YOU BROUGHT SOMETHING INTO THE WORLD ... - AURA

Master of Fine Arts Thesis

YOU BROUGHT SOMETHING INTO THE WORLD THAT DOES NOT BELONG HERE

(and one day you will pay for it)

Tomáš Penc

Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirement for the degree of Master of Fine Arts, School of Art and Design

Division of Sculpture/Dimensional Studies New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University

Alfred, New York

2023

Tomáš Penc, MFA

Coral Lambert, Thesis Advisor William Wheeler, Thesis Advisor Gerar Edizel, Thesis Advisor

Abstract

I was born and raised in former Czechoslovakia. Having had the experience of living in a totalitarian regime, I see aspects of its grip resurfacing again in the present world, but on a global scale. The apprehension of the possible things to come is reflected in my artwork as it addresses deeper political and existential topics, ridiculous scientific advances, irrational situations, logical inconsistencies and paradoxes of our memory. I am an observer who collects and reflects on these

absurdities, I stand in for the individual human and often highlight it with humor. This helps me illustrate how intellectually complicated we have become on one hand yet remain driven by irrational urges and subconscious impulses. The Thesis Exhibition is a free-forming collection of artefacts from an alternative world, a subjective

perception of a distorted landscape, which serves to remind us to take ourselves - from the overall point of existence - way less seriously.

Acknowledgements

I would like to wholeheartedly thank the following people (in no particular order) who have helped me shape this Thesis Exhibition, directly or indirectly, or influenced my artistic decisions:

Gerar Edizel, William Wheeler, Josie Fasolino, Joey Quiñones, Coral Lambert, Jesse Plass and the gallery interns, David Greene, Dimitri Callian, Rebecca Arday, Angus Powers, Glenn at Zweygardt Sculpture, Olin Gannon, Erin Taylor, Daniela Murphy, Justin Spillers, Zihao Chen

Contents

List of Illustrations 5

Introduction 7

Observation 8

Between Wisdom And the Unconscious 8

The Absurd 11

Formulation 15

Where Do You Go in Your Sleep? 15

Let me Tell You About my Mother (And Other Symbolism) 22

The Humor and Rules of the Absurd (Object) 26

Appendix – Photographic Documentation 30

Bibliography 41

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List of Illustrations

Figure 1. Penc, Tomáš, Chewing-gum Apocalypse, 3D sculpture concept, 2021, Render by the artist.

Figure 2. Smithwick’s Blonde Outdoor Advertisement, Cork, Ireland, 2015, Photograph: Tomáš Penc.

Figure 3. Delta Airlines In-Flight Commercial, New York, USA, 2022, Photograph: Tomáš Penc.

Figure 4. Penc, Tomáš, You Brought Something Into The World That Does Not Belong Here, Exhibition shot, 2023, Photograph: Tomáš Penc.

Figure 5. Penc, Tomáš, You Brought Something Into The World

That Does Not Belong Here, Approx. 8 x 8 x 4 feet, Mild steel, aluminum, LEDs, found objects, Installation shot, 2023, Photograph: Tomáš Penc.

Figure 6. Penc, Tomáš, You Brought Something Into The World

That Does Not Belong Here, Approx. 8 x 8 x 4 feet, Mild steel, aluminum, LEDs, found objects, Detail shot, 2023,

Photograph: Tomáš Penc.

Figure 7. Penc, Tomáš, Hedonic Cupids, Approx. 4 x 6 x 2 feet, 3D prints, electronics & Arduino, feathers, resin, spray paint, silicone rubber, Detail shot, 2023, Photograph: Tomáš Penc.

Figure 8. Penc, Tomáš, Hedonic Cupids, Approx. 4 x 6 x 2 feet, 3D prints, electronics & Arduino, feathers, resin, spray paint, silicone rubber, Detail shot through scope, 2023, Photograph: Tomáš Penc.

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Figure 9. Penc, Tomáš, (Perpetual) Death of Lucretia, Approx. 6 x 6 x 4 feet, Mild steel, electronics & Arduino, inflatables, spray paint,

Installation shot, 2023, Photograph: Tomáš Penc.

Figure 10. Penc, Tomáš, (Perpetual) Death of Lucretia, Approx. 6 x 6 x 4 feet, Mild steel, electronics & Arduino, inflatables, spray paint, Detail shot, 2023, Photograph: Tomáš Penc.

Figure 11. Penc, Tomáš, (Perpetual) Death of Lucretia and Hedonic Cupids, Approx. 6 x 6 x 4 feet, Mild steel, electronics & Arduino, inflatables, spray paint; Approx. 4 x 6 x 2 feet, 3D prints, electronics & Arduino, feathers, resin, spray paint, silicone rubber, Exhibition Shot, 2023, Photograph: Tomáš Penc.

