SLÁVA SOBOTOVIČOVÁ - Just shorten it!

An ideal article about Slava Sobotovičová would take the shape of a radically edited work of Dostoevsky, but we’ll deal with that some other time.

E. J.: How should I address you in this article? Sláva Sobotovičova? Sláva S., S.S. or perhaps just S.?
S. S.: Just shorten it. I have a long name.

S. does not build upon or follow any set form of art or artistic tradition. Her works fall outside both the modern and post-modern extended traditions. She does not use aesthetic or conceptual stereotypes. She seeks out perhaps strange, analogical approaches to life as a process. She only uses reactions to folklore, rituals and symbols from tradition. But this is not a systematic, rustic perversion. Without prejudice, S. takes that which the current subject offers, based on her own subconscious connections. She is interested in organic processes such as fermentation, proofing, and also in similar social processes that draw people together such as certain rituals, and standard folklore from both common and high society. Her motivation is not documentation.
She does not map the past. But, rather, she is interested in all elements that connect together all free phases of time and relate to survival. Her models come from the common living environment and other things associated with everyday life and man as he passes through it: things such as bread still in its living dough form, and wine where fermentation is omnipresent (Christian symbolism?). It is there, but not in a silly way. S. lets these things alone in nature, she does not try to change their form. She cannot help herself. She works with symbols and is employed without worry by the serious problems in song and the variations of fermentation. She works with what she has at hand. She does not wish to be careful. With an air of certainty, she does what must be done. And thus she often forcedly comes into contact with rather sensitive issues such as nationalism, Christian and family rites, or feminism. She does not work with these issues conceptually, but at the same time she does not avoid them.

E. J.: Or is it not so? You actually said that certain meanings become attached to your work accidentally?
S. S.: Yes, I don’t know if it’s accidental or perhaps by some short-circuiting. Short circuits are preceded by an intense rush, not by calm analysis.

