MICHAELA
THELENOVÁ
A long trip for a short distance
Michaela Thelenová
’s photographs do not meet the formal expectations which are connected
with this medium. Nevertheless, if we applied the criteria characteristic
of this expressive medium on them, they could be even considered defective,
incomplete or inaccurate. The trouble is that instead of a relatively
authentic record of reality, her pictures further fragment reality;
they break it and recompose it in new semantic connections. In this
sense, Michaela Thelenová is not in fact a photographer (she deviates
from such categorization consistently), but an artist, moreover one
with a distinct tendency to flexible expressive strategies.
Her attitude reflects the indisputable crisis of the photographic
medium, which, like painting around
the middle of the nineteenth century, is losing its dominant position
in documentation systems to make way for technologies of dynamic images
(video, television, internet, etc.). The reduction of the role
of photography in the sphere of official social visual representation
is also connected with its proletarization. In the era when it had
not yet lost its privileged position, individual photographs became
symbols of specific historical events or social processes, and as
such they predicated a general consensus. The development and mass
expansion of digital cameras have suppressed the codification aura,
which was connected with the technical imprint of reality, and have
concurrently caused an absolute loss of its aesthetic value. In this
connection, one necessarily wonders when the traditional presentation
of a photograph (both negatives and positives) will be replaced by
digital media, as happened to music recordings approximately fifteen
years ago with the passing of vinyl records upon the arrival of compact
discs. Then a photograph will be returned to its original state of
production exclusivity, though as a two-dimensional technical picture
medium, it will be deprived of its original content.
Michaela Thelenová is well aware of this change currently happening
in the visual paradigm and reacts to it by means of a connotational
photographic series,in which each picture refers to matters lying
beyond
the depicted frame. In this way, she in fact takes up Muybridge’s
experiments with the recording
of motion,though she replaces the linear, and thereby causal way of
narration with some kind of cubisizing multidirectional matrix, reaching
the determined communication goal by means of what are, to a certain
extent, abstracted photographic features. In such a context, individual
compositional views largely do not refer to anything but their own
ambiguity, while their message comes forth only during the process
of confrontation with other pictures in the given series.
Portrait features are consistently suppressed in the photographic
pictures of Michaela Thelenová, and if
a figure ever appears in them, then it is only in uncertain detail.
Architectonic elements or views through the landscape also miss an
explicit topographic relevance and, moreover, they are often combined
with
a text seemingly not related to the presented visual structure. The
climax of such treatment, with both contentual and compositional schemes,
is then shots that in various details or half-wholes record absolutely
banal things lacking any significant meaning. By this non-privileged,
seemingly illogical way
of imaging, Michaela Thelenová opens a wide space of inspiratory tension,
for in the centre of attention she places the fact of communication
itself, or more precisely,
the process of the diverse penetration of public medial perceptions
into the sphere of the natural world. Through a consistent categorization
of pictures and criticism of the manipulative dictates of the media,
she at the same time offers an alternative way to a visual deconstruction
of unifying social mechanisms from a peripheral and subversive position.
In her creation, Michaela Thelenová does not take notice of exotic
destinations, nor does she surf the waves of the global world; nevertheless,
if we accept the role of attentive viewers, she offers us long travels.
These are trips to those spots of the collective visual memory that
seem to be explored in detail. However, the author always opens new
and often risky views of the old, well-known panoramas to us.
Michal Koleček, 2007
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catalogue (pdf)
Michaela Thelenová
"Discourse
is hardly more than the reflexion of some truth that is born before
our eyes, and when at length everything can take on the form of a discourse,
when all can be said and when discourse can be pronounced about everything
it means that it is possible because all things, after having made obvious
and changed their meaning, can return to a silent internalisation of
the consciousness of themselves."
Michel Foucault
Where do you look for the strongest impulses for your work? And where
do you see the danger of its potential limitations? Michaela Thelenová
finds a single answer to these questions: in regionalism. In the simplicity,
but also the apparent illogicality of this attitude we can perceive
the principle that essentially influences the character of Thelenová's
work. It is not, however, the fact that Michaela Thelenová works outside
the the dominant centres of contemporary Czech art, although the problems
of the relationship between the center and the periphery is necessarily
a part of her thinking. The crucial agent in the work of this author
is above all her ability to acutely analyze and articulate lucidly a
core of frequently contradictory individual and social discourses.
In subject matter Michaela Thelenová's work derives almost exclusively
from the ambiguous reality of the post-industrial environment of North
Bohemia. With some exaggeration we may say that she repeatedly sifts
through her experiences of commuting between Chomutov - her birthplace
- and the small Sudeten village in the hills above Ústí nad Labem where
she currently lives. The poignant intimacy of her approach is further
intensified by a frequently inspiring focus on her closest vicinity,
when she uses as models for her artwork sections of her househould,
neighbours or family members. With such close detail, Thelenová is obsessively
focusing on parts of the depressing post-communist urban landscape,
overlapping the deformed social structure with the illusion of consumerist
opulence, recording the remains of the German past of the region, comparing
the image of nature with the human desire to change its form and recreate
it, confronting the global aspect of computer networks with the fragmentariness
of their concrete participants, stealthily scanning the sides of main
roads where prostitutes loiter next
to memorials to victims of traffic accidents.
