Anča, or Anna, Daučíková (*1950), by present-day definition an audio-visual artist, studied from 1972 to 1978 at Václav Ciger’s Department of Glass in Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design. Though at first sight remote from her later orientation towards video, the artist herself feels with hindsight that her schooling in glass had its importance: “The experience of that non-material remained in me, and a certain kind of spirituality which comes from the optical endurance of the subject, who looks in a way that is not just looking but gaze.”[1] (Self)reflexivity, transparency, mirroring, reflections of movement, and a certain complexity of glass as a receptive or “gaze” medium thus became a point of departure, even within the later development towards new media.
At the end of the 1970s, shortly after ending her studies, Daučíková emigrated to the Soviet Union. For love... The subsequent Soviet period was more a period of intellectual ripening, forming a view of time in paralysis (the celebrated historical timelessness: History, that is to say, had climaxed its Development with communism), rather than any notable “artefact” creativity in the western sense of the word. (“The outer unmediated world was a great deal more pressing, and so I gradually ceased to work as an artist and I devoted myself to life..”)[2] During that twelve-year period she produced little in the way of artworks. The accessible results, however, offer an entirely symptomatic testimony on the specific period and the unique “Soviet experience”. At the time, understandably, Daučíková did not show these (mostly photo-media) works in public. They only began to appear and resonate almost a quarter century later, in the new conceptual context of the so-called past future,[3] which aroused interest in the Soviet experiment even beyond the bounds of the former eastern bloc.
Three groups of these works are worthy of attention: Moscow/Women/Sunday (1989 – 1990), street photographs of Moscow women, recorded involuntarily, en passant..., going to the shops. In connection with this “anthropogical” set, Daučíková recalls the inspiration of her friend Juraj Bartoš, a well-known photo documentarist of Slovak normalisation and especially of Obchodna Street. The perspective is indeed similar, and her “gapers” at fashions prefigures her later video-series ordinary voyeurism. The photographs, and the “objects” in them, are compositionally haphazard, unattractive, non-organic... They evidence a kind of cheerlessness and resignation vis-à-vis people’s own lives and towards the compositional frameworks of “art” photography. The aesthetically indifferent shots of “a non-decisive moment” are a, let’s say, statistical (sociological?) record of the typical “communal” experience of Soviet women, who do not know any Sunday... and Daučíková would later use them in arguments about the impossibility of harmonising East European and West European feminism, the incompatibility of the feminine experience of divided worlds. In this sense she would present the set also at the Vienna exhibition Gender Check (2009/2010, team of Slovak female artists: Zora Rusinová).
Also from her Soviet period is a series of window-ledge still lifes of variously constellated dvojdecáky (two-decilitre spirits glasses). To all appearances, though, this series has nothing to do with the photogenic. For the non-photographer Daučíková the photo-medium is already a means of gender examination. One of the sets is entitled Family Album (1988), where an arrangement of glasses is played with; here this is a kind of performative role playing. By arranging them in various (non)standard familial connections, Daučíková makes “anthropological” compositions from the glasses. Afterwards the two-decilitre glass also figures in a work entitled Academy of Art (1988), where the artist herself, in a recess on the facade of Moscow’s Academy of Art, like a living statue pours water from one glass into another. Evidently what is involved here is an allegory of futility, dead time... At the same time, the concept (contact?) of woman and institution is sketched out here – an interest which the artist would develop more fully in about two decades’ time.
In the early 1990s Daučíková returned to Slovakia (created in 1993 by the unexpected division of Czechoslovakia). Her existence has seemed to be split between Daučíková the civic activist, an engaged defender of the rights of lesbians and gays, and Daučíková the artist, who works in her somewhat out-of-the-way apartment/studio and reveals her new, relatively introverted artistic programme. These two registers must be distinguished – particularly today, against the background of the current boom in engaged art! Daučíková’s art is political more as a life gesture, for example in her practice as a teacher, than in her own artistic programme. Her work is political in what it finds interesting, not in the “style” of art. By the integrity of her original personality, which – though it obviously stands out from the blurry horizon of the Slovak world – manages to stay within it and be an inspiring example for others.
