Beneath the Skin
One of the most significant editorial revelations of the last Month of Photography in Bratislava has been a beautifully compiled monograph that encompasses the trajectory of one of the most prominent presences in contemporary Czech fine-art photography. The man behind the book, which has been chosen from among some 160 publications as the best to have appeared in Central and Eastern Europe in the last two years, is none other than Vladimir Židlický (Hodonín, 1945). Židlický was singled out by the international jury for his highly personal and intuitive photographic language that seems to uncover the secrets of an incorruptibly intangible world beneath skin-deep appearances. His elaborate photographic tableaux of nymph-like figures, whose naked bodies become diluted and/or disrupted through movement, culminate in a hybrid amalgam of pictorial and symbolic references that negotiate corporeality and the humanness of the soul from an existentialist point of view.
In the early seventies Židlický quit painting to make his breakthrough in photography but it was not until the eighties that he attracted international attention. Since then, his work has been featured in galleries and museums, forming part of public and private collections all over the world. Despite this, Židlický's disinterest in self-promotion has worked against the accessibility of his oeuvre to the broader public. “My concern is to fulfil my creative ambitions to the fullest and convey to the world what I want”, he explains. “Life is too short and I don’t wish to waste it on marketing my work”.
Židlický's medium of expression is analogue photography. Beautifully processed, toned gelatine-silver prints—and following recent experiments, coloured—his photos point to a state of dreamful deconstruction. The parts of the nude female bodies that emerge subtly out of the perforated and stained surfaces evoke the misty works of Jöel-Peter Witkin. Though the two artists have never so much as communicated or coincided geographically, they appear to share specific concerns and fugitive encounters of coincidence that considerably reinforce their perpetual association. Back in the early eighties, a curator of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art came up with an idea for a show with a particular ambition. There would be, on the one hand, the provocative and intransigent Witkin with his outcasts, freaks and dead corpses; and, on the other, the pure, ethereal, yet deeply dramatic and passionate Židlický—the overall theme being bodily deconstruction in its post-modern uncanniness. Although this exhibition was never carried out, another show drawing upon the very same principle was held some years later at the Robert Koch Gallery, this time featuring Vladimir Židlický and Judy Coleman. The idea of the Western versus the Eastern gaze was still intact, and this is precisely what is of interest here, namely the envisioning of Vladimir Židlický on the Eastern (European) side of the track in terms of origin, aesthetic approach and conceptual sensibility. The juxtaposition in question provides us with a solid base for reflection when attempting to come to terms with the nature of Židlický's oeuvre.
If Jöel-Peter Witkin's bodies of misfits jar against the walls of post-modern nihilism, encountering beneath the contemporary peau douce what Slavoj Žižek once described as an interior gnawed away by worms, Vladimir Židlický admittedly seems to follow a rather Classical, not to say Romantic ideal of beauty that does not seemingly allow too much space for provocation. Židlický's beautifully arranged torsos and dynamically arranged compositions of bodily clusters draw their fundamental iconological references from Symbolism and the Renaissance pictorial tradition, whilst being imbued by a strict sense of geometrical composition, formal abstraction and meticulously calculated anarchy that owes a lot to the Czech photographic legacy of the nude. Židlický has never denied neither the deep ties with his fine arts background, nor the influence that the symbolically exalted iconography of his near-contemporary group Epos might have exercised on him during his early years in Brno. Still, this apparently ongoing conformism with tradition is quickly compensated. A sort of existential divine-driven drama throws the protagonists of these pictures onto the verge of immateriality. A romantic melancholy impregnates these bodies. Form drifts aside, giving its place to the mysticism of the being. While the earthliness of Witkin's bodies resonates in an American-Indian bio-philosophy, Židlický's ethereal gaze heads up towards the sky in search of an Orient-inspired metaphysics of the body. In a similar way to his antecedent Frantisek Drtikol, he is looking for a wistful body beyond the constraints of material infatuations—not despite but after life and death.
