Eugen Brikcius / Unloaded Artists or Kunsthistorical Fairy Tales
Those who listen to introductions at openings or read art-scientific treatises on the works, paintings and sculptures on display are often somewhat confused by what they hear or read in relation to what they see: the expert is trying to communicate something about something, in language about something beyond the self, he is forced to turn to linguistic gestures from various discourses of science, from philosophical theorems, just emerging, often abstractly placing one clichéd word next to another. And the result? An almost perfect redundancy of content. The art historian unwittingly comes close to another kind of fairy tale, - for what is a fairy tale? A form of verbal messages that approaches the ultimate redundancy, says the famous English socio-linguist Basil Bernstein.
The second exegete, in order to pronounce the unspeakable, resorts to depicting the "poetic moods" that the objects "evoke" in him, and thus the art historical discourse finds itself again, from another side, on the borderline of the already mentioned fairy tale form, this time, however, in that diminished sense of a fairy tale that would "give the spectator a living touch of beauty", as we could hear from an artist from Karlín.
In his art historical texts, the "rough mystifier" (Respekt) Eugen Brikcius does not resort to these evasive detours of the failed art-science discourse. Driven by the desire to free his interpretations from the ballast of "scientific claims", which end up in the aforementioned redundancy of content, and anyway end up in lyrical entanglements on the other side, he calls things by their proper name: art historical fairy tales.
(...) And if you ask to what extent the truth can be found in Brikcius' "art historical fairy tales", then it has long been known that the "truth" of the fairy tale is the truth of our imagination and not of sober causality. There is nothing "truer" to a child than what he wishes for, Tolkien wrote. After all, what is truth? A moving army of metaphors, metonymies and anthropomorphisms, as Friedrich Nietzsche knew.
Ivan Dubský, March 1991, excerpt from the preface
Exhibitions
Publications
- A conversation between Magor and Brikcius in the pub U Lojzy
- Eugen Brikcius / Sundial, photo Helena Wilson
- Eugen Brikcius / Unloaded Artists or Kunsthistorical Fairy Tales
- Open letter from Eugen Brikcius to lawyer Ortová
Films
- Pupating and Sundials
- Nepředmětně holka mysli!
- Nepředmětně holka mysli! (Sous-titres en français)
- Pilgrimage to Brandýs and Dining
- La fille pensant d’une manière nonfigurative
