Imago Summer 1996 [antikvár]

That there is an overproduction of visual images in the world is confirmed daily by the laboratories of Kodak and other companies who process hundreds of thousands of frames day in, day out. If these shots are intended as a document for the family or as a mementó for the future then there is little to object to, in the sense that it can be seen as a flow of images more or less hidden from the pubhc. Things cease to be so simple the moment that priváté activities are ascribed a value beyond the closed circle and the images from the laboratory begin to circulate in society at large. A selection begins which, while it restricts the flow of images, does not do so to a degree sufficient to prevent a justified feeling prevaiüng that the image is currently more important than the word. The images that scamper through journals, museums and galleries, and which we have in our computers testify to an overproduction unmatched in the history of art. This torrent cannot be stopped or reduced; the one necessity is that within it there be differentiation, that the public communication and evaluation of images be carried out within a framework of certain rules, that everything not be indifferent and equal and without hierarchy. That pseudo theories on equality and the impossibility of delivering judgment cease to function. Selection begins in the moment when we realise that neither the walls of museums nor the pages of magazines are infinite, and that it is necessary to favour one thing, to check another. Not everyone can exhibit, and not everyone can publish in magazines. Selection criteria may be - and they are - very personal, conditioned by the orientation, interests and system of values of both the pictures editor and the museum curator or director. Without criticism - whether institutionalised or not - it simply will not work. It seems to me that we have repeatedly to go back to an emphasis on the individual personality who has been somewhat undermined by the theory that has institutions as the main guarantors and criteria for the inclusion or exclusion of various artefacts from the ambit of art. To put it plainly, it is not the case that if something is exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art it is automatically elevated to the sphere of art. The most important thing for the advancement of photography is the individuality of the evaluator. We should look in vain within contemporary European photography for the like of Marcel Reich-Ranicki within Germán literature. True, we could come up with the names of directors of major museums and festivals - though not of critics - whose overview and taste is a guarantee of values. To counter the dominion of the emphasis on institutional defining of value in art, it would be good to restore the weight and the crucial standing of the élite among intellectuals, which would refine and articulate arguments for evaluation, would not be guided merely by the place in which something is exhibited or published. Allied to the renewal of an emphasis on the moment of the critic-personality is alsó the renewal of the importance of the polarity of the centre and the periphery in the functioning of the dynamics of art. If we acknowledge the significance of the individual evaluation, then we alsó renew a hierarchical perception of art. And here it is a question of renewal only in the sphere of theory, because in practice the ideas of the 1980s about a plurality that destroys the relationship between the high and the low, the centre and the periphery, the beautiful and the ugly, have never applied It is in fact, practice that testifies to a hierarchy in this or that ethnic or cultural context. A work is promulgated in a certain maqazine or in ' certain gallery, with each of them functioning as a centre or periphery in this or that environment. In Slovakia, for example there are two so-called "opinion-forming" journals, Vytvarny zivot and Profil, which create a hierarchy of values. Similarly, in Hungary Budapest's Műcsarnok and in Austria the Museum fűr angewandte Kunst function within their environment as institutional' centres A practitioner' endeavour to get to the centre, or transform his peripheral journal or gallery into a fórum to which the maximum number of artists attner t to gain access, is a motor which gives dynamism, tension and uncertainty to development. Nothing is fixed once and for all anart f ^h fact that there will always be polarities and changes in them. All illusions about plurality that replace older ideas about a hie ^h* f values and a hierarchy of taste are immaterial; they are not a reality in practice. rc y From this there follows the need to create centres beyond the traditional centres and as a result the emergence of peripheries b the traditional peripheries, not the denial of the importance of the centre. On the one hand there is a need for a renewal of faith utility and depth of discernment of the critic, and on the other there is a need for the expansion of the spectrum of environmentT cultures which create their own centres. Basically, the point is that if we acknowledge the functionality of the term Spanish photoar h Slovak photography, we are building a system, a context in which, of necessity, other criteria must apply than within the term Eurón ^ world photography. n or or The art critic and the centre are two related concepts. We have to restore to them the significance which is theirs by right. We cannot rely solely on a system of institutions dealing with works of art. It is, admittedly, necessary and important that new monographs appear Josef Saudek or Moholy-Nagy, but it is much more necessary that new names and new personalities emerge. And this is not possible without a renascence of the critic-personality as a deciding element in the process of evaluating a work of art. And without the creation of new centres. Václav Macek