• Gellage

  Gellage

  Since the end of 1989, Michal Macku has used his own creative technique which he has named "Gellage" (the ligature of collage and gelatin).

  The technique consists of transfer the exposed and fixed photographic emulsion from its original base on paper. This transparent and plastic gelatin substance makes it possible to reshape and reform the original images, changing their relationships and endowing them with new meanings during the transfer. The finished work gives a compact image with a fine surface structure. Created on photographic quality paper, each Gellage is a highly durable print eminently suited for collecting and exhibiting.

  The laborious technology, which often includes the use of more than one negative per image, makes it impossible to produce absolutely identical prints: Each Gellage is an original work of art. The artist does make at least 12 signed and numbered prints of each image.

  Michal Macku talks about his work: "I use the nude human body (mostly my own) in my pictures. Through the photographic process [of Gellage], this concrete human body is compelled to meet with abstract surroundings and distortions. This connection is most exciting for me and helps me to find new levels of humanness in the resulting work.
  I am always seeking new means of expression and, step by step, I am discovering almost unlimited possibilities through my work with loosened gelatin. Photographic pictures mean specific touch with concrete reality for me, one captured level of real time. The technique of Gellage which I am using helps me to take one of these "time sheets" and release a figure, a human body, from it, causing it to depend on time again. Its charm is similar to that of cartoon animation, but it is not a trick. It is very important for me to be aware of the history of a picture and to have a sense of direct contact with its reality. My work places "body pictures" in new situations, new contexts, new realities, causing their "authentic" reality to become relative. I am interested in questions of moral and inner freedom. I do what I feel, and only then do I begin to meditate on what the result is. I am often surprised by the new connections I find in it. Naturally, I start out with a concrete intention, but the result is often very different. And there, I believe, lies a hitch. One creates to communicate what can not be expressed in any other way. Then comes the need to describe, to define."

• Carbon Printing

  Carbon Prints

  Since 2000 Macku uses also other historical photographic techniques in combination with the technique GELLAGE. After experiments with heliogravure, platinum and kallitype he mastered technique of carbon printing. He was provided for working with original negatives of a real master of this technique and one of the legend of Czech photography - worldwide well known photographer Frantisek Drtikol.

  The carbon prints are sized approx. 35x30 cm (14x12''), on a top quality graphic watermark paper, stamped and signed and the edition of each motif is limited to 24 numbered copies.

  About the CARBON technique
  Text from book called: The Book of Carbon and Carbro: Contemporary Procedures for Monochrome Pigment Printmaking. For more information contact author: Sandy King

  In versatility and range of possibilities, carbon is a superb process. It is capable of presenting images with a wide range of image characteristics, of virtually any color or tone, and on a wide variety of surfaces. During the entire period of its history when it co-existed with other commercial processes in the second half of 19th century, carbon was considered the aristocrat of printing processes. Carbon prints were more costly than those produced by other processes, about twice as expensive as platinum and three to five times as much as silver. On the other hand, the technique is very difficult to work. But once mastered, carbon process offers a range of possibilities not available with any other photographic system, and difficult to, if not impossible, to duplicate.

  The carbon process, like all pigment processes depends upon the fact that colloids (gelatin, gum, albumen, casein etc.), when applied to a suitable support, sensitized with a dichromate salt and activated by exposure to light change their physical characteristics in proportion to the intensity of the chemical or light. The process, called tanning or hardening, makes the colloid insoluble in hot water.

  Carbon prints can be made to look virtually indistinguishable from silver prints. Because of their discernible relief, carbon images often have greater apparent sharpness than of silver prints. The archival qualities of carbon prints are superior to those derived from silver salt papers. The stability of carbon is limited only by the gelatin carrier and its paper base, making it the most stable of all photographic processes.

  Commercial Carbon Printing: Please contact Michal Macku for more information about commercial carbon printing for museums, collectors, photographers and artists He uses to work with both vintage and contemporary negatives. There is also available retouching and renovation broken glass negatives and vintage prints.

• Glass Objects

  

  Glass Objects

  Michal Macků combines in this work his gellages technique with large format historic photographic processes and state-of-the-art technology to create the 3D glass photographs-objects, so called glass gellages.
  Show Glass Object in Flash (swf file)

Michal Macku - The 3D Photography (pdf)

Solo exhibitions

• 1990

  Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco
  Kulturní Dům, Bruntál, Czechoslovakia
  Galerie Centrum, Plzeň, Czechoslovakia

• 1991

  Galerie pod podloubím, Olomouc, Czechoslovakia
  Fotografisk Galleri, Copenhagen

• 1992

  Galerie Bílá růže, Prague
  Galerie Caesar, Olomouc, Czechoslovakia
  Galerie Mladých, Brno, Czechoslovakia
  Umělecká průmyslovka, Palisády, Bratislava, Czechoslovakia

• 1993

  Galerie Aura, Olomouc, Czech Republic

• 1994

  Prague House of Photography, Prague
  Galerie Ambrosiana, Brno, Czech Republic

• 1995

  Photogalerie Bild, Aarau, Switzerland

• 1996

  Victor Barsokevitsch-Valokuvakeskus, Kuopio, Finland
  Gallery St.Gervais, Geneva
  Slezské muzeum, Opava, Czech Republic
  Galleri Karneval, Albrunna, Sweden
  Photoforum Feldeg, Zurich
  Photography Gallery, Perth, Australia

• 1998

  Galerie "U Řečických", Prague

• 1999

  In focus Galerie am Dom, Köln, Germany
  Galerie Pennings, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

• 2000

  John Stevenson Gallery, New York

• 2001

  FotoGaleria Teatro San Martin, Buenos Aires
  Estudio Lisenberg, Buenos Aires

• 2002

  Galeria Omar Alonzo, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico

• 2004

  Dylan Thomas Centre, Swansea, UK
  Aberystwyth Art College, Aberystwyth, UK
  John Stevenson Gallery, New York
  In focus Galerie am Dom, Köln, Germany
  J&T Bank, Prague, Czech rep.

