Michal Macku

by Emiliano D’Angelo

What do we speak about when we speak about photography?
Most of us would be tempted to give an impetuous answer to this question, which seems to be innocuous and free from pitfalls, highlighting some distinctive characteristic capable of codifying a kind of ontological statute: 1) as to the medium, photography is light impressed on a film; 2) as to dimension, it only contemplates height and width, but suggests an idea of depth not unlike that of perspective painting (even if obtained without difficulty or effort) 3) as to content and theoretical and conceptual implications, photography is a reflection, a faithful trace of reality, a kind of pocket-size readymade (something which also justified the importance it has been attributed in recent art history, since the crisis of traditional techniques). Yet artists as Michal Macku prove that none of these three assertions is wholly true. It is easy to disprove the first: many photographers have amused themselves with experimenting heterodox techniques based on special emulsions, assemblies and collages, often in the name of a recovery of the manual skills and knowhow associated with photography that have been displaced when digital technologies burst upon the scene. Macku has gone so far as to develop a technology which seems to hybridize photography, a painting based on signs and gestures and traditional printing: it is a matter of “gellage”, a mixture of gelatinous emulsions and collage transferred from film to paper and then enriched by manual interventions by the author (a typical product of the “liquid” melting pot of the Nineties, when it almost seemed indispensable and necessary to cross the frontiers of expression, after the disintegration of national and ideological borders). As to the dimensional aspect, Macku’s break with tradition is rooted in his very trans-media approach: the photographic impression transferred onto paper acquires an unusual material and tactile consistency, accentuated by post-production interventions (actually a mere finishing phase of the self-same production) which makes the intrusion into the field of painting even more evident. The gellages applied onto glass structures in 3D, where the dispersed shades of the bodies are impressed almost like shrouds, are declaredly volumetric. The character and content of the works of the Czech artist have been acutely pinpointed by Walter Guadagnino, one of our critics (and historians) who are most knowledgeable on photography. He has correctly stressed the connection between the artist’s frequent use of images of the human body with classical statues (the kòuroi of ancient Greece) and certain expressions of the Bohemian Surrealist movement. In particular, apart from evident parallels to authentic masters of photography as Karel Teige and Jindrich Stirsky, I like to stress the fact that Macku’s imagery is inspired by the same matrix and models of reference as Mukarovsky. In fact, Macku has assimilated some fundamental programmatic concepts of the theoretic apparatus erected by Mukarovsky, as the strategy of isolating the object from every spatial context, the discovery of the “beauty of the torso … of the broken or deformed object in painting”, as well as the provocation of a semiotic coup by means of which the trace impressed by the artist (in this case, the sign-body) ceases to represent reality, to take its place according to the bewildering logic of dreams. However, it should also be pointed out that this revisited surrealism is by no means aimed at an ecstatic reverie or an orgiastic and liberating tension: on the contrary, it gradually turns towards a dimension of oppression and nightmare, of the alienation of enumeration, with vaguely expressionistic connotations. Indeed, one gets the feeling of gazing at Kafka and at Kubin, to mention two literary models which are still associated with Prague. A poetic developed during an epochal crisis, immediately after the collapse of the Socialist utopia, could not but take cognizance of the unsurmountable gap that has come between the heroic early years of the movement (the most belligerent and determined of the whole 20th century) and this, by now terminal, phase ridden by profound end-of-millennia anxieties. The representation of reality has come to replace reality itself (still after still, pixel after pixel), overturning the theoretical presuppositions at one time enunciated by Bréton and his companions. Any man, any citizen, any subject (individual or collective) who is today unable to wield the levers of power of the “international machine” gets to feel a bit like a mutilated kòuros, banished from his own centre, lost in a destabilizing dream where no possible way out can be glimpsed. In this sense, and by pure historical and programmatic paradox, Macku’s “nocturnal” images represent the impossible instants of a possible reawakening, once again in the centre of one’s I, in a reorganized cosmos, in the diaphanous and meridian light of a new vision of creativity and of History. oppression and nightmare, of the alienation of enumeration, with vaguely expressionistic connotations. Indeed, one gets the feeling of gazing at Kafka and at Kubin, to mention two literary models which are still associated with Prague.