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Július Koller

Biography

Presentation

Július Koller Born in 1939 in Piestany, died in 2007. Lived and worked in Bratislava, Slovakia.

Engagement rather than Arrangement

The experimental work of Julius Koller for a new conception of aesthetic space since the 1960s.

Bratislava, around 1962 : the beginnings of a mutation in the Slovaque art scene : the modernist gesture reorients itself : kinetic objects, architectural utopias, progressive ideas linked to science and technology, Tachiste painting … Against the fantasies of the all-powerful, cynical, socialist state apparatus and its defenders and against the formalist therapeutic efforts of the prevailing modernism, the new imperative is to propose a direct experience of the reality of the work of art. This is the premise that Julius Koller will go on to develop at art school, and which he has, to this day, continued to refine. The rigour, perseverance and singularity of his work makes it one of the most experimental and most consequential of contemporary European art, the only comparable antecedent being perhaps the universe of a Marcel Broodthaers.

While still a student Koller was already critically opposed to the modernist principles of order associated with the political and cultural agitation in the Czechoslovakia of the early 60s. (At the time he was painting homogenous urban landscapes, compact analyses of space tending towards the concrete). He shared this refusal of modernist pathos with some of his fellow artists such as those of the Happsoc Group gathered around Z.Kostrova, or with Stano Filko and Alexander Mlynarczykwho who had, from 1964 onwards, developped a species of Happenings (of objects) adapted to the local context. But their euphoric idea that everything could be art, that everything could be included in the system of art was reversed in the work of the young Koller. In 1965, the very year in which the manifesto of the Happsoc Group appeared, Koller published his own polemic :

Anti-Happening (System of Subjective Objectivity) ». Contrary to the Happening that is a « way of putting into practice an artistic action », the Anti-Happening, according to Koller, aims at « a cultural reformation of the subject, of consciousness, of the environment and the real world ».

In a formulation that could have also been decisive for the Situationist International, Koller suggests that a poetic impetus limited to a textual existence cannot develop all the potential of its radical anti-hegemonic force. The Anti-Happening presents actions or conceptual objects, and in doing so creates cultural situations. Every spectator – real or presumed – can, in some way, behave in a manner intentionally opposed to the cultural situation created by this act of designation.

The strategy allows Koller to extend this operation to different kinds of practices. In 1965 he proposes the first textual works on paper, their existence in several editions indicating the mental space of the Anti-Happenings. And already by 1967-68, the first images : the artist uses white polymer paint instead of oil, and for the first time there appears what will later become the mutant symbol of Koller’s designatory attitudes, deployed on various kinds of supports and in different combinations, namely the question mark. These images will henceforth be called « Anti-Images ». Koller renounces all forms of technical mastery. The Anti-Images have the character of amateur works, conforming to the dictum : « to engage (oneself) rather than to arrange ». For Koller what is at stake is not pure painting but rather the elaboration of an iconic and semiotic typology of the textual corpus.

In 1970, two years after the end of the Prague Spring, Koller introduces, on the occasion of another manifesto, a new conceptual field in his work in the form of an acronym : U.F.O. In this text – the starting point of what will prove to be, in the more than thirty years to follow, the principal body of work that he will develop under the rubric « Universal-Cultural Futurological Operations »(U.F.O.) – Koller insists again on the realist and anti-illusionist approach of the Anti-Happenings and the Anti-Images. The U.F.O. opens up a complex space of references and relations between the acts of designation and their possibilities of mutation. In diverse works made subsequently the « O » of UFO comes to stand in for very different words : Object, Ornament, Orientation, Observation, Opustane Obrazu (liberation of the image), Otaznik (question marks), etc. The « F » of U.F.O mutates into Functional, Folkloric, Factographic (sic), F(ph)ilosophic, Fantastic, Flyer, etc.

In 1970 Koller installs, for the duration of a month, a Table Tennis Club in the private space of the « Youth Gallery » in Bratislava : visitors could play if they wished. Like his earlier interventions – in the preceding year, for example, he had traced with his hand a question mark on the ground of a tennis court and had worked with chalk and a machine for tracing lines (« Contact », 1969) – this act of transformation was conceived as an active rather than passive representation whose impetus was existential.