• 2005

  Galerie Brno, Brno, Czech rep.
  Gallery "pf", Poznaň, Poland
  Galerie Palais Breuner, Vien, Austria
  Městské divadlo Zlín, Czech rep.
  Státní zámek Třeboň, Czech rep.
  Czech Centre, München, Germany

• 2006

  Galerie Art Affair, Regensburg, Germany
  Photo Event, Turnhout, Belgium
  Ottoman Mint complex, IFSAK, Istanbul, Turkey

• 2007

  Galerie Caesar, Olomouc, Czech rep.
  Galery Na Soljanke, Moscow, Russia
  Bilder vom Menschen, In focus Galerie, Köln, Germany
  Over the photo, Galleria PaciArte contemporanea, Brescia, Italy
  Bielske centrum kultury, Foto Art Festival, Bielsko-Biala, Poland

• 2008

  Galerie David Guiraud, Paris, France
  Sklenene Gelaze, Galerie V Kapli, Bruntal, Czech Republic

• 2009

  Galerie Art-St-Urban, St.Urban, Switzerland
  Wei-Ling gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
  Michal Macku - Glass Photo, Galleria PaciArte contemporanea, Brescia, Italy

• 2011

  Karin Weber Gallery, Hong Kong

• 2012

  Wei-Ling gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

• 2013

  Michal Macků - 3D photography, Paci contemprary, Brescia, Italy
  Michal Macků, Antonin Tesar - Galerie Mona Lisa, Olomouc, Czechia

• 2014

  Michal Macků - Gelages, verres, carbones, Czech Centre in Paris and Galerie David Guiraud, Paris

• 2016

  Michal Macků - Glass objects, Galerie Zet, Velká Bystřice, Czech Republic

• 2018

  Michal Macků - Gellages 1989 - 2005, Fotogalerie Fiducia, Ostrava, Czech Republic

• 2020

  Michal Macků - Glass Sacred Geometries, Wei-Ling Contemporary, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Selected group exhibitions

• 1990

  Tschechoslovakische Fotografie Des Gegenwart, Cologne (traveled to Erlangen, Metz, Lucenburg, Strassbourg, Odense, Freiburg, Barcelona, Texas, Lawrence)

• 1991

  Bilder Lust, Galerie Rhanitzgasse der Landeshauptstadt, Sachsen (traveled to Dresden;Museum Ludwig, Cologne) The Male - Contemporary Male Nude Photographs, Portfolio Gallery, London

• 1992

  What´s New: Prague, The Art Institute of Chicago

• 1993

  Czech Photography of the 1990s - Fotofeis, Maclaurin Art Gallery, Ayr, Scotland

• 1994

  After the Velvet Revolution, 15 Czech & Slovak Photographers: 4 photos each, Photography Gallery, Perth, Australia Revelations, Photographs of Male and Female Nudes, The Gallery at John Jones, London

• 1996

  Institut tvůrčí fotografie 25/5, Slezské zemské muzeum, Opava, Czech Republic
  Jistoty a hledání v české fotografii 90.let (Certainty and Searching in Czech Photography of the 1990s) Nejvyšší purkrabství Pražského hradu (Burgrave´s House of Prague Castle)

• 1997

  The Body in Contemporary Czech Photography, Macintosh Gallery, Glasgow

• 1998

  Sicherheit und Suche in der tschechischen Fotografie der neunziger Jahre, Berlin
  The Body in Contemporary Czech Photography, London

• 1999

  Czech Photography of the 1990s, The Art Institute of Chicago
  Video Virtuale, Foto Fictionale, Museum Ludwig, Koln

• 2000

  Optical Delusions: Jokes, Puns, and Sleights-of-Hand in Photography, The Art Institute of Chicago
  Tre samtida fotografer fran Tjeckien, Replica Theater and Art Center, Stockholm
  Akt v české fotografii (The Nude in Czech Photography), Císařská konírna Pražského hradu (The Imperial Stables at the Prague Castle), Prague

• 2001

  Re-presenting Representation V - Arnot Art Museum, Rockwell Museum of Western Art, New York

• 2003

  Celebration of Light: Photographs from the Collection of Cherye and Jim Pierce, Honolulu Academy of Arts in Honolulu

• 2005

  NEW ART Redefining „The Photograph“ – collage, overpainting, 3-dimensions, and more, John Stevenson Gallery, New York
  Czech Photography of the 20th Century, The City Gallery of Prague, Prague

• 2006

  Noble Processes, in a Digital Age, John Stevenson Gallery, New York
  Autopoesis, Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava, Slovakia

• 2007

  Expressive Bodies: Contemporary Art Photography from The Kinsey Institute, Herron Gallery, Indianopolis, USA

• 2008

  Love – frammenti visivi di un discorso amoroso, Gallerie Civiche d´Arte Contemporanea di Palazzo Ducale, Modena, Italy

• 2009

  Tschechische Fotografie des 20. Jahrhunderts, Kunst und Ausstellungshalle der BRD, Bonn

• 2010

  Darkness for Light - Czech Photography Today, Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo, Japan

• 2014

  Zářivý krystal - Bohumil Kubišta a české umění 1905 - 2013, Galerie Výtrvarného umění v Ostravě, Ostrava, Oct 3rd.2014 - Jan 4th.2015
  Meta-illusioni: il giardino dell´impossibile, Villa di Donato, Napoli, Nov 27th.2014 - Jan 10th.2015

• 2015

  Michal Macku and Angela Glajcar in Karin Weber gallery, Hong Kong, 9.April-10. May 2015
  "Love is..." In Focus Galeria, Koln, Germany, 25.October - 22. December 2015

• 2016

  Michal Macku, Antonit Tesař, Jan Saudek, Galerie STP, Greifswald, Germany

• 2021

  Czech Glass, Quo Vadis!? Exhibition of 10 Czech artists, Giudecca art district, Giudecca Island, Venice, Italy, 3.9.-3.10.2021 (Venice Glass veek)

Collections

Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum for Fotokunst, Odense, Denmark; The Royal Library of Denmark, Copenhagen; Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris; Harvard Visual Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts; The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; Moravská galerie v Brně, Brno, Czech Republic; Muzeum Umění Olomouc, Czech Republic; MOPA - Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, USA; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts, USA; Kinsey Institute, Indianopolis, USA; Collection of Cherye R. and James F. Pierce; Private art collection of Jacqueline Bisset

Represented by galleries

• Galleria Paci contemporary

  Via Borgo Pietro Wuhrer 53, 25123, Brescia, Italia Tel. Fax +39 030 2906352, info@paciarte.com, www.paciarte.com

• GV Art, London

  49 Chiltern Street, London W1U 6LY, England, Tel:+44(0) 20 8408 9800,robert@gvart.co.uk, www.gvart.co.uk

• Galerie, Museum Art-St-Urban

  Modern art advising, Pavillon E, CH-4915 St. Urban, Switzerland.Tel. +41 622121717, info@art-st-urban.com, www.art-st-urban.com