Figure 12. Penc, Tomáš, (Perpetual) Death of Lucretia, Approx. 6 x 6 x 4 feet, Mild steel, electronics & Arduino, inflatables, spray paint, Installation shot, 2023, Photograph: Tomáš Penc.

Figure 13. Penc, Tomáš, Night is a Day That Fell Short, Approx. 10 x 20 x 4 feet, Mild steel, aluminum, electronics, glycerin, PVC, black food dye, 3D prints, Installation shot, 2023, Photograph: Tomáš Penc.

Figure 14. Penc, Tomáš, Night is a Day That Fell Short, Approx. 10 x 20 x 4 feet, Mild steel, aluminum, electronics, glycerin, PVC, black food dye, 3D prints, Detail shot, 2023, Photograph: Tomáš Penc.

Figure 15. Penc, Tomáš, A Hundred Steps Pilgrimage, Installation with Turner gallery staircase and computer generated projection, Dimensions variable, Still from a 3D animation, 2023, Render by the artist.

Figure 16. Penc, Tomáš, An Outsider, Installation with Turner gallery lights and a generic light fixture, Approx. 50 hours, Dimensions

variable, Installation shot, 2023, Photograph: Tomáš Penc.

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Introduction

This thesis is a contemplation on intellectual processes, themes and

inspirations in my artwork. It aims to provide the viewer with another layer of insight rather than serving as a guidebook or direct explanation. Instead of focusing on individual pieces of work in descriptive detail, I am limiting myself predominantly to discussing my background and the modus operandi behind my artistic enquiry.

Hopefully, at the end of this paper, the viewer and reader will be able to synthesize both the exhibition and the writing and solve their own individual puzzle to interpret my artwork.

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Observation

Between Wisdom And the Unconscious

I have tried to simplify the description of the process I go through when making art into a short definition. I failed at first, because my work is about the World and the World is not made up of one thing, so neither does my work address one particular subject. Eventually, I came up with “encounters of resonating ideas resulting in a subcutaneous haze of inkling”. Despite what this definition suggests, this haze of inkling is a very specific position. It is simultaneously knowing and not knowing. It is seeing and not seeing.

In 2011, during a Professional Art Practice course, of which I was a participant while waiting to be admitted into my BFA studies, we received an introduction to painting. Our assignment was to paint a coffee cup, still life. The painting teacher placed the white cup so that its shiny surface would reflect some of the pink tint from the curtain in a nearby window. Everybody (me included) painted a white cup. Uneducated yet about the nature of our seeing, we all painted an idea of the cup in front of us, not its actual appearance. Gradually, we learned to only paint the reality of the subject, not our fantasy or memory of it.

Michael Talbot, writer and author of Holographic Universe understands this

“personal reality” in a wider sense noting that “our mind does not reflect the objective reality but rather our idea of it”¹. Talbot is not concerned with individual petty

objects, nor is he invested in art. He goes philosophically deeper into the nature of reality proposing that this reality of ours is a result of our collective consensus,

1 Michael Talbot: Synchronicity & the Holographic Universe, Part 2. Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove. ThinkingAllowedTV.

1992. 58 mins. Accessed: March 22, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ugQBP3NQ2g.

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hallucination rather than something set in stone, all the way to the molecular level.

Reality as we call it is therefore not a result of logical, face value facts. Jung touches on something similar, although less radical, in Modern Man in Search of a Soul in a chapter on archaic man drawing comparison between the primal (original) and a civilized human²:

Primitive man is no more logical or illogical than we are. His presuppositions are not the same as ours, and that is what distinguishes him from us. His thinking and conduct are based on assumptions other than our own. To all that is in any way out of the ordinary and that therefore disturbs, frightens or astonishes him, he ascribes what we should call a supernatural origin. For him, of course, these things are not supernatural, on the contrary, they belong to his world of experience.

I recall watching a TV film titled Ishi: The Last of His Tribe (1978)³. It tells a story of the last member Ishi of a small Yahi tribe of Native Americans in Northern California. In one scene, the remaining members are hiding from the white settlers and are seen watching a steam train in the distance. Having no supposed concept of technology or steam engine - a machine, they explain the event and the distant object as a dragon raging across the plateau, reflecting a frame of mind untouched by modern civilization. This relativity of logic fascinates me (whether it is a deception produced by sensory input, such as our eyes or the processing of it in the brain) and I enjoy contesting its potential implausibility and apparent absurdity in my process.

But the idea of residing in what I would call in-between real and fictional, although with emphasis on achieving clarity of what is real through gradual wisdom, seems to be a very old one. In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates and Diotima discuss the origin of Eros, love. But not in a romantic sense of the word, they talk about love for

2 Jung, Carl G. Modern Man in Search of a Soul. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co Ltd. 1933). page 145.

