Anetta Mona Chisa & Lucia Tkacova

Peter Bürger, the German theorist and author of the influential book, The Theory of the Avant-garde, gave voice to his gloomy mood in epistolary form: “In the shadow of a society which is on the verge of putting the neoliberal market economy into effect without any ifs, ands, or buts, it is not a small accomplishment to preserve at least the thought of the possibility of a different life.” This is how he, back in 1996, described the “limits of Now.”[1]

For about twenty years, Anetta Mona Chişa and Lucia Tkáčová, art workers operating as a party of two, have been struggling with these limits, taking up a stance of permanent resistance, which in their case means making art politically: as rebelles. Working against our post-political and post-feminist universe, they convey their feminist scepticism by piercing the surface of Now, detecting in its depth the capillary working of power and questioning the effects they produce on art making and society as we know it. Their discursive practice, which is both visual and theoretical, does not rest upon the utopian dream of merging life and art, but opens up the possibility to think about both art and life differently. This is no small accomplishment.

The Institution

Tkáčová and Chişa graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava, where Lucia studied graphic design and Anetta sculpture. A year after they met, in 2000, they set up a collaborative practice based on the desire for “doing a piece of the road together” (Hannah Arendt), establishing a politics of friendship which became constituted (and carried on) - via the very process of cooperative art making. Reflecting on their beginnings as a duo, they stated in 2011: “Starting to work together was more of an intuitive momentum back then. Gradually we began to see our collaboration as a Socratic adventure, and we started to consider it as foetus of a possible Amazonian clan.”[2] The clan was launched by two female artists, academically trained according to the modernist canon, postulating that what constitutes Art is individual uniqueness, artistic subjectivity and male geniality. These myths have informed not only art teaching in the West, but have also been incorporated in the art education practiced over some forty years of East European state-socialism. The very decision to engage in a dialogical practice questions these creeds, but their cooperative work needs to be situated in the “immanent reality” and this was the post-socialist neoliberal Now, centred on individual entrepreneurship and the competitive spirit of new/old capitalism. They belonged to the generation of (Eastern European) “emerging artists”, many of whom were women, who attained professional visibility in the early 2000s, exhibiting both nationally and internationally. Entering the machinery of the Institution, Chişa and Tkáčová, as freshwomen, started very early on to examine its “language”, inspecting the channels through which the system functions. In 2005, Chişa and Tkáčová embarked on a lengthy project, relying on a rather unusual model of institutional critique: the two female buddies performed burglary. Their Private Collection (2005-2010), presented as an installation, consists of various objects of little value (extension cables, a computer mouse, a hole puncher, scissors, etc.) which they illegally appropriated from some of the most renowned galleries trading in contemporary art, from Paris, Berlin, London, Vienna, New York, Zurich, and Rome; galleries having a strong influence on the global market. Through this gesture of “privatization” they conferred upon these objects fetishist status, providing them with an aura of art commodity.

Using again the tools of institutional critique, they staged a series of conversational videos, among them Dialectics of Subjection #2 (2005) and Dialectics of Subjection #4 (2006), in which they are chatting about the art world as menspace: taking local and foreign male curators and international male politicians respectively, they measure them exclusively according to their masculine sex appeal. This video series, which Raluca Voinea astutely termed “a politics dans le boudoir”[3] consists of precious pieces, precisely because here two beautiful young women negotiate their way of “internalizing” the rules of the game. As Andrea Fraser remarked: “Because the institution of art is internalized, embodied, and performed by individuals, these are the questions that Institutional Critique demands we ask, above all, of ourselves.”[4] Touching upon the feminist credo “the personal is political” with a slight irony, the artists introduce a play of sexual subjection based on feminine seduction.

In 2011, when Chişa and Tkáčová shared the Romanian pavilion in Giardini di Castello at the Venice Biennale with Ion Grigorescu, they fashioned a hand-written statement on the pavilion’s façade, entitled 80:20. The mural is based on the Pareto Principle they had already started using in 2007 in the hand-written format, The Trivial Few (80:20). In Venice, in an act of questioning their own position in that fossilized international exhibition, where they as female artists had represented an Eastern European country, they offered 20% of (their) reasons not to be at the Biennial, conveyed in phrases such as “invisibility is resistance;” and “art=revolution=spectacle=capital; or “because we are a communist + a socialist feminist,”. The 80% of reasons to be at the Venice Biennale offers a shorter list of pros, two of which read: “to fight the way the world map is folded” and “to pussify the biennale.” These statements, formulated as a manifesto, disclose the ambiguities embedded in their profession, which they reflect with a biting self-irony. Summing up these paradoxes, albeit lacking in ironic tone, Angela Dimitrakaki writes: “[T]he ‘artwork,’ the output of artistic labour in a capitalist economy, is evidence of contradictions running through art and illuminates the latter field as the site of weak, structurally compromised, ultimately feminized politics. First and foremost, the artwork—no matter how ‘immaterialized’ or ‘socially engaged’—is the carrier of both the artist’s disaffirming critique and her affirming trade, irrespective of whether this trade is supported by private capital, public funding, or a ‘mixed’ economy.”[5]