• Wei-Ling Gallery

  No. 8 Jalan Scott, Brickfields, 50470 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Tel.: + 603-22601106/7, e-mail, www.weiling-gallery.com

• In Focus Galerie

  Brüsselerstraße 83 . 50672 Köln , BRD, phone and fax: ++49 221 1300341 , arnold@infocusgalerie.com, www.infocusgalerie.com

• Volakis Gallery

  6730 Washington St, Yountville CA 94599, USA tel: 866-945-1125, 707-945-1125, www.volakisgallery.com

Publications

• Tschechoslovakische Fotografie Des Gegenwart by Vladimír Birgus and Reinhold Misselbeck, Cologne, 1990
• Současná česká a slovenská fotografie, Prague 1991
• Bilder Lust by Ulrich Domrose, Heilderberg 1991
• Encyklopedie českých a slovenských fotografů, Prague 1993
• Graphis Photo, Zurich 1993
• Contemporary Photographers, 3rd edition, St. James Press, Detroit, 1995
• Fully exposed - The Male Nude in Photography by Emanuel Cooper, Routledge, London, 1995
• Jistoty a hledání v české fotografii 90.let - Certainty and Searching in Czech Photography of the 1990s by Vladimír Birgus and Miroslav Vojtechovský, Prague 1996
• Photographers Encyclopedia International - 1839 to the present, Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, 1996
• Photographie des 20.Jahrhundrets, Museum Ludwig Koln, Taschen, 1996
• Katalog, Journal of Photography and Video, winter 1997, Museet for Fotokunst, Odense C. Denmark
• Chimaera, Aktuelle Photokunst aus Mitteleuropa, 1997, Staatliche Galerie Moritzburg Halle, BRD
• Kamera Obskura, No.3, 1998, Moscow
• Česká fotografie 90 let - Czech photography of the 1990s by Vladimír Birgus and Miroslav Vojtechovský, Prague, Chicago 1999
• Fotografie v Českých zemích 1839 - 1999, Vladimír Birgus, Pavel Scheufler, Prague 1999
• The AIPAD Photography Show, 2000 Membership Directory and Illustrated Catalogue, Washington, D.C.
• Akt v ceske fotografii - The Nude in Czech Photography, Vladimir Birgus and Jan Mlcoch ,KANT, Prague 2001
• Re-presenting Representation V, 2001, Arnot Art Museum, NY.
• Strange Genius, 2002, The Journal of Contemporary Photography, Volume V, USA
• Vize, čin, sen, smrt (Vision, Deed, Dream, Death), 2005, Exhibition catalogue, Galerie Brno, CR
• Schwarzweiss 46, Das Magazin für Fotografie, Juni-Juli 2005, Germany
• Black & White Magazine, Issue 79, March 2007, USA
• The Elements of Photography, Angela Faris Belt, Focal Press, USA, 2008
• The Metamorphosis of Macku, Walter Guadagnini, Brescia, Italy, 2013
• Carbon Print Process by Sandy King, with John Lockhard, Hong-Kong, ISBN 978-7-5514-2394-6, 2019