The most natural environment for Daučíková to work in during the 1990s, her most congenial cultural circle, was the newly-emerged feminist journal Aspekt. Through Aspekt (and its editors-in-chief: Jana Cviková and Jana Juráňová) Daučíková began to acquaint herself more programmatically with feminism. Individual thematic numbers of the journal carried key texts of feminist theory, through which gender (gender-specific) discourse was created and differentiated in Slovakia. Daučíková participates in this process. She belongs to the inner circle of Aspekt; she herself inspires certain numbers (Lesbian existence) and collaborates on them as a visual artist (acting as curator of their pictorial supplement).
If in one of her recent interviews Daučíková says that (as an artist) she was born after the age of forty, i.e. some time in the mid-1990s, the period itself certainly has something to do with the birth. The golden age of Aspekt and Daučíková’s settling in or finding herself in the medium of video, and also via specific feminist themes: these things match intellectually and in time.
Although from the outset this artist had a marked intellectual formation, and although historiographers, when analysing her videos, tend to draw upon feminist and poststructuralist theory, nonetheless it was more by intuition that she produced her first videos. As experiments, often steps into the unknown, privatissima, games, corporeal studies sui generis. It was only somewhat later that they became theoretically “more assured”. So then, let us not be too quick to look there for Rosalind Krauss’s narcissism of the closed circle, Mulvey’s differentiation of look/gaze, or Lacan’s mirror stage. We should let them breathe more freely!
Daučíková’s videos from the 1990s are mostly (in the terms of the reality before the camera) home-made and hand-made. Especially compared to her later more sophisticated opuses, they have short running times and make evident reference to sexuality. Many of them are a simulation of sex, or its manual ironisation. One might speak of a certain manual fetishism running right through this artist’s work: “I began with large detail with the hand. (...) Large detail for me was a way of evoking intimacy, and automatically a feeling of corporeality, eroticism and sexuality came into that. I dealt with corporeality as a visualisation of desire. What I was seeking was a certain obscenity, which I regard as positive in the sense that it is banished outside of the scene and it is brought to the centre of the viewer’s attention. Obscentity is expelled beyond the visible field, but it returns to the scene by my decision.”[4] Just as children (with no knowledge of the things) “show” obscenities, so also Daučíková in her video-performances, featuring fragments of her own body, presents “certain” movements to the camera, various typical masturbatory or erotic rhythms or sounds: she pierces a net material with a needle (Home Exercise, 1997), wipes a glass vessel with her finger (Queen’s Finger, 1998), “attacks” a formless egg with a pruning knife (Malholandrajv, 2003), and with her own lips has intercourse with the camera lens (Kissing Hour, 1997)... The viewers who observe this simulated auto-eroticism in the visual regime of the gallery willy-nilly become voyeurs of these weird (queer?) practices. Instead of the pleasure principle, the referential experience of classical cinematography, what one gets here is rather a powerful ambivalence, Verfremdungseffekt.