NEWS REPORTS (FOOTAGE)
S’s socio-political work does not come about as an instant reaction to a current event. Her series of news videos exhibited in the Jelení Gallery in 2003 delves deeply into the issue of manipulating viewers and without the documentary medium itself. In news reports from around the globe, Reportáž (Report, 2003) with S. acting as a credible clone of Czech TV reporter Petra Flanderková standing in front of the White House, she offers her allegory for the Iraq Conflict in simple repetitive ditties: “The dog ate the blood sausage, but just a little bit, the cook got angry with him, and hit him over the head with a mallet, all dogs cried, they made him a grave, on the marble tombstone stood these words ...” and thus she continued over and over. Her surgical manner reflects upon the basic pitfalls of US anti-Iraq policy and its media massage.
E. J.: Do you engage directly in political art? Did you need to comment on Iraq as a current event?
S. S.: It actually happened almost automatically. It came from a news brief from Petra Flanderková that almost all of us were bombarded with day and night.
Then there are at least two further politically-tinged works: Panslovanská hymna (Pan-Slavic Hymn), which I will discuss later, and Pan Meerovich (Mr. Meerowich) – a police profile photo ID of a consul, who gained his “criminal” character based on the artist’s redefinition of his own personal fate (he was imprisoned for taking bribes). Originally, Ms. Meerowich commissioned the photo-triptych as a reference image for drawing her husband's head during the private lessons at Sláva Sobotovičová’s place. The private aim of this object acquired a political element. These character transitions, and mainly these changes of objects’ cores from private to public, are – as I will later explain – a constant topic for S.
But let’s go back to the next “TV video.” It uses heroic special effects for TV broadcasts and news reports on normal human acts. In the Sport (2003) video S. presents a news report on children’s football and recreational tennis matches with top-level sports attributes typical of TV broadcasts— zoom, slow-motion, detailed camera shots, and sports graphic features. The video shows what TV manipulation does to everyday life and shows off how the level of manipulation for given shots contrasts with reality.
The third news video is Koza (Goat 2003) – a concise report, without commentary, taken by a hand-held cam. It shows a goat eating apples. This is a typical example of “no comment” news reporting often used on the Czech commercial TV Nova. The report has its own soundtrack. It is meant to impress the audience with its authenticity. Compared to shots from the ZOO or footage shot during the 2002 floods, the whole visual space stoically focuses on the goat and its libertine indulgence. In one instance it brings to mind a nature documentary, while at the same time being an ironic juxtaposition to classic political news.
E. J.: Is this a reaction to a concrete situation or are you taking advantage of a given opportunity? You most likely have a natural documentary tendency? Or no? For example with the goat. That must have been a coincidence to which you adapted your artistic intent? Or the Angela the Cat (Anděla) and the titmouse, or with Shostakovich (we mention these below)?
S. S.: Well I did have a bit of luck with the goat. I had the camera with me and my filming instinct has always been strong. I didn’t need to add anything. That Angela the Cat became an angel of death also happened by chance. All I did additionally was sing the Ballad of Angel, whose kiss was not soft enough and thus caused a tragedy. In fact the ballad suited the moment almost too well – it is full of basic symbols that one can almost falsely combine with actual situations. Shostakovich: I was spying out the window of my house. I watched as the musicians practiced and I waited for them with my camera.
E. J.: And thereafter the true content is integrated into the film? Perhaps that, in fact, creates the pleasant absence of time between the “said” and “unsaid”. You combine two things together but still leave them a bit of their original character. That’s probably what creates the feeling that the content hasn’t been forced?
S. S.: I don’t have full control. You’re right that I often bring together two complete things or events. But the selection of the songs was always clear, even if at times coincidental.
In the video from the same year, Hudobníci (Musicians, 2003), despite the fact that the footage is not significantly altered, the content has been changed dramatically. A recording of Dmitri Shostakovich's concert makes up the soundtrack for this voyeuristic shot that includes the obligatory zoom. The zoom captures the at-home practice of a string quartet made up of two older men and two young girls. The video footage culminates at the moment when a group member, subject of the zoom shot, finally looks directly into the camera after making several nervous faces. After a few moments of silence, the sound returns without image, indicating the exposure of the filmed subject was not meant to be public. In this regard, the detective, lyrical work ties into the news series. At the same time it is a hybrid footage of one intimate concert and perhaps even an ethically-ironic commentary on the practices of a cameraman or on artistic practice.
E. J.: Do you notice also the relationship to unequal coupling? Could that be considered an implanted fiasco, or were you meant to be discovered as the voyeur?
S. S.: The point was that I was discovered. That I was spying on the coupling of two old men with young girls was just a bonus.
S. is trying to reconstruct common events in an attempt to capture something that functions subconsciously, automatically: something that we do not realize in the process of the event (i.e. a Saturday with the family, a trip). It comes from what she knows well; something that we all know well with variations here and there. Moreover, she is able to find a format even for today’s hard-to-handle and sensitive subject content. These include especially homeland, family, pride, mission, tradition, etc. And what’s more, she even knows how to give these things both mood and emotion. The structure of her work is analogous to musical composition; everything is pronounced curtly and metaphorically. Repetition functions as a mantra, explaining the world from a cyclical perspective. Its social character can serve as a soft form of super-consciousness. The contrasting transfer of certain phenomena from the public to private also plays an important role. The same applies to its effect in both worlds. For example, as concerns Shostakovich, this is an intimate view of a concert as seen through a window accompanied by an official recording of the concert. With Hymny nenaplněné lásky (Hymns of Unrequited Love), there is a contrast between commercialized music and folk songs. With 3 Popelky (3 Cinderellas) there is a contrast between the public fairy-tale feature film and the family life of the Sobotovičs. As concerns Zelený veltlín (White Wine) industrially-produced wine for an exhibit opening was replaced by private wine. In the case of the experiments with dough, this relates to the transfiguration of dough as a symbol of family contentedness from the kitchen to the street, where its life becomes threatened by civilization.