• The Metamorphosis of Macku - text by Walter Guadagnini, 2013

  The Metamorphosis of Macku, text by Walter Guadagnini

  “The corpse which you see here is that of M. Bayard, inventor of the process that has just been shown to you and of which you will soon see the wonderful results. As far as I know this indefatigable experimenter has been occupied for about three years with his discovery. The academy, the king and all those who have seen his images have admired them just as you are admiring them in this moment, however much he may still deem them imperfect.” This is the renowned opening to the letter which accompanied the ‘Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man’ by Hyppolite Bayard, produced on 18th October 1840: the creation of this photograph was to mark photography’s début in the world of artifice, in the construction rather than the reproduction of reality. Ambiguity in the relationships between text and image, tricks in both the shooting and the printing phase, additions and subtractions, technical errors, the overlapping of the medium with other disciplines: over the course of more than one and a half centuries, the history of photography has also been one of cheats, more or less conscientious lies, of inventions and re-inventions of reality. A history of bodies replicated ad infinitum, be they acephalous or with a thousand heads, of phantomatic appearances, impossible equilibria, of oval wheels, of minotaurs, of distortions and glass tears, to name but a few of the photographic icons invented. The reasons behind this betrayal are many and varied, ranging from the claims to artistic value of photography, which date back to soon after the middle of the 19th century, to the pure divertissement of photo amateurs from every walk of life; from the revolutionary desire of the historical avant-garde in the early 20th century to the more verbose needs of politics and propaganda bound up in it. Be as it may, the inside of the camera and the darkroom were for many decades the stage of exceptional alchemy, or in the words of Salvador Dalì, an artist considered something of an expert in the field of cheats and mis-en-scéne, “the Zeiss lens possesses an unexpected potential to surprise.” Now, it’s clear that Michal Macku is part of this tradition and that, indeed, he is currently one of its main exponents. But it’s because this tradition has been the source of so many profoundly diverse positions that it’s important to understand under which of the numerous headings his research may be included, where its roots lie and where its peculiarities come to the fore. For example, it’s clear that the elaboration of an unprecedented technique such as gellage and the use of an obsolete yet highly refined technique such as the carbon print may constitute the starting point for a reading of these works. Macku operates on the edge of photography in terms of a means of mechanical production of data from the outside world; for him, the camera is the tools that triggers the creative process, but it by no means completes it. It is the medium which allows him to objectivise a vision, to make perceptable the ‘having been’ of that body, in that situation. It also makes it possible to capture an action, a gesture or an expression outside of time, yet one which took place in real time; in this sense, his photography responds to that original characteristic of offering traces of the real, which the artist exploits to bind his own narrative to the physical nature of the body. The following intervention, the one that provokes cuts, wounds, disappearances and multiple appearances – in other words, all that which belongs to gellage and the printing process in a figurative sense – leads Macku into the field of the pure invention of imagery, giving up the ghost that originally appeared on the photographic surface. It is as if the artist found himself before a semi-forged image, and which to be made complete must be approached with a different medium: it is no coincindence if the term that the artist uses comes from the fusion of ‘gelatin’ and ‘collage’, for the very sense of his work is indeed set off it in this grey area between the two. In this regard, it is clearly not by chance that Macku works almost exclusively with the human body, that this is his only subject. If his images are examined in rapid succession, the constant reference to the forms of posture, construction and appearance of the figure come to light, dating right back to the origins of sculptural practices. Apart from the evident reference to the kouros of the ancient Greek tradition – together with the notion of totemic verticality of the body and of the idol – explicit references may also be noted to classic statuary elements, be it in the poses (from his ‘Discobolo’ to the ‘Prigioni’ to the ‘Pensatore’), or in some of his iconography which draws on this tradition in terms of visual tradition, in which the absence of a part of the body immediately leads the onlooker’s subconscious back to that specific sphere of classical forms. These choices also explain the use of the technique of gellage as a medium that works by subtraction, which picks out the form from within matter or, on other occasions, shapes it. At the same time this makes Macku’s passage towards his three-dimensional glass objects all the more natural, for they come even closer to sculpture in material terms. Hence, this is photography which lies at a crossroads between different media, yet photography which also lays claim to its own specificity just when it borders on other disciplines, for it is through this medium that Macku may display his own particular attitude towards that body which is not only his primary source of inspiration, but also the main channel by which he narrates the world. In these works, the body may be featured either in singular or plural terms, but it is in any case the absolute protagonist of the scene. The sculpture theme comes to the fore once more here, for Macku’s bodies exist almost always within an abstract space, bereft of specific connotations. In some cases, it is almost possible to see the figures move, float, existing within a space attributable to that of a room, or at any rate a prospective space suggesting some form of reality, however much it may clearly be far from any reference to our everyday experience of familiar spaces. This is an absolute space, within which absolute gestures are carried out, both on behalf of the subjects – which may sometimes even relate to one another – and that of the creator. More frequently, however, the surrounding space is not even hinted at; the bodies stand out against surfaces, the main purpose of which is to serve as a backdrop to the figure, the outright fulcrum of the composition. This attitude shares something with the pictorial, also by virtue of the tonal refinement of these backdrops, which must not come across as neutral, but rather as exempt of spatial elements that might be reminiscent of an external reality. On these surfaces, the body or bodies complete their transfiguration: it is here that the metamorphosis – the fundamental principle underlying Macku’s research – takes place in the pureness of its essentiality. At this point, it seems only natural to refer back to the surrealist experience, with which the Czech artist seems to have more than one thing in common (after all, the history of Czech photography is indelebly marked by a surrealist presence, not so much at the creative level but at the theoretical one; and alongside better known players such as Funke and Štyrský, we might also cite a number of curious portraits by Kašpařík or even a number of city views of Berka, in which the space is rendered unstable by the technique adopted). In fact Rosalind Krauss wrote with regard to Raoul Ubac (whose Pénthésilée series is certainly the most direct reference possible to Macku’s imagery): “Indeed, one of the ways we can generalize the whole of what we have been seeing so far is that a variety of photographic methods has been exploited to produce an image of the invasion of space: of bodies dizzily yielding to the force of gravity, of bodies in the grip of a deforming perspective, of bodies decapitated by the projection of shadow; of bodies eaten away by either heat or light. The use of the usual formulas for explaining surrealist images might lead us to say that this consumption of matter by the spatial ether is a representation of the upturning of reality, achieved in those metapsychic states so much sought after by the poets and painters of the movement: be it called rêverie, ecstasy or dreaming.” Despite the obvious differences in the times and the means of expression, these lines go straight to the heart of Macku’s poetics, highlighting its visionary nature, which is also expressed through specific choices in the presentation of bodies, in the construction of their inner space: one which may indeed be better defined metapsychic than metaphysical. For example, one of the most frequently recurrent compositional strategies in this series is that of presenting the bodies as acephalous, or at any rate with eyes closed, or even with hands placed in front of the face, not so much Gellage No. 115 to hide it but rather to highlight the oneriric nature of the image, reminiscent of the blindness of the poet in the Romantic and symbolist tradition, which in Rimbaud’s voyant encounters both its definitive incarnation and its ultimate impasse. It is no coincidence that despite the use of his own body as a priviledged subject, Macku’s research stands apart from that of artists who – even in certain formal details – might appear close to him, from Arnulf Rainer to Arno Minnkinen. It differs insofar as in the work of these artists, the body is the medium for research into an identity closely bound up with the individual, the artist himself, whereas the Czech artist conceives his own body as the medium for a vision of a symbolic character, one of universal value. Despite their appearance, Macku’s images are never self-portraits: the acknowledgement of his own identity never takes place through the representation of his own body. Even if in some compositions a clear mood comes to the fore, it always ultimately takes on the value of a common human experience, not exclusively individual. In this regard, just as meaningful is the choice to make up the images by joining the subjects – be they whole bodies or fragments – closely to one another, to create spaces that may be exclusionary: the cages that seem to made up of arms, for example or attractive, such as the circles formed by bodies and heads looked upon upwards in order to create a two-fold effect, which defines one of the main characteristics of Macku’s poetics. First of all, this shooting and composition strategy makes it very difficult to identify the individual subject of which repetition provides the overall image, forcing the onlooker to stop and adjust his/her gaze and mind to take in an abnormal sight; secondly, it creates a vortex which draws in that gaze, engendering a restless, disarming situation. From these visions, in which it is the bodies that create the space, we move over almost seamlessly to those photographs in which everything is played out on the surface: where the interlinking, overlapping and juxtaposition of the figures ushers in a great graphic composition, one which may even reach the threshold of abstraction (as may be seen most clearly in some of his images on glass, in which the iron-wire type passage of the line makes it possible to draw parallels with yet another discipline, that of drawing, thus completing the extraordinary wealth of evocations and technical references within these works). In these images, where individuality is turned into plurality, where the search for individual identity lies between brackets, while reflecting the melting of the individual within an infinite cosmos, ultimately the deepest and truest sense of this research comes to the fore: that giving rise to a parallel world, as unreal as it is full of ties with our own concrete experience. A frieze of a world yet to come.

