Frantiek Sklas Feeling for Nature1

Donna Roberts
university of essex, colchester

FO R THE PAST T WENT Y YEARS, the work of the Czech artist Frantiek Skla has been characterised by a skillful and imaginative manipulation of objects and materials plucked from natural or urban environments. Sklas work is extremely multi-faceted, however, and his inventive use of materials extends far beyond the transformation of objets trouves, into the media of photography, large-scale metal and wooden sculpture, interior and graphic design, and book illustration. The polymorphous character of Sklas works can be seen to reect a subtly protean artistic persona. This has greatly inuenced his reception in the Czech Republic as, on the one hand, an extrovert musical performer and, on the other, a solitary artist in the guise of the romantic loner.2 A series of exhibitions in the Czech Republic between 2004 and 2005 rmly established Sklas position as not only one of the countrys leading creative gures, but also as arguably its most popularly acclaimed artist. Sklas prominence in his home country is long-standing, however, originating in his leading role in the revolutionary group, Tvrdohlav (Hardheads or Stubborn Society), established in 1987,3 and rapidly developing in the early 1990s through his receipt of numerous awards and honours, such as the prestigious Jindich Chalupeck award in 1991 and the invitation to represent the Czech Republic at the Venice Biennale in 1992. He has maintained a strong public prole through both his artistic and musical activities, and in 2006 reached an even broader popular audience through his commission to make the lm-trailer for the Karlovy Vary lm festival and the publication of a photograph-based animation story, titled How Clek Found Lda.4

more, both as a member of the Tvrdohlav or the secret society B.K.S.,5 and as an independent artist, Skla has become well-known for his continual engagement with certain movements that are important within the history of Czech art, such as romanticism and symbolism.6 Not only is this engagement evident in the appearance of his work, but it is also highly constructive of Sklas creative sensibility, and, given the extent to which his artistic persona has become central to the reception of his work, this must not be overlooked. Particularly expressive of Sklas historicism is his Venice journey of 1993, when the artist walked from Prague to Venice through the Alps, making objects and sketches along the way.7 Here, a stylistic allusion to the past is apparent in the sketchbooks [1] that recall the drawings and

Skla the Popular Romantic

Despite the variety of Sklas output, there are a number of themes and central concerns which have run through his work for the past two decades. These include a fundamental concern with materiality, temporality, and an unapologetically subjective approach to creativity. What is distinct throughout is a strong engagement with the past that manifests itself both existentially and stylistically in the process and the nal result of the artists work. Sklas art is characterised by its evocation of lost modes of creativity, from skillful handcraft to the child-like fascination with found objects. It makes frequent allusion to historical styles of art and design, most notably those which represent a nature-inspired aesthetic. His Venice Diaries, for example, reect a romantic style, whilst his design for the Akropolis Palace bar and nightclub in Prague combines Art-Nouveau with the B-movie morphology of the 1950s. Further-

1/ Frantiek Skla, Diary Prague

to Venice 1992
Photo: Martin Polk

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watercolours of countless a romantic artist, from John Ruskin to Josef Vchal, while the journey itself is the expression of an artistic sensibility that is both craftily performative and profoundly motivated by a subjective engagement in the natural environment. Sklas re-visiting of traditions that have a strong historical and national character is thus particularly evident in such a journey through the natural environment. Using traditional craft skills, Skla re-models found and natural materials. These skills are frequently exploited in the creation of objects that have an overdeterminedly hand-crafted and labour-intensive quality, giving the strong impression that the importance Skla places in the temporal and experiential process of making is in some way a reaction to an accelerating, technologised world. Sklas approach to his work has nonetheless been seen by Czech critics over the years as symptomatic of his generation of artists who reacted defensively to global shifts that would have been felt with particular acuteness in the post-revolutionary Czech Republic. Ji evk and Jana evkov, for example, dened Sklas activities in the early 1990s in terms of a highly personal response to the political developments of the time, and in many ways one can see that Sklas fundamental concerns have not changed: Frantiek Skla is principally not using a global point of view. He concentrates himself on the world he can easily contain. He is ironic and romantic at the same time [] Lost and stopped time, a fascination with the laborious crafting of his objects, an emphasis on the apparently unimportant details of his work this may be recognised as the creation of a personal immune system against an over-sophisticated civilisation.8 Sklas rise as an artist was contemporaneous with the post-revolutionary era in which many artists strongly identied with the artistic traditions that ran through Czech modernism. Now, however, in a more internationally focussed Czech Republic, one senses that in some quarters there may be a backlash against Sklas playful and intensively subjective engagement in tradition and the values of manual craft. Nonetheless, Sklas employment of these skills suggests that

his work is not simply the expression of a reactionary and eccentric loner, but is in fact a broadly sympathetic reection of a late twentieth century Sehnsucht. This might be broadly perceived as a longing for a slower pace of life, for the return of authentic experience and the search, fuelled by the retro-romanticism of the recently outmoded within popular culture, for the talismanic objects that promise to yield up something of that authenticity that always seems to elude the present. Petr Nedoma was one critic who observed the dual character of Sklas art in the early 1990s, referring to how Skla creates a subtle tension between his playful allusions to the past and a more profound concern with lost time, personal and cultural memory: The seemingly childish play with romantic undertones is in fact serious adult play on the theme of a lost paradise. With condence and independence, Skla explores the domain of false sentiment. In principle, he does not use ridicule; rather he works on the fringe of seemingly serious adaptation and human anxiety.9 A large degree of Sklas popularity does, I believe, arise from this form of romanticism, which is manifest through his adaptation of natural and found objects into objects with a curiously historical and personally signicant character. In his manipulation of the found object, there is certainly a relation to the popular consumer obsession with historically evocative objects; not necessarily antiques, but, rather, the commercially produced objects which evoke an idea of the recent past; the objects that, according to Jean Baudrillard, pass from a nave utility into a cultural baroque.10 Sklas love for old plastics, particularly bakelite, is paradigmatic of this. Although he may deliberately age and distress his materials, natural or articial, Skla has said that