The undisputable protagonist of these images is the “éternel féminine”, namely, woman as the embodiment of fertility and as the mysterious intangible “other”. Possessed by a deep symbolic value, female nudity becomes the material expression of an Eden-like paradisiacal state of being, irremediably bound to the subconscious. “For me, the female body is an absolute symbol, the sole irreplaceable symbol, and I don’t know anything that would match it”, Židlický points out. “It represents the ultimate bearer of sexuality, the fundamental building block, the motor without which we wouldn’t exist. It intrigues me; it is perpetually mysterious and exciting, a permanent source of inspiration”. Yet, despite the sensual nakedness prevailing these pictures, sexuality, as we know it today, is absent from Vladimir Židlický's gaze. His work stands in a striking opposition to the erotically charged, self-claiming feminine identity that dominates the contemporary patterns of representation both in commercial and in fine art photography. In his eyes, artifice and masquerade relegate femininity to a sterile construct, lacking sexual purity, sensuality and animal warmth. His whole set of representations defies any materialist view of the world for a rather purist approach, whereby flesh becomes the ground for psyche and spirit.
Židlický's work may clearly depart from a stylistic formal point of view, aesthetically allied with traditional fine-art photography, but takes an unexpected turn by producing a dislocation of roles on a material level. There is drama emanating not just from the surface of the print but also from the very negative itself. There is an esoteric need pushing Židlický to increase immediacy at any cost. This is the reason he once left aside his brushes for photography. If this new medium were providing infinite possibilities for a closer relation with the external world, Židlický would make the best out of it.
Negative and positive: the original and the copy; the original and the imitation; the mirror and its reflection… Back in the 1920s, the Czech avant-garde propagated the superiority of the purely material qualities of the medium over form and content. To artists such as Jaromír Funke, direct photography epitomized an exceptionally illusory bond with tangible reality as much as hyper-reality, while others such as Jarosalv Rössler elevated the negative and the positive to material surfaces with autonomous properties whereupon the artist's willingness could be projected. The work of Vladimir Židlický, despite being created decades later and developed within a distinct cultural milieu, undoubtedly owes much to this legacy. Židlický 's photographs are above all physical objects: they may allude, in part, to the so-called “photographic momentum”, but the final, decisive touch comes always by means of a manipulation that the negative—the material matrix of the photographic event—suffers. Židlický describes this practice in terms of an “animalistic” need to manipulate, to reach the essence, to affect the original image, to literally cancel the surface in order to bring forward what lies behind, as if the negative were the soul which carried the body, as if everything to be found were there. “I felt that without my additional interventions my intention wasn’t formulated precisely enough, as if the whole truth wasn’t expressed and the message was only on the surface”, he explains. And he continues, providing a full account of his dynamic, intense interventions, “I manipulated the emulsion of the negative mechanically in different ways, even to the point of making holes in them, I painted on the negatives using a paintbrush as well as other means, I laid the negatives over each other to layer them, I worked with inversions of the negative; I exploited all thinkable means that could leave traces on the original image”. This is how his haunting photographic enlargements have been generated over the last four decades.
Manipulation acquires paramount importance in the oeuvre of Vladimir Židlický in the sense that it reinforces the ontological validity of his photographs as artefacts in progress. There are cases in which ten years pass between the birth of a negative and the final image. This is where the factor of time enters. Through mechanical interventions onto the image, deprivations and disappearances take place, as if an unidentifiable time accelerator were at work giving birth to both a temporal and a spatial dislocation. In this respect, these pictures are here and there, memory and present, finished and unfinished at the same time: they are three-dimensional “ready-mades” with infinite conceptual possibilities, travelling through time. What is more, they question themselves from within as much as from without. This is the fundamental premise around which Židlický's commitment with photography has revolved since its very first steps. This has always been the path and the challenge: to build upon the advantage of photography over painting, upon its fleeting dialogue with reality, and complement the whole with an effort to reveal the truth hidden beneath the surface—that intangible truth for which material bodies eventually become dust.
Abstract settings, blurry images—always intelligible and devoid of logic—conquered by motion; emotional maps and the human body itself as battlefield; all in all, drawings of light. This is the way these emotional landscapes of the absurd arise before our eyes. Vladimír Židlický has a lot to say about the existentialist reflection underlying the vibrating iconological ambience of his works, “There is no doubt that my work has been influenced by existential philosophy, which resonated profoundly in the situation we experienced when we were young in the late sixties”, he explains. His generation discovered Sartre, Camus and Dostoyevsky after the “Prague Spring”. “At that time, there was a sense of living in a world, which we did indeed shape ourselves but which at the same time was shaped as a hostile environment”.
