Slip Away
/1
- Slip Away
- 1993
- wood, metal
- 75,5 × 50 × 6,5 cm
The transformation of his actions and interventions into objects was significant for Jiří Kovanda. The most important rhetorical device in the process was a minimal shift, a deviation, a digression from grand matters to absolutely peripheral ones, using a dual code all the while. The first code involved readymade objects that referred to the reality they were taken from and originally used in. In the Czech context, which demanded interpretable contents and coded narratives, Kovanda demanded to be read minimalistically – a risky venture. However, the traces of the original fates of the well-worn items he uses always overrun this intention, and certain narrative moments end up surfacing. The second code involves references to high art that assist, intervene and live parasitically off found materials. There is an autobiographical element in this: the artist worked in the depository of the National Gallery for a long time, handling art and quietly subverting this supreme institutional arbiter. J.S.