3 Ishi: The Last of His Tribe. Robert Ellis Miller. Edward & Mildred Lewis Productions. 1978. 100 mins.

Accessed: March 22, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0ZI-T2MhR0.

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wisdom, the true nature of reality. In this context, Eros is placed somewhere between knowing and not knowing, wisdom and unconscious.⁴

First of all, he is always poor; and he is far from being tender and beautiful, as the many believe, but is tough, squalid, shoeless and homeless, always lying on the ground without a blanket or a bed, sleeping in doorways and along waysides in the open air; he has the nature of his mother, always dwelling with neediness. But in accordance with his father plots to trap the beautiful and the good, and is courageous, stout and keen, a skilled hunter, always weaving devices, desirous of practical wisdom and inventive, philosophizing through all his life, a skilled magician, druggist, sophist. And his nature is neither immortal nor mortal; but sometimes on the same day he flourishes and lives, whenever he has resources; and sometimes he dies, but gets to live again through the nature of his father. And as that which is supplied to him is always gradually flowing out, Eros is never either without resources nor wealthy, but is in between wisdom and lack of understanding.

For my purposes I take this excerpt as a metaphor for an artist, hunting somewhere between our world and other potentially equally real worlds, not necessarily understanding what one is channeling, trapped in an eternal, absurd and perhaps futile quest for clarity. Evidenced by lucid dreaming, dreaming in sleep, out of body and near-death experiences, according to Talbot “our mind is not necessarily residing in the brain”⁵.

4 Plato. Symposium. (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London. 1993). page 32.

5Michael Talbot: Synchronicity & the Holographic Universe, Part 2. Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove. ThinkingAllowedTV.

1992. 58 mins. Accessed: March 22, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ugQBP3NQ2g.

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The Absurd

My artwork is born out of observations, the vantage point and mechanics of which I have just explained. The subject of these observations are contradictions - of myself, the environment around me and other people, memories, situations, verbal cutouts from TV, the screen or paper. The point at which all of these observations culminate, and the limits under which my mind operates, have one thing in common - absurdity. But I do not mean the causal everyday absurdity. In 2005, I relocated from Czech Republic to Ireland, my new home country for the next 15 years. When I arrived, I had to rent an apartment. Unbeknownst to me, most landlords and estate agents would not rent out a property without a so-called PPS number, an Irish equivalent of the Social Security Number. The office on the other hand would not issue a PPS number without me first having a permanent address. This kind of bureaucratic absurdity is prevalent. My observations, however, arise from the existentialist nature of the Absurd. A human condition where a constructed meaning we give to our existence, and the apparent overall lack of meaning in the Universe, which is unconcerned with humans, is in constant conflict. In his well-known essay The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus, a French-Algerian existentialist philosopher defines the Absurd as “the comparison between the bare fact and a certain reality”⁶. The Absurd is born from this conflict as a synthesis. In one of his examples, he describes a knife-wielding soldier charging at a machine gun. This is where the tragedy and horror meet the comical. Camus further adds that the degree to which the Absurd occurs is in direct correlation to the distance between the two compared extremes. In his example, it is obvious that a soldier charging with a handgun would be far less absurd than one with a knife. Another example that I find illustrative of the

6 Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus, and Other Essays. (New York, Knopf and Random House, 1955). page 22.

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kind of absurdity I am interested in is the Christmas Truce of 1914. The First World War was in my opinion one of the events that shaped the human psyche into the state we find it today, a line that should have perhaps never been crossed. The war broke out in July and at first everyone, full of enthusiasm and unaware of what was coming, thought it would be quickly over. It was in December 1914, the first winter of the war, long before the battle of the Somme, or the military use of gas and the already

mentioned automatic machine gun. On Christmas Eve, soldiers on both sides spontaneously ceased fire and walked out of their positions to greet each other. This eventually spread across the whole Western Front and lasted until January. The officers were infuriated and ordered that “on no account is [fraternization] to be allowed between the opposing troops”⁷. The anti-life nature of the war machine, in which the soldiers found themselves, was in direct conflict with the interests of the individual who wanted to live and find friends in the World.

I was born in the late 1970s in Czechoslovakia. The historians call this particular time of the country’s history Normalization, a period following directly after the Prague Spring of 1968. On August 20, 1968, the Warsaw Pact armies entered Czechoslovakia in order to suppress what the Soviets considered an attempt at

counter-revolution, and to restore the Soviet sphere of influence in Central Europe.

