The Brooklyn Rail

Roman Ondak was born in Czechoslovakia in the mid sixties. He describes his maturity as an artist in terms of the changing political landscape in his home country: an autocracy in his youth became a struggling liberal democracy when he was a young man. Ondak continues to live in Bratislava, Slovakia, a place he feels deeply connected to and which is intimately connected to his artwork.

On the occasion of his exhibition at Peter Freeman Inc., David Rhodes met Ondak at the gallery as the installation was nearing completion. In the conversation that follows they discuss the artist’s preference for analog techniques and absolute simplicity, how Ondak’s artworks operate on the blurred boundaries of temporal and spatial divisions, and what it means to work with very young children.

David Rhodes (Rail): Before we began the conversation, I was looking at your show, and what occurred to me is that it’s very analog. We hear so much about artificial intelligence these days, but we still live in a world of objects and people. Your work doesn’t need to grab hold of technology to communicate or exist.

Roman Ondak: I am inspired by these new technologies, but I don’t feel the need to implement them in my work. As you said, I’m an analog guy, and I’ve always enjoyed creating fictions by playing with what’s real, and that can sometimes be more imaginary or strange than any digital intervention. It is also a more complicated way to achieve a certain result, and I like that.

So, for example, instead of digitally manipulating the picture of me with my father that you see here in the exhibition, I made the photos by first taking a picture of my father on a bench in the park, then putting on his clothes, and after that, he took a picture of me in the same place. You still don’t understand what’s going on, because it might look like it’s the same person—on the left a thirty-something, and on the right, twenty years older—because he’s wearing the same clothes. Even the newspapers we’re holding in our hands are identical. The setting with two characters was made—I would say—in an almost archaic style of dealing with the idea of intergenerational relationship.

Rail: You’re talking about the diptych from 2003, Bad News Is a Thing of the Past Now. When is the newspaper from? Was it the day that the Prague Spring protests were suppressed?

Ondak: It was the day after the Soviet and Warsaw Pact armies invaded Czechoslovakia. The idea that it is the “day after” is because it was one of the first printed newspapers to report on the invasion the morning after it happened—of course, it was completely analog at the time. There was no internet, so I just imagined the situation when my father—I was two years old at the time—woke up in the morning and realized, like everyone in the country, that the Prague Spring was over.

It must have been a terrible experience in 1968, but since I made the artwork in 2003, I said to myself, “bad news is a thing of the past now.” Nowadays, we are looped back again. So it’s not about the tragedy. It’s about how my father had to go through that moment, and how I had to live with it later—with the consequences of that event that affected the rest of my life. We took the photographs in a park in Bratislava, but the setting is unrecognizable—it could be any park. And the black-and-white color also has a kind of neutralizing effect. The image becomes so subtle that it’s as if the entire global problem could be condensed into the fates of these two men: father and son.

Rail: It seems an apposite work for the moment we’re in now. I mean, since you exhibited at MoMA in 2009, Europe has gone to war. We’ve experienced a global pandemic. And in the United States, we have the second presidential term for Donald Trump. So the notion of things being left in the past seems misplaced in the sense that they always return—they “loop back,” as you say. So what can be unique to one generation comes around in a different form for another generation.

Ondak: Yes, history repeats itself, but maybe we can change how we respond.

Rail: Tell me about the selection process for the works in the exhibition. It includes pieces from a period of several decades.

Ondak: I didn't aim to think of it as a retrospective, but more like specific selection of works which would span almost the whole of my career, to create a show with simple means that would be compact and reveal different directions in my methods of working. That’s why I went back as early as 1992 and decided to put the earlier works alongside the pieces I made this year.

The exhibition developed gradually, almost piece by piece. I decided on one or two artworks, then others followed. One of the first was the work that welcomes you at the front. The idea was to install this doorbell at the entrance, and its title, Waiting for Someone to Ring at My Door, should also be the title of the exhibition—simply marking this shift to a space that is personal. It’s very imaginary, because there is no way you could get to my house. But it’s the original doorbell from the apartment I lived in.

Rail: Speaking of doors and entering your personal space, domestic space, the work Adam’s Keys (2016)—that’s your son’s keys?

Ondak: Yes.