2/ Frantiek Skla, Seeheads 2003 kelp Photo: Martin Polk

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he deliberately seeks out objects that have a worn quality: I love the structure of worn material. Things and material used by both people and nature.11 The wear and tear of materials thus provides his objects with that quality of historicity that Skla pursues as part of his resistance to uniform technological fabrication: For me patina and traces of wear are irreplaceable values that I set in opposition to universal prefabrication.12 With reference again to Baudrillard, Skla produces objects that exude an evocative atmospheric value.13 This value can be dened more precisely as one that carries with it the character of anteriority; a character of the past that might sometimes result from a specic stylistic or mannered allusion to art and artefacts of the past, or a far more auratic character that crackles with latent energies and narratives.

Auratic and Ancestral Objects

In the 1980s Skla articulated his early attraction to auratic objects in the text Manifesto of the Third Rococo, in which he dened his concerns with the modication of found objects to reect what he called the values found in weekend cottage art; that is, the handcrafted style and souvenir-like character of the kind of kitsch artefacts found in rural holiday cottages.14 The manifesto is an ode to the magic of the everyday object and to the memory of objects discovered in the corners of countryside cottages when a child: Let us call up our rst aesthetic enchantments with special objects on childhood visits to relatives. All those little rush-woven garlands, those little baskets of tinfoil and postcards coated with celluloid foil and decorated with string, all those little models and Alpine edelweiss, landscape ashtrays with a tiny cottage or ice oe and polar bear. And dusty horns for a sensitive child they were a revelation of beauty surpassed only by weapons and old armour.15 The curiously prosaic romance of such mnemonically affective objects resonates throughout Sklas found-object work of the last two decades. Such works have the strong impression of the souvenir and of objects loaded with private signication that carry with them the traces of past experience; that of the artist and also that which extends beyond the artists experience into folklore and even ancient history. Skla has said that his work in the early 1980s was motivated by a spontaneous joy to free myself and work my way back to the sources of the spring of childhood and even further back into pre-natal emotions.16 Drawing inspiration from memories real, false, folkloric, imagined or otherwise has thus been central to Sklas creative world for decades. What is notable is that in Sklas imaginative and mnemonic world, nature is ever present as the agent of memory or the agent of history. The extra-personal, cultural memory of folklore, for example, runs through so much of Sklas work, and it emerged most pronouncedly when he rst moved from the city to absorb himself in the forests surrounding what would become his rural residence and studio.17 His works from the late 1980s and early 1990s, therefore, were very much involved in the imaginary folkloric forest world that he created in story books such as The Great Adventures of Hair and

3/ Frantiek Skla, Walker 1993 mixed media, 30 18 15 cm Photo: Martin Polk

Chin (1988), the characters of which were created in life-size form, and in the recent animation story book How Clek Found Lda; both of which cannot be simply dismissed as childrens books, but which reect Sklas intense imaginative world and his meticulous creative practice.18 While resident at the Headlands Centre for the Arts on the Californian coast in 1992, and while walking from Prague to Venice in 1993, Skla produced two further series which pronounced certain strong and continuing characteristics of his work. Firstly, these series of works which have a profound personal signicance for the artist; secondly, they evoke the phenomenon of souvenir; and thirdly, they both arise from an imaginative sense of historicity provoked by the natural world. At Headlands, Skla produced a series of small heads made from sea kelp, which he has called Seeheads. [2] After his initial discovery in 1992 of the process of working with kelp and creating these heads, Skla returned to California in 2003, when he

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made a further series of heads for an installation at his exhibition series in 20042005. Skla has said how he became immediately drawn to the kelp for its seemingly animate character and perceived in its suggestive form the potential for morphological manipulation. He felt that the objects blurred the classications of plant and animal, and he took this ambiguity further by reforming the anthropomorphic tips of the kelp into the shape of human heads. These he modelled on different features of ancient ethnic physiognomy in order to express the remoteness in time that he felt corresponded to the evolutionary archaicism of the kelp. Skla created the kelp heads through a process of dehydration and rehydration, sculpting them with small wooden tools he had crafted specically for the task. This process he describes in quasi-shamanistic terms, underplaying his role as an artist working on the objects from without and emphasising the morphogenetic process of the objects formation: Through drying and my intervention, their faces began to appear, and I felt like I was calling forth from past existences faces of the dead or beings from other civilisations.19 Sklas creation of these seaweed golems epitomises the drive in his work to animate the inanimate, and he

further exploited the anthropomorphism of the material in the 20042005 installation by placing the individual heads behind two opposing rows of portholes of magnied glass. The resulting effect was that on close observation of the glass the objects resembled shrunken or mummied heads, as if seen within the vitrines of an anthropological museum. However, at a greater distance, the effects of the glass caused the magnication of the heads to increase, and they thus loomed up to life-size, as if swaying underwater. These Seehead objects hold for the artist such intimate traces of a singular experience of the natural environment that he in fact refuses to consider them in terms of art. Instead, they are precious souvenirs of the process of detemporalisation that the artist experienced during his residency on the ancient coastline of California. I do not like to call them sculptures or objects, he has written, because this classies them in terms of particular art categories by which they are then judged. I would like them to be understood as evidence of time spent in another world.20 These heads, therefore, are part of Sklas personally invested collection of objects that reect his notion of authentic experience as a reunion with the natural environment.