Following on from this, Židlický's photographs are concerned with the investigation of the existential essence of “being here”: When it comes to individual figures, “the pros and cons of their existence” are addressed, whereas, in the case of “human clusters”, what is at stake are “the roots of the solidarity of the crowd which often proves fictive in the end”. “Existence precedes essence”, Sartre once stated, and indeed, in our struggle of beating down uncertainty and of imposing our law on reality even momentarily, the body becomes the principal vehicle of expression of the disorientation and confusion which existence throws up. Single bodies fragmented, perforated and stained from the inside, or alternatively, groups of bodies against each other become bits and pieces of human experience fusing sexuality and concrete identity into time and space. An unexpected turn towards a continuous choreography of drama takes place. Here too, as in the Sartrean universe, this uneasy coexistence with the “other”—in terms of flesh accumulation—takes on particular relevance as a hostile sign of our reflective consciousness. An uneasiness regarding human nature resonates within these pictures in the face of an apparently meaningless and absurd world. Is there any way out of this existential nihilism, and if so, where?
Two parallel tempos, two parallel sets of forces, at the heart of which constitutes the original unmediated result of the “mechanical reproduction”: the vigour of the spirit behind the artwork versus its material realization, and movement on the surface versus movement beneath. Not surprisingly for Vladimír Židlický movement is everything. Nothing else matters, neither fixed narrative nor literal iconological references. The image is literally “melting” before our eyes. Time and space flow and bodies become diluted in motion generating a synesthesia effect that has parallels in dance and music. This is precisely the way Židlický would like us to perceive his works: as cosmic visualizations of musical scores transcribed onto light; scores which appeal to the viewer's straightforward perception distanced from any phenomenal observation. Should music, in Schopenhauer's words, represent the only art that does not copy ideas, should it embody the energy motor of this world in itself—“das Willen”—then Židlický's envisioning suggests a similar reading. Here in turn, it is artistic expression as an aesthetic proposition which assumes the role of the purest will. Photography is rendered a synecdoche in the struggle for the ever-elusive balance between the external world, art, and the body in its feminine–ultimately symbolic— dimension as the envelope of soul. With it the circle closes and nothingness gives place to light.
Text by Natasha Christia
All Pictures: Vladimír Židlický
www.zidlickyvladimir.eu
Published in Eyemazing, o2/2009
One of the most significant editorial revelations of the last Month of Photography in Bratislava has been a beautifully compiled monograph that encompasses the trajectory of one of the most prominent presences in contemporary Czech fine-art photography. The man behind the book, which has been chosen from among some 160 publications as the best to have appeared in Central and Eastern Europe in the last two years, is none other than Vladimir Židlický (Hodonín, 1945). Židlický was singled out by the international jury for his highly personal and intuitive photographic language that seems to uncover the secrets of an incorruptibly intangible world beneath skin-deep appearances. His elaborate photographic tableaux of nymph-like figures, whose naked bodies become diluted and/or disrupted through movement, culminate in a hybrid amalgam of pictorial and symbolic references that negotiate corporeality and the humanness of the soul from an existentialist point of view.
In the early seventies Židlický quit painting to make his breakthrough in photography but it was not until the eighties that he attracted international attention. Since then, his work has been featured in galleries and museums, forming part of public and private collections all over the world. Despite this, Židlický's disinterest in self-promotion has worked against the accessibility of his oeuvre to the broader public. “My concern is to fulfil my creative ambitions to the fullest and convey to the world what I want”, he explains. “Life is too short and I don’t wish to waste it on marketing my work”.
Židlický's medium of expression is analogue photography. Beautifully processed, toned gelatine-silver prints—and following recent experiments, coloured—his photos point to a state of dreamful deconstruction. The parts of the nude female bodies that emerge subtly out of the perforated and stained surfaces evoke the misty works of Jöel-Peter Witkin. Though the two artists have never so much as communicated or coincided geographically, they appear to share specific concerns and fugitive encounters of coincidence that considerably reinforce their perpetual association. Back in the early eighties, a curator of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art came up with an idea for a show with a particular ambition. There would be, on the one hand, the provocative and intransigent Witkin with his outcasts, freaks and dead corpses; and, on the other, the pure, ethereal, yet deeply dramatic and passionate Židlický—the overall theme being bodily deconstruction in its post-modern uncanniness. Although this exhibition was never carried out, another show drawing upon the very same principle was held some years later at the Robert Koch Gallery, this time featuring Vladimir Židlický and Judy Coleman. The idea of the Western versus the Eastern gaze was still intact, and this is precisely what is of interest here, namely the envisioning of Vladimir Židlický on the Eastern (European) side of the track in terms of origin, aesthetic approach and conceptual sensibility. The juxtaposition in question provides us with a solid base for reflection when attempting to come to terms with the nature of Židlický's oeuvre.