DOUGH
S. loves to experiment with dough. One piece of dough, thanks to its leavening, engulfed an office wastebasket at the Gross Domestic Product exhibition in the City Prague Art Gallery (GHMP). Elsewhere, she allows cars to run over small loaves of dough, perhaps in the hope that yeasts are an organism of the future and can survive anything. But it’s more likely that this is a close physical analogy between warm rising bread and a live growing body. S. tried her biggest dough experiment at a road-side parking stop. It was one meter in diameter. A big object, a big life, a big death. Perhaps this is why no one wanted to run over it – or rather no one wanted to damage their car by it. It’s a laboratory of sorts, where yeasts, which most likely don´t feel any pain, become white mice that test drivers’ sensitivity. Dough, that’s been run over, implants motifs of guilt into tire treads. It’s an illustrative demonstration, similar to children’s games, but it’s not so much about the characters as the plot. Dough takes on the role of a new defenseless being that is taken from the kitchen to the street. Or it’s taken to the office as a precious heirloom demonstrative of family intimacy in a public or work space. This same dough in a civilizational context can become a symbol of dangerous expansion or organic comfort, which in one instance is watched and in another demonstratively destroyed. The experiment as such is very important for S.’s creation. It opens up the question of abuse and manipulation.
E. J.: So in fact the dough grows and gives the event or record a time-development or CV-like aspect: a real life and a real death. Is it true that the leavening actually allows you to watch a process and at the same time encounter a tangible result (existential evidence) at the end?
S. S.: Leavening or fermentation processes fascinate me. They are primitive and nourishing. My father is a wine-maker. From my mother I learned to knead dough. But here again we begin talking about holy symbols: wine and bread. These things have been part of my everyday life since childhood. You have to accept that I can’t help being a little pathetic.
E. J.: No, I don’t think that at all. Truly obsessive ideas – and what’s more omnipresent ones – on the contrary fascinate me. Can we reveal the secret of unfinished dough – the doughnut on the Prague wander (journey)?
S. S.: The loaf leavened for an hour on the car’s roof during the ride. We filmed it (from the front and from the side) with two cameras attached to the car. The drive began in front of our Karlín studios. We traveled through Prague, through a tunnel, along the waterfront, Podbaba, Suchdol, surrounding fields, returned to Prague, and finished our trip in front of Café Slavia. It was a sunny, summer day. The loaf rose during the hour to twice its original size. It is also important that I mention that the car was legendary, a blue L T (I promised to Krištof Kintera to mention it ).
Dough can represent, on one hand, a basic material of life, but it can also portray an uncontrollable being. The independent leavening movement can be found in other works by S. For example, in fermented urine used for watering flowers, in popping open champagne, in documentaries on wine, etc. This all ties dough to other areas of interest. S. does this with musical videos and folk creations, for which growth, bread and wine are important symbols of life. And while the dough and certain attributes of bourgeois culture in the videos refer to the physical work, the songs take on a shaman-like dimension. The exhibit, Zelený veltlín (2003), shown in 2004 at Preproduction in Berlin and in the Display Gallery, could serve as a bridge between these two worlds. The video showed a documentary on how Mr. Sobotovič made wine. During the exhibit opening, instead of the obligatory drink selection, they indeed served Zelený Veltlín wine made by Mr. Sobotovič. At the end of the documentary, Mr. Sobotovič toasted the opening, giving the film a presence and relevance – the prosaic mystery of transforming art into wine.