Rail: So, to have a door handle with keys, the doorbell, and then several pieces that are window frames—these are works that indicate an egress or an entry, and as with an exhibition, one enters, is temporarily inside, and then one leaves. You seem to be indicating that this is very normal as part of our everyday experience: to enter and to leave, and therefore to have points of entry and exit.

Ondak: For me, all these objects have both physical and time-based references. They operate on this blurred boundary of what is outside or inside, and what is now and then. When you have the deconstructed part of a window or a door in front of you and the only thing that remains legible is—as it were—a recording of sequences of their supposed movement caused by a light breeze or a human hand, it probably strikes us that there is a time shift that is captured there. It’s also about presence and absence. My intention is to take these objects from my personal world—I mean the world that I’m trying to understand and decode—and to bring them here to the gallery so that the viewer can participate, even just by looking, in this decoding. So somehow, it’s transferred to the unconsciousness. It happens between minds without intertwining these thoughts.

Rail: So these are experiences everybody can identify with. We know about a breeze moving through a window. We have keys that go in our doors—it’s not abstract in that sense. But it’s presented in a way that’s not obvious, because the work is identifying these things that we share but don’t necessarily bring to consciousness. They’re happening without us really being there. They’re habitual, normal, banal.

Ondak: When I work with these objects, I always tend to go to an absolute simplicity, and a simplicity of gesture, which can be almost invisible. Sometimes it looks like there is nothing happening from my side. But it’s also controversial. Adam’s Keys—they were my son’s belongings. I mean, they’re his personal items—there was the key from his locker, from school, etc.—but he was just at the age that he understood the whole thing. And he said, “Okay, I can have another set of keys made.” My aim is that, by making this simple, there could be something in the second layer of understanding which can bring this simplicity to a broader context, in terms of historical allusion to ready-made, abstract, or figurative art. I’m playing with this notion of using very simple objects for defining my own interests.

Rail: Can we talk about the work that reaches from the floor to the ceiling, Infinity (2021)? It immediately reminds me of Constantin Brâncuși.

Ondak: Yes, Brâncuși is there. It is formed by the multiplication of a small drop, so that the whole line resembles dripping of a liquid, wax, or even molten metal. The material is lead and when you look at its floor end, it looks like it is sinking—disappearing into the ground. You don’t see where it comes from or where it is going; it is framed by the parameters of space between the gallery’s floor and ceiling. Although it is motionless, a sense of imaginary movement is there. It also touches on the concept of disruption of the architecture of the gallery, because it vertically breaks through its whole space.

Rail: So, it could continue.

Ondak: Yes. Infinitely.

Rail: Are the individual components weights of some kind?

Ondak: Yes, they are weights. It’s ready-made material, held together with steel wire.

Rail: So it’s a very heavy material.

Ondak: Yes.

Rail: In the form of—like you say—a droplet. That’s very interesting.

Ondak: There’s a tension between a sense of lightness and weight. Lead is also a rather controversial material: it is poisonous if swallowed or inhaled, it is used in ammunition. The fact that Infinity is penetrating through the gallery can bring about many meanings.

Rail: Right. Let’s talk about the crossword pieces. I think you’re layering crossword puzzles from different eras or decades?

Ondak: Yes, it is at least two or three decades. The crosswords are from postwar magazines and newspapers from the late 1940s to the early 1970s. When searching for sources, all these crosswords that I found were unsolved, empty. I cut out the clues so the puzzles would still remain unsolved. By reducing the same thing and placing a small canvas in the middle of a large one, I intended to make this shift from history to the present, but again, without any solution that could indicate to us what the content of this puzzle is.

In my understanding, if some complex problems from the past, whether personal or social, persist unsolved, they can come back to us again. This is exactly the case with the postwar history of my country, and I found a very innocent metaphor for this in choosing these crosswords from that historic period and repainting them on canvas in larger and smaller scales. The small format in the middle of the larger one is like a return of the problem from the past back to the present.

Rail: The blank boxes read in their pattern like a code; they seem to have a balance. If it was a painting with marks distributed like this, you would say it has a certain dynamism or balance. But of course, that’s not the intention. But it’s interesting how we project ideas onto something that has a form or a pattern. It’s irresistible. But all the nuances that you’re describing—the fact is that there’s no solutions here. It’s very poignant, because although things have changed, this is a different crossword to the earlier one. They’re still empty of a solution.

Ondak: It is also about certain moments in history which reappear in cycles time and again, and which I feel I often encounter. These paintings are among those in the exhibition selected from my newest series.

