22. 4. 2013
RAFANI
O novém
The man who wears a star, whether he is a
figure in the crowd or a major character, has a limited range of responses to
situations. The same is the case with men who wear lab coats, carry sawed-off
shotguns, or drink their whisky straight. These men are their functions in the
plot.
Thomas
Sobchack, Genre films: a classical experience
The members of Rafani invited
the former minister of law and representative of right-wing party ODS, Jiri
Pospisil, to deliver a lecture preceding their exhibition in Gallery 207. In
preamble, the art group disclaimed this lecture as being part of the exhibition;
inviting the spectators not to look in the direction of art, they left them as
citizens in front of a person who represents them, more or less. Rafanis set a
democratic frame while putting aside the prism of their own reading. The host
mentioned he did not see clear in the reasons of his presence; he would at
least, according to his own words, fulfill Rafani’s ‘scenario’. The term
scenario took on a slightly suspicious consonance; it could be a carefully
phrased remark in front of a public presumed unfavorable, but above all, Jiri
Pospisil underlined the symbolical dimension of his presence, assuming to be a
character playing a part and serving an unreadable intention. The lecture
itself focused on the general lines of the ODS (its values), did not last on
the balance (rather pointing out the prejudices of power changes for
sustainable politics). During the debate, the ensemble of citizens appeared
more distinctively as a group willing to get answers according to its own
concerns. For what comes to the relevance of the ODS values and the answers
given, each person present can draw his/her own conclusions. For what comes to
a relationship between this lecture and the exhibition, the intervention of
Jiri Pospisil set a first direct encounter between the fact and the ideology.
The exhibition itself encloses two elements: a movie and
a performance. The title About the New
combines a classical form for the entitlement of an essay (objective and
didactic turn) to the idea of the new, then. An immediate shortcut may merge:
the new settles for fulfilling preexisting structures. Numerous similar
connections can pop up while watching the exhibition, words couple suggesting
easy connections (law/punishment/freedom/executive/execution) and echoing each
other while at the same time hardly letting any reading line fully develop.
The movie is installed on the external side of a gallery’s
wall. It consists in a short fiction taking over the classical codes of the
action movie: cutting out of the main figure on a landscape, solitary
progression of the character carrying the moral values (the hero), action of
the hero asserting/reestablishing/defending the values of the society. In this
very case, the hero leads a punitive raid against a pig. Rafani operates an
extreme reduction of a narrative formula, and thereby focuses on an archetypal
scheme. The archetype calls for a reading according to known codes. Staging
elements as well as the hero’s speeches content are characterized by their
ambivalence. The hero heard in voice-over asserts in turns the irreducible
violence of democracy (‘despotism of majority’) and an ideological radicalization
(conquering universalisation of the most basic individual needs) leading to the
exhortation of a preacher, while the anarchist flag plays against cast and the
crime weapon could stand for one of the attributes of law, the glaive (sword?),
as well as the rebel’s knife (and assimilated).
The movie plot could tell the taking of power by a force
of opposition as well as the solving of a succession matter in shadowed zones
of power. It could correspond to a reactionary discourse (the call for a new order
being necessarily associated a bloody perspective) like it could point out the
repressive dimension of governance, or the dangers of any attempt of governance
outside the juridical frames of democracy. However, developing those tracks is
vain, given the fact that the movie operates above all an equivalence of power
and counter-power equally subsumed under the common indications of force abuse
and ideology. The speeches’ solemnity itself is in fine denied by a both
severe and derisory act, the pig killing.
The pig plays its cast of the ‘eternally guilty’
(according to the historian of pigs Michel Pastoureau), and hence the ideal
expiatory victim. So, to grab what’s sure in the plot, who killed it? The
succession of shots includes a static point around which the movie revolves.