Das Kapital

Anetta Mona Chişa and Lucia Tkáčová began working as a clan during the early years of East European post-socialist democracies, also known as “democracies with a male face.” In the post-socialist region, with very few exceptions, democracy continues to connote maleness, which has nowadays acquired an authoritarian tenor. At the beginning of the millennium, Slovakia, like other post-socialist states, was still undergoing the turbulent societal and economic process of “transition.” Initial joy brought about by the “end of ideology” gave way to a sobering-up, given that freedom and parliamentary democracy had revealed their true “post-ideological” nature: the neoliberal capitalist Now. It implied a painful restructuring of the entire communal tissue, giving rise on the one hand to the nouveaux pauvres, forced to endure precarious living conditions (such as unemployment, particularly of female citizens) and on the other, the nouveaux riches, profiting from the new laws about privatization, restitution and lustration, which basically meant introducing the Western model of state-organized capitalism, locally understood as “normalization.” Certainly, in the public sphere as in state politics, this “normalization” has been largely viewed as “decommunization” (Jiří Suk). Anti-communist sentiments shaped the rewriting of the past, either by vilifying the “dark ages” endured during state-socialism, or by reinventing “glorious” and/or mystical pasts of the Nation. Since the removal of communist administrations in the early 1990s, and to some extent even today, references to “Marx,” “socialism,” “the Left” and Marxist theory overall have been considered embarrassing if not sacrilegious, occasionally exposed even to a Denkverbot.

Engaging with the given state of affairs, at a moment when the neoliberal economy in post-socialist parts of Europe was still in Kindergarten, Tkáčová and Chişa staged several pieces which I am tempted to read as “capitalism for beginners.” The family of works entitled After the Order (2006) is based on a political caricature, “The Pyramid of Capitalist System” published in The Industrial Worker magazine back in 1911. Triggered by this visual representation, they re-enacted it as a sculpture-to-be eaten during a public performance, as a live monument (lasting one minute) and later as collages (2006-2010). Of course, they had to go back to the very “origin,” rethinking the Father: in the video Capital: Magic Recipes for Love, Happiness and Health (2006), the artists ask a fortune teller to use Das Kapital (1867) as a device for divination, and answer their questions about their personal futures. Slight irony (but not parody) functions here as a Brechtean estrangement device, which could also be detected in their sculpture, All Periods in Capital (2007). After counting the periods in the first volume of the German edition of Das Kapital of 1976, they sculpted 22.591 clay globules painted black. This manual labour required 87,8 working hours.

Ironical distance is lacking in the following project, When Labour Becomes Form (2007), where they interface gender inequality/discrimination with a “typical” feminine activity women habitually do in their leisure time: needle work. For the collective exhibition, Equal Opportunities, held at Prague’s C2C gallery, the artists published an ad in a Slovak newspaper, trying to recruit an unemployed woman in her 50s to take part in the project and engaging her to perform her manual skills, for which she received all the funds the artists had at their disposal for the project. The patterns stitched into the crochet are taken from a Slovak graph of 2007, illustrating the weak position of women over 45 on the neoliberal labour market, clearly showing not only neoliberalism’s general investment in austerity but also that this venture is highly gendered.

Throughout the 1970s, the critique of capitalism in general, and the ways how capitalist logic has been reproduced in the art market in particular, was carried on by a not insignificant number of artists, who by implying banknotes in their artworks were unmasking the structures which (admittedly with their consent) were co-opting them. Even so, their critique unsettled those long-lasting myths about art’s autonomy and unlimited artistic freedoms, as posited by modernist art theories. The rebellious spirit which mushroomed all over the Western (art) world after ’68, was grounded in the belief (or hope) which Joseph Beuys summed up in his phrase La rivolutione siamo noi (1972). In 1979, Beuys wrote his notorious phrase Kunst = Kapital on the 10 Deutsch Mark banknote, which he re-produced in an edition of ten pieces (Edition Klaus Steak, Heidelberg). In recent years Chişa and Tkáčová have started to work with Euro notes or coins, which they have used differently however. Their project, where they work with 5 Euro banknotes, When you're Adibas and you're dreaming of becoming Adidas (2011 – 2013) has been realized in collaboration with the Moldavian writer Nicoleta Esinencu. The sentences of her theatre play were written on 388 Euro notes. In contrast to the 1970s works mentioned, which all ended up in museums and private collections, the theatrical production begins here the moment the Euro bills are sent back into everyday circulation. Each person who eventually gets hold of one and reads a line from the play written on it becomes a performer in a theatre piece which potentially never ends.

