Delete
“Delete. Art and Wiping out.” is an exhibition curated by Petra Hanáková in Bratislava’s Slovak National Gallery.
“The goal of this exhibition is to concentrate and meaningfully structure the work and contribution of individual artists, who employ gestures or procedures of disengagement, purification, exemption, removal, reduction, deletion and separation, bleaching and whitewashing, acidifying, dissection, censure and auto-censure, intentional disinterest, withdrawal, waning to disappearance, as well as those creating their work by expiration, loss, abandonment, forgetting or oblivion…”
Ironically enough, the SNG’s building is itself an excessive exercise in deletion. Dedeček built the bridge added onto the Baroque Water Barracks in 1970. The communist design radically sits in front of the block’s baroque courthouse without any shame. The bridge successfully hides the baroque barracks from view, thus deleting their immediate presence in the city. On the SNG’s website the bridge, though mentioned, is only shown from the inside and not the radical exterior. The SNG’s branding rather focuses on the — supposedly — grand baroque part of their premises.
The bridge’s massing, however, is arguably much more grand than the relatively mundane and even ubiquitous baroque back of house. The bridge’s dramatic cantilever allows it to engage not just the street, but much more the cars passing by: Even with accelerated speed, one must feel the pressure of this mass reaching beyond the datum that is the established building line. It becomes an architecture of speed, built for the viewers travelling at high velocities. This is ever more emphasized by the fact that it is exceedingly difficult to capture the building on a photograph — without making it look too bold and careless, which in effect — when experiencing it first hand — it isn’t, quite the contrary. The architecture of speed cannot be captured in a still representation.
For the passing pedestrians, the bridge is lifted to allow them to get pulled in by the lure of the mysterious contradiction of this baroque courtyard hiding behind this radical modernist building.
Unwillingly through it’s setting and harsh contrasts the SNG becomes a manifestation of Slovakia’s search for a national identity: In the past century, the Slovaks have witnessed the fall of the Austrian-Hungarian empire. They have seen their culture questioned by communism, just to be swamped by Western influence after the fall of the iron curtain. They split from Czechia to finally become independent — yet just in the wake of the European Union’s eastern enlargement.
Admits such a dense history of changing and competing identities, it becomes brilliantly and painfully obvious to deal with deletion in art: the show featured fast consumer goods whitewashed — left only with the gestalt of their packaging fighting for recognition, advertisement with no text, body parts dissolved in chemical acids, and stations of the cross with their figures erased only to leave their faint outlines carved into wood.
When the rest of the West is concerned with Copy-Paste, Bratislava turns to Delete.