During these years the symbol of infinity increasingly makes its appearance in the textual works along with the question marks and signs of negation. Umenie (art) becomes UmeNie (never again). Unending Möbius strips : circular, looped, or pressed into triangles ; spirals and Ying-Yang symbols that represent the U.F.O. with greater force than auto-referential designation. Koller presents performative acts of equilibrium, « levellings » in which, for example, he subordinates his body to the scale of the guide marks of the houses of the old city of Bratislava.

Julius Koller’s work must be interpreted from a contemporary point of view in keeping with the fact that a significant amount of art made in the late 60s and the 70s eludes the habitual categories.Already in 1991 Aurel Hrabusicky, in a catalogue essay, asserted that one cannot talk of the multi-faceted work of Koller in terms of conceptualism and must consider it rather as a reflexive contextual aesthetic practice, interwoven with multiple references, a practice that had almost no equivalent on either side of the Iron Curtain. The works of the mid 60s, the « Anti-Images », the « Texttextiles », or, the U.F.O.s of the early 70s, redefined aesthetic experience in terms of a multiplicity of non-specialist ways of approaching the question : What is most truly and authentically « modern » ?

After 1972 Koller’s actions appear to have taken a more melancholy cast but they are not the less rigourous for that reason.

As strange and clownish as some of his actions might occasionally appear, all of them nevertheless create a direct image of time that maintains the power of differentiation. Koller never works in the framework of the so-called grand themes related to the body, namely, pain, sexuality, death, injury, extreme psychological states resulting from abandonment. He intervenes rather within the frontiers imposed by everyday models of order and control. He demonstrates the imperative that art decipher a more profound truth about us, about our bodies and our culture, even as he replaces art by performative acts : engagement rather than arrangement.

Georg Schoellhammer

This is an abbreviated version of an essay of the same title that appeared in the catalogue accompanying the first retrospective of Julius Koller in Europe organised by Roman Ondàk at the Kunstverein in Cologne in 2003.

Biography

Július Koller Born in 1939 in Piestany, died in 2007. Lived and worked in Bratislava, Slovakia.

Solo exhibitions (selection)

2010

Retrospective exhibition (tour), National Gallery, Bratislava.

Július Koller, Martin Janda, Vienna.

2009

Július Koller's Symposium, National Gallery, Bratislava.

2007

Space is the Place, gb agency, Paris.

Art Premiere, gb agency, Art Basel, Basel, (with D. Narkevicius).

Raum aktueller Kunst, Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna.

2006

Július Koller & Jiri Kovanda, Index, Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm.

Kontakt-Bau-Stelle (U.F.O.), Action-Performance, Mumok, Vienna.

Echo and Culture Situations, Július Koller & Kvetoslava Fulierovà, Institut Français, Bratislava.

2004

Kontakt, Kunstraum München, München.

Isabella Bortolozzi gallery, Berlin.

2003

Július Koller Univerzálne Futurologické Operácie, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne.

1999

Gallery SOGA, Bratislava.

Kveta Fulierová, Studio S, Bratislava.

Kveta Fulierová, Vlastivedné múzeum, Trebisov, Uzhorod.

1993

Up - Down, UBS, Bratislava, Novy Smokovec.

1991-92

Sonds, Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava.

Gallery of Art, Zilina.

State Gallery Banská Bystrica.

1991

Post-komunikácia, The Art Gallery, Zilina.

1974

Textile Pictures, The State Research Institute of Textiles, Bratislava.

1970

J.K.Ping-Pong Club, Cabinet of the Gallery of the Young, Bratislava.

1969

Antigallery, Mending shop for stockings, Bratislava.

1968

Permanent Demystification I.,II., V- club, Bratislava.

1967

Gallery of the Young, Bratislava.

The Tatran Regional Gallery, Poprad.

1966

Editorial Office Smena, Bratislava.

1965

Park of Culture and Repose, Bratislava.

Group exhibitions (selection)

2010

Che Cosa Sono Le Nuvole, Museion, Bolzano, Italie

Július Koller, Jirí Kovanda and Roman Ondák, gb agency, Art Features, Art Basel 41, Basel.