The Icon

In her article about the articulation of protest Hito Steyerl argues: “Every articulation is a montage of various elements - voices, images, colours, passions, or dogmas – in time and space.”[6] If we consider only the visual component of protest, then the raised clenched fist is certainly that iconic sign denoting ‘just’ people’s struggle, resistance, anger, and the yearning for social change; the icon stands for revolution. This icon has had a privileged position throughout the history of workers’ movements, which commenced with the unleashing of their struggle against capitalism in mid-1800s Europe. If you look at the monumental landscape emerging after 1945 in the countries which were about to practice state-socialism, this body gesture, apparent in every second public monument, was used to signify antifascist resistance. However, the clenched fist has also been appropriated by many social groupings aggressively advocating the populist and nationalist crusades we are currently witnessing on a global scale.

These days, some thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the inception of the global imperative, freedom means capitalism and a regime of democracy, which, not only in Europe, often mutates from liberal to authoritarian form. Still, under the current democratic arrangements, we are advised that the articulations of protest and the formulas of social rebellion need to be rethought: “We should stop trying to storm the Bastille; it is time to walk around it.”[7] Nonetheless, the angry demonstrators may occasionally articulate their street protest by using the munitions at hand, namely, cobblestones. For their floor installations, Clash! (first presented in 2012), Tkáčová and Chişa produced hundreds of cobblestones, copying their original cubic forms, but “lying” about the material their stones are made of. They are precious, fragile, and breakable sculptures, made of porcelain coated with acrylic paint, mimicking the appearance of the “real” street weapons. Once in the gallery space, the visitors are encouraged to use the sculptures at their will, which usually imply their desire to touch and caress them, handling them with care. The articulation of social protest is approached differently in the mobile living sculpture, If not Us, Who? If not Now, When?, which was enacted for the first time in the streets of Komarno in Slovakia in 2010 (and later elsewhere). The protest is discharged here as a farce: the “masses”, mobilized for a street demonstration and holding blind banners, make a move only when a casual passer-by throws a coin into a bowl. In this highly politicized staging the artists make plain that the language of protest, built on, as Hito Steyerl put it, “the dynamic of desire and refusal, attraction and repulsion” is sadly absent, in spite of the fact that many of the “protesters” used the body language of the raised clenched fist.

Borrowing the phrase from Samuel Beckett for the title of the performance, Try again. Fail again. Fail better. (2011), the artists revisited the iconic sign of a raised clenched fist. In the video produced in 2011 for the Romanian pavilion at the Venice Biennale, the sign took the shape of a huge inflatable sculpture floating in the air, whose motion the artists try to manipulate, direct and control, sometimes even with success. The action is set in a pastoral landscape, and in parallel with the main action, the camera spots in the background two men engaged in a boxing match. The formal similarity between the object the female artists are manipulating, and the protecting gloves of the sportsmen, demythologize the meaning of the fist as the icon of revolution, without however, fully rejecting that connotation. The questions they ask relate to the visual mediation of power: “Do symbols construct power or are they mere ornaments of power? Can we free resistance from its own representation? Could there be a revolution without image? Can a protest survive without ideologically reified and commercially fetishized effigies? Do symbols control people or do people control symbols? What is the connection between ritual and rebellion?”[8]  After having produced for this video performance a “humanist” and genderless version of the clenched fist, the artists also fashioned its female counterpart. In the piece, Either Way, We Lose (2012), the huge inflatable sculpture of the fist, with nails polished red, rests like any consumable item in a shop window, incarcerated and disciplined.

Chişa and Tkáčová have grown up in state-socialism, where it was believed that the “women’s question” was resolved due to the implemented ideology of egalitarianism. A feminist critical theorization of the women’s question as it was performed in the former Yugoslavia for example, proved that gender equality at the work place did not solve the problem of women’s “affective” or domestic labour, which they, like their capitalist sisters, have been doing “out of love.” Ironically, both during the socialist era and after it, feminism continued to be regarded as an “import” from the West. Navigating the histories of feminist street revolts in Western contexts, the artists directed their feminist lens towards theory. In 2008, in their video, Manifesto of Futurist Woman (Lets’ Conclude), they are translating into a sign language the Manifesto della donna futurista (1912) written by Valentine de Saint-Point They shifted it to the public space, where they choreographed a group of young women in performing the text with the Semaphore message code used earlier in the maritime world. The women are dressed as majorettes, marching across urban space, creating an operetta-like visual spectacle whose meaning was impossible to decipher. Her manifesto was written as polemic with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism (1909), but regretfully the authoress failed in her desire to escape the patriarchal logic which she originally intended to crack down on.

The installation Before and After (2011) consists of collages based on documentary photographs showing women’s street protests from the suffragette era to the last decades. On each of them the artists overwrote the original slogans, introducing a linguistic play where everything revolves around the word OR: "for or against”, “left or right”, “magic or logic”, “yesterday or tomorrow”, and so on. The visual play is based on absurd antinomies, on unstable binary oppositions that tend to undermine the classical economy of truth and of language itself, between the set goals and the lived realities. And finally, the sculpture Freedom Trash Can (2013) sheds doubt on the mythologizing history of the American feminist activism in the 1960s, when the burning of bras was, for a while, considered to be a physical act matching the catchphrase “the personal is political.” In passing, in April 1969, Theodor Adorno became a victim of a “Busen-Attentat” when in the lecturing hall one of his female students “attacked” him with her breasts naked.