Rail: It’s interesting—the spatial, temporal, and formal qualities are all here in the gallery to be seen simultaneously. So one can now look from one to the other and make those comparisons. You went to school in Bratislava—is that right? And you still live and work there?

Ondak: Yes, I have spent most of my life in Bratislava. It is my personal history as well as the global history of Central Europe that I'm constantly engaged with. So of course, that includes the place where I was born, raised and where I still live. No matter what happened, when I traveled or did residencies, I always came back. And I realized that actually, this is the place I understand and can transfer to my artworks.

Rail: I lived in Berlin for a decade, and one thing I’d underestimated was the people I met there in my apartment block. Some of the artists I met had grown up in the Soviet Union, and they had a point of view that was very different. They were able to see the West, or—as you’re saying—travel and see other places in Europe with a different point of view, because the society in which they grew up had changed. The context had changed for them, without them having to travel anywhere. That perspective was important to them. I imagine for you too—that what you’re saying is: “This is where you know, and traveling is interesting, but there’s no reason to move from there.”

Ondak: Yes, it’s actually a very similar experience. The country in which I was born had a different name, Czechoslovakia, and when I was twenty-seven, it became Slovakia and Czech Republic. My life is divided between two opposite experiences: living in autocracy when I was born and through my formative years—until I turned twenty-three—and then a long transition or attempt to transform our society to a democratic system. It becomes a paradox, because it’s now basically looped back. In my relatively short time, I’m experiencing almost a full turn back to autocracy in Slovakia. It’s not very comfortable, but it’s something I have to take into account in my work. And as you said, it’s strange being in the same place, but somehow things are moving around you so radically that it feels different—my aim is to try to understand them, rather than ignore them. That’s why my place is fixed in this territory.

Rail: Thinking about somebody growing up in a particular place, and the experience of being a child and then becoming an adult—I noticed that children are used in some of your works. Is this a reference to that experience of maturing over time? It seems all children share a lot when they’re very young, but then they become something as they grow which is a reflection of the place and the people that they share that place and time with. Is that something significant for you?

Ondak: The connection is truly there; I was influenced by my personal experience. I actually thought a lot about how I had to change my perspective on art when I was growing up. When I was a teenager in high school, our approach was very academic. There weren’t enough resources from the West or from the rest of the world to understand the postwar and contemporary art movements. Censorship and the inability to travel flattened our view of the world. On the other hand, when I was a child, I didn’t understand what was wrong with the society I grew up in, because it seemed idealistic to me. It was during the years of so-called “normalization” after 1970, and there was this innocence of childhood. But at the same time, you could tell that something was very strange. It looked like a movie or like fiction, because everything was manipulated to prevent the truth from being conveyed to people, and of course, especially to children. It was very strange when I realized all these differences in society and the lies about political control of each individual.

When I was about fifteen years old, I was hoping to find my way as an artist. The problem was that I had to fulfill the assumptions of the educational system—what they expected from a maturing artist was loyalty—and, in a way, lie to myself, which I didn’t want to and didn’t have to apply, because I was still young and I wanted to make art more or less for myself. Then, when I was twenty-three, it finally broke: Communism fell, and I could start, albeit completely over again. I would say that when I go back to the period in which I grew up, the fiction around me inspired me a lot. I started working with children, among other subjects, not because of the concept of innocence—and certainly not because of sentiment—but because, as you perfectly stated: children are relatively unformed. They are the same everywhere. So basically, it’s like a human being who has a pure, primal vision of the world—strong desires, etc. So there’s undoubtedly a reference to my memories of this period, when I was growing up in an Orwellian society.

Rail: That’s very interesting. I wanted to ask you about a piece from 2002 that you made in Prague called Teaching to Walk. How did you come to make this piece?

Ondak: This came from a simple observation of my wife and our son a few years before organizing this as a performance with another mother and her son. I was making sketches of the moment when Adam was less than one year old and was just about to start walking, and needed my wife’s support to take his first steps. And I liked this image, especially as a moment of delegating the potential of walking to someone else—from an adult to a child. So then I ended up making a performance out of it, which seemed absurd, because you can’t ask a child who can’t talk to perform and explain to him that it should be a performance in a public space. But what I like about it is that all these failures and imperfections in the realization of this performance by the child would be accepted—both in everyday life and in the gallery.

