Vanesa Cvahte
I. Communication laboratory
Every preparation of artistic exhibition
is, to a certain extent, a laboratory experimental work halfway between
the work of the curator and artist. It is either the issue of artist's
specific project which he/she wants to realize within the institution,
or the issue of curator's concept of choosing and structuring artist's
production into a comprehensive whole. In the latter case we have the situation
of curator's/theorist's »Apollonian« systematization of artist's »Dionisyan«
practice, in which a new system of the specific aspects of the practice
is created through extraction. Generally. When we began preparations for
the exhibition of Peter Hergold's work, the theorists, that is to say the
curator and myself, were faced with a kind of vital and inspirative chaotic
situation of the artist's opus which ranges from pictures dealing with
pop-art issues, through happenings and actions to ideas and concepts which
have often been conceptualized very intimately and realized away from the
eyes of institutions or audience. Our active laboratory experiments actually
began as early as the initial stage of preparations, in the sense that
formal demarcation line between the theorist and the practitioner was blurred
to the extent that there was no more mention of the so-called concept of
the exhibition, but we rather talked about the possibilities of presenting
Hergold's creative work. At that point in time, »Hergold's creation« was
not something that had been already completed and now only »waited« to
be exhibited in the gallery. The completion actually occurred through his
articulations during our communication. We did not talk about the »selection
of works« for the exhibition which is always a haegemonistic attempt by
either side to reduce the work or the concepts to the limited scope of
the exhibition. The issue was rather the search for the artist's central
orientation which could be presented and conveyed to the audience. This
orientation could only be intuited by viewing numerous photographs which
are the records of the artist's aesthetic »figures« outside his studio
– in nature.
Nothing related to the exhibition has been
determined in advance; ideas developed non-hierarchically through continual
and direct communication which was thus becoming a constituent element
of the artist's practice and lent to his work and conceptions a more definite
diction. Indeed, a kind of communication laboratory evolved in which the
transmission medium was the spoken word.
A verbal fragment from the time of
the »communication laboratory«
Practitioner: »I am not after objects or
products. Not even symbolically. Even Duchamp abandoned ready-mades. When
ready-mades began to pile up while Duchamp was still alive, he stated something
like »where shall I put them all.«
TehoristI: »In some sense, though, you continue
to stick with the final product, only that the media you use are such that
your product is not endurable like other objects.«
TheoristII: »Of course - the wound on your
skin is healed, the pieces of wood made into a crater-like structure are
burned in a furnace, the snow field that you walked spirally has melted,
rain dried up. All of this is visible only on photographs. Are those photographs
in your case simply the document of the process or has the document itself
turned into a classic aesthetic object?«.
II. Hergold is the artist who abandoned
the realm of the studio in which he painted
In the manner of landart artists, he set
off to experiment in nature. This decisive step – the point when an artist
turns his back on the claustrophobic field of the canvas and the new field
of experimenting becomes virtually unlimited and hence challenging - this
step is the formal foundation of the manifestation of his work at this
exhibition. His research on canvas did not end here though – Hergold continued
to paint. Yet colors ceased to be his only material and yielded to landscapes,
earth, wind, rain, seasons.
Spiral Journey (1994) formally reminds of
the dissolved landart masterpiece Spiral Jetty. Like Robert Smithson's
sand poured into the sea in the shape of the megalomaniac spiral,
Hergold's spiral walked in the snow has also disappeared. While Smithson
attempted to wrench out of the programs of the institutional artistic
framework (and failed!), Hergold's primary interest is the probing of new
terrain – the expansions of nature as a new studio. Hergold is, of course,
familiar with the frustrations that landartists experienced when they were
forced to return to the institutional system and present video records
of their actions in nature, yet this experience as a problem is not the
object of his interest; more conspicuous is his intimate attitude towards
the simple mysteriousness of nature and its phenomena. The artist monitors
his new formal experiences through the lenses of the camera. The Structure
of Rain (1995) is one among rare poetic titles from this period. Not by
chance. As if the artist, exploiting innate human mathematic precision,
communicated subtly with unpredictable weather phenomena and recorded changes
according to his own personal keys. The Destruction of the Tree (1995)
is a kind of artificial repetition of the natural process that is anthropocentrically
understood as destructive.
Sometime around this time Hergold already
outlined the unlimited natural studio and in part restricted himself to
the extent of the family orchard where he came face to face with earth.
The orchard became the area of his experimentation in which the distinction
between natural, man-independent processes, and civilizational and social
processes is obvious. The Tectonics of Space (1995) shows man's tendency
to organize nature according to human criteria. Yet Hergold's actions are
not aimed at pragmatizing nature, something that man has been doing for
centuries now, but at exposing the phenomenon of nature's organization
– in this case it is the excavation of earth. The excavation is carried
out according to the precise plan. This could be described as one of the
most elementary changes of the state and the differentiation of substance,
which is the origin of man's interference with the natural, initial state.
During this period the artist seems to be
distant from civilization, society and its »mediazation«.
A slight move out of this remoteness might
be discerned in Stamping (1995). We are now faced with non-artistic materials
such as floor covering and petrol, which are fused through the artistic
act by means of fire. Fire, as the result and the process; warmth as the
basis of living (Rudolf Steiner, Josef Beuys). »Cheap material«, floor
covering , somehow spontaneously leads our thoughts to arte povera. In
this period Hergold makes use of many non-artistic, incidentally found
junk materials and objects.