Star City (The Future Under Communism), Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham; Ujazdowski Castle, CCA Warsaw. (Curated by Alex Farquharson, Lukasz Ronduda and Michal Wolinski)

Les Promesses du Passé, Centre Pompidou, MNAM, Paris.

2009

Nord, Nord-Ouest, gb agency, Paris.

2008

U-Turn, Quadriennale, Copenhagen.

Fluxus East, Ludwig Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest.

Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art, Barbican Centre, London.

Yes, No & Other Options, Art Sheffield 08, Sheffield.

Nouvelles du Mont Analogue, Musée d'art contemporain, Rochechouart.

Conspire, Transmediale 08, Festival for Art and Digital Culture, Berlin.

2007

Fluxus East, CAC, Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius.

Fiac, Cour Carrée du Louvre, gb agency, Paris.

Fluxus East, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin.

Learn to Read, Level 2 Gallery, Tate Modern, London.

Homage a Kassak, gallery of Art, Nové Zàmky.

Contemporary Slovak Art, Slovak Art in Collection of first Slovak investors group, Bratislava, City Art Museum, Ljubljana.

Recollection from 1987 to 2007, artistamp Museum of Art Pool, Art Pool Research Center, Budapest.

15th Exhibition of UBS Members, House of Art, Bratislava.

2006

Kontakt, Ester Bank Collection, Mumok, Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna.

Night of Sun, Mail art, Kunstkammer im Schloss Barten Stein.

III International Convocation of Mail Art, Museum, Ceuta.

Arte y Naturaleza-Art and Nature, Internatioanl Mail Art Exhibition, Merida.

Erzählungen (Narratives), Kunsthaus, Graz.

Auditorium-Stage-Backstage, Kuntverein Frankfurt/Main (Tranzit-Action).

PeaceTower - Day for Night, Whitney Biennial 2006, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Autopoesis, Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava.

Abstraction III, Umelecka Beseda Slovenska (slovak art group), Slovak Broadcasting-Radio, Bratislava.

Le Mouvement des Images, MNAM, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

Shift, Gallery Grita Insam, Vienna.

...Concept has Never Meant Horse, Generali Foundation, Vienna.

In (ter) Media (s) Res, Gallery of Art, Zilina.

Collezionami, Biennale d'Arti Contemporanee Italian and Slovak Art, Citadella della Cultura, Archivio di Stato e Biblioteca Nazionale, Bari.

2004

Collected Views from East or West and West or East, Generali Foundation, Vienna.

Eintritt Frei - Kunst aus Bratislava, Budapest, Ljubljana, Prag and Wien, BAWAG Foundation, Vienna.

Parallel Actions : Conceptual Tendencies in Central Europe from 1965 to 1980, Galerie der Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst, Leipzig.

De ma Fenêtre, des artistes et leurs territoires, ENSBA, Paris.

Who if not we...?, BAK, Utrecht; Centraal Museum, Utrecht.

Utopia Station, Haus der Kunst, München.

Begegnung auf höchster Ebene, Galerie Grita Insam, Vienna.

2003

Links, gb agency, Paris.

Wir Müssen heute noch..., Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne.

Utopia Station, 50th Venice Biennale, Venice.

Now What? Dreaming a better world in six parts, BAK, Utrecht

Parallel Actions: Conceptual Tendencies in Central Europe from 1965 to 1980, Austrian Cultural Forum, New York.

2001

Ausgeträumt..., Wiener Secession, Vienna.

Slowakische Träume, Museum Moderner Kunst - Stiftung Wörlen, Passau.

2000

Fundación Joan Miró, Barcelona.

Global Conceptualism, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; Ludwig Museum Budapest; John Hansard Gallery, Southampton.

1997

Face à l'Histoire (1933-96), MNAM, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

1996

23. Sao Paulo Art Bienalle, Sao Paulo.

1995

Before (Slovak art of 60's), Gallery of Art, Zilina.

60's in Slovak Art, Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava.

Dream of Museum, Gallery of Art, Zilina.

