Konfrontácia (Antihappening)
/2
- Confrontation (Antihappening)
- Konfrontácia (Antihappening)
- 1968
- green stamp on paper
- 11,5 x 16,1 cm
In 1965, Július Koller introduced his “Anti-happening” series and soon turned it into a permanent process of demystifying the institution of socialist culture. His dialectical language games, which he distributed as notices—text cards with stamped letters—were disseminated via the mail. In the 1970s, postal communication replaced the gallery space and effectively reached a wide spectrum of addressees worldwide. The use of anagrams and conceptual garblings makes room for the linguistic expression of notions from popular culture and the science-fiction sphere. The games, involving verbal mechanisms of denial and identification, make use of a tautological shift of positional demarcation and self-identification. Dialectical linguistic operations confront the field of subjective activities with the field of objective and real facts. Koller created these in the spirit of dialectical materialism to debunk the false consciousness and to demystify the social hypocrisy of socialist Czechoslovakia. D.G.