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And
yet another aspect: their presence is of a different nature.
They are irritating not because they reflect a particular
period (that is only the case for a handful of art historians)
but rather that they open a different relationship to time
as such: they extend from one time dimension into another
they are dead and yet immortal. How mortal than is
the viewer in comparision. Is there another confrontation
which so clearly articulates the feeling of one's own accidentalness
and mortality?
The
artist in Italy is in a dilemma. Caught between the virtual,
ubiquitous contemporary images and the real, isolated old
ones. Between the 'living' culture, universally
communicable world pictures, the large complex media brain
network and the 'dead' culture at best a rememberance
that remembering once might have been significant.
Milan
Kunc is consequent in avoiding cultural history's illusion
of sublime greatness which shrouds old paintings like a sticky
transparent substance. He combines the two worlds confronting
the Italian artist not by stratifying them but by allowing
them to integrate in complementary decoration. That's how
it happens that an antique torso lands in a ceramic-tiled
bathroom and that another smokes with a cigarette holder.
That, of course is humorous. Had a design artist made a postcard
out of it, the enlightened message of the corroded figure
sitting with a rubber stem would seem to be: "Smoking
is dangerous to your health".
Milan
Kuncs work is slightly but decisevly different: he exposes
the postcard perspective as such our own viewers perspective
which sweeps over the surface. In contrast to the Neo-Pop
Duo Fischli & Weiss with their room permeating postcard
installation in Munich and Düsseldorf, Milan Kunc constructs
large art formates and shows what happens when our stylized
TV-consciousness meets with it's cultural opposite: the grand,
serious old art.
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