  Walter Guadagnini, 2013

• Metamorfózy Michala Macků - autor Walter Guadagnini, 2013 (Česky)

  Metamorfózy Michala Macků, autor Walter Guadagnini, 2013

  “Mrtvé tělo, které zde vidíte, patří M. Bayardovi, vynálezci procesu, jež vám byl právě ukázán a jehož úžasné výsledky brzy uvidíte. Pokud vím, tento neúnavný experimentátor se svým objevem zabýval asi tři roky. Akademie, král a všichni ostatní, kteří tyto obrazy viděli, je obdivovali stejně, jako je nyní obdivujete i vy bez ohledu na to, jak moc nedokonalé je vidí on sám.” Toto je známý úvod dopisu, který doprovázel “Portrét sebe sama jako utopence” Hyppolita Bayarda, jež byl vytvořen 18. října 1840: tvorba této fotografie měla znamenat debut fotografie ve světě vynalézavosti, v konstrukci spíše než reprodukci reality. Dvojznačnost ve vztazích mezi textem a obrazem, triky jak ve fázi pořizování snímku, tak ve fázi tisku, přidávání a ubírání, technické chyby, překrývání média s ostatními disciplínami: v průběhu více než sto padesáti let, dějiny fotografie byly dějinami podvodů, více či méně vědomých lží, vytváření a přetváření reality. Dějiny bezhlavých či tisícihlavých těl replikovaných ad infinitum, dějiny přízraků, nemožných rovnovážných stavů, oválných kol, minotaurů, zkreslení a skleněných slz, máme-li uvést pouze několik z mnoha vynalezených fotografických ikon. Důvody stojící za touto zradou jsou mnohé a různorodé, od nároků na uměleckou hodnotu fotografie, sahajících do doby krátce po polovině 19. století, až po čirý divertissement fotoamatérů ze všech oblastí života; od revoluční touhy historické avantgardy na počátku 20. století až po mnohomluvnější potřeby politiky a propagandy v ní zaobalené. Ať je to jakkoliv, vnitřek fotoaparátu a temné komory byly po mnoho desetiletí jevištěm výjimečné alchymie, anebo, slovy Salvatora Dalího, umělce, který je tak trochu považován za odborníka na poli klamu a mis-en-scéne, “Zeissovy čočky mají neočekávaný potenciál překvapit.” Nyní je jasné, že Michal Macků je součástí této tradice a že v současné době opravdu patří mezi její hlavní zastánce. Ale právě proto, že tato tradice byla zdrojem tolika hluboce odlišných poloh, je důležité chápat, pod které z četných záhlaví může být jeho výzkum zahrnut, kde leží jeho kořeny a kde jeho zvláštnosti vystupují do popředí. Je například jasné, že propracování tak bezprecedentní techniky jako je geláž a použití tak zastaralé, leč vysoce rafinované techniky jako je uhlotisk, může tvořit startovní pozici pro interpretaci těchto děl. Michal Macků operuje na okraji fotografie, co se týče způsobu mechanické výroby dat z vnějšího světa; pro něho je fotoaparát nástrojem, který spouští kreativní proces, ale který ho v žádném případě neukončuje. To, co mu umožňuje objektivizovat vizi a učinit vnímatelnou “zkušenost“ (v orig. „having-been“ pozn. překl.) tohoto těla v této situaci, je médium. Umožňuje také zachytit akci, gesto či výraz, který se nachází mimo čas, ale který se odehrál v čase reálném. V tomto smyslu reaguje jeho fotografie na původní rys zachycující stopy reality, jenž umělec využívá k tomu, aby spojil svůj vlastní příběh s fyzickou povahou těla. Následná intervence, ta, která způsobuje řezné rány a zranění, mizení a četná zjevení - jinými slovy, vše, co patří ke geláži a procesu tisku v přeneseném smyslu - vede umělce na pole ryzí invence tvorby obrazů a vydává tak přízrak, který se původně zjevil na fotografické ploše. Je to jako by Michal Macků stál před napůl ukutým obrazem, na který, aby mohl být dokončen, je třeba použít odlišné médium. Není náhoda, že termín, který umělec používá, pochází ze spojení slov “gel” a “koláž”, neboť ten pravý smysl jeho práce se nepochybně nalézá v šedé zóně mezi nimi. V tomto ohledu není jistě náhodou, že Michal Macků pracuje téměř výhradně s lidským tělem, které je jeho jediným subjektem. Pokud prozkoumáme jeho obrazy v rychlém sledu, vyjde na světlo neustálý odkaz na formy póz, konstrukce a vzhled postavy, jež sahají až k počátkům sochařských praktik. Kromě tohoto jasného odkazování na kouros ve starořecké tradici - spolu s představou totemistické vertikality těla a idolu - si můžeme rovněž všimnout explicitních odkazů na klasické sochařské prvky, ať už je to v pózách (od jeho “Diskobola” přes “Prigioni” až po “Pensatore”), nebo v některých ikonografických dílech, které čerpají z této tradice ve smyslu vizuálním, ve kterých absence některé z částí lidského těla okamžitě vede podvědomí pozorovatele zpět do specifické sféry klasických forem. Tyto volby rovněž vysvětlují použití techniky geláže jako média, které pracuje skrze ubírání, které vybírá formu z vnitřku matérie nebo ji při jiných příležitostech formuje. To současně způsobuje, že cesta Michala Macků směrem k jeho třírozměrným skleněným objektům je o to více přirozenější, neboť tyto objekty se sochám ve smyslu materiálním blíží ještě více. Proto se jedná o fotografii, která se nachází na křižovatce mezi různými médii, ale která si právě v okamžiku, kdy hraničí s jinými disciplínami, nárokuje svojí vlastní specifičnost, neboť právě skrze toto médium může Michal Macků demonstrovat svůj konkrétní postoj k tělu, jež není jen jeho hlavním zdrojem inspirace, ale také kanálem, skrze který vykládá svět. V těchto dílech může tělo figurovat v jednotném či množném čísle, ale v každém případě je hlavním aktérem na scéně. Sochařské téma zde opět vystupuje do popředí, neboť tato těla téměř vždy existují v abstraktním prostoru zbaveném konkrétních významů. V některých případech je téměř možné zahlédnout, jak se postavy pohybují a vznášejí, existujíce v