Hay-Straw
/6
- Hay-Straw
- Seno-slama
- 1969
- 6 b&w photographs, each approx. 75 x 100 cm
The action-installation “Hay-Straw” was realized in August 1969 at the Václav Špála Gallery on Národní Street in Prague. In one room, Zorka Ságlová exhibited yellow bales of straw and green bales of dried alfalfa. In the other room, hay was tossed and dried throughout the exhibition’s run. The pressed bales kept rearranging, with the hay being piled and raked in many different ways; there was thus a constant exchange of the exhibited objects, a procedure by which Ságlová made a reversed land art gesture that differed from American and British land art in the sense that it was a continuing process not meant to lead to a defined result. Due to the looseness of the bales, hay and straw were scattered all over the rooms and mixed up, giving rise to the appearance of material structures whose movement suggested a variety of possibilities for arranging and rearranging. On a more personal level, this action-installation also derived from the artist’s upbringing on a farm, where the tossing and drying of hay were routine activities. W.S.