cords have been removed. Literally unnerved. Physically and morally immobilized, they recall images of a world that is suddenly petrified as it goes about its daily business. It's like that TV series The Fourth Dimension (or René Clair's film Paris Asleep), when the characters - coming out of a spell - wander through a stage set of human statues. So, Mr Vackar, I will ask you the question directly. This vision of a frozen, paralyzed society of work and teaching, doesn't it constitute - unconsciously - the allegory of a stopped world without a political quest, 'the end of history', the end of utopias, of days without tomorrows? A very anti-Hegelian, almost anti-Marxist vision of the course of history revealed in your video Towards the End, a never-ending loop of part of the road to Ushuaia. That is to say, to the end of the world. In this sense, are you advocating a political vision of Post-Modern disillusionment?

The idea for Towards the End occurred to me in a town that travel agents have nicknamed 'the end of the world' in a marketing strategy to attract tourists. In Ushuaia, I had the feeling that the environment and the ambience were almost the same as in the Czech village where I spent my childhood holidays. At that time of my life, the end of the world was situated, for me, at the top of the hedge in my grandfather's garden.

Walking along this rugged road to the southernmost tip of Patagonia, and despite the vast distance to reach the place, I never for a moment felt that I was at the end of the world. And it's there that I had the idea for this video. It's about the relativity of the notion of 'the end', which I believe to be fear of the unknown. The important thing in this video is the lines drawn along the road. I drew ephemeral lines with flour on this mostly untravelled road, in order to represent visually the hierarchical limits of our society.

Ideas about Post-Modernism still matter to me. They enable me to trace a trajectory through the utopian visions of Hegel, Marx, and Fukuyama, and understand that each of their visions of the end of the world or of history conceals a fear of the future and the unknown.

In my opinion, these visions of the end of the world repeat themselves throughout history, appearing and disappearing like mirages in the rear-view mirror of a car.

You, the defendant, are accused in the second instance of celebrating, with this ambiguously critical syncretism, the hybrid, globalized fusion of objects and products from the contemporary world. By so doing, with an inconsistent, fragmented logic, aren't you highlighting your own professional position? Doesn't this reveal that your own artistic practice is an indeterminate crossover between the anarchic tradition of the East and Western formal compliance with the dominant aesthetic of the art market? (I'm referring to your video, the post-Minimalist sculpture and the lightbox.)



Grounds: Sputnik Black (2006), a reproduction of the famous Russian satellite from the 1950s painted entirely in the black of the German motorcar, the Mercedes-Benz. A symbol of domination of outerspace by the Soviet Union, which burned up when it hit the earth's atmosphere, customized in the colour of triumphant Western capitalism, alluding to DaimlerChrysler, whose links with the Third Reich are well known.



Grounds: Open Source (2006), a sukkah (a hand-crafted hut for the traditional Jewish festival of Sukkot), which was made - at your request - by a typically Czech, non-Jewish family. It's a cultural hybrid, a penetrable sculpture improbably combining vernacular traditions that are extremely remote from each other. (They are even opposed to each other, when one thinks of the recent resurgence of antisemitic trends in East European countries.)



Grounds: Jamming (2006), a mixture of four products (Coca Cola, Nutella, Nescafé, and Heinz Tomato Ketchup), which was then poured back into the original packages, presenting an ideal condiment in a synthetic colour, a fusion of standardized and globalized tastes. Subsequent images were presented in the raw form of billboards in public spaces.



Grounds: Lastly, your own multicultural identity because of your Czech origins and your professional development between France and Japan, among other places.

Yes, I readily admit that I have absorbed these two influences, but always consciously and critically. Regarding my position as an artist, I think this is an important, rather complicated subject. During my studies, I was much inspired by the conceptual radicalism of Joseph Kosuth, whom I met in Tokyo in 1998. Kosuth, in my opinion, one of the most influential conceptual artists, considers art the continuation of philosophy. In his essay 'Art after Philosophy', he draws an important distinction between intellectual art and visual art, between function and morphology. Since the publication of the essay in 1969, the reality of the outside world has invaded the domain of art. It has influenced and profoundly transformed art at the level of economics, politics, society, and history. Just as the most 'evolved' political systems in Europe today are a fusion of Communism and capitalism, art has become a fusion of formalism and conceptuality.

In Kosuth's day, the artistic milieu was a world apart, dedicated to a small group of interested parties. Kosuth explains in his essay that one can understand a work of art as a proposition presented in the context of art, as a commentary on art itself.