rámci prostoru, který odpovídá místnosti, anebo, tak či onak, v potenciálním prostoru, který naznačuje nějakou formu reality, jakkoliv vzdálenou, a který může být odkazem na naši každodenní zkušenost důvěrně známých prostor. Zde se jedná o absolutní prostor, v rámci kterého vznikají absolutní gesta, jak jménem subjektů, mezi kterými může někdy existovat vztah, tak jménem tvůrce. Mnohem častěji zde však neexistuje žádný odkaz na okolní prostor; těla vystupují proti plochám, které slouží jako horizonty pro postavu, která je jasným středem kompozice. Tento postoj něco sdílí s obrazovostí rovněž díky zjemněným tónům těchto horizontů, které nesmí být vnímány jako neutrální, ale spíše jako zproštěné prostorových prvků, jež by mohly připomínat vnější realitu. Na pozadí těchto ploch tělo či těla dokončují svoji proměnu. Právě zde, v ryzosti její esenciality, dochází k metamorfóze, která je stěžejním principem výzkumu Michala Macků. V tomto bodě je zcela přirozené vrátit se k surrealistické zkušenosti, s kterou má tento český umělec, jak se zdá, mnoho společného (dějiny české fotografie jsou, konec konců, ovlivněny duchem surrealismu, ne tak ani na rovině tvůrčí jako spíše na rovině teoretické; a kromě známějších osobností jako byli např. Funke či Štýrský bychom mohli uvést mnoho zajímavých portrétů od Kašpaříka či dokonce množství pohledů na město od Berky, v nichž je prostor skrze použitou techniku učiněn nestabilním). Ostatně jak Rosalind Kraussová napsala ohledně Raoula Ubaca (jehož série Pénthesilée je jistě tím nejpřímějším možným odkazem na díla Michala Macků): ”Jedním ze způsobů, jakým bychom mohli zobecnit vše, co jsme dosud viděli, je rozmanitost fotografických metod, využitých k tvorbě obrazu invaze prostoru: těla omámeně podléhající síle gravitace, těla v sevření deformující perspektivy, bezhlavá těla sťatá projekcí stínu, těla poničená horkem či světlem. Použití obvyklých vzorců pro interpretaci surrealistických obrazů by mohlo způsobit, že bychom řekli, že tato konzumace hmoty prostorovým éterem představuje převrácení reality dosažené v metapsychických stavech, jež byly tak moc vyhledávány básníky a malíři pohybu: ať už tomu říkáme reverie, extáze či snění.” I přes očividné rozdíly v časech a způsobech vyjádření jdou tyto řádky přímo k srdci poetiky Michala Macků, podtrhujíce její vizionářský charakter, který je také vyjádřen skrze specifické volby v prezentaci těl, v konstrukci jejich vnitřního prostoru. Prostoru, jenž lze možná opravdu lépe definovat jako metapsychický než metafyzický. Např. jednou z nejčastěji se opakujících kompozičních strategií v této sérii je prezentace těl bezhlavých či, a to v každém případě, se zavřenýma očima nebo rukama umístěnýma před obličejem, ani ne tak proto, aby ho skryly, ale spíše ke zdůraznění oneirické povahy obrazu připomínající slepotu básníka v romantické a symbolistické tradici, která v Rimbaudově voyantu (vidoucí, pozn. překl) nachází jak svoji definitivní inkarnaci, tak i definitivní mrtvý bod. Není náhodou, že i přes použití svého vlastního těla jako privilegovaného subjektu, stojí výzkum Michala Macků stranou od výzkumu umělců typu Arnulfa Rainera či Arno Minnkinena, u nichž by se v jistých formálních detailech mohlo zdát, že jsou mu blízcí. Liší se tak moc proto, že v dílech těchto umělců je tělo médiem pro výzkum identity úzce spojené s individuem, tj. umělcem samotným, zatímco český umělec pojímá své vlastní tělo jako médium pro vizi symbolického charakteru, vizi, jež má univerzální hodnotu. I přes to, že tak vypadají, nejsou obrazy Michala Macků nikdy autoportréty. Potvrzení jeho vlastní identity se nikdy neodehrává skrze zpodobnění jeho vlastního těla. Přestože v některých kompozicích vystupuje do popředí určitá nálada, vždy na sebe nakonec bere hodnotu společné lidské zkušenosti, tedy ne zkušenosti výhradně individuální. V tomto ohledu je stejně tak smysluplná volba skládat obrazy umisťováním subjektů blízko sebe, ať už jsou to celá těla nebo pouze jejich fragmenty, s cílem vytvořit prostory, jež mohou být vyjímající jako např. klece, jež se zdají být vytvořené z paží, anebo atraktivní jako třeba kruhy vytvořené z těl a hlav, na něž je nahlíženo zdola, aby bylo dosaženo dvojitého efektu, který definuje jednu z hlavních charakteristik poetiky Michala Macků. Za prvé, kvůli této snímací a kompoziční strategii je velmi obtížné identifikovat individuální subjekt, jehož opakování vytváří celkový obraz nutící diváka, aby se zastavil a přizpůsobil svůj pohled a mysl tak, aby mohl tuto abnormální podívanou vstřebat; za druhé, vytváří vír, který tento pohled vtahuje, a vytváří tak neklidnou, odzbrojující situaci. Od těchto vizí, v nichž jsou to těla, která vytváří prostor, se téměř hladce dostáváme k fotografiím, v nichž je vše vyjádřeno na povrchu a kde vzájemné propojení, překrývání a srovnávání postav ohlašuje úžasnou grafickou kompozici, která může dokonce dosáhnout samotného prahu abstrakce (jak lze nejjasněji vidět na některých obrazech na skle, na nichž drátovitý typ linií čar umožňuje nacházet analogie s ještě další disciplínou, kterou je kresba, čímž dochází k dovršení neobyčejného bohatství evokací a technických odkazů v rámci těchto děl.) Na těchto obrazech, kde se z individuality stává pluralita, kde hledání individuální bytosti zůstává v závorkách, zatímco zrcadlí tání jednotlivce v nekonečném kosmu, vstupuje do popředí ten nejhlubší a nejpravdivější smysl výzkumu: vytvoření paralelního světa, který je stejně neskutečný, jako je propojený s naší vlastní, konkrétní zkušeností. Otisk světa, jež má teprve přijít.

