Dalibor Chatrný
In Dalibor Chatrný’s artistic work, a turning point was November 1970’s “Eight-Hour Exhibition” at the Dům umění in Brno. Devised as an “open work,” with the artist having set up an initial constellation of nine hollow cylinders linked by a 60-meter white string (the arrangement of which could be modified freely by the attendees), this undertaking paved the way for Chatrný’s dematerialized projects of the 1970s. In projects of this type, the artist merely established the initial conditions—whereas their true realization was to be effected by the viewers; at the same time, each such project was documented in an authorial
publication (one of the first of its kind) in order to facilitate its further distribution and interpretation. These publications, numbering twenty-five altogether, are focused upon the resolution of specific riddles addressing everything from a transformed understanding of perspectival representation to simple spatial mirroring and relation of this mirroring to the natural milieu. At the same time, these books anticipate the later, at first purely conceptual projects, realized employing a broad range of expressive means and starting from objects and installations all the way to land-art performances in natural surroundings. The drawn interventions in the sketch of an interior space from the conceptual “Projects” thus found a correlate in the objects of “Spatial Circuits,” wherein lines detach from the plane and levitate in space as variable aerial systems. Mirror orientations, for their part, featured in “Mirror Objects”—drawings that include mirrors propped against walls. It should be noted that some of the conceptual projects in the “Mirrors” group were actually realized by Chatrný, such as when he transposed a fragment of the opposite horizon into the air by means of a raised mirror or when he employed a series of mirrors at the horizon to create an illusion of the opposite horizon. All of Chatrný’s works—whether in the dematerialized form of conceptual projects or realized as objects, installations, or performances—investigated elementary spatial relationships and the various relationships between human beings and space. K.C.
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