4/ Frantiek Skla, Brunkopf 1993 mixed media, 25 25 30 cm Photo: Martin Polk

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At Headlands, authentic experience was felt through the diurnal ux of the seashore, and similarly on his twenty-ve day hike through the Alps from Prague to Venice in 1993, Skla experienced an escape from the urban tempo to a pace that he felt returned him to the natural world.21 The works exhibited in Venice strongly reect Sklas experience of temporality on this journey. Walker (1993) for example [3], made along the way from sticks and a car headlamp, is a beetle-shaped object that represents the artists experience of being a tiny beetle moving at his own tempo in his own world.22 In addition, both New Values (a wallet sprouting moss shoots) [5] and Brunkopf (a hat lled with a mass of lichen that resembles hair, nerves, or cerebral matter) [4] reect the substitution of the cultural values of currency and clothing by organic matter. Such objects evidently claim an important signicance in terms of Sklas experience of the creative process, and thereby present themselves as heterogeneous artefacts and yet also as homomaterial souvenirs of an authentic experience.23 According to Susan Stewart, the souvenir exemplies the capacity of objects to serve as traces of authentic experience as well as their capacity to generate narrative.24 With this in mind, alongside his intimate engagement with his materials, Skla thus brings to mind Walter Benjamins gure of the Storyteller: the artisanal gure of pre-industrial society who coordinates eye, soul, and hand in the steady pace of his labours, and who enriches his objects with narratives of travel and folklore.25 Although Skla is unhappy with the fairly supercial references to the surrealist character of his objects, it is hard to deny this character when confronted, for example, with objects such as Ancestor (19931994),

5/ Frantiek Skla, New Values 1993 mixed media, 13 10 8 cm Photo: Martin Polk

Foundation Stones (1990) [6] or The Weight of Authority (2000).26 [7] Along with Ship of Ancestors (1991) [8], the latter two are typical of works that Skla invests with private associations, and that he has described as objects lled with concentrated energy with the potential of their own history and obscure purpose, evoking the feeling of a private museum.27 With his strong sensibility for the auratic character of the found or natural object, Skla shares with the surrealists an awareness, observed by Walter Benjamin, of the potential within objects to contain hidden correspondences and latent energies. Sklas work can thus be seen to have strong afnities with that attraction to, what Benjamin called with reference to surrealism, the immense forces of atmosphere concealed in both the outmoded commodity and the natural object.28 Rather than working within a self-consciously surrealist legacy, however, Sklas works can be seen in terms of the relation between the surrealist object and the romantic fragment; those objects that invariably act as relics of a lost sense of unity or a lost primal relation.29 The ancestral allusions, the references to his own childhood and to the Czech folklore of the forest all serve to construct that character in Sklas work of the lost paradise and the overstated innocence to which Petr Nedoma has referred.30

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6/ Frantiek Skla, Foundation Stones 1990 wood, light, 36 58 11 cm Photo: Martin Polk

What is highly distinctive about Sklas evocation of the past is the way in which it is achieved through either a combination of natural and articial materials or a rupturing of the distinction between the natural and the cultural. His objects therefore take on the character of what Baudrillard calls the mythological object that nds its frame of reference in the ancestral realm perhaps even the realm of the absolute anteriority of nature.31 Given that nature in Sklas work consistently acts as a signier of anteriority and past authentic experience, we can see his reduction of this distinction as a romantic and nostalgic trope.32 While this reduction is a major attribute of the romantic character of Sklas work, it also contributes to its particular form of paradoxical humour, or wit; a form of wit that nonetheless relates his work to a strong European tradition in which the distinctions between nature and artice become blurred.

Sklas ludic and poetic liber mundi

One of the most distinctive features of Sklas art over the last twenty years has been his blurring of the boundaries between the natural and the articial or cultural that is, a highly personal culture of European art and design, of popular music, rural experience, and the discarded objects of the urban rubbish heap. This is expressed in the frequent combining of natural and articial materials, the production of organic and living works, and the inverting of natural and cultural forms and materials that is so expressive of Sklas paradoxical and philosophical humour. Skla is quite clear that the ambiguity of his objects is a central feature of his art, stating that his works sometimes more, sometimes less, look like art, and adding, I myself am most satised if it doesnt even look like a work of art. Often its nature I exhibit. Sometimes its hard to nd any work in