The context of the political conflict is clear, but the philosophical conflict that turned the East and the West against each other perhaps not so much. In the late 60s, a theorist and philosopher Isaiah Berlin introduced a concept of two liberties. His idea of the (Western) negative freedom is to live one’s life to the fullest without being interfered with by others, with certain exceptions, such as public health, peace and security or culture. The positive freedom implies some authority of a Government,

7 Murphy, Jim. Truce: The Day The Soldiers Stopped Fighting. (New York, Scholastic Press, 2009). page 82.

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nation or Church over an individual. And if this authority is in agreement with one’s interests, the extent of such authority is irrelevant. He sees this model applied in the Soviet Union and other totalitarian states⁸. As pointed out, the positive model only functions if the individual’s interests are in agreement with that of the governing entity, in this case the ruling party and its ideology. If it is in conflict, the individual’s existence becomes absurd. And since the post 1968 Prague Spring events were predominantly forceful and repressive, the individual experience became increasingly unbearable. It created a split between an individual’s inner life (which included family and close friends) where one could speak freely without repercussions and that of a self-censored public persona that regurgitated ideological dogmas in order to keep an employment, secure education and live in a relative peace. Berlin did not see any reconciliation between these two models⁹ and predicted that the negative concept of freedom will eventually prevail. And surely, at the end of 1991, the Soviet Union dissolved and with it the influence in its satellite countries. I observe my childhood memories resurfacing again now in what is called the free world. It is not the scare of the 20^th century styled communism or fascism, but a new kind, a form of technocratic utopia; Elysium that promises to eradicate all suffering and make human life a fully automated eternal bliss. There are suggestions being made about universal income, centrally controlled digital currency, fully digitized state administration, eradication of private property, limitations on personal freedoms and movement, and enforcement of one worldview narrative. What it shares with the totalitarian regime of my early youth is self-censorship and indoctrination, arrogant enforcers of ideology, tyranny of mainstream conformity and ridiculous scientific inventions. I see the distance between the two compared extremes of expectations an individual has about life and the

8,9 Berlin, Isaiah. Interview for program entitled Freedom of Speech. ATV, 11 February 1962. Accessed: March 29, 2022. https://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/published_works/tcl/.

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available reality growing again. I dedicated some time to this in (Perpetual) Death of Lucretia (fig. 9, 10, 11 and 12). The black robotic arms are in control, dictating to the human, represented by the inflatable daisy shaped birthday balloons. They move in intervals, pushing and pulling, together composing a machine soundtrack. The same goes for the Hedonic Cupids (fig. 7, 8 and 11), colorful 3D printed re-imaginations and transmutation of humans and birds. At certain intervals, the viewer can bird- watch these creatures through a scope as they tongue kiss, witness a distant fragment of some authentic human infatuation, reduced to a function.

But if we are to trust Berlin’s prediction again, the negative model of freedom will eventually prevail. The Absurd will function both as a frustration, but also as a failsafe. Fyodor Dostoevsky, considered one of the first authors of existentialist literature, writes the following in his Notes from Underground¹⁰:

What can one expect from man since he is a creature endowed with such strange qualities? Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in bliss so that nothing but bubbles would dance on the surface of his bliss, as on a sea, give him such economic prosperity that he would have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with ensuring continuation of world history and even then man, out of sheer ingratitude, sheer libel, would play you some loathsome trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive rationality his fatal fantastic element.

This context gives the myth of Sisyphus a completely new dimension. The rolling of the boulder up the hill, only to be watched rolling down and pushed up again is a tragic condition that is constant and unavoidable. And so is the existentialist questioning, it is unanswerable and eternal. If an answer is found, it eventually breaks down and ends with a revolt; a revolt of human nature.

10 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Notes from Underground. (Toronto ; New York: Bantam Books, 1981). page 34.

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Formulation

Where Do You Go in Your Sleep?

I don’t think it is possible to discuss the absurd nature of existence without considering the tool that is used to describe it - language. For without a name and definition, nothing can be discussed and therefore it is impossible to include in our supposed reality. While there is a clear distinction between how I deal with visual and textual information, I do sometimes include text and potential titles for my work early in my creative process, but not in a labored, forced and logical, descriptive way. I use language as a visual guide. I have no interest whatsoever in reverse examination of my artwork through verbalization. My creation must retain a certain level of mystery so that we can have a visual conversation, which the literal description would destroy.

I am a Czech native. Unlike Irish, Czech language withstood oppression of its imperial neighbor and remained in live use, although suffering through a period of time when it was used only by the lowest and the most common of societal classes.

Luckily, it was revived and today enjoys the status of an official language of over ten million people. Unlike modern English, however, it has many rules and exemptions to these rules that can make it sound very poetic, metaphorical and free flowing, often changing and bending. Educated writers and commoners alike sometimes used this quality to obscure ambiguous and anti-establishment narratives, keeping two simultaneous story lines within the same piece of text. A story has it that during the Czechoslovak Communist party rule one book seller managed to assemble his

window display of books in a manner that the titles of these books would read an anti- government slogan. Since this could also be a pure coincidence, casting doubt on the book seller’s true intent, he would have avoided accusations and potential jail. I have

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attempted to recreate something similar in one of my sculptures called Chewing-gum Apocalypse where I wanted to use a stack of books as a support base. I wanted the spines of these books to read as a sentence. I found books titled Chewing-gum and Chocolate, Apocalypse and Taking Lives (fig. 1). I was not happy with the result and so I have abandoned the idea. It is possible that English simply does not work in this way, or I have not found the right books. I suspect though it should not be that difficult.

