Peter Rónai

Intermediality, intertextuality, and the contextual discourse of art, characterise the work of the important Slovak and Central European  “postcontemporary” (László Beke) artist Peter Rónai (*1953). This experimental, postconceptual and multimedia artist, who has “no very conspicuous limitations of media”, is one of the most complex figures in contemporary Slovak art. His work has been developing authentically since the mid-1970s (in the background of the censored socialist “normalisation”) within the Hungarian-Slovak context of unofficial art, with its probing explorations crossing over into neo-modern and contemporary world art. In his initial experiments Rónai focused on the intersection of photography with action art and sought to analyse the photographic medium as image. Also, photo-montage was the method he used to produce his primary series of “cinematographic” graphics. Concurrently he was tending towards an analytic and intermedia type of portrayal. From 1973 onwards he created his ground-breaking graphic works from a photomontage position (Contradiction, Return, Double Vision, 1 + 1 = 3, M-O-R-E, and others, 1977 – 1978).

Rónai developed his postavantgarde positions in continuity with the line of Marcel Duchamp, conceptualism, and partly pop art, with the programmatic subtitle: neodada, postdada (Dadaism after conceptualism) and antiart. The change of regime in November 1989, with the downfall of communist ideology in former Czechoslovakia, found him in his prime. It turned out that already in the 1970s and 80s he had been occupied with works that were akin to avantgarde and postmodern non-classical art. In Rónai’s case this involved a programmatic negation and surpassing of the principles of traditional forms of painting, photography and graphic art, in favour of contextual art. His fundamental idea and thematic framework became art in its postaesthetic stage (Joseph Kossuth), which extends art’s mental influence and its boundless visual play. Rónai conceives and produces his art on three fundamental planes where it is thoroughly active. On the one hand, he responds to the condition and current discourse of art; on the other hand, he makes statements on the state of society (the level and scope of its art ); and in parallel he reflects on himself (his situation and position in art). The latter is an important self-referential dimension of his work, supported by his own portrait photography. It is found even in his earliest works (the collage and event Call Boy, 1973).

In the late 1970s he completed his study of painting in Budapest (1976) and his parallel study of the theory of photography (1977). Both of these primary lines of interest came together in an early cycle of paintings (Antimalevich, 1975) and conceptual photo-actions  (Malevich Street in Bratislava, 1985). He also worked on once-off photographs (Rónaiogram, 1985) and a cycle of montage offsets which bear a pop-art, filmic (photorealistic) expression. He pushed their expressiveness further, all the way to proto-“video-installations” (from 1985). From 1983 he had begun work on his photographic-communal and private portraits. One of the first was a photograph of the artist in childhood, used in the fluxus collage Call Boy (1973, 1983). The self-same title serves for his autoperformance in 1973 (Rónai is making a call from a phonebox in Budapest). His direct references to art and the artist’s identity continue during the 1980s. Censored Malevich (1987) a serigraph on canvas, refers to Malevich and Duchamp and concurrently to the artist’s early painting cycle Antimalevich (from 1975). The collage Moscow DA DA (1985), in xerox copy, is a self-identifying image of Rónai. In his photoportrait his eyes are taped over with square cuttings (a grid) of the syllables DA DA, snipped from the contemporary Soviet daily Pravda. Intertextually, this work bluntly signals the “East bloc” context of the “lip-service” paid to culture and simultaneously makes an implied reference to dadaism. Based on that same photograph, Rónai developed a gamut of further manipulations in the technique of collage (photomontage), decollage, graphics, and digital animation.

