Július Koller
Július Koller (Piešťany, 1939 – Bratislava, 2007) is a cult figure of the postwar avant-gardes on both sides of the former Iron Curtain. From the early 1960s, Koller occupied a marginal position in communist Czechoslovakia, developing his work from the sidelines. Since he was rediscovered in the 1990s, he has become an important source of inspiration for artists and intellectuals around the world. Július Koller worked with radical artistic methods that distanced his work from art’s formalisms and from all kinds of aestheticism, instead he was creating “new cultural situations.” His art aimed at a “new life, a new creativity, and a new cosmo-humanistic culture.” His strategy was to use real objects and real life as his program of permanent operations, challenging the present so as to open up opportunities for alternative futures. In all his works he therefore avoided any form of technical mastery.
Why? (Anti-Picture)
1969,
White latex on hardboard
In 1965, Július Koller introduced his «Anti-happening» series and soon turned it into a permanent process of demystifying the institution of socialist culture. His dialectical language games, which he distributed as announcements – text cards with stamped letters – were disseminated via the mail. In the 1970s, postal communication replaced the gallery space and effectively reached a wide spectrum of addressees worldwide. The use of anagrams and conceptual garblings makes room for the linguistic expression of notions from popular culture and the science-fiction sphere. The games, involving verbal mechanisms of denial and identification, make use of a tautological shift of positional demarcation and self-identification. Dialectical linguistic operations confront the field of subjective activities with the field of objective and real facts. Koller created these in the spirit of dialectical materialism to debunk false consciousness and demystify the social hypocrisy of socialist Czechoslovakia. (Daniel Grúň)
Augarten Contemporary, hoast, IG Architektur, Laurenz, Neuer Kunstverein Wien, Never At Home, Waffen Franz Kapfer, New Jörg, Ve.Sch
October 17–December 17
Main Exhibition
Curators: Serge Klymko, Hedwig Saxenhuber and Georg Schöllhammer