The Structure and Picture of the Postmodern Age

On the Concept behind the Miroslav Velfl Collection

Jaroslav Vančát

 (translated Stephan von Pohl)

Vision does not occur in the eye.
It occurs in the brain.

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

We are confined to ways of describing whatever is described.
Our universe, so to speak, consists of these ways rather than of a world or worlds.

Nelson Goodman

The type of thought that we are thus attempting to define puts the concepts of structure and function in opposition to the concept of substance, dynamic action in opposition to static being, wholeness in opposition to partialness.
If Aristotle’s substance is existence that can endure by itself, based in itself, eternal and immutable,
the concepts of function and structure require a different way of thinking.

Květoslav Chvatík

The world in the postmodern age

These days it is considered increasingly evident that the world can be viewed in many different ways. U.S. philosopher and semiotician Nelson Goodman even speculates on multiple worlds, countless worlds:[1] “We are not speaking in terms of multiple possible alternatives to a single actual world but of multiple actual worlds.”[2]

In contrast to what we believed earlier, it is impossible for us to spontaneously see something and subsequently depict it. Instead, each depiction that arises in this way is merely one version of the world, and what is more, seeing itself, which was the basis for this depiction, is nothing more than another version of the world.

When we are young, we learn to look at the world and name things through objects, through their stability and continuance, bound by laws and logic. We even try to package mutable things as objects. Spring, summer, autumn and winter is a year. The cycle becomes a closed object, and thus it can also be subject to immutable laws of nature. In this light, a person’s fate can also be an object. After death, it returns to whence it came, to its Creator. Faith in a predefined, stable world that may appear to be entirely spontaneous is actually a consequence of the previous conviction that in the beginning it was purposively created and thus should continue to be understood and maintained in this solid form.

However, today’s world is hardly solid and constant. Everything around us is in increasingly fast, almost frenzied motion; the world is changing its face right before our eyes. This year was not the same as last year. Temperatures are rising, spring is becoming summer, winter is disappearing. The number of people is growing and causing unrest. Objects arise “in real time” and all around us are transformed or decompose, leaving behind an ever-growing heap of waste. Nothing is solid and sure; plurality is ubiquitous. As a result, in many places around the world people are developing a sense of peril, crisis and collapse.

 

Postmodernism? Perhaps it hasn’t properly started yet …

The idea of modernism – the idea of progress, reason and laying the groundwork for man to be free – emerged from the revolutionary explosion in science and technology in the 19th and 20th centuries, and initially disrupted the earlier backwards world with great fanfare – until it completely depleted itself of energy.

It seems that its Grand Narrative has disappeared, dissolving into hundreds of millions of little stories that those who pass them on consider to be the only true ones and that, under the strain of many other different stories, cease to possess common meaning and are increasingly pitted against one another. Faced with the growing inability to make sense of the entire world, each person fears for his own little fate. All the while, science and technology continue to gain momentum; most of us are better off than our ancestors were at any time in the past. Emperor Charles IV certainly did not live in greater comfort than almost everyone today; he did not have the same health care, the same selection of foods from around the world, the same fast transportation or information linkages with an area vaster than he could have imagined.

Perhaps the point is to better understand the present. After all, the Grand Narrative has not disappeared, but has instead expanded from being the story of a family, clan and nation into being a story of the entire world – and thus it is only less apparent from our limited positions. Taking this perspective, postmodernism has not properly started yet. We will truly start to live in it only after we experience its contents and start to understand its story.

 

What we got from modernism and what is still missing

Modernism

Above all, modernism seriously shook up our self-image. Its main accomplishment is that it freed the subject from bitter totalitarian machinery, conventions, prejudices and social pressure. For the subject to be able to be aware of this freedom, it first had to be created – through a forceful attack by writers in philosophy, psychology, literature (Husserl, Heidegger, Freud, Kafka, Hašek, Joyce, Proust and others) and art. Here it was absolutely clear how Picasso’s perception of the world can be fundamentally different from Kupka’s – and Kupka’s from Kandinsky’s and Dalí’s. It was an opportunity for every one of us to discover just how much our visual imagination is tied to our person, uniquely viewed from a unique location in the space-time continuum – and how it must be respected as the basis for the uniqueness and diversity of one person’s perception as compared to another’s.