Figure 1. Penc, Tomáš, Chewing-gum Apocalypse, 2021, 3D sculpture concept, Render by the author.

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I prefer using contemporary English to Czech, maybe because it is my second language and it serves me purely as a device, not burdened by any additional baggage.

It does seem to provide some polysemous quality that often enables re-associations or reimagining of words in pattern like structures and in new contexts in accordance with my “hazy inkling” I described earlier, making the words visual for me. English structures are blocky, systematic, pragmatic and chess-like, they enable me to think and work in patterns, very much like assembling a puzzle. Where Czech can flow in two different streams simultaneously for long distances within one piece of text, English breaks new branches, takes abrupt and acute angles to reveal unpredictable, unexpected, new and often absurd and humorous jumps. Put simply, Czech is organic, Slavic, full of tenderness and warmth, evasive and adaptive. English is Germanic, rigid, mathematical and logical and therefore easier to break.

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Here is an example of a poem I wrote some time ago, which I think

demonstrates successfully these undirected re-associations of meaning, acute angles and limbs that go out to only meet again transmutated.

Dog morph bells ring ears ring bells tears brings things empty spring armed chair with ammo to amuse fills the fool eyes good whore

please fool me fully please fool-fill me one way door way no way coming back tilted autumn

hissing in my pocket peace is missing species cake in pieces Pisces blonde spy snake dance spices vest in wasting pests nest shake ripples

lake nipples

outlaw wall tight owl olive oil live longer lion wool trick rig gears greased knees parrot riot when matches well burns better

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Of course, it is impossible to talk about dimensions of reality and not mention the Surrealist movement of the 20^th century. What resulted visually in Duchamp’s readymade Fountain (1917) as an example of object de-contextualization had its foundation in literary form, utilizing automatic writing as a way of tapping into the unconscious. In The Magnetic Fields, founders André Breton and Philipe Soupault used automatic writing and created the first surrealist book¹¹. While I don’t exactly follow the rules of these techniques, such as automatic writing or Exquisite Corpse, nor do I start my creative process with a mindless text or a doodle, I do recognize the input of the unconscious as a fundamental aspect of my work. I also acknowledge the influences in my work of other modernist movements, such as Dada for its

nonsensical whim, and Futurism for its reaction to technology and the machine. At the same time, I could probably also dismiss all these having any specific impact since all these movements can be seen as an obvious historical foundation for all contemporary art. The following text is my experimental combination of automatic writing, dream reconstruction and a superimposed narrative outline. The protagonist is erased and replaced with an underscore allowing the reader to insert any potential person/object in its place, or themselves.

11 Breton, André and Soupault, Philippe. Les Champs Magnétiques, (Éditions Gallimard, 1968).

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A Fragment

When ___ finished the shift that day, it was not going to be an ordinary late evening. ___ worked as a lift operator voice talent, American-English dialect, in an unnamed five-star hotel. Work description simple - watch passenger's selection on a control board and then say clear and loud: “Door is closing, going up; or Going down.”

___ entered a bus station underpass. There was a beggar standing in the corner and played a song on his guitar that sounded like closing credits. Somebody looking like priest slowly peeled off the wall and hit ___ in the side. ___ made it all the way home but fainted and collapsed on the stairs to the apartment. ___ had a stab wound in the ribs.

___ woke up three hours later; the wound was not deep enough.

In the bathroom, ___ opened a medical cabinet and in it discovered a human nose. It was breathing. ___ found out by sliding a small hand size mirror beneath it. It fogged.

___ noticed an ear in the corner of the room, and then another, and another. They popped out like mushrooms. Wanting to say:

“My God!” But no sound came out. ___ said it, but all those ears sucked it out right from __ mouth, leaving __ two ears outnumbered.

When ___ saw an eye over the kitchen sink ___ did the math and ran outside before going blind.

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There exists, however, a surrealist method of intermittent sleep – having a lot in common with lucid dreaming, which I do use. Another term for the same technique I have come across is Blue Sky Thinking. An article in Scientific American describes a recent study examining how this method of controlled semi lucidity can open access to creativity and insight¹²:

The findings imply that if we can harness that liminal haze between sleep and wakefulness—known as a hypnagogic state—we might recall our bright ideas more easily.

