An Interview with the Observer

https://vimeo.com/562912414

An interview, as defined in dictionaries, is a conversation between two or more people, talking to each other, speaking to each other.

But how can a conversation be an exhibition? And anyway, what can be an exhibition?

Ever since Marcel Duchamp, anything. A connoisseur of art would say. Just take the most ordinary thing in the world and put a label on it. Just remember the gesture and show it again. Even a feeling can be exhibited; you just have to figure out how. And storytelling? That's also been a common part of exhibition practices since the avant-garde have ruled the world. 

And interview? It is now becoming an important figure in the art scene and in what we now call a performative turn. As the philosophers would write, conversation can be that kind of linguistic speech the point of which is not to describe or state reality, but to create it itself. Already by telling, a new reality is being created. To put it more simply: there are situations in which a fact and a word merge. Language and narrative is not a system that hovers over reality, but it is reality itself. It constitutes reality.

This introduction to the philosophy of rethoric acts is not a demonstration for its own sake.  Every reader who knows Martina Mäsiarová's work should, after these lines, raise their eyes to her images, or, on the contrary, close their eyes to remember that... it is, after all, about her! For, she creates with words and the relationships between them. With emptiness or silence. Searched for in the written, discovered in the spoken. She says that sometimes in her notebooks she gets into the habit of repeating the same word over time. That she takes it and grasps it, turns it over, touches it. She doesn't even know why, but she needs to understand and digest it first in order to move on. For her, understanding happens through writing and through drawing. She says: “After that, usually it turns into something else. I feel like after I step away from it, I'm not the one who is leading the conversation anymore, but I'm going along with it.....We're in this together ..... “

Several drawings in this exhibition are her recollections of Balaton (a lake in Hungary). Drawings. Free and playfully childish. They hold memories of summer of 1999, when she took a trip with her parents to see the solar eclipse. Her father, a scientist and astronomer, had the task of documenting this natural phenomenon. She recalls how fascinated she was when the entire atmosphere had changed for a few minutes. It was as if everything stopped and was set in a different light, sounds, movements of people, colours - of the world, of the air. She even found a long-forgotten family photography, a still from an analogue camera, where in one detail of the shot suddenly appeared... the feeling she was looking for, her restored emotion of the experience. There it was - in the shadows of the shape of crescent moons, cast by the tree on the white sheet. (During a solar eclipse, the shadows change shape as the sun fades).

And somewhere in the back, buried deep in her memory, there are those drawings of the solar eclipse that she had made as a child. She returns to them in the present drawing, approaching them unconsciously, in a kind of untrained hand. Because for her, drawing is the beginning. She feels certainty in it, a validation of everything. Affirmation through drawing, or as she says: purifying and smoothing the thought through drawing.

As it is in the drawing “Časozber” ("Timelapse") – it has been created by redrawing of the observational protocols used to record solar activities on the sun surface. They used to be sketched by observatory staff, ideally every day. She used to go to an observatory with her father when he would draw such protocols. Her time-lapse drawing is an interlaced archive of all her father's records from 1993-2000. Like traces of time, in the most elemental proto-beautiful form.

And this is where the conversation of “the doe and the observer” comes into play, a fictional encounter between two entities that perceive and observe the world on their own terms, each in their own way.

O: Observation is a highly subjective act; even in my case, objectivity is not guaranteed and the result depends almost entirely on the observer: on his experience, his insight, his technical equipment, his note-taking skills, his estimation, the steadiness of his hand, the precision of his eye, the way he would wake up ... these notations do indeed average out, but ultimately they do not give an objective picture, they are only a set of subjective views

("but I can't even draw", he used to say)

D: for you, drawing is just a form of recording... I agree with you in a way, it is both leaving a trace and being the trace itself, a record, a record of an experience. but I also see it as a movement, a process. drawing happens the same way as language does, in the realization it becomes itself and makes me become myself as well. it is both a language and an experience with the world. where language is not sufficient, there comes stillness, silence. and then comes drawing, touch. and vice versa...

O: we're both recording the stars over our heads. we are creating some form of a map

D: it's all the same. the same but different

This is a fragment from Martina Mäsiarová's Master's thesis. It is about everything that surrounds us and at the same time about what is the most deeply hidden, somewhere deep inside of each of us. The observer here is a father, an astronomer who believes in the order of natural laws and the logic of the world. It is he who says: even that distant dark matter, about which we actually know almost nothing, works conditionally and according to strict principles and can be comprehended. Even though its principles may not yet be articulated in a language we use and can understand today. Based on what I realise from the looking above, I can guess both what has happened before and what is to come. Everything about what you see down here on earth is written up there.

She (the doe) continues the conversation: I too am an observer, I too am looking around, searching, guessing...and trying to record it all...but I feel like it's about something much smaller and closer. By observing, looking, a touch with the world arises. I don't want to interfere in things and influence their course and development; I rather ask than give answers. And when I ask, I don't really expect an answer…it's not so much about getting an explanation.... rather...hmm... to realize the breadth of all possible possibilities?

In lieu of notes:

In order to write this introduction to the exhibition, it was necessary to find support in the thinking, especially in the book by Alica Koubová: Thinking from the Other Place (Myslet z druhého místa) and her engaging rendering of John Lanshaw Austin's linguistic theory of speech acts. (The book was published by the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague in 2019). And also, were it not for Dana Tomečková's published interview with Martina Mäsiarová entitled: Calling for an Encounter, which was published in Profil- the journal of contemporary visual art in issue 2, in 2020, everything would have been more difficult. Not to speak about the opportunity to experience the adventure of reading Martina Mäsiarová's thesis: The Mountain, or About the Companion (VŠVU, Bratislava, 2018), not to mention. Because the notes of the author of these lines tend to get lost in meetings with the author of this exhibition. They are often just a reference to the encounter, fragmentary fragments and illegible calligraphy from the conversations between them.

photo credit: Marek Jančúch