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a piece, but it might well be there is a lot of it.33 A work such as Tree of Life (2002) [14] a bare tree that only on close inspection reveals the metal bolts holding it together exemplies Sklas sleight of hand in creating objects that present the viewer with an uncertainty as to the distinction between the agency of the artist and of natural or environmental factors in determining their nal form. Paramount to this conceit is Sklas highly ludic approach. There is a tremendous sense of play in his work, in which objects of great multivalency participate in a game that works on various levels, most notably playing with questions of taxonomy and classication, with forms and materials and their cultural or historical connotations. The hybrid mounted heads of In a Past Life (1988) [9], the live models of Planet II (1999) or Orchard III (2000), and the more recent electrical goods made from natural non-conductible materials, typify Sklas play with signication and classication; where the hand-crafted and the natural combine to produce objects with an ambivalent character or ontological status.34 If we consider the cultural history of the art and the natural sciences in Prague, we can see Sklas paradoxical objects with their sense of occulted meaning, their baroque character, and their obscuring of natural and articial delineations as objects with an ancestral lineage to the Rudolne Wunderkammer of the Mannerist period.35 According to historians of the marvellous, Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, the Wunderkammer or cabinet of curiosity reected the organisational principles of the natural philosophy of the Renaissance period. These principles, they write, were characterised by a delight in undermining any strict denition between nature and art: Certain classes of objects typical of the Wunderkammer threw into relief both convergences nature to art, work to play. All of these exploited analogies of form between natural and articial objects.36 Although the inuence of the Wunderkammer is far more prominent, for example, in the work of the Czech surrealist Jan vankmajer, it nonetheless provides a historical frame of reference within which to situate Sklas fascination with unsta-

ble taxonomies and with the creation of objects with an ambiguous status.37 A work like Dragon Hide (1994) [10], for example, while evoking the fairy tale world of the forest that Skla created in the late 1980s, provokes comparisons with the elaborate fakes made by the cunning vituosi of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which were ardently collected by owners of cabinets of curiosity. We can thus see many of Sklas creations as having strong afnities with what Paula Findlen has called the paradoxes of classication that were characteristic of the early modern category of the marvellous, and which represented an ambivalent ordering that blurred the boundary between the categories of naturalia and articialia which arose from the organisational conundrum of the Wunderkammer.38 At the time of Sklas 20042005 exhibition at the Rudolnum Gallery, Prague, the director of that institute, Petr Nedoma, described the show in its publicity material as a playground for Sklas free association chain, thereby referring to the artists acute sense for exploiting the morphological resemblances and visual correspondences perceived between otherwise unconnected objects. This exhibition, which combined existent works with objects and installations made for the occasion, reected Sklas deeply poetic sense for connecting the formal and material relations perceived between objects. It thus provided viewers with a strong sense of the artists perceptual world, in which forms correspond unexpectedly and reverberate between distant or juxtaposed pieces: a model planet in one room, for example, resembled the form of a giant record player turning on a slow and heavy axis in another room. Sklas work has consistently displayed this tendency to play with surface resemblance, and to expose to poetic effect the unexpected similitude between forms.39 In the object Letter Buttery Eye (1999), for example, Skla makes the simple visual analogy between the form of an open envelope and a buttery wing, afrming the analogy with the following comment: Black moths, the bearers of mystery, wait out the winter in human dwellings. Then in spring they open their vividly illustrated pages.40

7/ Frantiek Skla, The Weight of

Authority 2000
mixed media, 28 20 17 cm Photo: Martin Polk

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This poetic sense for visual correspondences is at the heart of Sklas oeuvre, and was one aspect of his work that was identied by critic Ludvk Hlavek in the early 1990s as central to the artists world view. For Skla, Hlavek writes, the world is an endless universe of many things which are at one and the same time banal in their bare existence and mysterious in the far-reaching connections they hide within themselves.41 It was in the mid-1980s, Skla has said, that he found himself fascinated at the discovery of a peculiar morphology in natural forms; thereby referring to the existence of surprising similarities perceived between natural forms.42 It is not only, however, an interest in the morphology of natural forms that Skla displays in his work, but, moreover, an interest in how these resemblances are echoed in the forms of utilitarian objects.43 Thus, butteries and envelopes, jaw bones and the arms of record players [11], horseshoe crabs and guitars all become examples of the morphological resemblances exploited by Skla in his creation of objects that blur the supposed distinctions between cultural and natural objects. Skla has an acute sense, not unlike that manifest in surrealist objects, for the absurd reduction of an objects utility through the extension of morphological resemblance into an impossible functional resemblance. Through the confusion of form, material, and function, Skla thus succeeds in producing highly paradoxical objects seen to an absurd degree in the photographic series Shark, in which the artist performs a set of instructions for the use of a carved wooden shark known as the Defensive-offensive Shark Weapon

(1992).44 [12] As I will discuss below, this fascination with morphological similarities and the paradoxes they produce, is, I believe partly inuenced by the artists familiarity with imagery from pre-scientic natural philosophy, and his own awareness of how morphological resemblance has played a major part in the visual aspect of natural history.

