Miroslav Nicz — Permanent Values

The Permanent Values video installation was a part of the ON/OFF exhibition presented in Bratislava in 1993 and curated by Radislav Matuštík. Originally, it was created as a site-specific installation for a particular and very specific environment of the K-Mart department store (today’s Tesco in Nitra) and its department of consumer electronics, where the artist made use of the displayed TV sets situated in the department aisles. He appropriated thirteen TV sets he used to present thirteen different video footages, where each screen represented a letter of the book title Trvalé hodnoty [Permanent Values]. It was a book written by a communist historian Viliam Plevza, which he had found in the landfill, discarded as a worthless relic of the past. He expressed his position toward this pseudo-scientific work by putting each of letters in a virtual toilet and flushing it down the pipe. He repeated this process within a specific time frame which resulted into a soundtrack similar to an experimental musical score. The artist himself called it “Duchamp piano” (referencing the famous Duchamp urinal), as if “musicalising” the flushing sound. There was also a fourteenth TV set installed in the middle of the store, running a footage of the artist demonstratively and repeatedly writing and wiping the title of the book and the exhibition. The actual book Permanent Values was also a part of the exhibition, cut into small pieces, positioned in front of the artist and “served” to the watching and passing viewers. The installation was the artist’s response not just to the communist past, but also to the rapid launch of the consumer way of life that started spreading after 1989 “as a new post-November doctrine that flooded us with trivialities and their short life time. The subversive use of the title, whose meaning has been negated by flushing it down the pipe, raises questions about the true values of life of an individual”¹. A crystal clear reference to the consumer society is also the artist’s selection of the venue – a department store. One of the characteristics features of Nicz’s work is the selection of specific, non-gallery venues whose features, content, meaning and context are essential to creating a truly complex piece of art. The artist also opted for this approach while working at a poultry factory in Topoľčany (O NICZOM). 

Nicz was able to further recycle the Permanent Values video installation as one of the thirteen footages, representing the letter O, was used in one of his other works titled Duchamp Post (1996). The digital flushing of the letter O became a replacement for the missing letter in DUCHAMP P_ST, which he positioned above the TV set running a video footage referencing Marcel Duchamp and his ready-made Fontaine. The work is also supposed to symbolise the artist’s connection to the iconic artist by the means of a clever wordplay on his own surname, where the letter O is replaced by the number 0, meaning “nothing” [“nič” in Slovak], which phonetically corresponds with the artist’s surname NICZ.

Miroslav Nicz is an important representative of the generation of artists that entered the art scene in the early 1990s and who were very much influenced by conceptual art while turning their focus toward new media. Even though he had studied painting, he morphed into a multimedia artist shortly after 1989. His catalogue includes installations, action art, performances, video and new media. He also works with public space, covers various social issues, both individual and collective memory themes as well as his own identity, all while searching for new possibilities of visual communication.