However, the author does not sift through this diverse but geographically
located material with an aim to compose a clearly defined photographic
documentary, or on the other hand, to compile a socially conscious visual
message. Her artistic strategy is based on a thorough sharing of events
and on creating a critical discourse, through accummulation of visual
elements. The chosen method serves Michaela Thelenová to accentuate
the principle of "discontinuous systematicity" (M. Foucault),
she approaches the subject under observation from diverse, seemingly
random points of view, and relativizes the process of denoting and thus
weakens the viewers' possibility of mimetic orientation. The result
of this approach are an emotional series of photographs consisting of
individual images that are frequently not linked by any causal relationship
and resist traditional logic. These pictures simply exist next to each
other, and demonstrate their random congruity, they tempt the viewer
to break into them so that they might become a part of him or herself.
An approach similarly relaxed and ambivalent as in the sphere of orientation
towards content, Michaela Thelenová applies also when it comes to the
form of her artwork. The means of expression she predominantly uses
are "technically static images" (Vilém Flusser's term) produced
by a classical or digital camera and computer printing technologies.
It is, however, hardly possible to rank her work unambiguously within
the territory of photography, as she stands outside of it by weakening
the tautological function and by her skepticism towards the institute
of representation-representing. Thelenová relativizes the relationship
between the shot and its referent, she does not want to "possess
the world of objects through the camera" (in Susan Sontag's phrase).
She uses the same approach as in one of her earliest works of photography,
when she cut up hundreds of shots of reality into absolutely unrecognizable
details, and then composed those, using wax, into a strange and wonderful
collage. Later Thelenová substituted the form of collage for the principle
of seriality, in order to further the technological as well as logical
discontinuity of individual shots, focusing only on the authenticity
of the character of the observed discourse.
Michal Koleček, 2004
New Pictures of "Home": Michaela
Thelenová
30. 10. 2003 - 25. 1. 2004, Michaela Thelenová: Víkend (Weekend),
Gallery At a White Unicorn, Klatovy
Since
the early 1990s, Michaela Thelenová's work has been closely tied with
the city of Ústí nad Labem.
The art scene of this Northern Bohemian "capital" is gathered
around the local university, where Thelenová (born 1969) graduated
in 1993 and continuously teaches at the Studio of Photography led
by Pavel Baňka. Also thanks to the local Emil Filla Gallery, directed
by Michal Koleček, Ústí nad Labem became a challenging place for many
emerging central-European artists, and Filla Gallery turned into one
of the most remarkable contemporary art centers in the Czech Republic,
agilely promoting also its local artists of young generation, including
Jiří Černický, Zdena Kolečková, Jitka Géringová, Martin Mrázik, Martin
Raudenský, and Michaela Thelenová.
Unlike most of these artists, Thelenová focused her attention on photography-based
media at the beginning of her career. Since the mid 1990s, she successfully
splits her time between teaching, art projects and her countryside-based
family and homestead. Although Thelenová usually uses deploys "technical
images", she also often works with a broader and more precise
conceptual approach, closely combining photography and graphic and
industrial design. Her works urgently, but gently circle around
the issues related to femininity and motherhood on the one side, and
language of media and fashion on the other, always with a needed detachment
and irony. Also the media she uses are varied, from photography through
the computer-manipulated imagery to web art, often branded with intentional
"pottery" quality. Apart from a vast number of individual
and collective shows, last year she successfully presented herself
as one of the nominees of the prestigious Chalupecký Prize (dedicated
to young Czech artists) with
a series entitled Satelity (Satellites), diptychs consisting of satellite
images and their almost perfect imitations from home-found materials.
Thelenová's
latest show in Klatovy, curated by Jan Freiberg, manifests more photographic
aspects of her work. The series on display called simply Víkend (Weekend)
consists of 32 medium-sized photographs. Not only their panorama format
makes them look as being taken through a car windshield. They can
be - according to their title - interpreted as a bitterly ironic depiction
of leisure time possibilities in the Czech borderland. Moreover, they
bring a message about the ecological devastation of both natural environment
and social life in the region, and about consequent impossibility
to visualize the local landscape. Although the artist uses the language
of "subjective" photography and breaks the ties with old
canons and techniques of classical photography, one could also possibly
recall Josef Sudek's cycle of romantically desolate Northern-Bohemian
industrial landscapes from the 1960s. However, Thelenová goes much
further in the effort of imprinting her personal vision in the image
and developing her private language to talk about alienated country
that is, nevertheless, home for many people.
In the political-historical realm of the region of former Sudeten
Germany, re-populated by Czech citizens after the war, there exists
a specific absence of history that followed the expulsion of its German
population. Sometimes it seems that the history exists here only in
the bleached colors taken from communist photographs that depict the
fictitious efforts and successes of the "abnormal" post-1948
era, today perceived with both horror and nostalgia. When read through
this optics of political history, Thelenová's "weekend"
photographs look like an attempt to re-establish the country's identity
- to reconcile with history through new pictures of "home".
Pavel Vančát, 2004
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