The Body Matters

In 2011, in the above mentioned interview conducted on the occasion of their presentation in the Romanian pavilion in Venice, Anetta Mona Chişa and Lucia Tkáčová, reflected on their working procedures: “Since we work in a permanent dialogue, in an endless conversation, we are constrained to ceaseless verbalization. Words became our primary tool for transmitting thoughts and feelings. Besides just being means of production, words surmounted to being the theme, the enemies, and the amalgam of our ideas. It is as if we are trying to abolish language (logocentrism, reason, the nature of Western thought and culture) through words.”[9]

Permanently “dwelling” in the house of language, the duo is keen on exploring its various manifestations. In the early stage of their collaboration, they used  language, as Nina Gažovičová remarked, “with a saucy, demotic expression close to tabloid writing and methods, mirroring the dynamics of the ongoing social changes.”[10] In the videos belonging to the series Dialectics of Subjection (2005 – 2006), it is the spoken word, the speech, which always implies the actual presence of those who speak. As we may have learned from the long Western philosophical tradition of endlessly musing on the “metaphysics of presence”, the power of the “speaking subject” lies in the subject’s ability to master his spoken utterances and his voice. What is enacted in these videos is a feminist understanding of subjectivity, given that the subjects-who-speak have bodies; that is, they are gendered subjects. These works demonstrate that when language figures as the matter for art making, this does not mean that the body does not matter. In a similar vein, the group of blond girls who are whispering and passing on their secrets in the video The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (2010) are using one of the “techniques of the body” (Marcel Mauss); in this case it is sitting, offering a physical “translation” of the Charles Darwin’s script printed back in 1871, which allowed the artists to elaborate on the “origin” of cultural infatuation with blondes.

As in the mural in Venice, the artists often used the written word, usually present in hand writing, such as in the wall pieces 10 Tips for East European Women (2006) or How to Make a Revolution (2008) where the red text is sprayed on a wall painted red. The texts employed in the Haiku (2007) are jokes about blondes, women who commonly embody the “essence” of femaleness, a sexist fantasy which Tkáčová and Chişa like to deconstruct with obvious gusto. Here, the jokes which circulate on the web in English have been translated into Japanese and back by translation software. This piece may be exhibited as neon signs, but it also exists in published form, as a book.[11]

Bypassing the medium of language as our basic rational instrument for being-in-the- world, the artists often inquire into other communication systems, which either suggest or imply the actual presence of the body. Dealing with body matters is obviously informed by the clan’s feminist positioning. Elizabeth Grosz views feminist works as “texts” which she defines as “the products of any kind of discursive practice, whether poetic, literary, philosophical, scientific, visual, tactile or performative.” She understands the feminist products as those that “self-consciously challenge the method, objects, goals, or principle of mainstream patriarchal canon.”[12]  Over the years,  Chişa and Tkáčová have generated several works in which a palpable experience is actually performed, as in their hilarious Porn video (2004) or in the video performance Never Odd or Even (2011), in both of which the artists are touching and obstructing each other’s body. Tactility is implied in the sculpture Here and Elsewhere (2008) in which they placed a Braille script describing a striptease scene on a striptease pole. A deferent kind of touch is on display in their video A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z (2011), where the Morse alphabet dictates the rhythm of heterosexual intercourse. Besides the sense of touch, which played the crucial role in the reception of the installation Clash!, the sense of taste is set to action in their pieces conceived of as edible (and sweet) sculptures, like in After the Order, where the attending viewers are transformed into eaters, consuming the object orally. In the video dEATh defEATs, crEATes, repEATs (2012), we watch the artists enact a “ritual cannibalism”, eating their own masks made of cake.

Given that Tkáčová and Chişa often use the medium of performance for undoing the logos, they appear as body-artists only in front of the camera, allowing us to watch them only in a black box. The body transformation they underwent for the work Nothing Nowhere into Something Somewhere (2015) also remained invisible, allowing the audience to see and experience only its results. The most radical body technique they have ever tried was based on an ancient shamanistic practice, facilitating the body transformation. After having ingested fly agaric, a muscimol mushroom with psychedelic constituents, they used their own urine, which once coagulated was modelled into a number of edible sculptures.