If Jöel-Peter Witkin's bodies of misfits jar against the walls of post-modern nihilism, encountering beneath the contemporary peau douce what Slavoj Žižek once described as an interior gnawed away by worms, Vladimir Židlický admittedly seems to follow a rather Classical, not to say Romantic ideal of beauty that does not seemingly allow too much space for provocation. Židlický's beautifully arranged torsos and dynamically arranged compositions of bodily clusters draw their fundamental iconological references from Symbolism and the Renaissance pictorial tradition, whilst being imbued by a strict sense of geometrical composition, formal abstraction and meticulously calculated anarchy that owes a lot to the Czech photographic legacy of the nude. Židlický has never denied neither the deep ties with his fine arts background, nor the influence that the symbolically exalted iconography of his near-contemporary group Epos might have exercised on him during his early years in Brno. Still, this apparently ongoing conformism with tradition is quickly compensated. A sort of existential divine-driven drama throws the protagonists of these pictures onto the verge of immateriality. A romantic melancholy impregnates these bodies. Form drifts aside, giving its place to the mysticism of the being. While the earthliness of Witkin's bodies resonates in an American-Indian bio-philosophy, Židlický's ethereal gaze heads up towards the sky in search of an Orient-inspired metaphysics of the body. In a similar way to his antecedent Frantisek Drtikol, he is looking for a wistful body beyond the constraints of material infatuations—not despite but after life and death.
The undisputable protagonist of these images is the “éternel féminine”, namely, woman as the embodiment of fertility and as the mysterious intangible “other”. Possessed by a deep symbolic value, female nudity becomes the material expression of an Eden-like paradisiacal state of being, irremediably bound to the subconscious. “For me, the female body is an absolute symbol, the sole irreplaceable symbol, and I don’t know anything that would match it”, Židlický points out. “It represents the ultimate bearer of sexuality, the fundamental building block, the motor without which we wouldn’t exist. It intrigues me; it is perpetually mysterious and exciting, a permanent source of inspiration”. Yet, despite the sensual nakedness prevailing these pictures, sexuality, as we know it today, is absent from Vladimir Židlický's gaze. His work stands in a striking opposition to the erotically charged, self-claiming feminine identity that dominates the contemporary patterns of representation both in commercial and in fine art photography. In his eyes, artifice and masquerade relegate femininity to a sterile construct, lacking sexual purity, sensuality and animal warmth. His whole set of representations defies any materialist view of the world for a rather purist approach, whereby flesh becomes the ground for psyche and spirit.
Židlický's work may clearly depart from a stylistic formal point of view, aesthetically allied with traditional fine-art photography, but takes an unexpected turn by producing a dislocation of roles on a material level. There is drama emanating not just from the surface of the print but also from the very negative itself. There is an esoteric need pushing Židlický to increase immediacy at any cost. This is the reason he once left aside his brushes for photography. If this new medium were providing infinite possibilities for a closer relation with the external world, Židlický would make the best out of it.
Negative and positive: the original and the copy; the original and the imitation; the mirror and its reflection… Back in the 1920s, the Czech avant-garde propagated the superiority of the purely material qualities of the medium over form and content. To artists such as Jaromír Funke, direct photography epitomized an exceptionally illusory bond with tangible reality as much as hyper-reality, while others such as Jarosalv Rössler elevated the negative and the positive to material surfaces with autonomous properties whereupon the artist's willingness could be projected. The work of Vladimir Židlický, despite being created decades later and developed within a distinct cultural milieu, undoubtedly owes much to this legacy. Židlický 's photographs are above all physical objects: they may allude, in part, to the so-called “photographic momentum”, but the final, decisive touch comes always by means of a manipulation that the negative—the material matrix of the photographic event—suffers. Židlický describes this practice in terms of an “animalistic” need to manipulate, to reach the essence, to affect the original image, to literally cancel the surface in order to bring forward what lies behind, as if the negative were the soul which carried the body, as if everything to be found were there. “I felt that without my additional interventions my intention wasn’t formulated precisely enough, as if the whole truth wasn’t expressed and the message was only on the surface”, he explains. And he continues, providing a full account of his dynamic, intense interventions, “I manipulated the emulsion of the negative mechanically in different ways, even to the point of making holes in them, I painted on the negatives using a paintbrush as well as other means, I laid the negatives over each other to layer them, I worked with inversions of the negative; I exploited all thinkable means that could leave traces on the original image”. This is how his haunting photographic enlargements have been generated over the last four decades.
