Between the Last Supper and Breakfast in the Grass. 1992, performance on the Děčín Sněžník, 5 min, dishes, Vaseline, blue paint, water…
Between the Last Supper and Breakfast in the Grass. 1992, performance on the Děčín Sněžník, 5 min, dishes, Vaseline, blue paint, water…
You are now watching the video performance Between the Last Supper and Breakfast in the Grass (1992, 7 min), which is based on the artist’s understanding of the surrounding world as a strange toxic wilderness, a post-utopian landscape where natural processes intermingle with industrial chemical ones. Cernicky was aware of the limited scope of ecological activism, and rather than critical distance, he was interested in showing the processes taking place in the landscape of the time on his own body and on the human body more generally, as a kind of magical transformation of the pre-industrial into the industrial or directly post-industrial man. This great iconographic straddling between dinner and breakfast also points to the issue of time, when something ends and something else begins. It also captures the psychophysical processes taking place within the individual, which are connected to cosmic processes. The author likes to talk about the cosmic ethos. A feast on a frozen pond is reminiscent of a pagan festival. The artist has 20 kg of fat on his hands, stuffed into the shape of a keel or a paddle, again a kind of extension of the body sensitive to environmental stimuli. In this prosthesis he has a built-in container of blue ink. This, due to the uneasy manipulation of the heavy limb, flows irregularly onto the artist’s back (already here the artist is also exploring the medium of painting, which is formed unconsciously without the artist knowing where it originates). This Ovidian scene is more distant from the galleries than some of the examples he recalls (Josef Beuys, Yves Klein), yet it was deliberately recorded by the camera. Paradoxically, however, it was not exhibited.
