If the visual part of Roman Ondak’s (*1966) profile was a map of the world with entries of all his stays/movements, visual art activities, exhibitions, events in time and space, it would show us his high degree of mobility in the global age, with a remarkable spatial breadth (or diffusion) from Japan to Panama, and not only in the “white cube” display spaces. Maybe a map of that kind will be compiled in time to come, based on his notes and visible tracks: it will depict a criss-crossing of the world and a modern-day artistic nomadism without territorial limitation.
Ondak embodies the artist in ceaseless movement, one who actually thematises the situation of contemporary nomadism in several of his works (Common Trip, 2000; Anti-nomads, 2000; do not walk outside this area, 2012). With his projects he invites us on a journey not merely in space but also in time. As an artist he is able to address us in a universal and, apparently, also a timeless language, but despite his movement between continents he continues to return to one place like a satellite source, and that is Bratislava, where he lives and works. In his own words: “There was a time when I used to write down lots of things while travelling, because I had a feeling that a person perceives more abroad than in his home environment. Even so, in the end I found most inspiration right here in Bratislava, but I was able to grasp those things only after I had come back from somewhere else.”[1] On the Slovak scene he exhibits more modestly and hence for the broader domestic public he remains an unknown, or rather imperfectly known artist. Precisely the opposite is true abroad: more theoretical reflection has been devoted to his work beyond the borders of Slovakia, and he has had more opportunities to present the invitation to a time-space journey through his art.
From 1988 to 1994 Roman Ondak studied and graduated in painting and graphics at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava. Additionally, he studied at Slippery Rock University in Pensylvania (1993), Collegium Helveticum in Zürich (1999-2000), and CCA in Kitakyushu (2004); he received a grant from DAAD in Berlin (2007-2008) and Villa Arson in Nice (2010). Ondak is one of the 1990s generation, whom the social changes after 1989 gave the opportunity to link up with conceptual art, which the totalitarian regime had excluded from officially approved artistic production[2], and to develop new media (principally installation and video-art) and absorb the impulses and themes of world art. Free space for creative work, breaking through isolation, presentation in galleries abroad, a close awareness of the the international art scene, all this became a living reality for the artists of the 1990s and made possible the emergence of key figures in contemporary Slovak art who have outstripped the limits of Slovakia. Relatively soon after his art studies, Roman Ondak achieved international recognition; he is a regular participant in relevant curatorial exhibitions and prepares solo exhibitions throughout the entire world.[3] Although his background is in conceptual art, he has emphasised on many occasions that his “things” point towards a reflection on sculpture.[4] Ondak is disquieted by the relationship between memory and the picture; he plays with the material, essence and dimension of things, which he organises with irony; his works are hung between reality and utopia.[5]
At first Ondak created more traditional material instalations and objects based on work with ready made, mainly with furniture and with intellectual literature, from philosophy to art theory. He filled wardrobes, a table, a display cabinet with books drenched in formaldehyde; or taking book jackets which were typographically simple to the point of purism, he glued them to cans or wrappings of foodstuffs (Fates of Modern Art, 1993, Taste of Thinking, 1995, Sated Table, 1997).
With the disposable libraries he dissected the traces of the past; already in these early works one can feel a powerful nostalgia and a presentiment of the future onset of retromania in art, but principally what is contained there is Ondak’s obsession with the phenomenon of time, of the temporal repositories of thinking as messages to the future. Closely connected with them is a further key theme for this artist – memory and maturing, education and transmission of information from generation to generation (The Source of Art is in the Life of a People, 2016, exhibition in South London Gallery, London).
There are splendid and moving works where Ondak takes his point of departure from children’s experiences and responses, their games, or actions where children participate directly (Tickets, Please, 2002, Tomorrows, 2002). The artist’s recent exhibition Based on True Events[6] showed a return to material objects and installations (Signature, 2014), which he had never entirely abandoned, and those emerged in parallel with immaterial, more ephemeral works. In these “things” he reached for objects of the recent past, and especially for private ones associated with his family, the family home, and his personal studio.