If at first we recoiled from the automatic application of feminist hermeneutics to Daučíková’s videos, that was more a general consideration. Because in specific works this critical framework is certainly important. Daučíková’s video work is about creating a demanding, educated viewer. More a female viewer, be it said! Intellectually one of the best-equipped artists on the domestic visual art scene, she read texts by feminist authors (Mulvey, Butler, Wittig) and post-structuralist philosophers (Foucault, Deleuze, Lacan, Žižek), and in her artworks she communicated with them or paraphrased them.In this regard, perhaps Daučíková’s most ambitious work is her video We care about your eyes (2006), a kind of didactic or (more accurately) ironic summa of video-feminism, which is most fully interpreted by the filmologist Eva Filová. In this video, Filová writes, the artist “creates a kind of reverse model of exhibitionism: in men’s boxer shorts she comes up to the camera and opens the fly, but what is concealed behind it is not a sexual organ but a mirror. To the sound of a female operatic duet, attributes of the surrounding (symbolic) world are reflected (Anča pumping, bicycles, camera); a rubbing movement along the surface of the mirror connotes masturbation, but also the simple shine of the Lacanian mirror. However, the mirror does not only serve for identification with its own image: it is a threshold of the visible world, a projection of a certain superficies, a cultural “projective surface”, and furthermore, also an erotogenic zone that stimulastes fantasy.” [5]
Hence Daučíková’s films, on the one hand, communicated the experience of another sexuality, putting us in contact with the ambivalent and repellent (the abject)... Since, however, they were immediately classified by the term (hitherto not domesticated in the Slovak consciousness) queer art, they were more or less sealed off from understanding and meaningful reception. The pigeonholing of the queer art of the queer Daučíková, for a long time the only (and therefore by art historians quickly reified) “lesbian artist”, worked negatively against communication of her art. I have in mind particularly some texts by Katarín Rusnáková, who was the first who systematically and repeatedly engaged with Daučíková’s videos during the 1990s. Despite producing many words, she has said little about them – thus far. After such experiences, it is not surprising that Daučíková felt resentful about art theory/art history and decided she would rather speak about her works herself. And thereby, within the limits of possibility, protect/defend herself against misinterpretation and misunderstanding... Against pigeonholing. As a feminist to the core of her being, sensitive to any coercive strategies, Daučíková liked to keep her things under control. Intuitively she avoided takeover, appropriation or expropriation by art history. To this day the art historians (whose discipline is a power system of a distinctive kind) do not have an easy time with her.
Altogether unique in Daučíková’s work is her installation Parallel activities in the Public subject exhibition (2000). This was an intervention in the public toilets in the city centre, under Kamenné námestíe. The artist hung leather boxer’s punchbags in the individual cabins. The “jakes”, which the transgender Daučíková evidently does not see as a non-symptomatic space, but on the contrary, a site of coercive hetero-normativity, thus became a zone of confrontation. Reliefs of a different kind...
Around the turn of the millennium there was a noticeable shift in Daučíková’s work aesthetically and thematically. Her video work becomes less art-conscious, less introverted. The camera turns away and moves off from the body, which had hitherto been the main object and expressive means of her videos. The street becomes the new zone of interest. Public-social space, and certain shadowy zones within it. This sharp focusing of interest is evidently also connected with technological development: a camera lens with better definition enabled Daučíková to “measure” the world without observation, purposefully to appropriate certain problematic segments from it, and full to develop her voyeurist motivation. In a relatively broad time range she produced a loose group of works entitled Ordinary Voyeurism (1995 – 2006). The camera stares fixedly where it should not, zooms, and relentlessly “irritates” the zones of exclusion. From reality she abstracts the strangeness of human motivations and strategies for survival (a beggarwoman in front of St. Stephen’s Cathedral, Ukrainian gastarbeiter during the night shift). In 2005 she produced the video Ordinary Voyeurism – Piano Trio in B-flat, a record of “stolen” intimacy of homeless people in Moscow, camping out on the city’s waterfront. The video-artist “grounded” this image of a savage reality with classical music. The resulting counterpoint is highly impressive. A scene which we ordinarily turn away from acquires certain choreographic qualities, becoming a spectral performance of a kind of street theatre.
