Women's institutions? On the history of artistic operation in the nineties

Publisher: Slovart / VŠVU

Year of publication: 2010

ISBN: 978-80-556-0282-0

The object of this work is still hot - contemporary fine art. However, neither artists nor their works of art will be a means of getting to know him. It will be what is usually cold and is lost the fastest in history - its operational or institutional background. Despite the general assumption that art is created and culture is constituted primarily by talented artists, this work is more convinced that art and cultural awareness are lost, its horizon diminished if this creative potential is not "held" and does not strengthen a functional infrastructure. In other words, if the mechanisms of its institutional and cultural operation are not sufficiently intensified. Writers need publishing houses, theater actors with enlightened dramaturgy and functional cinematography, gallery artists and the art gallery. (And of course, everyone needs money, quite a lot of money!) If these "back-ground" components, this important background does not work, respectively. if its functioning fails, whether due to a lack of money or the inconceivability of cultural policies, it also loses its artistic potential. The Slovak 1990s are also about that. We will be interested in this problem of institutional operation (and the conditions of its functioning, or non-functioning) in the field of fine arts.

The defining premise of this work is actually the knowledge that art is a contextual matter: that is, it is not a closed entity, the essence and qualities of which can be agreed once and for all, and especially objectively. Rather, it is clear that art "as such", that is, art with a large U - universal, timeless, "objectively high quality" - simply does not exist. There is only art that becomes Art under certain circumstances, which are predictable but not immutable. The question: What is art ?, which has plagued art history for many years, and even today it is sometimes involved in amateur aesthetic debates, so today in a more professional discourse it has been replaced by another, more careful: Where is art?

Petra Hanáková (1974) is the curator of the collection of other media in the Slovak National Gallery. He deals with the theory of the museum, Slovak film and visual culture of the 20th and current century and the curation of exhibitions (eg: 60/90, Slovak art for free, Nybüvitt - in collaboration with A. Kusa; Lost Time ?, Július Koller: Science-Fiction retrospective - in collaboration with A. Hrabušický). She is the co-author of a book profile about Pedro Almodóvar (with V. Matáková, SFÚ, 2005), the author of the monograph Paľo Bielik and Slovak film culture (SFÚ, 2010).