Similarly he returns to his earlier, beginner’s artworks. For Ondak the return, the backward look, is a fundamental about-turn in time. Through a personal mythology he communicates themes of collective memory; he transforms political and social problems via a certain kind of self-portrait, gradually uncovering his privacy and the deposits and absurdities of the period (e.g. in the exhibition Roman Ondak. Erased Wing Mirror. Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna, 2014). Autobiographical content, personal experience, the private history of the artist, is manifested in each work of his and is not just an admixture, an inessential component, but the filter and catalysator of the content.
Ondak’s objects and installations later became more inconspicuous, almost unresearched, difficult to differentiate from reality. There was only a minimal shift beyond what they were essentially – a transference of the everyday to the gallery and a simple or even, we may so, poor material: “Creating something out of nothing: that is what Ondak does. The economy of his means and the modesty of his gestures are stunning: monotone, often without a material basis, while even the largest of his projects is not wholly monumental.”[7] According to Hans Ulrich Obrist, central to Ondak’s projects for public art or for an exhibition space is the strategy of infiltration[8] – natural symbiosis with the physical, mental and social space. The inconspicuous elements and situations of everyday life “disturb” the exclusive space of the gallery. Ondak’s sensibility is shaped by respect for the existing; a source of inspiration which he draws from is the daily perusal and reading of newspapers (now perhaps more of digital sources?) and the permanent creation of visual and textual notes. At the same time, he is building a specific archive of stimuli and possible ideas for future projects, but his commentaries also reveal a systematic working with thought and idea. Apart from realisable projects, his design sketches also have a utopian, unrealisable nature. This “flying off” into notes and records is not only of a purely pragmatic character, rather it gives proof of the artist’s powerful imaginative capacity and openness to alternatives in the perception of reality and to observation of human behaviour. After following his artistic development for a certain period, we find that Ondak returns to certain themes, subjects, spaces, phenomena, situations. His open system has a capacity for recycling, repetition, and vital circulation.
In Ondak’s work there is a functional intertwining, a crossing-over between, and layering of, media – drawing, action, ephemeral or stable installation, video, which accompanies many of this artist’s projects (already realised and unrealised, realisable and utopian projects, visual notes, records of the progress of the preparation of a concept). Chronological development includes a thoroughgoing, through-and-through reticulation and bringing-forward of thoughts. As if a circulatory system was functioning there, with blood circulating for the filtering of ideas and their continuation in the infinite... In 2009, for the Czech and Slovak national pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale, he prepared the site-specific installation Loop, which is one of the milestone achievements in his work. Ondak employed the entire pavilion as a ready made. With their typical flora, the Venetian Giardini continued naturally from exterior to interior, so convincingly that the pavilion building became invisible, almost vanished. The artist deleted the differences between inside and outside, between the national and the global, between Nature and culture. Ondak, who is regarded as a master of illusion (Brigitte Huck), eliminated the sense and meaning of the pavilion and of any inequalities whatever. The flourishing of Nature in the pavilion changed it to some kind of transit space, a connecting link between something and something else. Overgrown with vegetation, the building perhaps also evoked an apocalyptic vision of the end, when wild Nature, with its capacity to absorb all into itself, would triumph: here again there is the idea of incursion, the historical growing over into the contemporary.
Ondak reflected on postcommunist reality and the economic problems connected with transformation, which existed in the abiding difference between West and East, in SK Parking (2001), a work shown in the Vienna Secession. From acquaintances the artist borrowed seven cars of the Škoda make, from the late 1970s with Slovak registrations. Together with friends, he transported them from Bratislava to Austria, where he left them for two months parked at the rear of the well-known historical building of a gallery in the centre of Vienna. These Škodas, as it were, represented the Gastarbeiter in an economically more developed country. They looked strange, suspicious, maybe even dangerous, but quite definitely poor and impertinent at the same time.