During the 1990s he developed the area of postdadaist, conceptual and analytically conceived art which he has continued to work on to this day, through the media of photography and video and their digital postproduction. In 1989, “at the tail-end of totalitarianism”, Rónai had his second art exhibition Object/Subject (1989) in Bratislava, where he presented analytical installations, taking as his theme the nature of the image – between painting, photo-image, and static ready-made “video”. Part of the installation Eve of Suprematism (1988) was a television showing a current programme, on which he painted a black square. While the exhibition was still running he deinstalled it to a “storeroom” form. Post-1989 also, Rónai continued to use postconceptual strategies and forms of installation, graphics and photography. They were based on ironic reflection on art and himself as an artist, even as he sceptically and ironically codified the strange postmodern condition of art from which he derived the method of his own work, abbreviated O. F. U (Opačne fungujúce umenie: “Other-way-round-working art”). He first applied it in antiperformance, as a reading of a theoretical address “backwards” in 1988.

From 1990 to 1993 Rónai worked in collaboration with the conceptualist Július Koller (1939 – 2007) in the New Seriousness group. They devoted themselves principally to action art and ad hoc work and in situ installation. Their performances were conducted in a spirit of polemical questioning about the nature and status of art in the postmodern situation, in eastern Europe. In the context of former postcommunist Czechoslovakia (until 1993) that also carried a large dosage of irony, with reference to the specific social situation between communism and consumerism. Koller used his question mark as an “identikit”, Rónai a diagonal deletion – a sign of permanent negation as a symbol of antiart (Sorry, no art today, 1992). The deletion sign appears already in his photoactions, such as Post Graffiti (1988) and his  performances Self-identifications (1989). Koller used the abbreviation and signature U.F.O (from 1970), Rónai the abbreviation O.F.U (from 1988) in the sense of “other-way-round-working art”. The shared symbol and cipher of the pair was, as a rule, the wavy line. Each of the artists used it in his own interpretation and meaning, based on a dialogue of many common actions. Also at that time, Rónai produced his innovative identifying code and portrait, which he designated with the abbreviation New²Ave.

During the 1990s Rónai created dozens of video objects and video installations, which appeared in important exhibition projects at home and abroad. From 1991 onwards he made a striking contribution to Slovak video art. His initial experiments with camera and television go back as far as 1985, when he worked with re-run documentaries of randomly photographed people in a crowd; there were also static proto(video)installations with a manipulated TV screen, including Antivideo, Picturescreen (1985), Seeker of the Image (1987), TV Tautology 1x1x1=3 (1989 - 1990). Peter Rónai’s video work is extensive, and there too he has developed the conceptual, analytic and experimental possibilities of the medium.   

One of Rónai’s defining themes, which he constantly reflects on, is his own position as an artist (self-contextualisation), and also the condition of art, which he hybridly expresses, with an admixture of distancing irony, in his self-portrayals. With his strategy of self-mystification he responds to the “dubious” postmodern condition of art. He does this in relation to those modern trends whose contribution was fundamental – first of all suprematism, dadaism, and postconceptual art. Rónai operates with his own methods, for which he has his own designations: dadamemorial, post-duchamp, secondhand art, art strike, no art today, auto-reverse, and selfmutation. In 1992 in Bratislava he presented the video installation Camera obscurna with photographic plates, including 12 morphed portraits of the artist, generated from the video animation Selfmutation (1991). The camera was running on a tripod. His video installation The End of the World (1992), at Barbakan ’92, an exhibition of site-specific installations in Banská Bystrica, was noisy due to its security system. The viewer had to involuntarily trigger it, by approaching the work. Apart from a television with a static black-and-white video, it also contained a “package” of decomposed xerox copies of portraits of the artist (from the above-mentioned Moscow Da Da, 1985). Originally “blinkers” had been put on the artist’s eyes with the syllables DA DA, but here he left empty slot-holes. He called this declarative gesture “decollage”. 1992 saw the appearance of the video installation T.R.A.N.Z.I.T, where Rónai combined his own enwrapped images which he had previously shot on static video.