Today, we all can make use of this subjectivity. It is presented before us matter-of-factly as a natural phenomenon of almost boundless freedom the moment we enter into the world (even though just one hundred years ago, women in England were still fighting for the right to vote and men in the United States working at Ford were not allowed to live with a woman without marrying her or risk being fired, and just sixty and seventy years ago homosexuality was a crime).

But just as abstract art eventually lost its initial revolutionary association with the liberation from convention and today, when freedom is commonplace, and remains a mere default stigma of each particular artist, so too do today’s post-revolutionary subjects wander aimlessly in their lives, no longer thankful for their liberation, not knowing their goals, exhausting their existence by fulfilling their ever-increasing banal personal needs.

 

Hope from postmodernism

If we can therefore understand modernism – as we can see with our own eyes from the pictures it produced – as a deconstruction of the preceding solid, objective world through sharpened attention to its parts, postmodernism can show what this is good for: to be able to investigate more deeply and thoroughly how the world functions in motion and change, in growth and transformation.

The new Grand Narrative that postmodernism offers, despite the currently predominant scepticism, builds the whole not from stable parts determined by their sole purpose (one example of this concept may be a monarchy with devoted serfs, but none of us would want to return to that time – although given the lost subjects’ ignorance, we are not far from that situation today), but also from individual active agents cognisant of their unique potential and capable of using it in their interactions with other equally free agents, thus forming unprecedented wholes with as yet incredible possibilities.[3]

Consequently, many established positions must be re-evaluated from their very foundations so as to arrive at the new Grand Narrative: thus the notion that vision copies reality has suffered the same fate as the “realistic” nature of pictures. Cognitive neurologist Vilanayur S. Ramachandran interprets vision as a strong back-projection, with the brain checking which visual images that the brain created earlier and has available for a given situation are best suited for an incoming percept. The earlier order of “percept – image” proceeds in the opposite sequence, and thus in a new hierarchy – “the imagination controls perception”. In the end, it is the imagination that guesses what solution best applies to the given situation. These suitable solutions, interpreted as “true vision”, are accompanied by an active reward, thus creating preferred visual fields of our experience in the world.

“In a sense, when we look at the world, we are hallucinating all the time. One could almost regard perception as the act of choosing the one hallucination that best fits the incoming data, which is often fragmentary and fleeting.”[4]

Creating visual images – models for “hallucination” as described above – is evidently the purpose of art. Experimental art constructs images that, for now, are not at risk of being wrongly used or applied. If such a defective model occurs in art, the worst-case scenario is that we do not like the picture. But if we do, they become visual images that will subsequently have a major impact on our real orientation in the real world.

In this way, we can use pictures to create daring visual images that we have not yet encountered in our everyday lives but that we sense may suit us in situations that have yet to happen and in places that we have yet to reach.

Pictures for the postmodern age

Although, influenced by French post-structural philosophy and American architectural theory, we usually consider the start of postmodernism to be the 1970s, the first signals of its emergence in forms of visual expression can be found in Dadaist thinking in the midst of the havoc of World War I. The fragments of destroyed pictures that reflected the Dadaists’ views of culture – which they believed was at the very least unable to prevent the senseless worldwide wartime massacre – also became a fundamentally constructive factor for creating pictures of new qualities in the culture that followed.

This transformation cannot be understood as the mere rejection of earlier motifs (i.e., in the tradition of understanding Dadaism simply as negation and provocation), but as an ability to respond to the newly discovered essence of reality, in particular the notion of measuring the individual against the vast mass of people that had first come to the fore with the onset of the global theatre of war, and to the newly discovered processes from similarly massive quantities of particles existing beneath the shells of earlier wholes – in physics, biology, transportation and manufacturing management, and in the skyrocketing growth of increasing information.