Ondak’s performative forms of art have a ritual character. They derive from everyday human situations and are realised according to rules set by the artist, with respect for natural deviations: a crush or mob of people (Stampede, 2011, Crowd, 2004), waiting in a queue (Good Feelings in Good Times, 2003), human curiosity (The Stray Man, 2006), a mother teaching her year-old child to walk (Teaching to Walk, 2002), shoelaces untied on feet (Resistance, 2006), or simple children’s games (Swap, 2011). Ordinariness, wit, situational humour, improvisation all play a role in these, and people often become participants in them without being aware that they are part of art. The essence of human behaviour is repetition of certain rituals which are connected with a feeling of security and deepen social solidarity, and awareness of one’s own individuality in comparison with others.
Ondak’s “ceremonies” are of a private but also public character, minimal but also more mass-type, founded on interactivity and the participation of viewers. Not only does he use the concept of displacement of ordinary objects, he also shifts, or by other means fuses, ordinary activities with the spaces of the gallery and cultural practice. In these disruptions of a place reserved for art one may also detect an institutional criticism of art and of the sterility of the gallery. One example is his performance Good Feelings in Good Times (2003), first presented in the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne. It was based on creating a fictitious queue of waiting people [9], which has been repeated a number of times in various cities round the world, indoors and outdoors, with volunteers and with hired actors. The queue draws attention, concentrates the viewer’s awareness on the fact that something important (desired) is happening in the gallery; it shows us models for behaviour in a throng or in a queue, evoking the individual experience of waiting in life for anything whatever. This legendary action of Ondak’s offers several readings – reference to the ordinary socialist situation of insufficiency, bureaucracy, obedience, partly also consumer behaviour, or alternatively it may evoke humility, patience, meditation, concentrating on the actual course of time. In the category of unspectacular performances of everyday situations in galleries we should not forget such fragile actions as Resistance (2006), when a small group of people with their shoelaces undone mixed with the crowd at the opening of an exhibition. After similar actions of Ondak’s today, who can tell whether it was action or reality? How are we now to distinguish when what is involved is reality or deception? The task of these actions masked within reality, which many visitors did not even notice, was to play with disorientation, expectations and norms. After this practice the informal term “Ondakovčina” caught on behind the scenes: it is used when something suspicious turns up in the artistic space...
The action forms, culminating in site-specific installations which came into being through the participative spirit of visitors and staff at the museum institutions, and in which Ondak uses a synthesis of time, event, and visualised / materialised record, may be repeated according to rules set by the artist. For Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich he prepared Measuring the Universe (2007). During the work’s existence in space, as time went by details were affixed to the white wall by the supervisor of the exhibition about height (with a line), the given names of visitors, and the dates of their visits, inscribed in black on the white walls. With time the records grew, accumulated and overlapped on a horizontally conducted energy line. This legendary work, repeated in MoMA in 2009, takes its departure from parents’ habit of recording their children’s growth on the door frame. Once again, this is about experience from the childish, private, supremely family world, shifted into the pure white displaying space. The accumulated textual and numerical records on the wall created a dynamically functioning universe of the traces of human presence: “The viewer of Measuring the Universe (again we emphasise this aspect) is the subject of the production of a drawing and an indissociable part of its object, and thus he/she is both actor and motif. The traditional hierarchy between artists and non-artists, or authors and readers, has been removed, in the same setting, through their participation in the work. The viewers are uniting everyday reality and pictorial reality.”[10]
Well-known in this category is the spectacular installation called Passage. Five hundred Japanese steelworkers in 2004 received a bar of chocolate from Ondak and were asked, after eating the delicacy, to create miniature sculptures from the silver foil. He used these for an installation again in 2017, accumulating them on a surface, in Pinakothek der Moderne. And later, on the principle of similar participation by others, he created the well-known installation Enter the Orbit (2011) and others. Action features change to static, fixed to processual, for example in the already-mentioned The Source of Art is in the Life of a People (2016) in South London Gallery.