Besides the fact that the artists took a genuine personal risk by letting these transformative ingredients into their own bodies, there are other aspects of risk layered in this work that are socially conditioned. Mentioning that each culture has its own taboos and risks, the anthropologist Mary Douglas writes that in most of them, “bodily margins” are thought to be specially “invested with power and danger.” Like any structure of ideas which is vulnerable at its margins, “all bodily margins are dangerous.” She goes on: “We should expect the orifices of the body to symbolize its specially vulnerable points. Matter issuing from them is marginal stuff of the most obvious kind. Spittle, blood, milk, urine, faeces or tears, by simply issuing forth have traversed the boundary of the body. So also have bodily parings, skin, nail, hair clippings and sweat.”[13] It seems thus reasonable, that after informing the gallery visitors about the material used for making the sculptures, the artists perhaps tested whether they would dare to risk: to eat or not to eat, or to just look.  

The Book  

If you check out the imposing library comprising volumes published after 1989 in which our contemporaries lament Now, you easily get the impression that we are in trouble. The theoretical climate is marked by reflections on the “end of history,” posited by Fukuyama as the Last Man, which keeps me wondering whether this universalist and/or humanist inferno includes also the End of Woman (I truly hope it does not). Parallel to these voices coming from the Right, there are also theoreticians addressing us from the rive gauche, and they are equally obsessed with the notion of finitude, diagnosing the “end of times” (Slavoj Žižek); the “end of politics” (Jacques Rancière); and the end of “speculative leftism”, which Alain Badiou defines as “any thought of being which bases itself upon the theme of an absolute commencement.”[14]  All in all, the worst of times are over. We can now relax: “ARMAGEDDON WAS YESTERDAY – TODAY WE HAVE A SERIOUS PROBLEM.”[15]

In a recent email, Anetta Mona Chişa explained the duo’s current concerns, which, it seems to me, are deeply enmeshed in Today.  “Over the years we moved from the past more and more towards the present, reaching in the last years into contemplating the future. All this came along with a disenchantment and disappointment with the dullness and impotence of most critical forms of art to trigger a real change. Fighting capitalism overtly seemed like a dead alley and we started to think more about invisibility and more sophisticated subversive tools that we could work with. Change became for us an agenda on personal level more than ever (under the slogan ‘if you want to change the world, change yourself’). And what we felt we need to do was moving from a critical position to a more affirmative one, towards proposing alternative scenarios to this depraved system we live in, designing new worlds with new aesthetics, inviting people to unlearn, to think differently, to intuit change, to fantasize.”[16]

In their latest installations, Chişa and Tkáčová, artists with astonishingly bookish knowledge, started to rebel against the institution of the Book. Growing up (as many of us did) in a print culture, on more than one occasion their works revolve around Marx, Darwin, Derrida, Beckett, and most recently Huxley. In their iconoclastic attitude as regards the Book they perhaps agree with Elizabeth Grosz: “Knowledge is an activity; it is a practice and not a contemplative reflection. It does things.”[17]  A copy of the Oxford English Dictionary, which is transformed into a sculpture entitled What's What, and What It Might be Reasonable to Do about What's What (2015), has been long exposed to liquid LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide). In its transformed condition however, the “total knowledge” for which any dictionary stands for could now be only looked at, safely protected in a glass vitrine.   

By undoing written knowledge and spatializing it, the given gallery rooms and their installations also “do things” visually. The visual working of these spatial pieces could be based on playful, even joyful gestures. Between 2012 and 2018 the artists realized five times in different exhibitions works conceived of as a sculpture- to-be-performed: this was/is Politiques de l'amitié (initiated in 2012). They have been wiping out the French edition by Jacques Derrida (Galilée, 1994, 423 pages), cutting it by hand each time into small confetti that will later shower the given gallery space. In this volume Derrida elaborates on those social links established throughout the Western tradition which he recognizes as forms of loving and desire, quest and promise, consensus and respect for the Other that are not determined by familial bonds or ideological solidarity: these are male friendships. In our culture however, the “philosophical paradigm of friendship” maintained in his words, “the double exclusion of the feminine …that can be seen at work in all the great ethico-politico-philosophical discourses on friendship; namely, on the one hand, the exclusion of friendship between women, and on the other hand, the exclusion of friendship between a man and a woman.”[18] Producing the confetti and modelling the thousands of periods of Das Kapital into small balls could easily be recognized as “typical” female  manual labour, which nonetheless implies a certain “ecstasy of monotony.”

The most extreme gesture against print knowledge which “does things” is the sculptural installation Totems (2015) where the books are made mute. It is composed of a number of columns constructed with ignited books. Any true book lover (like myself) who looks at these works, cannot escape their unheimlich, even nauseous feelings. But we do not expect art to make us feel uncomfortable. Since the artists left the meaning of their gesture open, it is possible to speculate about it. We may situate these sculptures historically (in the Reformation, Protestants’ burning of Catholic books, the Nazi era, or the recent burning of the Koran for example). Or we might find references in Cold War science-fictions films, such as Fahrenheit 541, a British production directed by François Truffaut (1966). The title indicated the temperature at which paper ignites. The film script was based on the novel by the American writer, Ray Bradbury (1953), written in the shadows of the Bomb on one side, and on the other, the Red Scare with its paranoia about the imagined commie invasion. The film version narrates a dystopian drama in which the firemen are ordered by the government to destroy all books, with the intention to prevent revolution and free thinking.

