Jaroslav Košš — Junk DNA A+B

Jaroslav Košš’s oeuvre ranges from conceptual and action art to site-specific works, objects and installations. He uses ready-mades, assemblage, found and recycled materials, objects, parts of machines and employs these techniques to organically unite texts, sounds and images. He works with ideas, signs, symbols and slogans that he appropriates from science, technology, politics, culture and religion. He paraphrases, blends, and reorganizes them to comment on the society critically, to explore the abuse of power and the accentuation of commercial pseudo-values in the contemporary world.

The pair of artworks titled Junk DNA/ Jalová DNA, A and Junk DNA / Jalová DNA, B consist of large metal plates with bores and polished patterns, where accumulated circuit boards are combined with various parts of electronic equipment. The shapes of the cutout holes symbolically remind us of female (variant A) and male (variant B) sex. The polished pattern on the plate’s surface of the female variant consists of ornamental “curly” waves, in the case of the male variant it is made up of simpler lines. The title Junk DNA carries several meanings that can be interpreted in different ways. Junk can connote infertile but also meaningless and useless. In electronics, the term idle current (in Slovak “jalový prúd“) refers to the current running through an equipment which contributes no power but increases the power losses of the system. DNA is the carrier of genetic information of a cell, all live organisms need it to replicate. Therefore the title of the artwork and its form can critically reflect on the contemporary situation in the world overfilled with technology where society cannot live without technology, thus becoming totally depended on it. Even small children can operate mobile phones or computers better than their grandparents. Who of us will survive and what will other generations look like if due to any reason we will be forced to exist without technology?

Junk DNA was also the title of one of the installations presented in the exhibition of Jaro Košš [55 to the Ground!], that took place at the Nitra Gallery in 2011. The curator of the exhibition Eva Kapsová wrote about it: “The exhibition consisting of objects, installations, site-specific strategies is the artist’s interpretation of the situation in politics, religion, morals when confronted with scientific knowledge on the verge of and development of life in space. Jaro Košš, the artist, shows how these general discourses based on relations and ideas acquire ideological form, participating in the practices of manipulation and power, leading to radical changes, even to cataclysms of contemporary postcolonial world. He is specifically interested in real and possible abuse of scientific knowledge, monotheistic religions and information technologies for political, economic but also artistic aims. The artist points out to the fact that the tendency of a human being to manipulate is existentially grounded, whether s/he is an active constructor or a passive victim. He poses the question about the degree of narcissism we can encounter in the human world, as a requirement for the human being to become accomplished in the social environment, as well as the reason to develop irresponsibility, undirected anger and violence that deny humanity as such…” ¹