Jan Mancuska

Born in 1972 in Bratislava, Slovakia.
Died in 2011 in Prague (CZ)

  

While I Walked… In my studio in ISCP, 323W 39th Street #811, New York

2003
Textile rubber band, white silkscreen
variable dimensions
Purchased in: 2006

The place is run through in various places with a taut black line, attached at several points on either side of the room’s walls. At first glance there seems to be nothing to look at, apart from the contrast produced by this line which is visually and spatially detached from the white walls. This is a mistake, for this interactive work is so full of subtleties that we need to get up close to it. Then we see how the line is made of fabrics and it becomes easy to read the text written on it, for it is at just the right height.

Like writing or reading, words seldom stray from a two-dimensional medium, and they generally refer back to a static activity. Now Ján Mancuska’s work offers an extra dimension : in addition to the volume that comes from the installation and sets the perception of the text itself in a third dimension, our act of reading suddenly becomes indissociable from an experience of movement, of an accompaniment by the whole body. This walking around we have to do in order, literally, to follow the thread of the story, is cleverly done by the artist. There is nothing haphazard about 3D for Ján Mancuska: the text gets its meaning precisely from the direction it would have us walk in, for there is often a parallel between what we read and where in space we are reading. So it is up to readers to be physically in line with what passes before their eyes, sometimes mistaking their own thoughts for thoughts that turn out to be the narrator’s inner dialoque. While I walked (2005) invites us to exactly that experience. In this way we can find ourselves in a rather disturbing parallel between the reality of our action and the fictitious character of what we are reading.

Ján Mancuska tests the resistance or otherwise of this narrow margin, this porous chink existing between narrative fiction, imagination and reality. His works start out from the principle that our apprehension of reality is subjective. It is based on cognitive processes, subject to psychological disturbances or distortions linked to the interpretative sensory approach that we have to reality. This fact places us in a paradoxical situation in relation to the question of the visible and the non visible. If we think that our senses – here sight – are no more objective that anything that can come out of the imagination, then it makes no difference, the vision can be passed on by some other mode of perception, maybe more indirect, such as reading a descriptive text.

In the line of conceptual artists who have worked on language like Art & Langage, Lawrence Weiner or Joseph Kosuth, the works of Ján Mancuska have no hesitation however in using narrative and fiction and solicit a personal and multisensory approach on the visitor’s part.

Carole Billy

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