The installation Attention! Here and now, boys! Here and now! (2015) is a breath-taking artwork, in which the artists, following the “utopian impulse” (Fredric Jameson), spatialized the parts of the novel Island by Aldous Huxley (1962), a social science fiction published in the hottest moment of the Cold War. Escaping geographical and ideological confinements, Huxley shifted his narrative to a faraway island where nature and culture coexist in harmony. The people of Pala, having mystical experiences with the help of a Far Eastern technique based on psychedelic drugs, are living Here and Now. In the gallery installation, the birds are thought to use human speech and pronounce the words “Attention”, “Here” and “Now.” This is what the two Caribbean parrots occasionally do, surprising the visitors walking in the space-image converted into a magical, dream-like place.

The installation, The Prophecy of Things (2016-2017), presented the enlarged images of smart phones after they have been discarded for not being good enough or able to communicate rational content. The artists used the screens as the carriers of visual information for deconstructing the logic, the meaning, and the language of communication on which we are so dependent these days. They negate this aspect and search for objects’ visual qualities and charm. Broken screens are for them fascinating material, offering new layers of aesthetics and new worlds that open up, beyond ratio and control.

The In-Visible

For years now, Anetta Mona Chişa & Lucia Tkáčová have been wrestling with the triadic coalition between voir/savoir/pouvoir (seeing/knowledge/power). Michel Foucault, who is credited with inventing the phrase, was not really concerned with inspecting the gendered aspect of the triad, but feminist philosophers are. Back in 1978, reading the Western logocentric tradition, Luce Irigaray asserted: “Investment in the look is not as privileged in women as in men. More than the other senses, the eye objectifies and masters. It sets at a distance, and maintains a distance. In our culture, the predominance of the look over smell, taste, touch, hearing, has brought about an impoverishment of bodily relation. The moment the look dominates, the body loses its materiality.”[19] Tkáčová and Chişa’s collaborative practice has dismantled on more than one occasion the ocularcentric paradigm on which the entire edifice of modernism is built, but as visual artists they cannot fully discard the regime of visibility: they could only tests its limits. For the Cartesians who are still occupied with the I/Eye dichotomy (defined centuries ago by the father, Descartes), darkness can only cause a nightmare. The strategy of invisibility, which the clan started to apply in their recent works, brought about dark spaces, where one feels insecure and indeed lost since the eye, our most rational organ, is deprived of its mastering powers.

And we feel perplexed because the materiality which an art work should “normally” possess is lacking. Reflecting on this dilemma she calls the “metaphysics of substance,” Elizabeth A. Povinelli asks: “How can we grasp some of the qualities of a material object that is nevertheless a discursive object? How can we talk about subject-effects and object-effects without making materiality disappear or making its different manifestations irrelevant to the unequal organization of social life.”[20] The “metaphysics of substance” seems to be at the core of the project Things in Our Hands (2014), for which Chişa and Tkáčová cast objects from melted Euro coins, each of which is placed on a foam pedestal. These new objects made out of steel, function as artworks, precious also because every piece carries traces of the artists’ hands. In her beautiful essay about these sculptures, Raluca Voinea looks at another possibility, elaborating on a conceivable future. “This future can be either side of the coin, it can be terrifying, confronting us with a post-apocalyptic society in which there is perhaps nothing left to trade except one’s own life, […] but it can also be an exciting one, where the misery, hunger, competition and individualism that characterise the ages governed by money are moulded into multifaceted objects of hope, from which to venerate not their former value but their current beauty, not their cold ambition for neutrality but the warm body which shaped their form.“[21]

There is however, one older project, Memory without History (Memorial to Lída Clementisová), with which the artists intended to convert invisibility into visibility. This work was shown between 2009 and 2010 in several editions, but it was actually planned for the public space. It could be realized anywhere, since in the collective memories told and replayed in every single country of the world, women are (made) invisible. Tkáčová and Chişa implemented their “feminist interventions” (Griselda Pollock) by initiating a memorial dedicated to a forgotten woman, an opera singer in the 1950s who, because she was married to a communist politician, spent two years in prison while having to pretend in the love letters they exchanged that she was free. He did not survive the Stalinist cleansing, but she did. By inserting the name of Lída Clementisová into the collective “memosphere” (Mihnea Mircan), which as a rule relies on the patriarchal model of masculinity, the artists proposed a memorial-to-be, produced simply by planting creeping plants (Clematis Hybride) around existing monuments, which regardless of the place/country in which they came into existence have been, and still are, honouring great men.