Another important area of this artist’s work is his installations, including Message Salon - Art Strike (1992), “defenestrated” in 1993 from the window of a gallery in Trnava at Labyrinths, the Soros Centre’s annual exhibition. In 1993 Rónai created Alter Ego, an extensive “retrospective” compressed exhibition, in Bratislava (SVÚ). Alter Ego’s principal section, and the part accessible to viewers, was the installation Corridor – a kind of blind alley, closed off by the video Post Duchamp. The remainder of this extensive, “museally” conceived display could be seen only through narrow spyholes in the corridor. Rónai’s video installation Slovakian Virtual Reality (1993) makes an impression of absurdity: its principal content is a paradoxical device of the medium, the Head Cleaning cassette. Its static video image is surrounded in space by fastidiously arranged physical cassettes. The artist’s self-reflexive video installations include Deo Veco (1993), the video object Cogito Ergo Kunst (1994), Neo-diogenetics (1995), Slovakian Virtual Reality, Head  XXII (1996), Auto-reverse (1995 – 2005), Elastic Reality, Fragment – Venetian Project (1997), and others. Ironic thoughts on the position of contemporary art in Slovakia may be found in the installation Second Hand Art (1992) and the video installations New Slovak Dream, Slovak Virtual Reality (1994) and Slovakian Virtual Reality (1997). Auto-reverse (1996) inspired an eponymous video projection. In the loop it runs 44 found photo-portraits of the artist, from childhood to his current likeness. In 1997 the artist applied it to objects in After Alter Ego, an exhibition in Trnava (Ján Koniarek Gallery – Synagogue). Based on the black-and-white cycle Meta-morphoses (1996 – 2006), in 2007 he created a further exhibition for the Ján Koniarek Gallery: Mixed Memory, which is dominated by expansive morphed photo-portraits of the artist (on the lines of Moscow DA DA of 1985). In each image, within openings, videos are in action, representing the human mind.

Graphic art is a special field in Rónai’s work, “a transmedia instrument”, accomplished via the media of photography, collage and reproduction, and later in computer programmes based on postphotography and morphing as ready made. The artist showed his early photomontage graphics at Journey (O), his first exhibition in Bratislava in 1979. In 1985, using xerox, he produced his Moscow DA DA leaf, which afterwards passed in transition through many mutations, animations and videos (Camera obscurna, 1992). Later he produced a grid enlargement, which he scanned and transferred to the digitalised data form “according to numerology” of Head XX. In the artist’s words: “... these heads have undergone diverse technological processes. They are cloned descendants of a single ancestor, and they bear out the French proverb plus ça change... (the more things change, the more they remain the same)”. Earlier, in 1988, he had created the series of collages Marylin – Head XX., paraphrasing Andy Warhol’s early cult diptych Marylin Monroe (1962). Via photomontage he produced the emblematic offset Cogito ergo kunst (1990), with a new attribute of the artist, a small TV monitor. In Censored Malevich (Malevich’s New Wave, 1989) the graphic work shifts to a new symbolic form and reading. The original serigraph on canvas (image object) with a grid of black squares (censorship of Malevich’s manifesto) is covered with a grille, in the form of a structure of wavy lines. During the 1990s Rónai’s graphic art developed in computer and reprographic montage procedures, in a register of postreadymade, though he was fully engaged in video and action work.

In 1991, at A Dream about a Museum, Rónai created an installation of graphic leaves. At that time he also produced a manipulated reproduction of George Segal’s Cinema (1963), where Rónai erased the original neon text and deposited “his own” text MUTT R. He thereby enciphered Duchamp, whose Fountain (1917) is signed thus (series Hommage á hommage - MUTT R, 1990 – 1991). This is a declarative work, where the artist proclaims his conception of the postduchamp line of neodada work, designated by him as the R_mutation of art. Using digital postproduction of his own earlier communal photography, he created a series of self-portraits Selfmutation – Auto(R)changes (1991). In the digital graphics area he also produced the black-and-white cycle Alter ego (1992) and Metamorphoses (1993), and subsequently more and more of their clones. The graphic object Postinstallation (1993) is a portable “folder” with loose leaves of print on transparent folio. This is a cool interpretation of Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors. Large Glass (1915 – 1923). Rónai decomposed the schematic description of the work. He replaced the glass with transparent folio and an office “folder”. The adaptation evokes the form of the neodada “suitcase” – Duchamp’s portable galleries. It points to the need for transformation in our art, which in Rónai’s view is stagnating in a “lukewarm” mainstream cultural environment. Postinstallation is a programmatic declaration of the artist’s work, i.e. (post)neodadaism, and a criticism of the avantgarde on the European scene, where serial production and the valuing of commodities have partially replaced the idea of art. While referring to the fluxus character of art, by adaptation it takes on the chilly form of a unit of administration. By placing it on the floor of the gallery, outside of the main exhibiting space, the artist rounded off his declaration.