All of these processes essentially involved the search for how to suddenly cope with the emerging “supernumerary” quantity of units that the new scientific and technological civilisation was creating and discovering, the subsequent organisation of which could no longer be viewed through simple laws of logic and causality (one example is the discovery of the uncertainty principle in nuclear physics) – moreover, with the understanding that anything an individual attempts to understand as a chain of causes and consequences is, from the perspective of the whole, a statistical phenomenon, life in potentialities.

The world, which even after Cézanne’s discovery and pictorial application of the relationship between “cylinder, sphere and cone”, was still understood as relatively coherent, was torn apart once and for all by Tzara’s poetry, formed from single words cut out from newspapers and randomly drawn from a bag; Arp’s collages, created by pasting image elements that were randomly dropped from a height onto a paper; and Duchamp’s “Readymades”, torn from their original existence into new confrontations. This provocatively arranged relationship of parts to the whole was set free to search for the new Grand Narrative.

Through the relation to the structure

However, the fate of the whole and of the parts within it, if we are thinking primarily of human society, is not only determined by statistics. Large wholes or units, such as societies, do not acquire their qualities from the statistical averages of their members, as totalitarian communist and fascist regimes attempted immediately after World War I. One of the great contributions of Czech culture at the time was that – evidently influenced by the freedom that existed in the country in the interwar period, when it was surrounded by totalitarian regimes – during their study of language and art the members of the Prague Linguistic Circle discovered a different model for understanding such wholes that could be applied in organising a supernumerary quantity of individuals, components or elements.

Cézanne’s discovery of how to fine-tune “the relationships of various tones” so as to achieve a “perfect” picture is activated by Mukařovský’s definition as the “effect of transformations of parts to transformations of content and the dynamization of wholes, through which, by the nature of this dynamic, transformations, and the growth of their relations”, we can attain an entirely new structural approach to the world:

 

“We refer to the mutual relationships between a structure’s components, relationships that are intrinsically dynamic, as a specific characteristic of the structure of art. According to our conception, we can consider as a structure only such a set of elements, the internal equilibrium of which is constantly disturbed and restored anew and the unity of which thus appears to us as a set of dialectic contradictions. That which endures is only the identity of the structure in the course of time, while its internal composition and the interrelationships of its components are in constant change.”[5]

It is outside the scope of this study to provide more detailed evidence of how the concept of structure was enriched by French postmodern philosophy, which emerged from a critique of the static interpretation of structure by Levi-Strauss, who – as opposed to Mukařovský’s interpretation – sought in it a solid, timelessly stable network of mutual relationships.[6]

For our purpose of analysing visual works, we can understand postmodern philosophy and art theory as an elaboration of Mukařovský’s synthesising dynamic definition of structure in details, which had been known far earlier from the efforts to resolve the question of organising a painting – by comparing, for example, one of Derrida’s fundamental discoveries (“The play of difference supposes, in effect, synthesis and referrals which forbid at any moment, or in any sense, that a simple element be present in and of itself, referring only to itself.”)[7] with Cézanne’s description of his method for building the picture (“The secret of drawing and modelling resides in the contrasts and relationships of tone”; “There is no such thing as line and modelling. Drawing is a relationship of contrasts or simply the relationship between two tones, black and white” and “There is no light painting or dark painting, but simply relations of tones.”)[8]

In our study of the visual representations that characterise postmodernism not only as an undeniable visually mediated fact, but as a method for organising structure from a supernumerary quantity of elements, Mukařovský’s approach thus still offers very clear and understandable criteria.

Pictures of a structural version of the world

 

If this championed structural version of the world is to become imaginable and graspable, we must clearly find adequate visual images for it. The act of discovering pictures that can express and evoke these images is just as much an experimental activity as creating them. We run the risk that the inclusion of certain pictures will cause us to miss the objective of the collection; on the other hand, we must become accustomed to the new visual images that some pictures present, and to repeatedly investigate their effects, to become habituated to them. It is also evident that there are many paths to expressing the crucial theme of the collection, and that not all can be covered.