Becoming-Third

Lucia Tkáčová and Anetta Mona Chişa have been engaged in a politics of friendship for almost twenty years. When two strong artists work in a team, they must be aware that each of them is already going through a process of becoming-subject, as Rosi Braidotti argues: “The subject is a process, made of constant shifts and negotiations between different levels of power and desire, […] It implies that what sustains the entire process of becoming-subject is the will to know, the desire to say, the desire to speak, as a founding, primary, vital, necessary, and original desire to become.”[22]  Working-together requires enduring mediations of their artistic identities and the narcissism these imply, permanently disciplining their otherwise strong individualism (without which the cooperation would not be possible) and balancing the power relations that inevitably resurface in any project based on cooperation. In the beginning, they jumped into it, with plenty of joy and curiosity about each other. In the series of videos, Dialectics of Subjection (2005-2006) filmed in the space traditionally connoted as “feminine” (here it is a bedroom), their intimacy and closeness is, let’s not forget, performed in front of the camera. Two young women, a blonde and a brunette (well, nobody is perfect), are engaging in “dirty” talk about powerful men, jumping into the role of a Bakhtinean carnivalesque or “unruly” women who (used to) demonstrate their disobedient attitude towards the world-as-it-is by their laughter. The anthropologist Victor Turner explains: “The danger here is not simply that of female ‘unruliness.’ […] The subversive potential of the carnivalized feminine principle becomes evident in times of social change when its manifestations move out of the liminal world of Mardi Gras into the political arena itself.“[23] Playfulness, which they always tint with a slight self-irony, slowly recedes, to be replaced with serious examinations of their common practice. What conditioned and even sealed their friendship in life and in art, I believe, is their sense of humour and their unmatched ability for self-irony.

In the performances, photographic works and installations produced some ten years after they started to work together, Chişa and Tkáčová have reflected upon their collaboration. In the performance Never Odd or Even (2011) recorded on video, they carry on the technique of self-bondage “becoming one” via a self-masochistic action, exploring the desire for as well as fiction of complementarity. In the photographic piece The Others 1 (2011), they show their faces masked with the face of the other; in the video dEATh defEATs, crEATes, repEATs (2012) they eat casts of each other's faces made out of cake. In the installation Nom de guerre (2013) in which their self-irony reappears, they played with 27 letters of their names, made of gold. Since 2012, the titles for most of their exhibitions have been generated from the letters contained in their names. The 2012 piece Vessel (i aM a venus, A conch, a kiT, a Cat, a Lot) offers another word-play with their names. In passing, the neologism “chitka” (which figures as the name of their website) is also composed of the abbreviation of their names. By introducing the “third”, the artists did make a radical move. Marjory Garber is helpful here: “The ‘third’ is a mode of articulation, a way of describing a space of possibility. Three puts in question the idea of one: of identity, self-sufficiency, self-knowledge. […] The third deconstructs the binary of self and other that was itself a comfortable, because commutable and thus controllable, fiction of complementarity.“[24] What is crucial is that the artists did understand that Becoming-Third could not be “finished” by their decision to work together, made twenty years earlier. It is an evolving process changing over time, during which their artistic interests and earlier priorities have been abandoned, opening new possibilities, as recently stated: “We are in a mood of constant search and inner struggle and our major theme is transformation - from wanting to change the world by unveiling the delusion of matrix that surrounds us, to inventing tactics of resistance and transforming the self. All of our works have at their core the idea of change and are involving complex (alchemistic) processes of converting different value systems into (each) others. All our works grow from our need for a new rationality and from an endeavour to molt our old cognitive, written, causal and logical worn out scaled skin and acquire a new skin that allows us to grow.“[25]

These changes could be observed not only in their visual practice (videos, installation, sculptures)  but also in their equally significant theoretical practice, where they extend their radical and feminist scepticism, detecting the microphysical working of power, patriarchal structures included. I find this part of their artistic agency extremely important. They usually supplant a number of their visual productions with their own writings, which function as a parergon, something which belongs and at the same does-not-belong to the artwork but goes “around” it, as a “supplement outside the work.”[26] This parergonal discourse is never simple statement about their intentions, information about materials used, or the subject matters they address. These written statements usually take on the format of mini philosophical treatises, theoretical enquires, and often have the tenor of manifestos. Besides their website where these writings can always be accessed, most of them have appeared in their latest publication, in which they “frame” each of their artworks.[27] 

The question is, how has it been possible that Lucia Tkáčová and Anetta Mona Chişa have been working as a duo for such a long time? Their practice contradicts those widespread opinions shared by the art world that maintain that any collaboration artists initiate these days could only be a temporary utopian intermezzo, after which everybody goes back to doing business as usual. Are we going to label their agency utopian? I don’t think so. Becoming-Third is a feminist and political positioning which does function Here and Now.

Bojana Pejić

Berlin, April 2019.

