the sleeping city

first published by a virtual biennale, line magazine

www.avirtualbiennale.tumblr.com

Title: Czech and Slovak Republic: The Sleeping City

Artist: Dominik Laing

Curator: Yvonna Ferencová

Venue: Giardini

‘My father was a sculptor. He had stopped working long before I was born. His sculptures were more like sleeping witnesses than living work. With their help I am trying to look into my own past, which is at the same time a portrait of collective memory. I am thus construing an inter-generational dialogue in retrospect, a dialogue which in reality never came to pass.’ - Dominik Lang

The selection process for Dominik Lang to represent the Czech and Slovak Republics at the Biennale was a long one, and not without controversy. His proposal entitled 'The Sleeping City' was initially chosen by an expert committee put together by the National Gallery, but the choice was later rejected by the gallery’s highly-opinionated director Milan Knížák, who then attempted to replace him with various other notable Czech artists. This incident caused the Czech Culture minister Jiří Besser to usurp Knížák’s authority, claiming the expert committee’s choice needed to be respected. Despite this defiant support, the Biennale experience has not been easy one for Lang, who described the episode as ‘unpleasant’, although he was surprised by his initial selection and thus, not surprised by the subsequent problems. 

However, from an external viewpoint it is difficult to understand where the difficulties arose with The Sleeping City. Fundamentally, the installation is Lang’s investigation into his past, his father’s past and the historic past of his country. Lang links two different sculptural approaches - his more architectural practice alongside his father’s figurative sculptures - with various historical contexts, against the backdrop of his family dynamic. Through the fragmented presentation of his father’s work - which he has severed, alienated, constrained and disrupted - Lang develops a fictitious inter-generation dialogue, which speaks about the relationship between father and son, as well as their differing epochs. 

Jiří Lang (1927-1996) stopped creating work years before his son was born. His artistic practice is often said to be marked by the period in which it was created, due to material constraints as well as ideological ones. Dominik Lang has taken these generic, postwar figurative sculptures, and provided them with an entirely new, fractured environment. A penguin-like figure is given crutches and a bubble-wrap neck brace, a girl with her dog is severed at her middle by a wooden table, small heads are severed and propped on poles, and some sculptures are obscured by curtains or body bags. This does not manifest as an homage to an admired father, nor an understated talent. Instead, there is a sense of ridicule; a sobering suggestion of the redundancy that awaits the majority of art work produced at any given point in time. 

The Sleeping City initially proffers a melancholy reflection of the obscurity of the art object, and the Lang father/son dialogue gives this statement an added rawness. As Lang states, this is ‘a dialogue which in reality never came to pass.’ The strange concoction of indifference and devotion, of disrespect and reverence, reveals a difficult paternal relationship - something which Dominik Lang appears to have clinically and brutally assessed. However, it is Lang’s ‘almost-too-personal’ approach which is the crux of his attempt to emphasise the impossibility of ‘a free treatment of material closed in its own terms.’ That is to say, while Jiří Lang’s work is often considered too entrenched in its own context, his son’s intervention is attempting to disturb it, to create a ‘new method of reading it’, to make it relevant again in a different way.

Dominik Lang’s presentation is either a desolate protestation about the human incapability to create endurance, or it defies this by asserting the continual importance of artwork through re-contextualisation, disturbance and (mild) destruction. Furthermore, it questions the relationships between different generations and epochs - challenging their parallels, and differences, asking whether we are detached from our past or embedded in it. Either way, it seems difficult to understand Milan Knížák’s objections to the installation. The Sleeping City is a matrix of interpretations, each one as interesting as the last.