In Ondak’s “things” the precise mathematical statistics and numerical symbolism (five hundred workers, ninety six objects or minutes, a hundred days’ duration of an exhibition etc.) point to the closing, the measuring of time in the course of a life, a generation, an epoch.[11] Ondak’s decisive concept, however, is the binary principle[12], based on the pair, two, duality, dialogue, play, a doubling network, a numerical and relational system of mathematical legibility where the foundation is two parts or two units. His basal system, founded on the pair and on universal form, is comprehensible either in a western or eastern context of thinking. With Ondak we find the binary principle in the relation of interior and exterior, fiction and reality, local and global, space and time, old and young, child and adult, empty and full, before and after, west and east, nomad and antinomad, miniature and monumental, private and public, concealment and revelation. The system of the pair seems to be a fortunate one: it has an overview, a partner, communication and balance.
Vladimíra Büngerová, November, 2018
[1] Skřivánek, Jan a Jirkalová, Karolina: Umění všedních situací. S Romanem Ondakem o bienále, soše a vztahu k tradici. (The Art of Ordinary Situations. With Roman Ondak on the Biennale, sculpture, and the relation to tradition.) In: Art & antiques, č.6, červen 2009, pp. 31-32.
[2] For Ondak the most important influences were Július Koller, Stano Filko and Alex Mlynárčik. Cf. also: Určite Slovensko neobchádzam. Juraj Čarný sa pýta Romana Ondaka. (Definitely I’m Not Avoiding Slovakia. Juraj Čarný asks Roman Ondak.) In: Flash Art CZ/SK, June-September 2009, p. 29.
[3] The breakthrough exhibitions were: 2004 in Kunstverein v Köln, 2000 Manifesta 3 in Ljubjana, Tate Modern in London (2006, 2007), Biennale in Venice(2003, 2009, 2011), MoMA in New York (2009), Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlín (2012), participation in DOCUMENTA (13), Kassel (2012), etc.
[4] Skřivánek, Jan a Jirkalová, Karolina: Umění všedních situací. S Romanem Ondakem o bienále, soše a vztahu k tradici. (The Art of Ordinary Situations. With Roman Ondak on the Biennale, sculpture, and the relation to tradition.) In: Art & antiques, č.6, červen 2009, p. 31.
[5] Huck, Brigitte: Roman Ondak. Galerie Martin Janda. In: Artforum, April 2014, p. 276.
[6] Roman Ondak. Based on True Events. Lovis-Corinth -Preis v Kunstforum Ostdeutsche Galerie Regensburg, 19.5.-9.9. 2018.
[7] Filipovic, Elena: The Ordinary as an Aesthetic Operation. In: Ondak, Roman, Hütte, Friedhelm, Klumpp Nora (ed.): Roman Ondak. Notebook. Deutsche Bank AG, Frankfurt am Main, Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern, and authors, 2012, p 119.
[8] Hans Ulrich Obrist in Conversation with Roman Ondak. In: Rhomberg, Kathrin (ed.): Roman Ondak. Spirit and Opportunity. Kölnischer Kunstverein und Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln, 2005, p. 118.
[9] https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/ondak-good-feelings-in-good-times-t11940 (Accessed 25.11. 2018)
[10] Schwenk, Bernhart: Measuring the Universe. Roman Ondak. Measuring the Universe. BAWAG Foundation Edition, Christoph Keller Edition, JRPǀRingier Kunstverlag AG, Zürich, 2008, unpag.
[11] Schwenk, Bernhart: Measuring the Universe. Roman Ondak. Measuring the Universe. BAWAG Foundation Edition, Christoph Keller Edition, JRPǀRingier Kunstverlag AG, Zürich, 2008, unpag.
[12] Büngerová, Vladimíra: Roman Ondak pohľadom Vladimíry Büngerovej. Princíp dvojky. (Roman Ondak as seen by Vladimíra Büngerová. The principle of the pair.) Unpublished text written in 2016 for the prepared publication XXL Pohľadov na súčasné výtvarné umenie (XXL Views of Cntemporary Visual Art), ed. Ladislav Snopko.