About 2010 she produced a series of personified portraits of women with institutions: the feminist cultural historian Hanna Hacker with the University of Vienna, the architectural theoretician Monika Mitášová with the Slovak National Gallery (more with modernist architecture, in fact), and the artist herself, Anča Daučíková, with a Roman Catholic church. In comparison to her previous work, this portrait series introduces a number of shifts on the formal plane. Most notable here is how the work of cutting, postproduction, is applied. Essentially what is involved is a polyscreen (depending on conditions, a multi-channel projection or split screen). These videpos are thoroughly collaborative. The depicted subjects co-create and co-author their “text” within the intentions of écriture féminine...[6] This is a feminist photo-set par excellence: the women portrayed are respected authors in their disciplines, natural adherents of feminism; furthermore, the institutions (Church, Architecture, University), which personify or more precisely determine their lives, are all feminine-gender nouns in the Slovak language. While in the case of Mitášová and Hacker the women move quite naturally in their environments, with whose curvatures they have more or less come into harmony, Daučíková’s relationship with the church is more confrontational, and even the very conception of her video self-portait is different. What it involves is a kind of reenactment of an investigation before a church commission (in the matter of marital “duties”), which a friend of Daučíková’s friend had once been the object of. Daučíková “plays out” (again in the sense of playing a role) this process in front of the facade of the Blumental church, alternating, with costume changes behind the camera, in the role of investigator and witness. For Daučíkov, the claim to pleasure is legitimate. The voice of the institution does not belong in the bedroom! This is not the first reflection of the hidebound church in Daučíková’s filmography. In this radical register, however, she is (alongside artists such as Kristián Németh and Maroš Rovňák) among the unique voices raising this type of institutional criticism..
In recent years multi-channel projection has appeared more frequently in Daučíková’s work. The videos are more strikingly political, at the same time autobiographical, and (in form) more refined (Thirty Three Situations, 2007 – 2015). Their language is English and the leitmotif is geopolitics. Evidently, then, they are aiming at a global public. The film Three Curtains (2011) carries a narrative of three micro-stories about the “irregular” crossing of borders. The artist herself is the narrator and also the actor in the stories: passing by the bare board of a white table, a kind of imaginary “projective surface” for revitalised memories, she “places” black-and-white photographs on it; she sets out (“plays for us”) a kind of (photo)scenario of her stowed-away experience. The camera focuses variously on the individual photographs: scanning, zooming, panning... multifariously manoeuvring on the projection square of the table. In the form of ornamental punctuation their arranger “estranges” the (dis)placed photo-stories with glass fragments from a crystal chandelier. Czechoslovak crystal was actually a universal means of exchange in Soviet Russia, and it appears also in one of the stories. The personal is political has been a motto of Daučíková’s since time out of mind. Although the form has radically changed in recent years, themessage remains.
In fact, in two of the videos most shown internationally (Allong the Axis of Affinity, 2015; On Allomorfing, 2017) it was form itself, or more precisely formation, that became the distinctive theme of the projections. The narrative frame is again the interweaving of personal and politico-cultural history, communicated by a multi-vision of images. A geometric construction with a certain neo-plasticity of the camera trajectory, doing right-angled scans of the surfaces of bookcases or the tiled patterns of architectual facades, keeps coming back to the name of the Ukrainian artist Valerij Lamach and to a specific intellectual tradition of Soviet underground “bohemia”.
Daučíková’s hitherto latest video (In their Shoes, 2018) is a return to older premises. To the arrangement of objects (here shoes) in certain social, gender or sexual roles. To the fetishism of hands and feet. To the body as metonymy...
Although today we cannot imagine the Slovak video scene without Anča Daučíková’s input, she has actually never entirely belonged to the Slovak world. Her professional and private trajectories have ranged beyond regional limits, both artistically and intellectually. It was not only that her domestic environment was or would have been too confined. And it was only partly her trans-gender otherness, slowly accepted, if with reservations, in a conservative milieu. There was also a history of intimate relationships which, by force of circumstances, bound her to other linguistic and cultural settings, which naturally brought the challenges of other networks (contacts in Russia/Soviet Union, Italy, Switzerland, Germany...). This centrifugal or restlessly-moving nature has long been part of her modus vivendi and in recent times it has actually intensified. Daučíková has ever been a nomad. She has moved about, physically and mentally, essentially more than was usual in Slovakia. Nonetheless, one cannot say that she has had no resonance on the domestic scene. From the mid-1990s her videos have been an obligatory part of exhibitions of “queer” and “gender” curatorial concepts, devoted to problems of identity... Any more complex interest in Anča Daučíková as an artist, going beyond the above-mentioned categories, has, however, been lacking. In this regard our domestic art historians, in terms of writing and exhibiting, “woke up” only after 2015, when Daučíková made an impression at the Kiev Biennale (2015) and at the Athens-Kassel documenta 14 (2017). In accordance with the age-old rule that no one is a prophet at home, the interest shown abroad awakened curiosity (and certainly also envy) among those who had hitherto more or less overlooked this artist, “kick-starting” institutional and collectors’ demand. In other circumstances that might have brought a certain satisfaction to an artist at a ripe age, but now it was perhaps somewhat “chilled” by a cool breath of melancholy... This sudden wave of interest about a well-known/unknown artist gave local art historians a disagreeable awareness of work neglected. Daučíková’s monograph (in reality rather autobiography [7] within the SNG’s system) has fulfilled expectations only to a certain extent.