Two shots frame the same part of reality. The first one shows a group of men
immobilising an invisible being (situation evaluated by the hero’s
look), the second one shows the hero transmitting the order of killing and,
basically, putting things in order. The pig has been executed by a remote and
indistinct underling, who obeyed a porter of flag blind towards this action,
who himself served the leader that would not dirty his hands. The repetition
between these two shots puts them in relation and the confusion raised by
Rafani’s use of symbols (too meaningful to be absurd, too meaningful to make
sense) may have cleaned the place for this question: to which extent did the
leader merely complete the action or the wish of the group of men (now being
retired from an action they initiated)? Whom stands he for?
The untitled movie stages a man without a name
corresponding though to a type of character: the mercenary (vigilante), a
darkened version of the upholder of the law (the one who got urbanised, takes
advantage of law malfunctions, rationalizes his quest in a manicheic way and
finds the shortest way to fulfill his goal (as defined by Pia Pandelakis in her
thesis The hero who came undone: Representation of Heroism in American
movies). Once the symbols put apart, the context in which the character
acts reveals itself as being close and common (contemporary era, muddy
landscape, regular clothes), but the expeditious succession of shots does not
enable to anchor the plot steps in a temporality.
Rafani combines an ironic emphasis on ideals at distance
to the most down-to-earth realism. Here realism is called up to produce an ‘effect
of real’, notion forged by Roland Barthes: an element not aiming to signify in
the plot, but to enhance the feeling of verisimilitude. The use of the
information thread extends this way of doing. Getting a news-line run on the
screen is quite conventional for denouncing the world run or info transmission
in general. From the superposition of the movie and the line feed merge some
funny associations, but this line above all distracts; it distracts from
hearing the speech, it troubles the perception of the film’s duration: the
short movie that is remarkably short, probably shorter than some current long
feature movie trailers, appears quite long when compared to the rhythm the
world run writes itself.
Besides
the screen, a man in black stands in the frame of the gallery repainted in
black. Here also, he can embody both a law executive (in his hand: the police
officers baton) and a rebel (secrecy of the camouflage). So he’s a potential
mercenary too, this figure enabling to stand for both. He represents the force
and a potential threat for those who aim to come closer – transgressing him is
necessary for getting a beer. His presence soon stops being intimidating,
though the code of his action remains unknown (shall he act according to his
will, interact with a spectator, or at some point execute some Rafanis secret
instruction?). The thirsty spectator has to decide if he’s indeed a threat or a
scarecrow: after a while it appears everyone took the same option, and got used
to this man’s presence, assuming he won’t act anymore because he did not act so
far. The fact that the performer did not move is peculiarly strong considering
he daily mimes in the street: one could not have the hands more tied, one could
not operate in a higher combination of fleeting noticing and general
indifference. The demonstration promised by the exhibition’s title might happen
in the relationship to this figure – not in the direction of the look, in the
implacable demonstration of the feature movie where elements tend to neutralize
each other –, but right besides, in the habituation to this character.
Rafani’s
exhibition functions on the basis of an immediate familiarity for a viewer who’ll
soon meet the limits of his identification. Referring to Thomas Sobchack
sentence quoted up, the use of symbols and types is intrinsically linked to a
restricted significance. Rafanis add to this restriction another level: the
impossibility to situate what should merely accomplish its function in the plot
opens for the viewer a semantic void, while the direct superposition of the ideology
and the facts, the ways back and forth between the abstract and the matter of
fact increases his/her speculation. It seems to me that the efficiency of
Rafanis exhibition does not lie into subverting symbols by revealing their
nature (the jamming of context gets them derealized) than in establishing multiple
processes of suggestion raising in the spectator a diffuse feeling of
deprivation.
Anne-Claire Barriga
Rafany
všichni dobře známe. Možná i proto byl při příležitosti jejich výstupu
v galerii 207 použit u předcházejících prezentací již osvědčený model
oslovení někoho jiného, aby hovořil. Vernisáži tedy předcházela přednáška o
principech a idejích ODS v posluchárně 215, kde vystoupil JUDr. Jiří
Pospíšil, místopředseda strany ODS a místopředseda Poslanecké sněmovny PČR.
