Anetta Mona Chişa and Lucia Tkáčová — Dialectics of Subjection # 1 /Holiday Video/

In 2000, already during their studies at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Anetta Mona Chisa and Lucia Tkáčová started their joint projects. Over a decade this creative tandem has established themselves successfully on the Slovak and international scene. The authors are perceived as remarkable representatives of postfeminism and engaged art. Their works are imbued with a sense of provocation, distance, humour, irony, but also self-irony. They examine various aspects of femininity and masculinity, East European history and collective consciousness, social, cultural and political situation but they are also interested in specific contemporary problems arising from relationships and functioning of art scene and cultural institutions.

Video Dialectics of Subjection #1 (original title Holiday Video) presents a scene as if recorded directly in a summer swimming-pool: the authors, two young and attractive women in swimsuits (the focus is provocatively on their breasts), sip casually refreshing soda through straws and giggle over their discussion on men – which of them is more attractive, who they would sleep with and under what circumstances. Here the authors ironize and parody typical male perspective of women evaluating them on the basis of their appearance, reducing thus a human being to a sexual object. The source of irony lies in the fact that the objects of their desire (or of their ridicule) are not “regular” men but famous Slovak artists, art theoreticians and curators.

Their discussion can be perceived from several points of view. One of them is “the career advantage” of having sex with an influential man. Foregrounding this fact they criticize their own work environment as there are women who get to various lucrative job position (in show business and so on) when “they sleep with men” or so called “gold-diggers” who have sex with successful and rich men only because of money.

The artwork can be perceived also as a way to provoke, to trouble the waters of the small art scene in Slovakia, where everybody knows everybody. Combing provocation with male “self-exaltation” it could have been a relatively strong fuse to start a discussion. Stormy responses and a number of hurt feelings surfaced, however, when they created the site specific work of art for the Galeria Jelení in Prague (The Red Library, 2005). The inscribed names of Czech artists and curators divided into several categories, from “wherever whatever (men that can turn me on with a single look)” to “biological duty (sexual intercourse as a threat of human annihilation)” covered the walls of the gallery. The men whose names they involved in the project were evaluated on the basis of their sexappeal not on the basis of their artistic and intellectual qualities.

The authors created more videos dealing with the same topic. To name some of them: Dialectics of Subjection #2 /Home Video/ (2005), produced for the Prague Biennale 2 focusing on two influential men Giancarlo Politi (editor-in-chief of Flash Art magazine from Milan) and Milan Knížák (then a director of the National Gallery in Prague). In 2003 these men founded together the Prague Biennale. Following their sharp argument widely covered by media they split and in 2005 each of them organized their own biennale. Here in contrast with the above mentioned works the authors take into consideration not only men’s sexappeal but also their political and media power and power, which both Alfa Males, have in the art scene. In another video Dialectics of Subjection #4 /Late Night Video/ (2006) they evaluate world political leaders this time again only on the basis of their sexual attractiveness.

As Petra Hanáková puts it: “…the idea [of videos] is in fact always different, “remade” always with respect to the new context when showcasing an artwork (a certain misconception regarding the national context is the fact that the authors ridicule mostly men even though it is obvious that the institutional power is in hands of women art historians in Slovakia.)”[1]

Perceiving the above mentioned video from any perspective one thing is important to notice its content is extremely specific the viewer, who does not know the Slovak art scene or does not know artists and curators who are mentioned in it, cannot appreciate the artwork fully and laugh openly the same way as viewers who belong to the art scene and know it very well, know persons involved, though they themselves are not mentioned in the video…

Omar Mirza

Sources
[1] Hanáková, Petra: Mona Chişa, Aneta; Tkáčová, Lucia. In: Arslexicon – výtvarné umenie na Slovensku. Eds.: Balážová, Barbara – Pomfyová, Bibiana, URL: http://www.arslexicon.sk/?registre&objekt=mona-chi%BAa-aneta-tkacova-lucia (5.4.2012)