07.08.2008 00:00:00 - 31.08.2008
Eropark Notes I.
Eropark = an extensive landscape formation, an English nature park, into which human eroticism is added as another natural element.
I walk through a wonderful park with impressive grown up trees, refined openings into the landscape, beautiful natural corners and I get more and more overwhelmed. I marvel at the proud and mysterious beauty of the nature, I feel excited at the meeting of a strength which goes beyond me. The bedazzlement by the landscape is a humble and asking encounter with the mystery of creation.
If I was making an erotic park, I would try to re-turn this excitement of the mystery back towards the perceptor. By placing, by careful installment of sculptures or objects or garden artworks with the topic of human sexuality, I could enhance the sensation of excitement. I would invoke a trickle of sexual, human, personal excitement in the stream of the general, all-embracing excitation. One just like the other, the chemical content of the aesthetic or sexual excitement or even the excitement from watching a horror movie – they are all the same. The trickle, the memory, the reminder of the sexual excitement slowly colours the whole stream of the experiences from the park. The pilgrim watches the monumental beauty of huge trees and at the same time he feels the growing intensity of sexuality. The natural strength in man starts communicating with the mysterious potency of the products of nature, one can feel that the things to worship, to take your breath away, are suddenly inside of him. He also is the nature with the mysterious, not possibly controllable happening. The feeling of bedazzlement from the nature we turn back towards ourselves in the Eropark, we don’t wonder at the mystery of something outside but excitedly worship ourselves and our natural reactions.
Eropark is a very hard task. So far I have strayed into several dead ends. What we really don’t need to develop in here is voyeurism. Or joke. To walk through a garden and laugh at funnily installed phallic objects and sculptures of figures having sex is not the desirable experience. Just one or two, a few really impressive objects which bring such a strong excitement that the visitor might be able to climax only at the sight of a beautifully formed flower.
We can’t stop sexual intercourses from happening in the park. To eliminate this would mean to make the park a place of suffering and of unwanted voyeurism. We should try to reach a certain element of activity in the objects, they could - to certain extent – be used as sexual requisites, in totally new measures, means and materials.
I am in a phase of evolving the image of Fountain and I also have sketches of the object of Bestrider. The Fountain is actually a stone sex doll. To imagine that the visitors would fill the tank with their sperm which will go out of the sculpture’s mouth is unhygienic and it also doesn’t correspond with the anatomy of the female body, but the woman from the Fountain fulfills the form of the multisensual allegorical sculpture with a function element.
Lenka Klodová, Sluhy, July 31, 2008
Since 1999, Lenka Klodová has been investigating the theme of women through the sensitive material of the pornography industry. Fascinating are the variety of ideas anchored in that one theme, the simplicity of the material, and constant invention in the field of method. Lenka devotes herself with the same seriousness to sculptural work as to paper-cutting; her works range from monumental realizations, like Miluji (I Love, 2001) in Neratovice, to flat “sculptures” made out of cardboard dressed up in tailored clothes, but there are also samizdat mystifications and body performances. All these methods of creation mingle with and complement each other. The work with porno-magazines is developed further in the samizdat magazines, Bříza (Birches, 2000) and Komíny (Chimneys, 2001). The new magazine Krásné holky v akci (Beautiful Girls in Action, 2004) complements the Miluji installation by rendering it ironic; it is a photo-essay in which Lenka and her friends, Helenka and Lucie, work on this sculpture while dressed as prostitutes. Wearing high heels and workers’ goggles they hammer wedges into monumental stone blocks, move them with a crane and grind at them with a hand grinder. It was as if they were constructing an advertisement for their erotic service. That adds another slightly ticklish dimension to the multivalent outcry “I love,” and the photo-documentation shifts the realization of a sophisticated art work to the level of a student prank. This is not the first time that such self-irony, something that seems to undermine artwork’s seriousness, appears in Lenka’s work.
From text by Pavlína Morganová, When Everybody finally Somehow Fell Asleep… (Klodova’s “black book” Pregnant Songs)
