Ivan Vosecký

Ivan Vosecký’s products are interesting in that they have a definite design. Or rather they react to a certain design, for example, graphically. This style is at once retrospective as well as timely, ironic and serious. The artist’s messages as such (read in a language code) can seem very banal and sometimes even arcane. In fact, their visual style is what indicates their shift toward conceptualism and political agitation. The language code here is not likely a fully adequate key „for their reading.“ We could notice shapes, lines and colours more. The artist often writes texts with sociological, political and/or culturally alternative content. These messages are born in the context of a public discourse. However they are extracted therefrom and transplanted into institutions with a different type of context. Art, galleries or museums represent institutions, whose nature is neither private nor public, but rather culturally- and socially-specific. Art is defined such that it cannot more or less penetrate the public space. Wherever works of art are placed, the public space ends and a closed cell of specific discourse appears. We are not speaking now of visual culture in general, but specifically about art.  Public intervention is possibly done only on the assumption of a transformation of functions and roles, and in such a case barricading the art and activating its non-artistic meaning. At the tip of this paradox Ivan Vosecký balances a large part of his works. It concerns rather the public space’s intervention into art and not the other way around. Here, the public discourse becomes however mere material, attractive for its radicalness and provocative for its wornness. Generality, commonness, popularity – these are trumps he’s playing with here. It is not about the mass consumption culture as with pop art, but rather about a sufficiently-known and profaned alternative culture. Today the most common types of advertisement and presentation of goods no longer represent pop art.  Contemporary mass culture offers the viewer a product – in its essence characterizable as „two for one“ – for quick, cheap and dumb consumption as well as for its own critical contemplation. Mass culture often makes fun of itself (and this on purpose). Vosecký reprints this feature of today’s culture into the artistic space. This exaggerated and ineffective engagement is a statement on the state of modern art, more specifically art from the post-Communist space. Here, artistic production constantly seeks out its societal role, its viewers, values and own power.