When I was about fifteen years old, I was trying to find my way as an artist. The problem was that I had to fulfill the assumptions of the educational system\u2014what they expected from a maturing artist was loyalty\u2014and, in a way, lie to myself, which I didn\u2019t want to and didn\u2019t have to apply, because I didn\u2019t have high ambitions at the time, 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\u2014and certainly not because of sentiment\u2014but because, as you perfectly stated: children are relatively unformed. They are the same everywhere. So basically, it\u2019s like a human being who has a pure, primal vision of the world\u2014strong desires, etc. So there\u2019s undoubtedly a reference to my memories of this period, when I was growing up in an Orwellian society.<\/p>\n
Rail:<\/strong> That\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n Ondak: <\/strong>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\u2019s support to take his first steps. And I liked this image, especially as a moment of delegating the potential of walking to someone else\u2014from an adult to a child. So then I ended up making a performance out of it, which seemed absurd, because you can\u2019t ask a child who can\u2019t 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\u2014both in everyday life and in the gallery.<\/p>\n For its execution at the gallery, it\u2019s crucial that it repeats on a daily basis. It wasn\u2019t a one-time event, but it became a recurring moment. There was then also a change in the child\u2019s behavior that actually happened during the exhibition. So, over the course of about a month and a half, the child\u2019s walking improved\u2014or, he actually started walking on his own by the exhibition\u2019s ending. This moment of learning to walk is very short, and the transformation is very rapid.<\/p>\n Rail:<\/strong> That\u2019s an extraordinary moment to be able to point to in your work, and it\u2019s not something you have to invent. It\u2019s something you simply show. Yes, maybe it\u2019s something that is not given the importance that it deserves because it\u2019s such a normal part of life. And so you organize people to do ordinary things as an artwork. And this\u2014I\u2019m going to say\u2014is not inventing something; it\u2019s moving something into view. I\u2019ll mention Good Feelings in Good Times from 2003, where you employed a group of people to stand in a line outside the K\u00f6lnischer 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\u2014they presume, \u201cOh, interesting, there\u2019s something happening in there.\u201d<\/p>\n Ondak<\/strong>: Yes, indeed. Or it\u2019s frustrating because you have to wait. That was the sense of the title. But the title referred to my memories of the endless lines from the seventies 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\u2019s why I invented this ambiguous title. \u201cGood feelings in good times\u201d reverses the feeling from the Communist times, where you would say, \u201cgood feelings in bad times.\u201d So, good feelings were about the ability to buy something, even if the times were bad.<\/p>\n 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\u2019d play this game in my performance with reality and fiction, by stating that my line isn\u2019t real, but it is staged out of memory, and when integrated into the exhibition context, it becomes real again\u2014especially 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?<\/p>\n Rail:<\/strong> What you\u2019re describing, our government is doing that\u2014they impose a fiction which people accept as normal, but it\u2019s not. It\u2019s somebody\u2019s 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\u2019t have to describe what it means. You can simply let it happen once it\u2019s organized, and then the viewer or the audience will discover for themselves what\u2019s real and what\u2019s fictional, and how those two categories are not independent but intertwined.<\/p>\n Ondak: <\/strong>I agree, yes. Completely.<\/p>\n Rail:<\/strong> I was thinking about this idea of repetition and changing our context over time\u2014this temporal aspect\u2014and you\u2019ve 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\u2019s 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 Br\u00e9tigny 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\u2019s a simple change that affects the experience profoundly.<\/p>\n Ondak: <\/strong>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\u2014which looks absurd in a gallery\u2014that 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\u2019s not forbidden, but it\u2019s unexpected to find someone at MoMA, for example, demonstrating how to teach a child to walk.<\/p>\n 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\u2014that the Turbine Hall model could somehow interfere and compete with another white cube space or another museum in which it would be displayed.<\/p>\n Rail:<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n Ondak: <\/strong>Yes.<\/p>\n Rail:<\/strong> But it\u2019s 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\u2014working the way you do with performance, or using ordinary people as performers\u2014there is a strong relationship to Duchamp\u2019s 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, \u201cThis can be an artwork simply because I point to it, or I place it somewhere else\u201d\u2014was 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?<\/p>\n Ondak: <\/strong>That\u2019s a very interesting question. I think it\u2019s 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\u2019 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.<\/p>\n In a sense, this railing was something that was easy to overlook. It was in my parents\u2019 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\u2014Descending the Staircase, and the other called Leap (2012)\u2014I 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.<\/p>\n Rail:<\/strong> So these objects that you use, they are not neutral. They\u2019re not simply props for human beings. They have some kind of agency, and you\u2019re saying they absorb memory and experience. So if you represent them, it\u2019s not just how they appear. They have a resonance. They can prompt other thoughts. They can be provocative when they\u2019re recontextualized.<\/p>\n Ondak: <\/strong>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.<\/p>\n Rail:<\/strong> 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 \u201csituations.\u201d I think he said they were symmetries to point to this doubling, but you didn\u2019t like the symmetry idea. Is that right?<\/p>\n Ondak: <\/strong>I can agree with both situation and symmetry, but I know what he tried to emphasize. But by doubling or repeating physical objects or multiplying\u2014not multiplying in the sense of increasing\u2014but multiplying of something that is never the same. So it\u2019s never symmetrical, but it gives you this time-based reference without actually recording time.<\/p>\n I try to 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\u2014like 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\u2014like some of my other performances that are coated by paint after the exhibition is over.<\/p>\n Rail:<\/strong> We tend to take a lot for granted, socially and in terms of identity\u2014or what we call \u201cthe self\u201d\u2014but 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\u2019s not that this can\u2019t be done by purely rational explanation, because the exchanges are difficult to grasp.<\/p>\n There was something Sigmund Freud said\u2014this was in 1915\u2014that he believed one person\u2019s unconscious can act on another person\u2019s unconscious without it passing through consciousness. It happens in a way we\u2019re 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, \u201cWat, or who, am I? What am I doing? Who\u2019s this other person?\u201d But it\u2019s through what we\u2019re calling \u201cart\u201d that this can be revealed or made important, but without an explanation. It\u2019s a kind of poetic realization of these facts.<\/p>\n Ondak: <\/strong>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 try to express in my art, in a sense.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When I was about fifteen years old, I was trying to find my way as an artist. 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