  Walter Gaudagnini, 2013

• Le metamorfosi di Macku - testo di Walter Guadagnini, 2013 (Italiano)

  Le metamorfosi di Macku, testo di Walter Guadagnini, 2013

  “La salma che qui vedete è quella di M.Bayard, inventore del procedimento che vi è stato appena illustrato, e di cui vedrete presto i meravigliosi risultati. Per quanto ne so, questo ingegnoso e instancabile sperimentatore ha dedicato circa tre anni al perfezionamento della sua scoperta. L’accademia, il re e tutti coloro che hanno visto le sue immagini le hanno ammirate come le ammirate voi in questo momento, benché egli le consideri ancora imperfette”. E’ l’incipit, celeberrimo, della lettera che accompagnava l’”Autoritratto in figura di annegato” di Hyppolite Bayard, redatto il 18 ottobre del 1840 : in pratica al momento della sua nascita, la fotografia dichiarava già la sua appartenenza al mondo dell’artificio, della costruzione più che della riproduzione della realtà. Ambiguità nei rapporti tra testo e immagine, trucchi in fase di ripresa e in fase di stampa, cancellazioni e addizioni, errori tecnici, incroci tra tecniche e discipline, nel corso di oltre un secolo e mezzo la storia della fotografia è stata anche storia di inganni, di menzogne più o meno consapevoli, di invenzioni e reinvenzioni del reale. Una storia di corpi replicati all’infinito, acefali o con mille teste, di apparizioni fantasmatiche, di equilibri impossibili, di ruote ovali, di minotauri, di distorsioni e di lacrime di vetro, per non dire che di alcune delle icone della fotografia di invenzione. Le ragioni di questi tradimenti sono state differenti, e vanno dalla rivendicazione dell’artisticità della fotografia a partire dalla metà inoltrata del XIX secolo, al puro divertissement dei dilettanti di ogni stagione, dalla volontà rivoluzionaria delle avanguardie storiche nei primi decenni del novecento alle più prosaiche necessità della politica e della propaganda ad essa legata : in ogni caso, l’interno della macchina fotografica e lo spazio della camera oscura sono stati, per decenni, luoghi di meravigliose alchimie o, per dirla con Salvador Dalì, artista che di inganni e di messe in scena era assai esperto, “la lente Zeiss possiede insospettate facoltà di sorpresa”. Ora, è evidente che Michal Macku si inserisce in questa tradizione, e ne è attualmente uno dei più significativi rappresentanti. Ma proprio perché questa tradizione è stata portatrice di posizioni profondamente diverse tra loro, è opportuno capire all’interno di quale tra i numerosi modelli possibili possa inserirsi questa ricerca, dove trovi le sue origini e dove manifesti le sue peculiarità . E’ chiaro, ad esempio, che l’elaborazione di una tecnica inedita come il gellage e l’adozione di una desueta e raffinatissima come la stampa al carbone possano rappresentare il punto di partenza per la lettura di queste opere. Macku opera sul confine della fotografia come pratica di riproduzione meccanica dei dati del mondo esterno; la macchina fotografica è per lui lo strumento che innesca il processo creativo, ma che non lo esaurisce affatto. E’ il mezzo che gli permette di oggettivare una visione, di rendere percepibile l’”essere stato” di quel corpo, in quella situazione, di congelare fuori dal tempo un’azione, un gesto, un’espressione avvenuti nel tempo reale; in questo senso, la fotografia risponde alla sua caratteristica di traccia del reale, che serve all’artista per ancorare la propria narrazione alla fisicità primaria del corpo. L’intervento successivo, quello che provoca i tagli, le ferite, le sparizione e le multiple apparizioni, tutto ciò insomma che appartiene al processo del gellage e della stampa in senso lato, porta Macku nel territorio della pura invenzione dell’immagine, senza che questo lo costringa ad abbandonare il fantasma originario rivelatosi sulla superficie fotografica. E’ come se l’artista si trovasse di fronte a un’immagine formata a metà, che per compiersi deve essere però affrontata con uno strumento diverso : non a caso, il termine che l’artista usa nasce dalla fusione di gelatina e collage, perché è proprio in questa terra liminare che si trova il punto di innesco del senso dell’opera. Gellage No. XXVIII Non è certo casuale, a questo proposito, che Macku lavori pressoché esclusivamente con il corpo, che esso sia il suo unico soggetto. Se si osservano in rapida sequenza le sue immagini, è evidente il costante rimando a posture, modalità di costruzione e apparizione della figura che appartengono sin dalle origini alla storia e alla prassi della scultura. Al di là dell’evidente riferimento al kouros della tradizione greca dell’antichità – e con esso alle tematiche della verticalità totemica del corpo e dell’idolo -, sono ravvisabili espliciti riferimenti alla statuaria classica tanto nelle pose (dal “Discobolo” ai “Prigioni” al “Pensatore”), quanto in alcune iconografie che ad essa rimandano per via di consuetudine visiva, laddove l’assenza di una parte del corpo induce immediatamente l’inconscio dello spettatore a riandare a quel particolare bagaglio di forme classiche. Queste scelte spiegano anche l’adozione della tecnica del gellage, in quanto tecnica che lavora sul levare, che trova la forma all’interno della materia o la plasma, a seconda dei casi; e allo stesso tempo rende naturale il passaggio di Macku alla tridimensionalità degli oggetti in vetro, che materialmente si avvicinano ancora di più alla scultura. Fotografia che si situa dunque alla confluenza delle tecniche, fotografia che rivendica però una sua specificità anche nel momento in cui maggiore si fa la tangenza con altre discipline, poiché è comunque attraverso di essa che Macku può manifestare il suo particolare atteggiamento nei confronti di quel corpo che è non solo il centro della sua ispirazione, ma anche il tramite primario della sua narrazione del mondo. Il corpo è, in queste opere, declinato di volta in volta in chiave singolare o plurale, ma è comunque il protagonista assoluto della scena. Torna a questo proposito, e ancora, il tema della scultura, poiché i corpi di Macku agiscono quasi sempre in uno spazio astratto, privo di specifiche connotazioni. In alcuni casi, è in effetti possibile vedere le figure muoversi, fluttuare, esistere all’interno di uno spazio riconducibile a quello di una stanza, uno spazio comunque prospettico che suggerisce un rimando ad una realtà, per quanto evidentemente slegata da ogni accidente relativo, priva di qualsiasi riferimento alla nostra esperienza quotidiana degli spazi mondani. Uno spazio assoluto, all’interno del quale si compiono gesti assoluti, sia da parte dei soggetti – che talvolta possono anche entrare in rapporto tra di loro - che da parte del creatore. Più di frequente, però, lo spazio non è nemmeno accennato, i corpi si stagliano su superfici la cui caratteristica primaria è quella di fungere da fondo all’apparizione della figura, fulcro totale della composizione. Un atteggiamento vicino a quello pittorico, anche in ragione della raffinatezza tonale di questi fondi, che non devono apparire come neutri, ma come privi di elementi spaziali che mimino la realtà esterna. Su questa superficie, il corpo o i corpi compiono la loro trasfigurazione, è qui che la metamorfosi – principio fondamentale della ricerca di Macku – avviene nella purezza della sua essenzialità. Viene naturale, a questo punto, rifarsi all’esperienza surrealista, con la quale l’artista ceko sembra avere più di un punto di contatto (e d’altra parte, la storia della fotografia ceka è segnata indelebilmente dalla presenza surrealista tanto a livello creativo che a livello teorico; e a fianco dei personaggi più noti come Funke e Štyrský, vengono da citare alcuni curiosi ritratti di Kašpařík o persino alcune vedute cittadine di Berka, dove lo spazio è reso instabile dalla tecnica adottata). Scriveva infatti Rosalind Krauss a proposito di Raoul Ubac – la cui serie delle Pentesilee è certo il più diretto riferimento possibile all’immaginario di Macku - :”Si può sicuramente generalizzare e dire che si è ricorsi a diversi procedimenti fotografici per produrre un’immagine dell’invasione dello spazio : corpi che si abbandonano alla vertigine della pesantezza, corpi nella ... di una prospettiva deformante, decapitati dalla proiezione delle ombre, ... dal calore o dalla luce. L’utilizzo delle formule abituali di spiegazione dell’immagine surrealista, potrebbe farci dire che questa consunzione della materia per effetto di un etere spaziale è una rappresentazione del rovesciamento della realtà, che si raggiunge in quegli stati metapsichici così ricercati dai poeti e dai pittori del movimento : la rêverie, l’estasi, il sogno”. Nella ovvia differenza dei tempi e delle modalità espressive, queste righe portano al cuore della poetica di Macku, ne evidenziano il carattere visionario, che si esprime anche attraverso scelte specifiche nella presentazione dei corpi, nella costruzione del loro spazio interno, uno spazio che per l’appunto si può definire più metapsichico che metafisico. Una delle strategie compositive più ricorrenti in queste serie è ad esempio quella di presentare questi corpi come acefali, o comunque con gli occhi chiusi, o ancora con le mani poste davanti al volto, non tanto per nascondere, ma per evidenziare il carattere onirico dell’immagine, memore della cecità del poeta della tradizione romantica e simbolista, che trova nel voyant di Rimbaud la sua ultima e definitiva incarnazione, e insieme il suo scacco. Non a caso, nonostante l’utilizzo del proprio corpo come soggetto privilegiato, la ricerca di Macku si distanzia da quella di autori che pure potrebbero, talvolta anche in taluni particolari formali, apparire a lui vicini, da Arnulf Rainer ad Arno Minnkinen. Si distanzia perché in questi autori il corpo è tramite per la ricerca di una identità strettamente legata all’individuo, all’artista stesso, mentre l’artista ceko concepisce il proprio corpo come tramite di una visione dal carattere simbolico e dal valore universale. Quelli di Macku, al contrario di ciò che può apparire, non sono mai autoritratti, attraverso la rappresentazione del proprio corpo non passa il riconoscimento della propria identità : se anche in talune composizioni si manifesta uno stato d’animo definito, esso finisce sempre per assumere il valore di un’esperienza umana condivisa, non esclusivamente individuale. A questo proposito, altrettanto significativa è la scelta di comporre l’immagine ponendo i soggetti – siano essi corpi interi o frammenti – strettamente collegati gli uni agli altri, a creare spazi che possono essere escludenti (le gabbie che sembrano costruire le braccia, ad esempio) o attrattivi, come i cerchi creati dai corpi e dalla teste visti dal basso in alto a creare un duplice effetto, che determina una delle principali caratteristiche della poetica di Macku. In primo luogo, questa strategia di ripresa e composizione rende difficilmente riconoscibile il singolo soggetto la cui ripetizione costituisce l’immagine complessiva, costringendo lo spettatore ad arrestarsi e a riposizionare occhi e mente su una visione anomala; in secondo luogo, crea un vortice all’interno del quale lo sguardo viene risucchiato, creando una situazione di disagio, destabilizzante. Da queste visioni, in cui sono i corpi a creare lo spazio, ci si sposta quasi naturalmente alle fotografie dove tutto viene risolto sulla superficie, dove il concatenarsi, sovrapporsi, affiancarsi delle figure dà vita a una sorta di grande composizione grafica, che può giungere sino alle soglie dell’astrazione (come si vede con maggiore chiarezza in alcune delle immagini su vetro, nelle quali peraltro l’andamento a fil di ferro della linea permette di istituire il parallelo con un’altra disciplina ancora, quella del disegno, a completare la straordinaria ricchezza di suggestioni anche tecniche di queste opere). In queste immagini, dove l’individualità si trasforma in pluralità, dove la ricerca dell’identità individuale è posta tra parentesi, e viene invece esaltato lo sciogliersi dell’individuo in un cosmo infinito, si manifesta infine il senso più profondo e più vero di questa ricerca, quello di dare vita a un mondo parallelo, tanto irreale quanto ricco di legami con la nostra esperienza concreta. Un mondo, congelato, in divenire.

