I see Július Koller standing before me, raising his right hand vertically from the middle of his face toward the zenith in order to position himself in a system of coordinates in which the ground markings are formed by the endless edges of a Mobius strip and its unraveled form, the question mark. And how from that stance he takes the measure of the room by way of a performance, the strange druid that he was. Then he uses a marking cart to draw a chalk line through the art gallery or stretches a tennis net between the walls and plays ping-pong. These are parataxes on his concept of cultural work – allegories and metaphorical acts, but behind them is his strategy of using the real world, the everyday world, as a given program for an automatic and infinite aesthetic operation – an aesthetic displacement designed to put an end to aesthetics, but which at the same time enables a general aetheticization of the world: Ethics and aesthetics, just as in Wittgenstein’s famous dictum, were always one and the same thing for him.

When news came in August of his untimely death, it affected us doubly. After all, the work of the Bratislava artist, which had always taken place below the radar of the arts scene, had only just begun enjoying an astounding rediscovery and revaluation, putting him at last into the limelight of the international museum and collecting world. Július had finally obtained as well the recognition from young artists that had previously been denied him.

Not that he could really be considered to have been »forgotten.« Even in the leaden years from 1972 to 1989, his works repeatedly popped up in group exhibitions in both Eastern Europe and the West. In widely disparate constellations they served as a demonstration of the existence of post-Dadaist practices behind the Iron Curtain, as well as proof of the presence there of neo-avant-gardist painting, lending themselves to interpretation either as encrypted performances in the field of individual mythologies or as strictly conceptual procedures. And they definitely had their interpreters and heralds: Thomas Strauss, then Aurel Hrabusicky, later Jana and Jiri Sevcik, and finally, concurrent with the artist’s great international breakthrough, the artists of the younger generation, who acknowledged the potential of these anticyclical and unparalleled endeavors and appreciatively supported them: first and foremost Roman Ondak and Boris Ondreicka as well as curators including Vit Havránek, Maria Hlavajova, Kartrin Rhomberg and Hedwig Saxenhuber.

As far as the powers that be in the counter-culture world of Bratislava itself are concerned, the critical distance Július Koller allowed himself from the respectively dominant art paradigm was always read as self-denying escapism, with the artist at best being consigned to the role of rebellious outsider – the kind of displacement that still prevails today despite the international acclaim the artist has achieved in recent years. The reason for this lack of appreciation can perhaps be found in Július’ insistence on always remaining skeptically open to all the possibilities inherent in his own fields of artistic activity, and in his indolent attitude toward every fashionable formalism.

The alienation already began in the mid-1960s, when he quietly snubbed his own context with his first manifesto »Antihappening (System of Subjective Objectivity).« By contrast to a happening, which is a »way to translate an artistic subject into an act,« the anti-happening aimed at a »cultural reappraisal of the subject, at awareness, at the environment and the real world. Using the means of textual description (›making known‹), drawing the cultural boundaries becomes part of the cultural context,« Július writes in »Antihappening.« These remarks were not only addressed to the Fluxus artists of the West, but above all to the Happsoc group surrounding Z. Kostrova, Stano Filko and Alexander Mlynarczyk, who had developed out of their contacts with the Nouveau Realisme in Paris spearheaded by Pierre Restany and Yves Klein (1964) a locally transposed mode of object happenings. Július sent telegrams on which he wrote »Ume nie«: »Not art.« He produced postcards with the words »Anti Happening.« These were the beginnings of his skepticism toward the aestheticism of the neo-avant-garde, since he was aiming instead at a broader-based cultural practice beyond the confines of art, and it was also the start of the game of trying to consign him to one of the genre roles, although his practice always eluded such definition. His strategy consisted of using real objects and everyday life as the prescribed program for an aesthetic operation: starting in 1965 in text works stamped on paper in the thematic context of the anti-happening; then from 1967/1968 in paintings for which Július used latex paint instead of oils and in which the question mark first appears. This would later evolve into the continually mutating symbol of his descriptive stances, appearing again and again in various media and aggregate states. These anti-images take on a special variation starting in 1968/ 69: as »Textextily,« text images on a textile ground.

It is not only in formal terms, however, that the »Invitations for an Idea« – as Július called the text works for the anti-happenings – and the palimpsests and serial arrangements of the anti-images differ from the academicism of late modernism. In them he in addition renounces any form of technical mastery. This amateur ductus is designed to help them fulfill their task of »engaging instead of arranging.«

In 1970, two years after the tanks of the Warsaw Pact dashed all hopes for a possible third mode of socialism in the _SSR, Koller introduced by means of a manifesto a new three-letter field of associations in his work: U.F.O. - »Universal-Cultural Futurological Operations.« During the next thirty-odd years he compiled a major group of works of the same name, referring to himself as »Ufonaut« in his fixed annual portraits as registrar of this activity, thereby transforming his artistic practice. He also worked as teacher in a club for amateur artists until the 1990s.
Július later became known based primarily on this system of categories for reality, devised as a cosmology. He is commonly labeled a conceptual and performance artist. The great painter Július Koller, by contrast, is still waiting to be rediscovered by the West. This might have something to do with (and Aurel Hrabusicky, who wrote on Koller frequently starting in the 1980s, pointed this out in his funeral speech at the Bratislava crematorium) a reductive reading of Koller’s work, trying to squeeze it into the Western avant-garde canon of conceptualism and post-conceptualism – a critical stance that has accompanied the reception of Eastern European avant-gardes ever since such noteworthy exhibitions such as »Works and Words« at Amsterdam’s de Appel in 1979. As necessary as this may have been in order to slip at all through the small crevices in the stout walls of art historical writing on conceptual practices in Western-dominated canons, it has nevertheless been limiting for our view of Koller’s overall oeuvre, easily provoking false conclusions and generalizations. The fact is that Július’ work simply developed historically under different coordinates and within a system of references shifted considerably from that of Western art. An adequate analysis or appraisal of this parallel work has yet to be undertaken.

Július? Is it really true that we will never again receive one of your one-of-a-kind faxes in your manifesto-like handwriting? No news will ever again be heard of the latest Universal Futurological Operation? No precise calibrations of the real will ever be made again in your coordinate system? Really?

Sleep well, good man!

 

Translated by Jennifer Taylor-Gaida

 

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