The (due) appreciation given abroad notably rearranged the priorities of interest, as regards Daučíková’s artistic biography. Above all, there is a return to the (communal?) experience of life in the Soviet Union , hence a Moscow and East European (rather than Czechoslovak and Central European) reference. Works hitherto overlooked, not exhibited, or marginalised (numerical paintings, the more cameral works of a photo-media nature) are being exhibited and institutionally evaluated. Old works are being adjusted in new (magnified) formats and (maybe even excessively) perfectionist glamour installations. Even in the context of domestic exhibitions there is at ,long last some acceptance of the premise that “Anna Daučíková should not be presented exclusively as a mythological, feminist and queer artist, but as an artist in complex development.”[8] Daučíková, at home assessed mainly through the prism of feminism and queer art, thus begins to be seen in a more complex way. At the same time, however, she is manifestly being orientalised and to a notable degree academicised: the Anča we have over time grown to know and love is (again?) becoming Anna...
Petra Hanáková, November 2018
photo (portrait): archive of Anna Daučíková
[1] Narodila jsem se až ve čtyřiceti. S Annou Daučíkovou o videu, Rusku a politickém umění. Rozhovor s Milenou Bartlovou. (I Was Born at Forty. With Anna Daučíková on video. Interview with Milena Bartlová.) In: Art & Antiques, č. 3, 2015, p. 24. Accessible also at: http://www.artcasopis.cz/clanky/narodila-jsem-se-az-ve-ctyriceti.
[2] Na slovo s Ančou Daučíkovou. Rozhovor A.D. s Tamarou Archlebovou. (Talking to Anča Daučíková. Interview A.D. with Tamara Archlebová.)In: Slovenské pohľady, No.. 6, 1992, p. 82.
[3] Zálešák, Jan: Minulá budoucnost. Současné umění na cestě od archeologie k angažovanosti. (The Past Future. Contemporary art on the road from archaeology to engagement.)Vysoké učení technické v Brně, 2013.
[4] Cf. note 1, p 28.
[5] Filová, Eva: Divadlo a teatralita v kontexte (slovenského) vizuálneho umenia. (Theatre and Theatricality in the Context of (Slovak) Visual Art .) In: Slovenské divadlo,. No.. 3, 2015, p. 213.
[6] Daučíková, Anna: Video ako obraz v pohybe – autorská prezentácia. (Video as Image in Movement – artist’s presentation. In: Zborník prednášok o súčasnom výtvarnom umení so zameraním na mediálne umenie. (Collection of Lectures on Contemporary Visual Art, Focusing on Media Art.) Nitrianska galéria, 2014, p. 152.
[7] Mitášová, Monika (ed.): A_NNA D_AUČÍK_OVÁ: TRANS_FORMÁCIE. SNG, Bratislava 2018.
[8] Urbanová, Miroslava: Jedno rebro bez komentára nestačí. (One Rib Without Commentary Isn’t Enough.) Na: http://artalk.cz/2018/06/11/jedno-rebro-bez-komentara-nestaci/.