I would like to point out here an interesting commonality of meaning between the terms sleep and wakefulness in this quote and the lack of understanding and wisdom mentioned earlier in the excerpt from Plato. Heavily involved in the matters of dreaming, it should be no surprise that, according to the article, surrealist painter Salvador Dalí also induced this hypnagogic state in his creative process. While falling asleep, he would drop a key on a metal plate. The sound of impact on the metal would wake him up at just the right time to harness the creative vision revealed in this brief moment of sleep.

12 Spark Creativity with Thomas Edison’s Napping Technique. Bret Stetka. Scientific American. Accessed March 22, 2023. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/thomas-edisons-naps-inspire-a-way-to-spark-your-own- creativity/.

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Let me Tell You About my Mother (And Other Symbolism)

In A Fragment I left the person/object out and allowed the reader to fill in the gaps according to their imagination. In the poem Dog Morph the meaning of words can change based on their placement within the text, such as a “chair armed with springs”, which brings ”amusement” in form of ”ammunition”. The word “match” can represent both a counterpart but also a device for lighting fire in “when matches well burns better”. I attempt to use the same mechanics in my visual work by suggesting certain symbolic correspondences.

The title of this section is a line from a replicant character Leon Kowalski in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982)¹³. It is this precise moment when he fails the Voight-Kampff test designed to tell replicants apart from humans and he turns violent.

He is asked to describe in single words only the good things that come to mind about his mother. And since he never had one, he is unable to answer. Based on certain psychoanalytical theories, objects, when considered in their symbolic capacity, carry other, often quite fundamental meanings that resonate somewhere deep inside our primal selves. So, when discussing our parents or one’s mother in particular, we should all be able to answer the test question and, in its course, experience an

emotional response of some kind. It is interesting how this symbolic potency plays out as visual correspondence in various contexts. It is worth noting that such psyche affecting visual clues are often found in advertising – for obvious exploitative reasons. I consider the most clear-cut and profound those of a vessel, container and water, liquid, mountains or an ascent of some kind.

13Blade Runner. Scott, Ridley. Warner Brothers. USA. 1982.117 mins.

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It is now an established scientific fact that life requires an agent. In a NASA article concerning the importance of water as a lead to finding extra-terrestrial life, a scientist and science writer Philip Ball describes three conditions¹⁴: Life most probably needs a solvent. That solvent needs to perform an active, diverse, and flexible role. Water is so far the only common liquid we know that is capable of this.

Symbolically speaking then, our existence is confined to a vessel, over 50% of which is made up of this agent – water. This piece of genetic memory is fundamental for survival of an individual and more importantly for continuation of the human race.

While searching for clean and safe source of drinking water is a task not generally pursued in the West, the genetic memory still drives us, and the symbolic meaning still resonates. In modern society it takes the form of a body (vessel) enhancing potion or cream, refreshing beverage and various containers (bodies) to carry it in, such as trophies or even the Holy Grail of eternal youth and sustenance. A possible result of such logic could form the following visual narrative.

Figure 2. Smithwick’s Blonde Outdoor Advertisement, Cork, Ireland, 2015, Photograph: Tomáš Penc.

14 Water: The Molecule of Life. Philip Ball. NASA's Astrobiology Magazine. Accessed March 22, 2023.

https://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/solarsystem/Water:_Molecule_of_Life.html.

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There is a clear use of anthropomorphism in the Smithwick's advert (fig. 2).

On the billboard, one beer glass obscures another, the Blonde clearly taking the spotlight. One can only speculate whom should the other beer glass represent, a parent perhaps or a pimp. It is clearly somebody with unrelenting superiority. The Blonde stands in for youth, health and fertility. Similar connotations can be found in the use of the mermaid (fertility) symbol in the Starbucks logo or traced back to the recent rejection of the Bud Light advertising campaign by its male customers. The mother symbol has been described in detail by Carl Jung¹⁵:

The mother symbol is archetypal and refers to a place of origin, to nature, that which passively creates, hence to substance and matter, to material nature, the lower body (womb) and the vegetative functions.

It connotes also the unconscious, natural and instinctive life, the physiological realm, the body in which we dwell or are contained, for the "mother" is also a vessel, the hollow form (uterus) that carries and nourishes, and it thus stands for the foundations of consciousness.

In August 2022, on my flight back to Alfred from my brief visit to Czech Republic, I took a video of an in-flight commercial that was playing on the plane’s entertainment system (fig. 3). It featured a professional woman, probably a marketer, on board of a Delta Airlines flight reading Homer’s Odyssey. The story takes us on her adventure of creating a new product design and culminates with a long shot of a mountain range and a tagline “Keep Climbing” associating success, ambition,

physical elevation but also knowledge, spiritual ascent, self-worth and adventure with Delta Airlines.

15 Jung, Carl G. Modern Man in Search of a Soul. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co Ltd. 1933). page 28.