For its execution at the gallery, it’s crucial that it repeats on a daily basis. It wasn’t a one-time event, but it became a recurring moment. There was then also a change in the child’s behavior that actually happened during the exhibition. So, over the course of about a month and a half, the child’s walking improved—or, he actually started walking on his own by the exhibition’s ending. This moment of learning to walk is very short, and the transformation is very rapid.

Rail: That’s an extraordinary moment to be able to point to in your work, and it’s not something you have to invent. It’s something you simply show. Yes, maybe it’s something that is not given the importance that it deserves because it’s such a normal part of life. And so you organize people to do ordinary things as an artwork. And this—I’m going to say—is not inventing something; it’s moving something into view. I’ll mention Good Feelings in Good Times from 2003, where you employed a group of people to stand in a line outside the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne. This is an everyday experience, but it was something that you made happen. A line may be culturally defined, or where the line is geographically would mean something different. And the way people react to a line—they presume, “Oh, interesting, there’s something happening in there.”

Ondak: Yes, indeed. Or it's frustrating because you have to wait. I still well remembered the endless lines from the seventies and eighties in my country, where you basically had to stand in line for anything. In scarcity, people were used to waiting without complaining, because it was just a matter of everyday habit, and that’s why I invented this ambiguous title. “Good feelings in good times” reverses the feeling from the Communist times, where you would say, “good feelings in bad times.” So, good feelings were about the ability to buy something, even if the times were bad.

The absurdity of this artwork remains the same. The lines in the seventies were actually a typical conclusion of the anticipated failure of an autocratic system, because there were not enough goods to buy. And so I’d play this game in my performance with reality and fiction, by stating that my line isn’t real, but it is staged out of memory, and when integrated into the exhibition context, it becomes real again—especially if the audience considers it real to join in. So creating this fictional moment also becomes part of the work, emphasizing that a certain point could be a point of interest or could be a place to follow, but at the same time confusing the audience very lightly to make them question: is this an artwork?

Rail: What you’re describing, our government is doing that—they impose a fiction which people accept as normal, but it’s not. It’s somebody’s idea of how people should behave, or what they should do habitually. So to repeat that in a different context recalls differently what you remember, but you don’t have to describe what it means. You can simply let it happen once it’s organized, and then the viewer or the audience will discover for themselves what’s real and what’s fictional, and how those two categories are not independent but intertwined.

Ondak: I agree, yes. Completely.

Rail: I was thinking about this idea of repetition and changing our context over time—this temporal aspect—and you’ve repeated works in different locations where the shift would be very productive. In It Will All Turn Out Right in the End, the piece you made in London in 2005, you made a scale model of the Tate Modern’s enormous Turbine Hall. And when it was in the Turbine Hall, it became more like a shelter, rather than an overwhelming space. So the viewer felt and would understand the effect of size or scale simply by your intervention of changing this the size of the space experience. But you also showed this piece at the CAC Brétigny in France as a freestanding box. There it can be seen more like a dollhouse. Or, you know, the idea of a child having a scaled environment that they can relate to differently than, again, the overwhelming expanse of the world they actually live in. It’s a simple change that affects the experience profoundly.

Ondak: Yes. If I compare this piece to my performances, they have the same ready-made quality; or, speaking of the formal aspects of this piece, one is more connected to time, the other is more spatial, but its meaning is triggered only when the viewer steps into the interior of the model, so there is some performative aspect there too. But in both respects, you can understand that either the child and mother walking in the gallery or this scaled-down model are very subtle intruders in the space or the given architecture. Whenever you come to an exhibition, the definition of the space you enter has a huge impact on your understanding of the artwork in that context. So when you see a child and a mother who are not professional artists, it is simply a reality—which looks absurd in a gallery—that whatever space they perform in becomes part of the artwork. So also the activity of this little couple affects your understanding of the architecture, because they are freely doing something that they should not be doing. I mean, it’s not forbidden, but it’s unexpected to find someone at MoMA, for example, demonstrating how to teach a child to walk.

The same goes for the model. It was made in scale to almost precisely fit for the room at the Tate Modern. I scaled the model down ten-to-one, so it fit perfectly into the space of that gallery, but the only way to experience it was to approach it from one side. So instead of coming to my exhibition, you entered this huge model, and you kind of happened to be inside it. But my intention was that the work would be exhibited also elsewhere—that the Turbine Hall model could somehow interfere and compete with another white cube space or another museum in which it would be displayed.

