FotoPop – the laughing Art of Milan Kunc

It is difficult to be an artist in Italy. One is caught between an everpresent obscene TV-culture on the one side, which, while destroying art, binds common desires in a grand fashion and on the other side a great tradition in the fine arts which transcends the reach of electronic channels.

TV-culture is a first class variety show of erotics and politics, at the forefront of Europe's brain-desolving mass media. A pool of sweet sins and forbidden pleasures which simultaneously greatly represses liberty. It can be defined as hedonism if viewed morally or as nihilism if approached metaphysically. Ether lives; images race by at the speed of light only to sink slowly into the synthesis-addicted, never satisfied right half of the mediterranean visual peoples brain. "I love Italy". On the one hand: Ubiquity, simultaneousness. Everything included and everybody infatuated. Larger than human will is electronic fate. After China, Bertolucci flees into the desert. Frustrated. And what for? To film colorfull, moving imagery. An offensive variation of this is Jeff Koons and Cicciolina as a colorfull sculpture: Post-TV 3-D artware.

On the other hand: the old paintings, grey, static, isolated. Figures out of stone, aged from weather, damaged in the course of time. Two thousand, five hundred years. In museums, scattered over gardens and parks, in bushes, behind hedges: they grow out of a distant period and overwhelm the visitors. Like Milan Kunc, for example, during his decisive Rome-year 1988. They are indeed there, these figures, one's hand can rub their porous surface; but that is exactly the problem: that they do not reflect the reality which we as viewers mistake for our lives but rather are dusty, hard and real.