25 Figure 3. Delta Airlines In-Flight Commercial, New York, USA, 2022, Photograph: Tomáš Penc.

I used this visual symbolism in A Hundred Steps Pilgrimage (fig. 15), together with the existentialist criticism of religion and the consumer styled spirituality. By including the architecture of the gallery space and stairs, I tried to create a humorous experience for the viewer that challenges complacency of commodified answers to questions about life’s meaning in the post-truth society.

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The Humor and Rules of the Absurd (Object)

Those who do not understand the Absurd and are living in some illusory ideas of ultimate justice and superficial morality, find the association with humor

sometimes offensive. Even more so if the subject matter reveals absurdity of some strictly followed ideological constant. I mentioned the soldier with a knife running towards a machine gun. The image of such a scene is horrific, but (let’s face it) also ridiculously comical. It will land differently if it is presented as a war drama, or a cartoon. Maurizio Cattelan is an example of an artist who utilizes this comical absurdity in his work, such as La Nona Hora (1999) depicting Pope John Paul II struck by a meteorite or a 9/11 memorial Blind (2021), a black passenger plane fused with a black skyscraper, denounced by a Guggenheim curator to be “too emotionally fraught, maybe even toxic”¹⁶. Thinking of where else does violence meet the

grotesque, a scene from Alfred Hitchcock's Torn Curtain (1966)¹⁷ comes to mind.

Paul Newman plays an American scientist Armstrong who finds himself in a double- agent rendezvous on a farm somewhere in East Germany. Unfortunately, Professor Armstrong is closely followed by a Stasi (East German Secret Service) agent Gromek and to protect his cover he makes (together with the farmer’s wife) a desperate attempt to stop him. After the initial confrontation it becomes obvious that Gromek needs to be killed. The farmer’s wife first hits the standing Gromek’s knees with a shovel, then clumsily stabs him in the neck and finally they drag the wheezing Gromek across the kitchen, put his head inside an oven and suffocate him with gas.

The scene lasts more than six agonizing minutes and Hitchcock exploits it fully. It is both ridiculous and emotionally torturing. One detail, that is not elaborated on in the

16 Maurizio Cattelan unveils memorial to 9/11 in new Milan show—20 years after witnessing tragedy. Hannah, 14 July 2021. The Art Newspaper. Accessed April 28, 2023. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2021/07/14/maurizio- cattelan-unveils-memorial-to-911-in-new-milan-show20-years-after-witnessing-tragedy

17 Torn Curtain. Hitchcock, Alfred. Universal Pictures. 1966. USA. 128 mins.

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film is the use of gas in Gromek’s murder, which I interpret as an absurd reference to the Holocaust, linking the East Germany Stasi in a bizarre twist to Nazi Germany Gestapo.

I have not used anything as radical as this in my exhibition. Perhaps the only exhibited artwork slightly provocative is You Brought Something Into The World That Does Not Belong Here (fig. 5 and 6), which is also the title of the exhibition. It stands at the entrance to the gallery as a glowing monument, a gateway to the distorted landscape, and consists of three suitcase-like steel structures. They all have a handle, which is fixed at awkward places, and are lined with green LEDs, the mood of which resembles an operating room. Two of them feature an aluminum head of a pig, the central piece is mutated into a human mouth that holds a plastic rose. The piece is both a birth place and a tomb and the title is a play on words – language. It poses some questions. In Czech, one has to always distinguish between singular and plural

“you”. In English it is unclear. It is also unclear what this “something” is. Is it material, an object, a being, or an idea, policy or some event? And is it me, the artist making a statement concerning someone else? Or is it a statement that the individual viewer has been making about something in their life? Or is it something entirely different?

I did wonder what made things funny, absurd or ridiculous and how can objects be subverted in this way. Sometime during my first year of study I came across a documentary featuring Rowan Atkinson, creator of the legendary character Mr. Bean, titled Laughing Matters: The Visual Comedy (1992)¹⁸. Atkinson establishes three basic principles of visual comedy: object must behave in an unexpected way, it must appear in an unexpected place and it must be the wrong size. The same applies

18 Rowan Atkinson: Laughing Matters. David Hinton. Tiger Television Productions. 1992. 47 mins.

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to humans and animals and the roles are interchangeable. All three principles can also be at work simultaneously. He also makes strong connection between comedy, violence and fear, with slapstick comedy and horror comedy as examples. One of the ways a visual comedian can transform violence into comedy is through overstatement of pain. While Atkinson supplies many examples of his own, all that I have just said can be also successfully applied to Cattelan’s Pope and his 9/11 memorial. The slight overstatement in Gromek’s acting and the unusual way, in which he is assaulted in Hitchcock’s film, also explains the grotesqueness of that scene.