The fundamental inspiration for establishing this collection was unquestionably the work of Zdeněk Sýkora. His pioneering work naturally leads us to ask for its sources of inspiration; the original, distinctive composition of his works also causes us to wonder as to their more general meaning, who his contemporaries were, and which aspects of his work can be developed further. These are all questions to which it is exciting to seek answers. A mutual confrontation of pictures that can initiate these answers provides the collection, which attempts to do this, I hope, with a unique, exceptional character.

Zdeněk Sýkora himself said the person who inspired his concept of the picture was Martin Salcman, who was his teacher shortly after World War II.[9] He brought to Bohemia an understanding of Cézanne’s three-dimensional, spatial composition of the picture based on the relationship between patches of colour, as he had personally studied during his several-year stay in interwar Paris. Salcman learned how to view the act of creating a picture as the conscious composition of colour relations (still in their symbolic effect at the time) from his teacher, Jan Preisler. If we were to look for further inspiration for this compositional approach to painting in Czech art, we would reach Kupka and Cubism. Zdeněk Sýkora become more steadfast in the use of the freer possibilities provided by this method during his personal encounter with the work of Henri Matisse. A key inspiration on the path to rational picture-making was a quotation from Paul Klee in which he discussed the grid in the structure of a picture, leading Sýkora to also use pictorial elements in his individual fields and, by filling in a predefined grid, confront the Cézannesque approach to creating pictures from the relationships of elements.

Zdeněk Sýkora thus opened several new approaches to depicting structure, i.e., to the visual organisation of a supernumerary quantity of elements in their mutual relationships.[10] His first painting, Grey Structure (1962–1963), which was inspired by Klee’s concept of the picture as a grid that can be filled with elements, resulted in a fundamental discovery for Sýkora. Paul Klee proposed cultivating the alternation of elements within this grid, apparently with mostly the rhythm of their arrangement in mind. However, in his first painting Zdeněk Sýkora applied a pictorial element (which had several variations in terms of saturation and orientation) with regard to its relative position to the adjacent elements in the picture.[11] The variations of these elements’ mutual interactions resulted in patterns on the resulting higher structural level of the painting that were entirely unexpected for Sýkora. His investigation of these “structural fields” – i.e., the forms composed by the interaction of elements selected in this manner – became a central principle in this stage of Sýkora’s work.

Sýkora taught himself a relational method for creating pictures that he also applied to works where a computer finished calculating the placement of the elements to complete the relation. The first step towards creating these pictures was placing several elements in various locations and defining the relationships between them, with Sýkora consciously attempting to study the shapes seeping through at the higher structural level. This relational understanding of the surface of the picture makes Sýkora stand out against other computer work from the period, which often used a universal algorithm for the entire surface of the picture. The pictures from this period in his work may evoke visual images through which we can better understand new phenomena such as neural networks.

Although the second stage in Sýkora’s work, based on lines, applied randomness in defining the directions of the individual lines, the main theme was the relationships that resulted from comparing the lines’ various phases, which visualised the relationships among the lines themselves. Sýkora transformed these line relations by experimenting with their direction, width, length, colour and rules for intersections (overlaps), thus letting us see the possibilities that arise from their mutual plural existence.

What is also significant in Sýkora’s work is that he never thought of his pictures (as was common in non-figural art at the time) as a depiction of his inner feelings, but as resulting from his studies of nature and the universe – and thus his own personal view of the order of the world around us. In his interpretation, despite his efforts for conscious organisation the picture is never a formalist construction, but a possible way of accepting one’s existence in the newly revealed world through the imagery thus established. This approach to depiction is another basic feature of the presented collection.

It is remarkable that Sýkora’s experimental structuralist forays were part of a broader art movement in Czechoslovakia, which arose approximately in the mid-1960s with artists who variously investigated the problem of organising a larger quantity of visual elements within a picture. Like Sýkora, several of these artists were members of the Crossroads art group (Křižovatka, established in 1963), which proclaimed that it wanted to “face the predominance of romantic sentiment and excess of subjectivity, and to return to objective tendencies resting on the rigorous principles of constructivist order, proportion and numbers”.[12] These included Jiří Kolář, Karel Malich, Vladislav Mirvald and others who were later invited for a group exhibition at Mánes in 1968 – Hugo Demartini, Jan Kubíček and Radoslav Kratina. Their work also shows, though not as consistently and focused as Sýkora, various approaches to relationships in pictures and to the picture as a structure. Most of these artists also became established on the European art scene.