Výběr tohoto politika byl podle Rafanů dílem náhody, tedy losovali mezi
parlamentními stranami. Los ukázal na ODS a ze sekretariátu příslušné strany
byl pověřen právě tento pomazaný. Podle Rafanů neměla Pospíšilova prezentace s výstavou
souviset, a propojím-li ji s následujícím výstupem v galerii, snad
ani nesouvisela. Pokud ano, pak přeneseně tím, že byl proveden iniciační akt oslovení
politika, aby navštívil akademickou půdu – prostředí, pro jehož autonomii hraje
míra svobody důležitou roli. Právě proporce svobody jsou do jisté míry
záležitostí politiků – toho, do jaké míry je politici mohou ovlivňovat a
určují.
Rafani se dlouhodobě věnují tématu svobody. Ne jinak tomu bylo
v Galerii 207, kterou na týden proměnili z white cube na black cube, což
také koresponduje s jejich vizuálním stylem a používáním černé barvy.
Abych ovšem nepředbíhal, součástí téhož byl taktéž iniciační akt oslovení pouličního
mima-herce, který, oděn stejně tak v černém se začerněným obličejem a s předmětem
nápadně připomínajícím klacek v ruce držel ve vstupu do galerie stráž. To
vytvářelo jisté pnutí, zda se bude něco dít. Po celou dobu vernisáže zůstal
však figurant na stejném místě, stejně tak jak jej možná potkáme v Praze
na ulici. Kdo však chtěl, mohl do galerie nahlédnout a ověřit si, zda tam není
ještě něco kromě černého provedení a běžného vernisážového občerstvení – basy
s pivem. Galerie jinak zůstala zcela prázdná, to další podstatné probíhalo
vedle vstupu na venkovní zdi galerie, kde Rafani prezentovali skupinové video. To
se skládalo ze tří rovin. Prvním byl děj ve smyčce, další mluvené slovo, třetím
pak doplňující titulky, které známe z běžného televizního zpravodajství,
kdy během pořadů nebo reportáží běží
na liště informační
text o proběhnuvších událostech.
Slova Rafanů vyjadřujících se k svobodě zní: „Svobodni jsme tehdy,
když se můžeme pustit do takového řešení obtíží, jež většina lidstva uznala za
nejlepší. Obejde se to s nepatrnou dávkou násilí. A rovněž k svobodě
je potřeba, aby se nám právo na ni co nejméně upíralo, abychom tedy byli co
nejméně nuceni násilí používat. Každému z nás stačí malý stůl, židle, mísa
a lůžko. K obživě chleba a slabý čaj. Ale mimo to potřebujeme všechno jídlo
světa pro chudé, všechen čistý vzduch, absolutní moc a veškeré svobody pro celé
lidstvo. Tedy úplnou proměnu lidstva.“
Akce děje je zasazena do pošmourné zimní krajiny a jeho finálním
aktem je podříznutí prasete, v něčem trochu připomínající rituální popravu.
Tyto dvě roviny spolu zdánlivě nesouvisí, nejvíce matoucí mohou však být běžící
podtitulky.
Pakliže se Rafani vyjadřují ke svobodě, nedávají v tomto videu
jasný návod, jak by měla tato svoboda fakticky fungovat, popřípadě jak jí
dosáhnout. To, jak zde o ní mluví, je v praxi neuplatnitelné. Jde spíš o
ambivalentní vyjádření. Snímáním obrazu v estetizujicím prostředí krajiny video
vyvolává velmi senzuální, až poetický zážitek. Ten může vybízet k otázce po
svobodě a odkazovat na ni jako základní a určující hodnotu v chápání a
utváření našeho života.
Matouš Lipus
foto: Matěj Pavlík a Iveta Schovancová