I have employed a mix of these techniques in my work. The suitcase handless, pig heads and human tongues appear in unexpected places, the balloons react to the force of the black robotic arms with an overstatement by inflating and distorting their shapes. They are the wrong size too. I turned the viewer into a comedian by making them climb the stairs and walk all the way to the end of the dark gallery, to perform A Hundred Steps Pilgrimage (fig. 15). Only to be greeted with a projection of more stairs leading to sunrise – that turns out to be just a poster. In An Outsider (fig. 16) I have anthropomorphized the object (a light fixture) and created an association (by including it on my title card) with all the other gallery fixtures. And while the actual gallery lights all have a function and purpose, my light is old-fashioned, it is placed where only a few will ever see it and because it runs on battery, it has limited life. I have turned the object into a comedic character that is “an alien… is like us, but different… innocent, being born yesterday… bound to be inept… maladjusted and finds it hard to form normal human relationships”¹⁹. The Sisyphean struggle against the mainstream society and the tragic absurdity of the piece has resonated with some viewers who personally shared their sentiments with me. The Night is a Day That Fell

19 Rowan Atkinson: Laughing Matters. David Hinton. Tiger Television Productions. 1992. 47 mins. Accessed April 28, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqKqVrBP-so.

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Short (fig. 14 and 15) oversees the distorted landscape of absurd object mutations. It is the authority, an anti-Sun that measures time backwards with oozing black liquid, and infuses the comedy with drips of fear and darkness.

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Appendix – Photographic Documentation

Figure 4. Penc, Tomáš, You Brought Something Into The World That Does Not Belong Here, Exhibition shot, 2023, Photograph: Tomáš Penc.

Figure 5. Penc, Tomáš, You Brought Something Into The World That Does Not Belong Here, Approx. 8 x 8 x 4 feet, Mild steel, aluminum, LEDs, found objects, Installation shot, 2023, Photograph: Tomáš Penc.

31 Figure 6. Penc, Tomáš, You Brought Something Into The World That Does Not Belong Here, Approx. 8 x 8 x 4 feet, Mild steel, aluminum, LEDs, found objects, Detail shot, 2023, Photograph: Tomáš Penc.

32 Figure 7. Penc, Tomáš, Hedonic Cupids, Approx. 4 x 6 x 2 feet, 3D prints, electronics & Arduino, feathers, resin, spray paint, silicone rubber, Detail shot, 2023, Photograph: Tomáš Penc.

33 Figure 8. Penc, Tomáš, Hedonic Cupids, Approx. 4 x 6 x 2 feet, 3D prints, electronics & Arduino, feathers, resin, spray paint, silicone rubber, Detail shot through scope, 2023, Photograph: Tomáš Penc.

34 Figure 9. Penc, Tomáš, (Perpetual) Death of Lucretia, Approx. 6 x 6 x 4 feet, Mild steel, electronics & Arduino, inflatables, spray paint, Installation shot, 2023, Photograph: Tomáš Penc.

Figure 10. Penc, Tomáš, (Perpetual) Death of Lucretia, Approx. 6 x 6 x 4 feet, Mild steel, electronics & Arduino, inflatables, spray paint, Detail shot, 2023, Photograph: Tomáš Penc

35 Figure 11. Penc, Tomáš, (Perpetual) Death of Lucretia and Hedonic Cupids, Approx. 6 x 6 x 4 feet, Mild steel, electronics & Arduino, inflatables, spray paint; Approx. 4 x 6 x 2 feet, 3D prints, electronics & Arduino, feathers, resin, spray paint, silicone rubber, Exhibition Shot, 2023, Photograph: Tomáš Penc

36 Figure 12. Penc, Tomáš, (Perpetual) Death of Lucretia, Approx. 6 x 6 x 4 feet, Mild steel, electronics & Arduino, inflatables, spray paint, Installation shot, 2023, Photograph: Tomáš Penc.

37 Figure 13. Penc, Tomáš, Night is a Day That Fell Short, Approx. 10 x 20 x 4 feet, Mild steel, aluminum,

electronics, glycerin, PVC, black food dye, 3D prints, Installation shot, 2023, Photograph: Tomáš Penc.

38 Figure 14. Penc, Tomáš, Night is a Day That Fell Short, Approx. 10 x 20 x 4 feet, Mild steel, aluminum,

electronics, glycerin, PVC, black food dye, 3D prints, Detail shot, 2023, Photograph: Tomáš Penc.

39 Figure 15. Penc, Tomáš, A Hundred Steps Pilgrimage, Installation with Turner gallery staircase and computer generated projection, Dimensions variable, Still from a 3D animation, 2023, Rendered by the artist.

40 Figure 16. Penc, Tomáš, An Outsider, Installation with Turner gallery lights and a generic light fixture, Approx. 50 hours, Dimensions variable, Installation shot, 2023, Photograph: Tomáš Penc.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqKqVrBP-so.

Hitchcock, Alfred. Torn Curtain. Universal Pictures. USA.1966. 128 mins.

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