Jiří Kolář, evidently originally led by the poetic and symbolist intentions of his interest as a poet, established a direct connection to Dadaist and surrealist sources of the structure as a metaphor. But his actual artistic activities led him to create works that converged with the era’s structuralist movement, since their main theme is the organisation of the relationships among a supernumerary quantity of visual elements. In many cases, these are parts of texts or musical scores that are thus subject to an organisation that differs from their original linear arrangement.

The three-dimensional work of Karel Malich has a specific relationship to structural arrangement. Based on the artist’s own phenomenological investigations, they look beyond the object-based outlines of matter in order to view their oscillations and the movements and transformations resulting from these oscillations. They thus evoke something that Buddhism explains as a path towards aparigraha (non-possessiveness) and that the 14th Dalai Lama sees as being related to contemporary transformative science.

One important characteristic of the collection is the search for further similarities between Sýkora’s work and the foreign artists with whom Sýkora had professional and personal contacts during his career through group exhibitions. These include other artists who might have contributed to the structural concept of his works, in particular François Morellet, Kenneth Martin, Manfred Mohr, Rita Ernst, and Elsi and František Kyncl.

François Morellet first took an interest in statistics and randomness during the construction of grid pictures containing a large number of elements in the late 1950s. The collection includes prints of Random Distribution of 40,000 Squares using the Odd and Even Numbers of a Telephone Directory. Also of importance is his investigation of the mutual angular rotation of grids, whose regular foundations give rise to remarkable irregular shapes in various parts of the picture based on a principle similar to the multilayer additions that fascinated Sýkora in his first Structures.

Another artist to base his work on the study of randomness in the picture was Kenneth Martin, who first did so in the early 1970s. Like other artists included in the collection, he investigated the influence of randomness on a geographic pattern – in his case, coloured lines. As Martin explained himself, it is this presence of a geometric shape allows us to understand randomness not as chaos, but as the act of contemplating ways of arranging reality that differ from those we are used to.

Manfred Mohr contributed to the study of structures, both on the level of the element (by analysing various cross-sections of two-dimensional projections of cubes) and by investigating the graphic effects of the relationships among the elements thus achieved. Recently he has been interested in the kinetic expression of the process of transformation in actual, physical movement.

A special line connecting these two types of work created from a supernumerary quantity of elements and connecting Czech art and the international scene, is the work of František Kyncl. A native of Pardubice, Kyncl studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and was inspired to discover the world of structure by another part of Paul Klee’s legacy – by developing structures through point, line, triangle and pyramid (as a two-dimensional and three-dimensional shapes defined by the least possible number of lines). His justification for the main motif of his work could also serve as the motto for the entire collection presented here:

“Portrait, tree, landscape, deer, apple, rose – but beautiful visible forms cannot exist without this invisible structure!”

In perceiving and evaluating pictures that attempt to express various possibilities for the structural organisation of a supernumerary quantity of elements, we arrive at new visual categories that require us to seek out non-traditional label for the various aspects of these works – such as the types of structural elements, their density, the rules for interconnecting them, the number of ways in which they can be linked, etc. – which may play a role not only in the classification of the pictures themselves, but also in the classification of the resulting innovative phenomena and events that we discover in what today is certainly a revolutionary era.

The paths hinted at by the collection should inspire us to study other, even more complex structural interrelationships – such as when these relationally-based lines would influence each other in their basic characteristics. They also lead us to contemplate possibilities of finding our way within structurally-based forms through media that capture the development of structures over time (film, video), or that enable their generation from a reference point and offer us multiple ways of observing them from various positions in the space-time continuum.