Manipulation acquires paramount importance in the oeuvre of Vladimir Židlický in the sense that it reinforces the ontological validity of his photographs as artefacts in progress. There are cases in which ten years pass between the birth of a negative and the final image. This is where the factor of time enters. Through mechanical interventions onto the image, deprivations and disappearances take place, as if an unidentifiable time accelerator were at work giving birth to both a temporal and a spatial dislocation. In this respect, these pictures are here and there, memory and present, finished and unfinished at the same time: they are three-dimensional “ready-mades” with infinite conceptual possibilities, travelling through time. What is more, they question themselves from within as much as from without. This is the fundamental premise around which Židlický's commitment with photography has revolved since its very first steps. This has always been the path and the challenge: to build upon the advantage of photography over painting, upon its fleeting dialogue with reality, and complement the whole with an effort to reveal the truth hidden beneath the surface—that intangible truth for which material bodies eventually become dust.
Abstract settings, blurry images—always intelligible and devoid of logic—conquered by motion; emotional maps and the human body itself as battlefield; all in all, drawings of light. This is the way these emotional landscapes of the absurd arise before our eyes. Vladimír Židlický has a lot to say about the existentialist reflection underlying the vibrating iconological ambience of his works, “There is no doubt that my work has been influenced by existential philosophy, which resonated profoundly in the situation we experienced when we were young in the late sixties”, he explains. His generation discovered Sartre, Camus and Dostoyevsky after the “Prague Spring”. “At that time, there was a sense of living in a world, which we did indeed shape ourselves but which at the same time was shaped as a hostile environment”.
Following on from this, Židlický's photographs are concerned with the investigation of the existential essence of “being here”: When it comes to individual figures, “the pros and cons of their existence” are addressed, whereas, in the case of “human clusters”, what is at stake are “the roots of the solidarity of the crowd which often proves fictive in the end”. “Existence precedes essence”, Sartre once stated, and indeed, in our struggle of beating down uncertainty and of imposing our law on reality even momentarily, the body becomes the principal vehicle of expression of the disorientation and confusion which existence throws up. Single bodies fragmented, perforated and stained from the inside, or alternatively, groups of bodies against each other become bits and pieces of human experience fusing sexuality and concrete identity into time and space. An unexpected turn towards a continuous choreography of drama takes place. Here too, as in the Sartrean universe, this uneasy coexistence with the “other”—in terms of flesh accumulation—takes on particular relevance as a hostile sign of our reflective consciousness. An uneasiness regarding human nature resonates within these pictures in the face of an apparently meaningless and absurd world. Is there any way out of this existential nihilism, and if so, where?
Two parallel tempos, two parallel sets of forces, at the heart of which constitutes the original unmediated result of the “mechanical reproduction”: the vigour of the spirit behind the artwork versus its material realization, and movement on the surface versus movement beneath. Not surprisingly for Vladimír Židlický movement is everything. Nothing else matters, neither fixed narrative nor literal iconological references. The image is literally “melting” before our eyes. Time and space flow and bodies become diluted in motion generating a synesthesia effect that has parallels in dance and music. This is precisely the way Židlický would like us to perceive his works: as cosmic visualizations of musical scores transcribed onto light; scores which appeal to the viewer's straightforward perception distanced from any phenomenal observation. Should music, in Schopenhauer's words, represent the only art that does not copy ideas, should it embody the energy motor of this world in itself—“das Willen”—then Židlický's envisioning suggests a similar reading. Here in turn, it is artistic expression as an aesthetic proposition which assumes the role of the purest will. Photography is rendered a synecdoche in the struggle for the ever-elusive balance between the external world, art, and the body in its feminine–ultimately symbolic— dimension as the envelope of soul. With it the circle closes and nothingness gives place to light.
Text by Natasha Christia
All Pictures: Vladimír Židlický
www.zidlickyvladimir.eu
Published in Eyemazing, o2/2009