In Cogito ergo kunst (1994) Rónai’s portrait becomes integral to a new situation. This video installation is based on a digitally printed image: the artist’s photo portrait. There is a spyhole cut on the forehead, through which the viewer sees the mobile image of a wrinkled brow. Wavy lines as thoughts. Thinking as the foundation of conceptual art, and also Rónai’s transition to video art. In 1997 he produced After Ego, a cycle of digital graphics where he is already interblending his own portraits with the portraits of other people so that they become totally unreadable. Here we have the grotesque grins and poses of politicians, art theorists and artists (the art world), overlapping with the face of Rónai himself. A further cycle appeared between the years 2002 and 2008: Head Line still Picture morph (Elastic Reality). Rónai continued to devote himself to digital work, which he advanced (by an entire series of remixes of “painterly” styles and hands) to the level of an analysis of the medium of painting. A radical ready made form appears in graphic collages and prints from the cycle History of Slovak Visual Art (1997 – 2002) and the resuming digital montage Other-way-round-working Art (2016). Photography and its graphic postproduction, with his questioning of the medium’s traditional limits, led him to self-citations, where he designates his own works in their new contextual structuration as ready made.

Rónai’s relationship to the public and the viewer is equally specific: he navigates it by giving preference to the mental level of the work and a different (ungilded) view of art. Already in his decomposed postinstallation Object/Subject (1989) he had indicated that visitors could compose the exhibition differently. In 1998 he turned his position round about: he was the artist and also the viewer who was photographing himself using camera spectacles. The viewer becomes part of the “self-portrait”. At 1 + 1 = 3 (an exhibition with Ilona Németh) at the Ludwig Múzeum in Budapest (1999) he mounted a security camera on one of his objects and photographed the viewers, on the principle of “other-way-round-working art”, when the work (object) observes its viewers (Security Camera).

In recent years Rónai has acomplished several exhibitions based on retrospective reconstruction of the corpus of his work thus far. They have had the character of expansive museal displays, prefigured already in Alter Ego (1993). T    he largest was the monumental installation/exhibition Only for Swimmers (2014) in the Kunsthalle in Košice, where he created an installation/reading room in a former swimming pool, with the theme of his own self-analysis as an artist. A more chamber-style total exposition KunstvHalle (2014) was held in the Roman Fecik Gallery in Bratislava (2014), and in the same year also Retro way to go..., his most extensive exhibition, was held in the Synagogue in Trnava. A free continuation of these was Post Ping Pong (2015) in the East Slovakian Gallery in Košice, where Rónai deinstalled the exhibition while in progress. He placed the complete paintings on the floor and replaced them on the gallery walls with photographic displays. New works by the artist, intended as an ironic and sceptical deconstruction of painting, object and text art, may be found in his series of diverse “profane” mats (2016 – 2019), presented in 2009 at Other-way-round-working Art (Galéria G19, Bratislava). That series, between object, painting, graphics and text art, reflects on the current status of art in relation to a postglobal and multicultural Europe. Discursively, the meaning maker Rónai continues to raise questions about the nature and significance of art today. 

Alena Vrbanová, July 2019