Imago Winter 1998 [antikvár]

Gloomy Pictures of Golden Times rrihe post-iiKxleni "revision of modernism", with its interest in motifs from history and principles of X appropriation, jiaraphrase, (|uotation and interpretation, to a remarkable degree renewed the taste for interweaving and untangling threads of codes, signs and symbolic meanings. Today in the second half of the nineties of the last century of the mdlennium, nobody is surprised by interest in how mythical ideas secure the unity of the world-view of various societies, and especially in the functioning of these ideas in cultural and artistic expressions. Nobody is at all surprised by the various strategies of contemporary art, working with an archetype, as with an inherited tendency of the human mind to create representations of mythological motifs. This is clearly an important phenomenon, which is confirmed by the significant transfer of shared motifs of non-European cultures, their positive meaning, and still perhaps unappreciated significance. Indeed, precisely this dialogue with the past represents an important impulse of the new quality of the "wandering" of motifs and cultural connections. In fact, in the Central European region, the meeting with the mythical expression of other cultures and societies, was perceived with a whole series of variations. Meeting with "other" cultures had and still has here, the character of arranging fragments of the spiritual history of humanity into an overall picture of the world. As a result, this effort is often accompanied by distrust, immediately lialanced by enthusiasm for the archetypal "archaic heritage of humanity" (C.G.Jung). To put it simply, this is about the ability and wish to look from a different angle at special rearrangements of myths, legends and images, at shifts from one form of their existence to another, and at the union in myths of completeness and unity: "how a person becomes aware of its presence and meets with the "code" or "speech" of this world" (M.Eliade). In 1994, the Cologne publisher DuMont produced a book of essays about "gloomy i)ictures of golden times" (düstere Bilder in goldener Zeit), which its author Gregory Fuller named END-TIME-MOOD (Endzeitstimmung). In five chapters with the titles: Fin de siecle, Ecce homo, Man to nmn like wolves. Death, Apocalypse, the author proceeds according to a method very different from tlie traditional art historical interpretation. For us, it is important that the 20th century as the problem of the "culmination" of the modernist process and the coming of a new world, is seen as the result of a process, which dominates the visuality of the "fin de siecle" of the present century. Equally imjjortant is the statement that the pictorial material is partly from the areas of photography and video. In this context it is clear that the interest of the interpreter is concentrated on structural elements, with combination, overlapping, in short with work with free associations, which Jung called the unconscious background of conscious processes. That is, they are an important process of percejjtion. In this area, it is precisely