Over the course of gathering and adding to the collection, we have consistently found that the number Goodman’s different ways of worldmaking continue to rapidly increase in number. If we are to avoid going mad from their sheer quantity and apparent contradictions, we must find their mutual interrelationships. The most essential method for organising these relationships is the structure. Structure is a way of thinking that can help prevent such a collapse.

Literature: 

14th Dalai Lama, Čtyři vznešené pravdy, Pragma Prague, 2002.
Jacques Derrida, Texty k dekonstrukci. Archa, Bratislava, 1993.
Norman Doidge, Váš mozek se dokáže změnit. C Press Brno 2012.
David Eagleman, Tajný život mozku. Dybbuk Prague 2012.
Nelson Goodman, Způsoby světatvorby. Archa Bratislava, 1996.
Werner Heisenberg, Fyzika a filosofie, Prague 1966.
Pavel Kappel, “90”. Prague City Gallery exhibition catalogue, Prague, Verzone, 2010.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mýtus a význam. Bratislava: Archa, 1993.
Claude Levi-Strauss, Strukturální antropologie. Prague: Argo, 2006.
Jan Mukařovský, Studie z estetiky, Prague 1966
V. S. Ramachandram, Mozek a jeho tajemství. Dybbuk Prague 2013.
Zdeněk Sýkora, Grafika. Introduction by Jaroslav Vančát, organised by Lenka Sýkorová, Praha Gallery 2008.
Jaroslav Vančát, Aleš Svoboda, Svět jako struktura, struktura jako obraz. Catalogue for the exhibiton at Galerie Klatovy/Klenová 2003.
Jaroslav Vančát, Aleš Svoboda, Strukturní směřování. Catalogue for the exhibition at Galerie Dobner, Faculty of Humanities, Charles University, Prague, 2006.

[1] Goodman, 1996, p. 14 et seq.

[2] Ibid.

[3] These processes are not taking place just at the social level – for instance, at the last Ars Electronica in 2016 in Linz, the exhibition Radical Atoms presented these elements not (as we traditionally know them) as orbits whose forces are directed towards their centre, but as an interactive opportunity to combine with other atoms in order to create new structures with transformational potential.

[4] V. S. Ramachandran, 2013, 268.

[5] Mukařovský (1966; 109). Dialectical contradictions still retained some residue from Plato in the concept that only one or the other contradiction can be sustained in the structure after such a “duel of dialectical contradictions”. However, if we view the elements of the structure entering such an interaction also as structures at their subordinate level, also composed of elements one structural level lower, their interaction is not necessarily a duel of A versus B, but rather a structural modification of each of the interacting elements.

[6] Levi-Strauss (1993: 16) sees the meaning of structure as a set of stable parts: “Probably there is nothing more than that in the structuralist approach; it is the quest for the invariant, or for the invariant elements among superficial differences.” Cf. Levi-Strauss (2006, 39 et seq.)

[7] Derrida 1993: 38.

[8] Cézanne, 2001, 18 – 19.

[9] A number of later important artists also encountered Martin Salcman as a professor at the Teaching Institute in the post-war years: Karel Malich, Dalibor Chatrný, Vladislav Mirvald, and Jan Smetana, whose students included Vladimír Kokolia, whose work manifests this way of thinking.

[10] Many attempts by other artists to arrange a supernumerary quantity of elements did not consider these inner relationships, but rather attempted to organise either one type of element, or applied an algorithm to the arrangement of elements, organising them “from the outside” in a uniform manner. This is one of the fundamental differences between the work of Zdeněk Sýkora and Viktor Vasarely, whose work was confused with Sýkora’s work (due to the use of similar elements) by superficial observers. However, Vasarely applied geometric symmetry in the arrangement of elements in his pictures.

[11] Many further relational consequences can be further derived from the fact that the “secondary element in the picture” was actually a variant of the same element – i.e., when it “entered the picture” it was in an internal relation to the original element.

[12] Wikipedia, Czech entry for the Crossroads art group. [retrieved 23 March 2017, translation by Elizabeth Spacilova].