Arte povera opposed rationalistic precision,
emotional scarcity, elitist aesthetics of minimal art, the linguistics
of concept art, and began to use trivial, unimportant materials which were
structured to give situational compositions. While the essential elements
of arte povera are the choice of the materials which invoke provocative
series of associations and stressing of the artist's act (the choice and
composition of the materials), Stamping and other similar works are the
paraphrasing of this orientation. In retrospect, however, Hergold is not
keen on citing the formalism of »cheap materials« or exploring their
interrelations. He rather focuses on the processual nature of action. Therefore,
Hergold thematizes the formation, lasting and eventually disappearance
of the work of art.
The premises that the artist gradually returns
to the civilizational and social reality from the state in which he worked
exclusively with non-civilizational, natural materials and phenomena, which
is manifested through the use of artifacts in Stamping and similar works,
is confirmed, if I can say so, by the project that was set up in the Gallery
of Arts in Maribor. Coating (1995) is the transfer of a limited section
of the granite pavement into the gallery. The transfer has been carried
out according to a certain geometrical rule and everything was recorded
on photographs. The point here is not simply the change of some natural
or »civilizational« material, but the change of the space itself; through
this transfer Hergold brings into question also the meaning of the public,
social space belonging to the gallery - the institution of artistic presentation.
Granite cubes refer to the space outside the gallery – the interior of
the gallery becomes its exterior; as if one tried to turn the interior
inside out and democratize it. Or, in other words: formally, the key importance
of this project lies with the processual nature of the action i.e. transfer,
which Hergold systematically develops through various forms, while on the
socially critical level the project draws attention to the seclusion of
the artistic institution and its limitations manifested through spatial
boundaries. This establishes the constellation in which Hergold, the artist,
is also the social subject critical of the system of artistic institution.
III. Object – process
Hergold thus systematically draws away from
the concept of artistic creation whose result would be an artistic object:
a work of art, a lasting object that could be exhibited, bought, owned,
placed somewhere, taken, admired for its aesthetic virtuosity or sensitivity
and so on. Hergold's acts, his messages, poetics, profession, and especially
criticism is therefore not manifested through objects but through the process
of work recorded on photographs. I think it is quite appropriate if I stress
again this particular dimension of Hergold's work, because the majority
of audience, including the expert elite, still degrade this kind of art
which is not palpable as an aesthetic object and reduce it to the level
of aimless experiments. And, once again: one of the essential trends within
the avant-garde artistic movements in the beginning of this century was
tendency towards artistic creation whose a priori result would not be the
final product, something that could be »admired« separately from the process
of creation. The stress was on the presentation of the creative process
itself, on self-reflection and analysis. This tendency is obvious in the
artistic production of past decades, namely action-painting, happening,
fluxus, performances, concept-art, up to the new-age media arts which even
went a step further – the core of art is not merely self-reflection, but
communication – art as communication (interactivity).
Hergold develops the process and self-analysis
of artistic creation through a subtle dialog with nature and its phenomena
acting within marginal (battle) fields of primary interaction between nature
and civilizational processes, the field in which society comes face to
face with art (gallery). His research strategies are: changing of state,
material, space (transfer), context and energy.
IV. The Key of the Lord of the Castle =
Pinus's Gardener, the installation in the gallery
Towards the end of the century we are afraid
of cloning, one of the latest achievements of bio-chemistry and other technologies,
because of the danger and fear that man’s meddling with evolution might
even »confuse« natural development that has been »planned« by almighty
nature. This anthropological discourse has become animated only a few years
ago with the appearance of new technologies (virtual reality, artificial
intelligence). But we forget that man interfered with the so-called natural
evolution long before that, namely when he produced hybrids which
have since become so familiar that they even delude us into thinking of
them as being the »result« of some natural evolutional process. The majority
of cultivated plants consumed across the planet are hybrids.
Hergold is the owner of an orchard. He inherited
it. He is the fruit grower and he takes his role extremely seriously and
analytically – he is the expert. Hergold grows fruits that do not require
extra care by man and can survive without additives and artificial substances.
On taking over the orchard, however, he found there hybridized species.
»Nursing« of these fruits was precisely defined along with the substances
they needed for survival. These species can therefore survive only if given
the adequate and regular care. Hergold sympathetically continues to grow
these species and observes them in their artificial existence. Some of
the trees died nevertheless – they were not nourished enough artificial
substances. Taken metaphorically, Hergold is the head of the laboratory
with artificially grown beings. He (not the almighty nature) is the highest
authority who decides about the survival or expiration of these beings,
about the quality and duration of their existence. Any connotation to a
hi-tech institute of artificial beings buried somewhere under Pentagon?
Would/Will the head of such an institute be so caring and sympathetic like
Hergold? What would/will he do (or already does) with »by products«? Hergold
grows mentioned fruits with substances that are usually called »poisons«.
This term has extremely pejorative implications. Substances that support
life have acquired pejorative character in everyday verbal use. Are we
unconsciously oriented against life or is something wrong here? Keep in
mind that »poisons« also come in the form of cosmetics used for embellishment.
Once again: are we unconsciously oriented against beauty or against beauty
and life made possible with the help of those means?