1994

After the Spring, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.

Der Riss im Raum, Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin; Zacheta Gallery, Warsaw.

1993

The 1st Floor, Municipal Gallery, Bratislava.

The 2nd Exit, Ludwig Forum, Aachen.

1992

Hills and Mills, Arti et Amicitiae, Amsterdam.

Zwischen Objekt und Installation, Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund.

Ebb and Tide, Nová váznost, Slovak Radio, Bratislava.

1991

Dream of a Museum, Gallery of Art, Zilina.

On the Beautiful Blue Danube, (together with P.Rónai), Budapest.

Interspaces, The Bardejov Spa, Bardejov- Oscillations, Kmárno, Budapest.

1990

Art against Totality, Bratislava.

Nová váznost, The Clarists'church, SFVU Gallery, Bratislava.

Slowakische Kunst Heute, Villa Merkel, Esslingen.

Slovak Photography of the Sixties, Bratislava.

1989

Slovak Photography of the Eighties, Bratislava, Brno, Moscow.

Basement, Bratislava.

1988

Hommage á Kassák (100), Budapest.

The New Slovak Picture, Bratislava.

1987

Art of Today II, Club of Young Artists, Budapest Gallery, Budapest.

1986

The Body in Czecho-slovak Photography 1900 - 1986, Kromeríz.

1982

Bilder aus der Slowakei, Galeria Pragxis, Essen-Kettwig.

1982 -87

Archelogical Monuments and the Present, Bratislava.

1980

Exhibition of Drawings, Pécs.

1979

Works and Words, Stichting de Appel, Amsterdam.

Miejsca i chwile, Galeria Foto-medium-art, Wroclaw.

Dziekanka, Warsaw.

1976

The Seventies, CAYC, Museu de Arte Contemporanea, Sao Paulo.

Multimedia, Museum de Arte Contemporanea, Sao Paulo.

1974

Prospective '74, Museo de Arte Contemporanea, Sao Paulo.

Hygiène de l'Art, Genève.

Wis hebben ook ideen, Aalst.

1971

Contemporary Slovak Graphic Art, Banská Bystrica.

Multisensorische Ereignisse: Tischtennis Aktion 71, Bielefeld.

Junge Tschechoslowakische Künstler, Bielefeld.

1970

The 1st Open Studio, Bratislava.

Polymúzická priestor, Piestany

1969

Contemporary Trends in Slovak Painting, Bratislava.

Jung Künstler aus der CSSR, Berlin.

Donation, Paris.

1968

Danuvius, Bratislava.

1967

Contemporary Slovak Painting Trends, Cracow.

Picture 67, Brno-Pictures 1965-67, Kosice.

1966

Exhibition of the Young, Bratislava

Bibliography

Bibliography

Press (Selection)

2008

Art 21,#17, french, Nouvelles du Mont Analogue, Loraine Dumenil.

2007

Untilted, 42, Tranzit : an institution without institution, by Tobi Maier

Documenta Magazine, #3, german / english, "Julius Koller".

Untitled, #42, english, "tranzit: an institution without institution", text by Tobi Maier, Summer.

Frieze, #111, english, "Julius Koller 1939 - 2007", text by Jan Verwoert, November / December.

Springerin, german, Július Koller 1939-2007, april.

2006

Index, english, "Engagement instead of Arrangement. Julius Koller's Erratic Work on the Re-Conception of Aesthetic Space 1960ff", text by Georg Schöllhammer.

Press articles

Click on the underlined parts to download the texts in pdf

Press (Selection)

2007

Documenta Magazine, #3, german / english, "Julius Koller".

Untitled, #42, english, "tranzit: an institution without institution", text by Tobi Maier, Summer.

Frieze, #111, english, "Julius Koller 1939 - 2007", text by Jan Verwoert, November / December.

2006

Index, english, "Engagement instead of Arrangement. Julius Koller's Erratic Work on the Re-Conception of Aesthetic Space 1960ff", text by Georg Schöllhammer.

Publications

Univerzalne Futurologicke Operacie

Science-FIction Retrospective

Works

Photographs

Vintages

Installations

Textiles

Interview