But today we can no longer allow ourselves such questions. Art does not go unnoticed in society anymore. It's thanks to the art market and financing from outside that art has evolved so much, and must subsequently redefine its place in society. With the political changes in my native country, I realized that as an artist I should take a different position from the one I held before, and defend a larger vision of art, one which would interact more with society.

In my opinion, artists should seek out society and provoke it, implicate themselves in this complex reality, and defend the role and position of art in society at large. (This is what is happening in Eastern Europe where, in the absence of institutions and art centres, artists have to defend art. And this is what constitutes their existence.) For me, the role of the artist is close to that of the aimless anarchist. Furthermore, artists must absorb and recycle reality and references. They must act, show, intervene and integrate the diversity of phenomena existing in their work.

I think my generation is living in the era of the democratization of art, which - owing to the art market - is opening itself up more widely in society. Art belongs to a network of social structures that are interconnected and inseparable from each other. This is the idea that the mathematician and physician, Fritjof Capra, develops in his Web of Life: A New Synthesis of Mind and Matter, which I found fascinating. He argues that the world is not composed primarily of units but rather of networks that join those units together, 'where everything is linked'. It's a general revision of contemporary thought according to relative scales, whereby we can define ourselves with regard to the structure that surrounds and influences us: the networks of atoms, family, artists, art, society, the world, the galaxy, and so on.

All definitions remain approximate, since they can never be defined in absolute terms. This is why I think that art should in the future play an important role as a guide for society. Because for me, art integrates reason and emotions far more than philosophy and politics can.

If I understand right, your position defends a certain relativism that you act upon while at the same time regretting it. It is undeniable, as you say so eloquently yourself, that the art market (and therefore capitalism in art) breaks down barriers between form and concept, abstraction and figuration, the artist and society, the work and its viewers, reason and emotion. Similarly, your works seem to cross transversal borders. They are even 'transgender', to use a cultural studies term. They appear nomadic in the way they use neo-liberal prerogatives about the free circulation of goods; Sputnik traversing the galaxy of German industry, the sukkah tradition being observed in the West like a diaspora of merchandise, and the car journey to the end of the world on a dotted line.

Nevertheless, Mr Vackar, don't you think that this Post-Communist idealism is blinding you? Don't you think that although some borders have been erased, new ones have drawn? Not just between East and West, but also between North and South? Not just geographically but also intellectually and spiritually, and economically as well as politically? Don't you think that in a discreetly perverse way, art - driven by this new financial capacity - can also classify, limit and exclude? Don't you think that art - if it should be engaged in reality as you advocate - should denounce these new tensions rather than blindly celebrate a hypothetical reconciliation of opposites?

I think I am realistic. I'm aware that new borders have been drawn. In fact, this is what I explore in my video Towards the End. It's optimism; rather, it's a simple statement. It's not a position that I regret, because for me regret is a form of passivity. As for your accusation about my works being 'transgender', for me culture belongs to art as much as art belongs to culture. I think this is a necessary and enriching two-way exchange. Besides, I think my optimism actually derives from neo-liberalism, which is very common in Post-Communist countries like the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary.

I think that art should invent new tendencies and influences in the society. I try to discover these influences at both an artistic and social level in a work called Jamming. As I mentioned earlier, I mixed together four international brandname products. Then I got on the Metro in Prague with fake posters of a pseudo-advertisement for these four products displayed in a shop window.

The work was inspired by British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman's Liquid Modernity, which describes a vision of economic change in a system of territorial power with new borders. It's a fascinating vision. Bauman describes reality as being composed of elements from the Modern and Post-Modern eras, which change identity, creating confusion between old and new interpretations. For me, these 'components' are represented by symbols like Coca-Cola, Nutella, Nescafé, and Heinz Tomato Ketchup, which I use in my work. They represent recyclable, unavoidable, and indispensable references.

We see a similar situation today in contemporary art, which is recycling motifs from conceptual art of the 1970s. This involves a return to experimental film, performance, text, and discourse, artistic forms embraced by the majority of young artists. I think it's completely natural to make new things based on old ideas. This is why a nomadic way of life is important to me, because it brings complexity and novelty. I have to create works that are itinerant or that celebrate movement, since they require making the effort to go somewhere and understand a situation. I feel that an artist is obliged to be open and curious about other places, and this should nurture a body of work.

In saying that artists should engage with reality, I mean that I am opposed to formalist and purely decorative works of art, which merely express the identity of a piece of merchandise. For me, the worst artworks are those destined from the start to decorate a collector's house. For instance, works by Martin Boyce and Bernard Frieze, or armchairs by Franz West, which are conceived to decorate a living-room - the true cemetery of art.