Skla Naturae
Given Sklas intense fascination with the natural world and with the idea that the world of forms natural, artistic and manufactured yields endless possibilities for resemblance, I would like to suggest that Skla draws not only from this great morphological bank in the creation of his works, but that his work also asserts the pre-eminence of a visual logic of resemblance. As if to make explicit his fascination with the phenomena of the resemblances of nature and his awareness of the historical discourse on this theme, Skla devoted a page of his 2004 exhibition catalogue to an extensive quotation from the book by Czech historian of science, Stanislav Komrek, titled Mimicry, Aposematism and Related Phenomena. Here, Komrek writes of the theories of resemblance and analogy put forth by Renaissance natural philosophers, Giambattista della Porta [13] and his predecessor Paracelsus; With the decline of Renaissance thought, interest in this type of interpretation waned, and after erosion of faith in the creation of living organisms and the petering out of Ger-

8/ Frantiek Skla

Ship of Ancestors 1991

mixed media, 24 25 10 cm Photo: Martin Polk

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9/ Frantiek Skla, In a Past Life

1988
wood, fur, h 120 cm Photo: Martin Polk

man romantic natural science in the last century it disappeared from the educated world. In our cultural circle only artists and small children can allow themselves to believe such resemblances are not accidental [] As if resemblance was a matter of the revelation of the interior forces of attraction between things, their secret loves and misalliances, and as if perceiving it we are peeking into their privacy (always a favourite human occupation).45 Sklas use of Komreks text does, I believe, testify to the artists strong attachment to the notion that although the natural science of such epochs (and its grounding epistemology) might now be redundant, it

maintains a persistent poetic appeal and may in fact accord with an inherently analogical mode of thinking prompted by visual experience. Moreover, the highly visual mode of thinking to which Skla refers through Komrek represents a core feature of Sklas engagement with historical traditions not only artistic but also pertaining to natural history and their legacy through modernity to the present.46 Following the referencing of Komrek, for example, one can see how Skla expresses an afnity with the visual logic of Renaissance natural philosophy that was dened by Michel Foucault as characteristic of an epochal

10/ Frantiek Skla, Dragon Hide

1994
hide, wood, 210 40 20 cm Photo: Martin Polk

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11/ Frantiek Skla

Sound of Silence 1991

mixed media, 108 108 14 cm Photo: Martin Polk

Weltanschauung that was rooted in analogical thought, and which to a large degree based the classication of objects on similarity of form. Komreks text can be read as a response to Foucaults account in The Order of Things of analogical thinking as central to a historical epistemology that dominated Renaissance thought and that declined in the seventeenth century. According to Foucault, this century was the historical locus of a major epistemological shift, after which the empirical domain of the Renaissance that was characterised

by a complex of kinships, resemblances, and afnities was superseded by a system based on analysis and not analogy, on difference and identity rather than resemblance and similitude.47 Like Komrek, art historian Barbara Maria Stafford has also recently argued for a reconsideration of the importance of analogical thought to both artistic and scientic practice. In her defence of analogy as an important feature of creative cognitive processes, Stafford denes it as the art of sympathetic thought.48 While accepting Foucaults

12/ Frantiek Skla

From the series Shark 1992

Photo: Martin Polk

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Erotic Analogies and the Desublimation of Natural History

It is rare for Skla to produce explicitly erotic works, and so the series of erotic collages made for his 2004 exhibition represent a notable deviation, and yet it does follow the pattern of Sklas visual games and his delight in visual analogy. [15] In this series, Skla shifted the focus of his sense for the pattern-making character of the natural world and his xation with morphological resemblances from a seemingly innocent scopic eld to make the age-old analogy between the organs of human and plant reproduction.50 It is my conjecture that in these collages Skla plays a visual game that works on a number of levels that allude to historical modes of the perception and representation of natural forms. Firstly, Skla takes as his raw material the garish glossy imagery of modern pornographic magazines, arranging carefully cut close-up images of coitus into decorative patterns that resemble oral designs, thereby making the analogy between oral and human reproductive organs. Secondly, in setting out the images in decorative patterns that resemble nineteenth century botanical designs and ower pressings, Skla brings to mind a particular epoch of natural history that was characterised by a highly aesthetic approach to nature which nonetheless continued the old pre-scientic habits of resemblance making. These collages therefore connote what historian of science Lynn Merrill has referred to as to the highly sublimated eld of Victorian romantic natural history, which she denes as aesthetic science, nature closely examined to enhance the pleasure that an ordinary person takes in it. Merrill adds that it offers pleasures of detail, form, and complexity, as well as evocative connotations and human associations.51 When exhibited at the Rudolnum Gallery in 20042005, three erotic collages were displayed in a side room lined with black fabric and entered via a heavy velvet curtain. The illicit atmosphere connoted the private den of a connoisseur, and the vitrine in which the collages were displayed enhanced the antiquarian atmosphere. Through the effect of the

low lighting, the carefully spaced pages looked at rst like decorative prints of oral patterns, pressed owers, or possibly decorative entomological illustrations, attached at the top with a protective tissue paper folded back, its delicate spiders web print pattern adding to the impression of a natural history-themed decorative work. On closer inspection, however, the pornographic content of the images became apparent, leaving the viewers position transformed to that of voyeur. This effect was enhanced by the presence of the upturned opaque tissue cover, which seemed to play upon the idea of the Victorian tendency to cover-up and the illicit act of peeking at what lies beneath the cover.52 Thus, in Sklas series, the modesty of seemingly innocent peeking is met with the visceral affront of contemporary pornography. In these collages and their installation I believe that Skla condenses layers of cultural associations and orchestrateds in the viewing of the works a theatrical display of the sexual sublimations involved in natural history, particularly connoting the natural history of the Victorian era and the domestication of nature into the popular taste for natural history prints and ower pressings that the collages mimic.53 In a manner that exploits the aesthetic appeal of what at rst appears to be the imagery of a decorative natural history, Skla plays here not only with the similitude of forms (human and oral), but also with the mimicking of a delirious and kaleidoscopic erotic vision. This series thus provides another point of comparison with surrealist practice (erotic collage) and surrealist simulation of the effects of the erotically overdetermined gaze, thereby recalling Roger Caillois denition of the analogies of nature that reveal all sorts of unexpected echoes that seem the products of hallucination.54 These collages thus reect that link between Sklas work and surrealist thought that runs along an axis from poetic analogy to the simulations of delirium that collapse difference and identity into one hallucinatory vision. One can also compare the connotations of the Victorian sublimation of natural history in these works to what Max Ernst exposes in his uncovering of the repressed sexuality of the Victorian penny novel. 55 Furthermore, one might describe