[1] Peter Bürger, a letter to Jean-François Chevrier from November 1996, in Politics-Poetics,  documenta X – the book, eds. Catherine David and Jean-François Chevrier (Kassel: Museum Friedericianum and Ostfildern: Kantz Verlag, 1997), p. 380. His Theorie der Avantgarde (1974) appeared in English as Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis, MN.: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

[2] “From Flirtation through Fatal Attraction to Fixation – Balancing out the Scales of Power –

Raluca Voine in Conversation with Anetta Mona Chişa and Lucia Tkáčová” in Performing History – Romanian Pavilion at the 54^th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia 2011 (Special Issue of IDEA arts + society, # 38, Cluj, 2011), p.78.

[3] Raluca Voinea, “Changing the Rules of the Game While Playing it”, in Anetta Mona Chişa and Lucia Tkáčová, ed. Marius Babias (Berlin: Neue Berliner Kunstverein and Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter König, 2009), p. 16

[4] Andrea Fraser, “From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique” (2005) in

Institutional Critique and After, ed. John C. Welchman (Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2006), pp. 133 and 134.

[5] Angela Dimitrakaki, “Feminism, Art, Contradictions,” in e-flux journal # 92, June 2018, p. 2.

at: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/92/.../feminism-art-contradictions... [Accessed 4.04.2019]

[6] Hito Steyerl, “The Articulation of Protest” (2002) in Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), p. 78.

[7] Martin Škabraha, “Revolution “, in Atlas of Transformation, eds. Zbynĕk Baladrán and Vít Havránek (Prague: tranzit.cz, 2010) p.554.

[8] In Anetta Mona Chişa & Lucia Tkáčová –  a Love Can atTack a sun. Ah, atoMic I., ed. Gažovičová (Bratislava: Aukčná spločnost’ SOGA/ The Auction House SOGA, 2018), p.82.

[9] “From Flirtation through Fatal Attraction to Fixation – Balancing out the Scales of Power – Raluca Voinea in Conversation with Anetta Mona Chişa and Lucia Tkáčová”, in Performing History (See Note 2), p. 78.

[10] Nina Gažovičová, “abracadabra, monachisatkacova!”, in Anetta Mona Chişa & Lucia Tkáčová –

a Love Can atTack a sun. Ah, atoMic I., ed. Gažovičová (Bratislava: Aukčná spoločnost’ SOGA/ The Auction House SOGA, 2018), p. 8.

[11] See Anetta Mona Chişa and Lucia Tkáčová: Blondes Must Be Stopped (Rome: Purple Press srl, 2008).

[12] Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion - Essays on the Politics of the Bodies (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 11.

[13] Mary Douglass, Purity and Danger – An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London and New York: Routledge, [1966] 1991), p 121.

[14] Alain Badiou, Being and Event (London: Continuum, 2005), p. 210.

[15] The slogan on Lisbeth Salander’s T-shirt, Sven Larson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (London: MacLehose Press, 2008), p. 307.

[16] Email correspondence with the author, 26.04.2019.

[17] Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion, (See Note 12), p. 37. Italics in original.

[18] Jacques Derrida, “The Politics of Friendship,” in The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 85, Issue 11 (Nov 1988), pp. 642. Italics in original. Online at http://www.jstor.org/stable/2026938 [Accessed 6.04.2019]

[19] Luce Irigiray (1978), quoted in Craig Owens, “The Discourse of Others: Feminism and Postmodernism”, in The Anti-Aesthetic - Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA.: Bay Press, 1983), p. 70.

[20] Kin Turcot DiFruscia, “Shapes of Freedom: A Conversation with Elizabeth A. Povinelli” (2012), republished in What’s Love (or Care, Intimacy, Warmth, Affection) Got to Do with It?, ed. Julieta Aranda et al., (e-flux and Berlin: Stemberg Press, 2017), p.120.

[21] Raluca Voinea, “Imagining a Future without Us,” in MUSEUM III 2.3 – Anetta Mona Chişa & Lucia Tkáčová (Gent: Museumcultuur Strombeek/Gent, MERbooks, 2019), p. 2.

[22] Rosi Braidotti, “On Bugs and Women: Irigaray and Deleuze on Becoming-Woman,” in Engaging with Irigaray, ed. Carolyn Burke et al., (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp.118-119.

[23] Victor Turner (1977) quoted in Jo Anna Isaak, Feminism & Contemporary Art: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Laughter (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 32.

[24] Marjory Garber, Vested Interests (London: Penguin Books, 1992), pp. 11 and 12.

[25] Anetta Mona Chişa in conversation with Eva Decaesstecker about their exposition ‘a no, A voLcanic attaCk, a hiT, a Muse’ in Cc Strombeek - CaCtuS magazine (2018, March 30).
Retrieved from https://www.ccstrombeek.be/nl/artikel/46/kunst-is-voor-ons-een-instrument-dat-nieuwe-werkelijkheden-bedenkt

[26] Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 55. French original: La vérité en peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978)

[27] See Anetta Mona Chişa & Lucia Tkáčová - a Love Can atTack a sun. Ah, atoMic I., ed. Gažovičová (Bratislava: Aukčná spločnost’ SOGA / The Auction House SOGA, 2018) and www.chitka.info