So I'm not particularly optimistic about the economic system. In my opinion, it plays an ambiguous role. On the one hand, identifying artworks as pieces of merchandise destroys a form of authenticity. On the other hand, 'democratizing' art gives it wider visibility and easier circulation. While most artists are aware of this reality, they participate in the market and take the path of making money with their work without considering the impact it could have on their explorations. And I find this worrying.

In my sculpture Sputnik Black - which is made from a Sputnik model painted in "Mercedes black' - I endeavour to play with the errors and contradictions of the art market. I think this sculpture, which was commissioned by an art gallery, encapsulates all the questions raised in Liquid Modernity. The mix and confusion of political status in this piece treats the history of the Mercedes (which had a role in the Nazi regime) like that of Sputnik (a symbol of the success of Communism). Equally, it critiques how the sculpture itself came about owing to the art market.

I'm very interested in Hans Haacke's work, which examines important economic and historical problems, but his method is more immediate, more accessible, easier. Rather than being an art 'activist', I am trying to develop a new form of creation, which explores and questions all the complex problems we have mentioned here.

Please do not criticize Franz West or anyone else who isn't here to defend himself. Furthermore, I hold you responsible for describing Hans Haacke's work as 'easy', because apparent ease and immediacy in art often belie great complexities in terms of identity and how art is received. I would remind the court of Esther Ferrer's saying, which I adhere to myself: 'The simpler you are, and the more you say what you think in the simplest way, the harder it is for others to accept you.' But that's not my point.



Charge No. 3



You are accused, in the third instance, of pursuing a slightly ironic aestheticization of reality, subversively bending certain historical motifs out of artistic necessity, side-stepping their inherent, fundamental energy and political meaning. This was evinced by how you employed the expression

'aimless anarchism'.



Grounds: By presenting your Sukkah as an object exhibited in an art space, accompanied by a practical demonstration of its manufacturing process - a bit like Robert Morris's Box with the Sound of its Own Making - you have transformed a sacred symbol into something purely sculptural, hand-crafted and secular. The original, allegorical meaning has been removed.



Grounds: You operate in the same spirit by transforming a minute of silence into a performance at the heart of an artistic institution. It is a dominating action without an aim, a celebratory gesture that has become intransitive.



Grounds: Sputnik Black highlights a formal coincidence between industrial design and the Soviet empire. A minimal, sculptural, rather seductive form, it contributes - almost in a sense opposite to a futuristic ideal - to bringing forms of technological progress into the passivity or immobility of the art world.



Grounds: During Pawel Althamer's group exhibition at the Centre Pompidou you chose to present a work of shadow theatre about manual labourers, proposing a stylized, almost eroticized projection of a labour-intensive activity.

I don't entirely agree with you. I don't see what you mean by a 'slightly ironic aestheticization'. I make my works with sincerity and engagement, without regret. Making art is a necessity for me, and my works have always had a raison d'être. If there is any irony in my work it is purely accidental.

I think this misunderstanding is due to cultural differences between you and me. I will give you an example: when I was a child, my friends and I interpreted freedom and democracy as a chance to drink Coca-Cola and eat hamburgers at McDonald's in the same way as our parents' generation ardently desired freedom of speech and the chance to travel. In my work, this reverence for the art market is tempered by cynically denouncing consumer culture and its useless excesses. My work expresses the tension between this new availability and saving money in the Communist era. It's not irony, but an engaged outlook linked to the context of my country and personal history. In no way is it artificial syncretism.

You can see similar influences in the work of other Czech artists of my generation. Many of these artists research and explore the situation and local phenomena with depth. This reflects the same cultural influences as elsewhere in Western Europe, but from another cultural background. So our work prompts different perspectives and possibilities of interpretation. This is why it's rewarding for other people who were unable to experience such a political transformation.

With regard to the eroticism and seduction that you mentioned, that point can be applied to nearly all artworks of any era. Perhaps I have been influenced by a generation of French artists such as Jean-Luc Vilmouth and Ange Leccia and their students, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Philippe Parreno, and Pierre Huyghe. Since I too studied with Vilmouth, I share some of their ideas about the universality of expression. But I don't share the 'sensuality' and 'seduction', in their work. For me, seduction and sensuality reveal a sort of hypocrisy, a desperate intention to please. I feel a need to make work that attracts others to view it, but not in this way. The seduction that you find in my work is always intentional and deeply critical, for instance the intentional seduction of the market.

Thank you for your active participation in this challenging role-play. I find your answers evidence of the energy of your work, a profound reflection, a remarkable, affirmative quality, and a capacity for lucidity, which bodes well for the future. For all these reasons, and after much deliberation, you are acquitted. The case is closed.