14/ Frantiek Skla, Tree of Life

20022004
wood, metal, 370 600 280 cm Photo: Martin Polk

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15/ Frantiek Skla, Erotic Collage

2003
Photo: Martin Polk

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Sklas collages as a visual echo of Georges Batailles desublimation of the so-called language of owers (the scale of emotional and amorous values attributed to various owers), with Skla directly substituting owers with the organs of human reproduction.56 Skla has said that the images used were carefully selected for the orid hues of the skin, and that the process of creating the collages was in itself an exercise in selfconscious sublimation, wherein images were chosen purely with a view to their potential within the decorative arrangement.57 However, while the process of creating the collages may have involved a large degree of sublimation, the end result is in fact a desublimation of the erotics of natural history. Notes

Skla has an acute sense for a kind of visual shorthand that can quickly evoke an historical atmosphere. Combined with his sense for narrative, this worked to great effect in the erotic collage installation, and brings together Sklas engagement in natural history, in visual resemblances, and his taste for witty paradoxes of classication. Although these works are unusual within Sklas oeuvre, they reect how his apparently supercial and stylised evocation of historical modes of representation is underpinned by an extremely sophisticated knowledge of, not only the history of art, design, and natural history, but also of the modes of thought and perception the sensibility, even of the epochs to which his work alludes.

1. With the term feeling for nature, I refer to the chapter of Louis Aragons surrealist text Paris Peasant, titled A Feeling for Nature at the Buttes-Chaumont, in which Aragon describes the curious combination of the natural and the cultural which held a fascination for the surrealists that is echoed in Sklas work. See Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant, Boston 1994. 2. Skla has been a member of a number of musical groups connected to the Sklep theatre in Prague, including the cabaret and skat-style trio, Tros Sketos, alongside two fellow artists, Jaroslav Rna and Ale Najbrt, and the pop cover group MTO Universal. Sklas persona as a romantic loner has been frequently observed and most often compared to that of the symbolist artist, Josef Vchal (18841969). Marie Judlov, for example, has written of Skla: Like several others of his generation, he set out on the road of the romantic Czech loner, the sensitive and independent creator, who from time to time appears in Czech art. Marie Judlov, I See No Courage in Shocking, Vtvarn umn XVII, 1993, No. 4, p. 17. 3. This group of nine Prague-based artists formed in opposition to the oppressive conditions in artistic life under the Communist regime, and was an important force within the unofcial Czech art scene of the late 1980s. It was the rst group of artists in twenty years to publicly exhibit outside the state controlled Union of Fine Artists and it played a major role in the artistic front of the Velvet Revolution. 4. Frantiek Skla, Jak Clek Ldu nael, Praha 2006. 5. B.K.S. is the acronym for Bude konec svta, the end of the world is nigh, a group founded by Skla and a number of friends in 1974. The groups activities have taken place in a cultivated atmosphere of secrecy and are rooted in a ludicrously fabricated culture of pseudo-chivalric ritualism and craft-based labour. 6. Ji Oli, for example, has described the Tvrdohlav as grounded in a deep respect for Czech artistic tradition: The Hardheads harboured a latent, secret love of tradition in general and the Czech modernist tradition in particular, as well as for those solitary and visionary artists who had gone their own way. Ji Oli, Vtvarn skupina Tvrdohlav 19871999, Praha 1999, p. 219. 7. A selection of Sklas sketchbooks made on his walk from Prague to Venice in 1993 have been published titled Frantiek Skla: Praha Venezia, cestovn denky, Praha 2005. 8. Ji evk Jana evkov, Post-Totalitarian Blues with a Happy Ending, Beyond Belief: Contemporary Art from East Central Europe (exh. cat.), Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago 1996, p. 75. The particular atmosphere in which Skla rst began to produce work following his studies was one in which open exhibitions could only be made through ofcial channels. This situa-