MUSICAL VIDEOS
It is a relatively surprising intention to take on song as the basis of your artistic language and implant it briefly into actual situations.
E. J.: When and how was your first musical video created? Or when did the idea come about?
S. S.: Another short-circuit. I incorporated my old poem into a Slovak hymn. This amused me. So I made my sisters practice this song. They dressed up in our national colors and sang the song in my father’s wine cellar. I don’t want to give the impression that I don’t stand behind these symbols and their meaning. But then again: they were right there in front of me, I didn’t have to make up anything. The buxom young women are my sisters. The wine cellar is behind our house. And we sing all the time.
Hymna nenaplněné lásky (Hymns of Unrequited Love, 1999) relates both to the history of song (it reminds us that many official compositions borrow from folklore) and well as to the political situation surrounding the dissolution of the Czechoslovak Federation. S. gave the Slovak hymn, as performed by the Sobotovič´s Sisters Trio, the form of a love song. A hymn is in its essence a mantra, but even after institutionalization, the folk element still lives on. The video element displays, in the tradition of videos for folk songs, a songstress in a vineyard.

E. J.: Do you use this cute kitschiness as a factor for rendering the upgrade to be ironic?
S. S.: This was not the result of some sort of rational calculation. I have an intimate relationship to kitsch, and irony is the only bearable state of being for me.
The following year the musical video, 3 Popelky (3 Cinderellas) appeared (it comes from the Czech fairy-tale film icon and also possibly from the 1980s TV show “Zpívá celá rodina” – „The Whole Family Sings“). It just had to come into being eventually. The image of the Sobotovič “Three Sisters” cannot be opposed endlessly. Even here you can make use of the transformational principle of intertwining two environments – fairy-tales and dreams with reality in its cliché form. Film needs the nourishing living room culture in order to live. And the living room has to be full of dreams of fulfilled wishes. In as much as this image and sound collage can be critical, it must also be human and nostalgic to a similar extent. At the end of the film, it is only Sláva’s singing overdubbed upon the final scene of the fairy-tale. At the very end both sound tracks move back into the Sobotovič’s living room.
Balada o Anděle a ptákovi (The Ballad of Angela and the Bird, 2002), whose motif is death because of passion (both for the hunt and for love) is a further application of a folk song to a concrete event. The video unfolds in three storylines, where Angela the Cat follows a titmouse. In the second scene the bird is dead. A funeral follows. The caught camera with a flagging belt in the shot renders the ballad homemade. The cynical final shot of the table with a chicken ready for baking makes an allegedly unwanted point. “Give me a kiss, my little angel. Such is that, which the nightingale does not hear ...”
E. J.: You attend concerts, you listen to good music, you collect different versions of the same songs. Do you listen to folk music or do you know everything “since childhood”?
S. S.: I don’t listen to folk music. Whatever I have used I remember from childhood, from my parents – my mother was always singing at home. During my teenage years, and for other short periods, I was perhaps more interested in folklore, but not in a programmatic sense.
E. J.: Do you want to talk about Pastýři (Shepherds, 2007) or not, given that it has not yet been exhibited?
S. S.: It was shown at an exhibit in the NoD Gallery in January 2007; an event conceived by Eva Koťátková. It was called Na názvu jsme se nedohodli (We haven’t yet agreed on the title) and the theme was text.
E. J.: An ordinary situation (the Sobotovičs family is traveling somewhere by car and singing carols) is prompted somewhat like a sacrament message that the carolers are taking to preach. But it also has a sort of comical dimension, a sort of sinfully Dänniken-esque missionary element in that given moment. So then it’s more or less irrelevant whether it’s sci-fi, comics or Christianity, right?
S. S.: Yes, it is more or less irrelevant. The situation came about haphazardly – we were fighting over how the song should be properly sung. The scene spoke to me, and so I decided to re-enact it with a camera.
E. J.: Let’s move to Den poté (The Day After, 2005). Wasn’t this originally called Saturday? Why is it no longer Saturday?
S. S.: “The Day After” is supposed to underscore that fact that beforehand something irreversible happened. Saturday also indicates a wedding, and at the same time, is the title of a song that my sisters sing. It’s a man’s lament about the fact that the woman he loves has been kidnapped by Turks because of her beauty. Horror of situations that cannot be reversed is a very common motif in songs. It related to my fear from my sister getting married. The most important thing is that they are singing a heart-wrenching ballad, while at the same time carrying out routine housework.
E. J.: And is it the reconstruction of the day after a wedding?
S. S.: It’s not a reconstruction. In fact, it’s the day after my little sister’s wedding. My sisters are still full of song, they are packing up food from the wedding, one of them is checking out her dress shoes all worn out from dancing. The only way I manipulated the situation was by allowing them to know that I was filming, and I purposefully asked that they sing that song.