Rail: Your exhibition at the Arts Club of Chicago had a piece called Descending the Staircase (2012). This seems like a clear reference to Marcel Duchamp.

Ondak: Yes.

Rail: But it’s not an artwork that simply falls into that tradition, and for that piece you used part of a childhood staircase. So you took some objects from your actual family home to connect real experience within that reference to a famous artwork. Do you feel that—working the way you do with performance, or using ordinary people as performers—there is a strong relationship to Duchamp’s conception of the found object? I mean, with very different ends, obviously for yourself, but the notion of taking something from the environment and saying, “This can be an artwork simply because I point to it, or I place it somewhere else”—was this something that came to you from looking at that art historical perspective? Or did you come to it independently through the experience of wanting to have your art address and be part of the place where you are living?

Ondak: That’s a very interesting question. I think it’s both. When I talk about objects or references, I try to point out that they are mostly objects that have some trace of my personal history. It is either in my parents’ house, or in the house where I live now, or where my studios are or were, which are located mostly in former industrial buildings. I try to understand the trace that is embedded in the content of the place.

In a sense, this railing was something that was easy to overlook. It was in my parents’ house. But there was a special moment in my childhood when I fell from the first floor, because the house was still under construction, and this railing had not yet been installed. It was 1968, and of course, no one would ever connect my leap with the political or historical circumstances of that turbulent year, but when I was making these two sculptures—Descending the Staircase, and the other called Leap (2012)—I did think of it. I was thinking of Duchamp, and also of Yves Klein, of his Leap into the Void (1960), and also basically how well my childish, accidental leap into the void turned out.

Rail: So these objects that you use, they are not neutral. They’re not simply props for human beings. They have some kind of agency, and you’re saying they absorb memory and experience. So if you represent them, it’s not just how they appear. They have a resonance. They can prompt other thoughts. They can be provocative when they’re recontextualized.

Ondak: Yes. This can happen only by their transfer from banal reality to the context of an exhibition, and we can read them differently, even with a provocative ending. I sometimes intervene with minimal gestures, or I reduce their forms to fragments.

Rail: In your work, there frequently seem to be inversions or mirroring or reflections, both materially and as objects of thought that are prompted by misrecognition, maybe because of the fragmentary nature or the change of context. The curator Igor Zabel has described your work as “situations.” I think he said they were symmetries to point to this doubling, but you didn’t like the symmetry idea. Is that right?

Ondak: I agree with the situation and the symmetry and I know what he was trying to emphasize. I'm interested, among other things, in the doubling or repetition of physical objects or the multiplication of them—but not multiplication in the sense of addition—but the multiplication of something that ultimately never remains the same. So it's never symmetrical, but it gives you a kind of time reference without actually recording time.

I combine objects and sources in such a way that when you see the result, you think about what role the objects had before, and what process transformed them. But if this is multiplied in their very repetition, you imagine a time shift between one and the other. It creates a history between them—like the first could have existed yesterday and the second only today, or the other could only be here tomorrow or at some point in the future. This interests me: destabilizing the solid grounding of the object, so that it cannot be assigned to anything with certainty. It is something that can disappear, which is also one of my interests; or the artwork is shown and then it either has to be recreated or started from scratch—like some of my other performances that are coated by paint after the exhibition is over.

Rail: We tend to take a lot for granted, socially and in terms of identity—or what we call “the self”—but this is very fluid and co-produced between people, and the fixity that is designated for these categories is often misleading. It can mislead politically or socially. But through our works, this relationship can be seen or felt or experienced, and it’s not that this can’t be done by purely rational explanation, because the exchanges are difficult to grasp.

There was something Sigmund Freud said—this was in 1915—that he believed one person’s unconscious can act on another person’s unconscious without it passing through consciousness. It happens in a way we’re essentially unaware of, and I think your work addresses this. I mean, this is a very important aspect of being human in society and reflecting on, “Wat, or who, am I? What am I doing? Who’s this other person?” But it’s through what we’re calling “art” that this can be revealed or made important, but without an explanation. It’s a kind of poetic realization of these facts.

Ondak: I agree. My works make links between the people who are depicted in them, or present through their creative input, with their roles in society and also with the objects that surround us. And that is what I want to express in my art, in a sense.