tion, according to evk and evkov, had a formative impact on the approach of artists like Skla: Artists lived without critical confrontation, without the inuence of the public, without an art market, and without ofcial independent galleries. In this isolation they were mostly exploring their own internal problems, without real impact from the world around them. Ibidem, p. 71. The legacy of this distinction between the artists public and private domains could be seen to be humorously played out in the activities of the Secret Society B.K.S. 9. Petr Nedoma, Nadoblan Skla (Skla Beyond the Clouds), Atelir V, February 1992, No. 4, p. 1. 10. Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, London New York 1996, p. 16. 11. Frantiek Skla: Works from Headlands (exh. cat.), Vysok kola umleckoprmyslov, Prague 1993, p. 5. 12. Frantiek Skla (exh. cat.), Galerie Rudolnum, Praha Egon Schiele Art Centrum, esk Krumlov Moravsk galerie v Brn 2004, p. 178. 13. Baudrillard (see note 10), p. 37. Ondej Va observed the historicity of Sklas work in his exhibition review, The Monstrous Muteness of Frantiek Skla, Umlec International VIII, 2004, No. 4, pp. 9091. 14. Skla (see note 12), p. 177. 15. Ibidem, p. 13. 16. Ibidem, p. 177. 17. Following a change of environment in 1987, Skla declared that his work was directly inuenced by the intense experience of the genius loci of a dilapidated agricultural farm in the middle of the woods, in a spot rich in historical memory. [] This place, he has said, broke down my urban irony and encouraged the creation of stories. Ibidem, p. 177. 18. In terms of Sklas engagement with historical traditions, Sklas animated adventure story can be rmly placed within the strong tradition of East European animation. 19. Skla (see note 11), p. 5. 20. Ibidem, p. 5. 21. Following his invitation to present at the Venice Biennale in 1993, Skla decided to walk from Prague to Venice, creating sketchbooks and assemblages along the way that would constitute the material element of his exhibit. He has written openly of this profound experience in terms of a highly romantic ight from urban reality: The greatest experience of the journey was that of overcoming the distance at a speed natural to a human being. I got into absolute harmony with nature and started to perceive everything with great intensity [] The chance to live through an uninterrupted

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series of days in this natural way remains the most powerful (and non-transferable) experience of my life. I think few so-called free people equipped with every time-saving possibility can afford this luxury as they chase the consumer way of life. Skla (see note 12), p. 141. 22. Ibidem, p. 157. 23. I refer here to Umberto Ecos notion of the homomaterial as discussed in A Theory of Semiotics, Bloomington London 1976, p. 227. 24. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir and the Collection, Baltimore London 1984, p. 135. 25. Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller: Reections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov, in: Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, London 1992, pp. 83107. With reference to Paul Valry, Benjamin connects the artisan with the storyteller as lost companions in the tracing of experience within material objects: That old co-ordination of the soul, the eye, and the hand [] is that of the artisan which we encounter wherever the art of storytelling is at home. In fact, one can go on and ask oneself whether the relationship of the storyteller to his material, human life, is not in itself a craftsmans relationship, whether it is not his very task to fashion the raw material of experience, his own and that of others, in a solid, useful, and unique way. Ibidem, p. 107. 26. Skla does not associate himself with surrealism and he has no connection with the Czech Surrealist group in Prague. His antipathy towards the surrealist label might well be due to the fact that surrealism is still active with a very particular character in the Czech Republic. 27. Skla (see note 12), p. 179. Ship of Ancestors consists of a toy wooden boat, made by Sklas great grandfather, a mining carpenter, found while cleaning out a barn. Ibidem, p. 177. The vegetable forms within the boat are pieces of dried fruit picked around Sklas country studio and residence. The Weight of Authority consists of a prosthetic hand clutching a giraffes tooth, placed on a bed of sea-brush picked on Italian beaches, and a snakeskin case which was a gift from the artists wife. The plasticine head in the centre of Foundation Stones was a mummys head that the artist made as a child and found years later in his grandmothers attic. 28. Walter Benjamin, Surrealism Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia, in: Reections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, edited by Peter Demetz, New York 1975, p. 182. 29. On the surrealist object as an object of primal loss, see Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty, Cambridge, Mass. London 1993. According to Foster, Benjamin considered aura to manifest itself in at least three registers: rstly the natural, which Foster denes as the aura of an empathic moment of human connection to material things, secondly the cultural and historical, which he denes as the aura not only of cultic works of art but also of artisanal objects where the traces of the practiced hand are still evident, and thirdly the maternal body. Ibidem, pp. 195196. With his frequent conation of the natural object, the crafted object, the prehistoric object and the ancestral object, I believe Sklas objects work within all these registers of the auratic. 30. Nedoma has dened Sklas work as a joyful play with Romantic origins that unite us with a mythologised past and overstated innocence. Nedoma (see note 9), p. 1. 31. Baudrillard (see note 10), p. 81. 32. According to Susan Stewart, the prevailing motif of nostalgia is the erasure of the gap between nature and culture. Stewart (see note 24), p. 23. 33. Martin Mikule (review), Frantiek Skla a midwife of contemporary art, http://www.radio.cz/en/article/59678, 10. 08. 07.

