Curatorial statement by Marek Meduna
and Zuzana Blochová for the Cursor Gallery
The exhibition programme for the Cursor Gallery will consist of five exhibitions. The similarities and dissimilarities between exhibitions will be framed by the jointly devised exhibition elements and the constraints of the curatorial duo. The exhibitions will be shaped by the taste and negotiating skills of both curators and the opportunity to seek consensus as well as to fetishise minor differences of opinion. They will be a cross and crossword puzzle that the curators have committed to bring to a climax in 2024.
Like law, politics or economics, art is an autonomous domain with its own contexts and criteria. It is a subset of the external world – a subset, but not a bubble, notwithstanding the undercutting metaphors of social media. Individual outcomes can be translated, and so concepts borrowed from the world of law or politics, for example, become aesthetics within the domain of art, take on different forms, are endowed with different objectives. The curators will repeatedly touch upon exhibition conventions as well as the infamous “authorship” of curators. They will make no effort to subvert, invalidate or negate. They will, in all modesty, attempt to find their true level in a plurality of domains.
In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville writes about the way that inheritance is acquired. He stresses the importance of the distinction between two variants: the first, in which the first-born child inherits the property; and the second, in which the property is distributed equally amongst all heirs. The latter option he associates with democracy, with feelings of decline, the dilution and weakening of the social potential of elites. Art in a democratic society always finds itself in a crisis situation on the periphery of interest. The aesthetic legacy of the avant-gardes, arts and crafts and Old Masters is subject to a general entropy. Instagram is eroding art-historical canons, while movement in an environment without polarities and landmarks is like wandering around aimlessly. The duo of curators allow themselves to be carried away by circumstances and fleeting thoughts, their trajectory is aimless yet calculated. All that they leave behind are a few slightly more trodden paths and maps of crumbs of rapidly fading usefulness.
The husband of an unnamed young artist has a firm that manufactures prosthetic devices. Over the years he has been left with those whose owners died in the interim between the device between manufactured and handed over. Because they are bespoke, they cannot be used by anyone else. And so they wait in a box to be put to another, probably symbolic, use. We believe that this situation corresponds nicely to the function and effectiveness of art in particular and culture in general in an era in which many place such an emphasis on the unique “individual”, when the concept of the ideal viewer dies with each individual struggle in no-man’s land, between the individual and the universal.