Whether it is a capitalist Club Med or a Communist Caribbean, there is trouble in Milan Kunc's paradise. Indeed, the point of his art is to show that the wish to be in paradise, to make a paradise of society, is ultimately foolish and destructive of life: a social paradise, whatever its party line and however modern ist form, is a fool's paradise. Kunc's art demonstrates that the dream of utopia, which professes to make life like poetry – as Marx wrote, in his utopia we'll work in the morning, write poetry in the afternoon, and read it to each other in the evening – in fact always betrays life by turning it into dull prose, that is, makes it seem banal, if not finally pointless. Indeed, the language of utopia – the place where the dream of utopia is most explicit – is the banal lang uage of kitsch, that paradise of cliches (the fool's gold of thought) that invites us to enter a fool's parad ise of fantasy. Milan Kunc uses this language to represent social paradise, as though to give it the lie from the start. But he uses kitsch against itself, manipulating visual cliches to suggest, however broadly and subliminally, the vitality of life that is the alternative to an insidiously life-sapping social paradise. His is a life-affirming art that on the surface represents the living death of modern social reality, proclaiming at every turn the big lie of its paradisiac ideality.

Milan Kunc's art, then, confronts us on two levels. On the one, it mocks the universal language of kitsch by using it in an absurd way, thus undermining the paradise of facile understanding it presents itself as. On the other, he mocks the idea of social paradise by representing it as a contradiction in terms, that is, he shows that it is all too human, suggesting that where there is human society there can be no paradise. Clearly, the construction of absurdity, the creation of a sense of madness – the method of radical, unresolvable contradiction – is the bread and butter of his art. This throws a monkey wrench into the methodical character of kitsch representation and into the methodical character of life in the social paradise.