34. Planet II was a large papier mach sphere coated with fruit pulp which was left to cultivate into patterns of mould inside a glass case. Over time the object became a microcosmic model of global geographic and demographic development. Orchard III was a miniature graveyard diorama, described by the artist as a live model of the ow of time, with all its hidden meanings and cultural and social contexts, and which represented the aesthetics of disintegration, overgrowth, putrefaction. Skla (see note 12), p. 161. The electrical goods, such as wooden radios or toasters, were exhibited in a commercial gallery in Prague, winter 2006. They were the artists response to the gallerys request that he produce something commercially viable in time for Christmas. 35. According to John Pickstone, the implication that meanings and messages were embedded within the objects was an important feature of the culture of the cabinets of curiosity: The cabinets of curiosity of the sixteenth century onwards showed natural objects as bearers of meaning objects were amazing, found or made, each with its own story or message. John Pickstone, Ways of Knowing: a new history of science, technology and medicine, Manchester 2000, p. 61. 36. Lorraine Daston Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150 1750, New York 2001, p. 277. 37. According to Daston and Park, the Wunderkammern exploited the old opposition between art and nature to feign pleasant paradoxes and also hazarded new combinations of the two that subverted the distinction altogether. It was in such collections of rarities and marvels that art and nature rst mingled and ultimately merged. Ibidem, p. 260. 38. Paula Findlen, Jokes of Nature and Jokes of Knowledge: The Playfulness of Scientic Discourse in Early Modern Europe, Renaissance Quarterly XLIII, No. 2, Summer 1990, pp. 292331. 39. According to Michel Foucault in his discussion of the poetic character of similitude, the poet is he who, beneath the named, constantly expected differences, rediscovers the buried kinships between things, their scattered resemblances. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: an archaeology of the human sciences, Abingdon New York 1989, p. 55. 40. Skla (see note 12), p. 179. 41. Ludvk Hlavek, Three Czech Postmodern Artists, Vtvarn umn XVI, 1992, No. 4, p. 36. 42. Skla (see note 12), p. 177. 43. One can see Sklas constant attention to the relations between natural and man-made forms in the light of Baudrillards observation of the natural connotations of functional and technological objects: It is the Idea of Nature which, in its myriad forms (animal or vegetal elements, the human body, space itself), everywhere becomes involved in the articulation of forms. Baudrillard (see note 10), p. 61. 44. In his discussion of the overestimation of morphological resemblances by the natural philosophers of the Renaissance, Umberto Eco denes the conation of morphology and function as a homologation of different relationships: from the morphological analogy they passed to the functional analogy. In Stefan Collini (ed.), Interpretation and Overinterpretation, Cambridge 1992, p. 50. 45. Stanislav Komrek, Mimikry, aposemantismus a pbuzn jevy, Praha 2004, pp. 10, 14. Quoted in Skla (see note 12), p. 153. 46. We can in fact trace Sklas engagement in the natural philosophy of the Renaissance period to commercial work he undertook in the 1980s. An encyclopaedia titled ivot (Life), for which Skla provided numerous illustrations, is a rich anthology of the visual history of the natural sciences, and contains specic material on elements of medieval and Renaissance natural philosophy that exemplify the logic of analogy and resemblance. These include

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images from the Phytognomica (1588) of Renaissance natural philosopher, Giambattista della Porta, which illustrated his theories of the sympathies between different kingdoms of the natural world that were based on morphological resemblances. See ivot, edited by Jan Buchar, Praha 1987. Skla displays an understanding of such theories of the natural world outmoded but nonetheless marvellous in their arcane juxtapositions in another commercial project of the 1980s called Lost Crafts, in which he illustrated the analogical relations used in the sympathetic magic of early medicine. See Miroslav Janotka Karel Linhart, Zapomenut emesla, Praha 1984. 47. Foucault (see note 39), p. 60. The activity of the mind, writes Foucault of this seventeenth century shift, will therefore no longer consist in drawing things together, in setting out on a quest for everything that might reveal some sort of kinship, attraction, or secretly shared nature within them, but, on the contrary, in discriminating, that is, in establishing their identities. Ibidem, p. 61. 48. Barbara Maria Stafford, Visual Analogy: Consciousness as the Art of Connecting, Cambridge, Mass. London 2001, p. 10. 49. Ibidem, p. 58. 50. In his account of this old analogy, David Freedberg, for example, discusses the sexualised anthropomorphism of the drawings by Renaissance botanists that manifest an overdetermined relation between the organs of human and plant reproduction, which he says reect that old drive to anthropomorphism and similitude. See The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, his friends, and the beginnings of modern natural history, Chicago London 2002, p. 233. 51. Lynn Merrill, The Romance of Natural History, Oxford 1989, p. 14. Merill writes of the popular craze of natural history in the nineteenth century, which, through a vast number of publications on the theme, spoke through a discourse of the aesthetic qualities of natural marvels in a language of extreme intimacy between a very specically gendered nature and her observer. Although

presented through its educational and moral good, natural history in the Victorian era, writes Merrill, dignied sensuous and tactile pleasure by giving them an intellectual and poetical component. Ibidem, p. 39. 52. In her discussion of the Victorian obsession with the cover, Susan Stewart denes the cover as an archetype of eroticism: In concealing nature, the cover, of course, makes nature all the more titillating. The cover invites exposure; it always bears the potential of striptease. Stewart (see note 24), p. 114. 53. According to Stewart, Victorian crafts and hobbies turned the signs of nature into controlled and domesticated cultural signs that reected the ambiguous character of sexuality in the era: The impulse towards control manifested in these Victorian hobbies [] seem symptomatic of the double nature of Victorian sexuality the simultaneous urge towards repression and licentiousness which resulted in both a specic moral code and a blossoming taste for pornography and distanced desire. Ibidem, p. 114. 54. Roger Caillois, The Natural Fantastic, in: The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader, edited by Claudine Frank, Durham London 2003, p. 356. 55. The writings of popular Victorian naturalists reveal the enormous sublimated investment of their authors in the description of nature. Philip Henry Gosse, for example, wrote of the study of natural history as peeps through Natures keyhole at her recondite mysteries From Gosse, Letters from Alabama, Chiey Relating to Natural History, quoted in Merrill (see note 51), p. 61. Referring to the erotic rapture of naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace on capturing a buttery, Merrill asserts that the sexual sublimations and expressions involved in Victorian natural history could ll the pages of an entire book. Ibidem, p. 203. 56. See Bataille, The Language of Flowers, in: Visions of Excess, trans. Alan Stoeckl, Minneapolis 1985, pp. 1014. 57. Interview with the artist, April 2005.

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