The video uses a split-screen shot, where one of the cameras is static and the other follows the Sobotovič sisters in the kitchen. Perception of the work in the kitchen is changed even for us, thanks to the atmosphere created by the mantra-like singing. Later men enter the scene, the mood changes a little, various matters are sorted out, the song falls apart. But there is no feminist intent behind the footage. Rather the film makes us reflect upon how exaggerated attempts to interpret art fail in today’s society. Art is not an amoeba that can encompass and absorb just anything. A similar situation occurs in the video – the event record Šampaňské (Champagne 2005), where Patricie Fexová shoots, from one side of the video image, a number of corks into Vasil Artamanov on the other side of the film image. It’s true that a bottle in a woman’s hands must appear phallic. However, despite this, perception of their mutual activities from a militant-feminist angle is dubious at best: this mainly thanks to the abandon and absence of emotion that characterizes both sexes. Here we have come much closer to the work of the Abramović / Ulay duo.
E. J.: In addition to sound-tracked videos you also make purely audio-projects. One of the most impressive is Panslovanská hymna (Pan-Slavic Hymn), which you sing with Laibach. The way you articulate “thunder and hell!” with such beautiful decisiveness, has that ever been presented anywhere?
S. S.: It was also shown at the exhibit „We haven’t yet agreed on the title“ in the NoD Gallery. I am a very passive exhibitor in the sense that „I don’t think up a concept, but rather I just lend material.“ But in this case, I did help develop the concept, and I was very happy with and still today am happy with the exhibit.
E. J.: And then you sang the song in Slovak. And Lenka Vítková sang the Czech version at some event in NoD? And with Petra Herotová (Croatian) this year at Eskort?
S. S.: Yes, I did sing together with Lenka at the opening of the exhibit in the NoD Gallery. I first sang with Petra at the opening of her exhibit at Eskort. Petra works with themes such as homeland, pride, land, belonging, based on her experience with family relationships in the context of the Czech Diaspora to Croatia (in places other than in such preserved conditions, these questions are unthinkable). I once did an interview with Petra. I was interested in how she dealt with those same tricky starting points that I once experienced. Panslovanská hymna (Pan-Slavic Hymn) fit Petra´s theme very well: she sang it in Croatian and I in Czech. I still perceive this song with a dangerous (nasty) connotation. Everywhere that I’ve heard it, it was sung for the most part in secret, provocatively, in situations expressing opposition, nationalism and even ultimately nostalgia for clerical fascism.
E. J.: Do you exhibit often in Slovakia? Is the number of exhibits proportionately similar?
S. S.: I rarely exhibit in Slovakia. With the exception of family visits, I rarely travel to Slovakia. I don’t travel much and I’m not suited for long-distance communications.
S. was born on 9 March 1973 in Nitra. Between 1991-1995 she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design (VŠVU) in Bratislava. She completed her studies in 1998 at the Academy of Fine Arts (AVU) in Prague (studying under professors Miloš Šejn and Milan Knížák). She lives in Prague, where she edits documentary videos for the Scientific Research Facility of the Prague Academy of Fine Arts. Until this year she worked with the Czech-Slovak version of the magazine, Flash Art, and also helped the Prague Biennale Foundation. She gives private drawing and painting lessons to adults. Sláva Sobotovič has a joint studio with Patricie Fexová (the two sometimes work together as a creative team) in Karlín. Patricie Fexová has a beautiful large-format photo of a piano in her living room, a picture given to her by Sláva Sobotovičová.

E. J.: Did you ever play the piano?
S. S.: They signed me up for lessons, but I ended up playing the violin. I gave that up after only a short while. My sister played on that piano there.

01.04.2007