  Walter Guadagnini, 2013

• On the other side - text by Victoria Girenko, 2007

  On the other side (Photography by Michal Macku), Victoria Girenko, "ZOOM Russia" magazine, march-april 2007

  "More than anything else an artist is someone who is trying to
  go beyond the limitations of being human. They search for the realm
  of the unseen and non-human. It is this search for a greater
  underlying reality, that they feel exists parallel to the ‘known’ world,
  which motivates their work."

  Giyom Appoliner

  The human body has always been a challenging and complex subject for artists. The narrative language adopted by artists towards the human body is influenced by the cultural and technological context of their time. The skill of some of the world’s greatest painters is showcased in their portraits and nudes. For example the masterpieces of Rubens and Kustodiev evoke in our minds images of pneumatic pink-cheeked ladies radiating health and well-being. We can see their different standards of beauty and aesthetics in their approaches. Such prevailing and varied artistic perceptions of a human body were directly challenged by the advent of photography’s ‘empirical’ eye. The changes that photography caused to humanity’s perception of it’s world have yet to cease occurring.

  In Czech photography the human body has always been an object of a close study. Today the human body is becoming a subject for the artists and photographers who are interested not in the erotic but the emotional component of their models. The nude has traditionally been a popular and spectacular genre in photography.By focusing upon the model’s body an opportunity is created to construe the person by dwelling upon their body and it’s connection to nature. This is typical for the collages from the beginning of the 20th century which constructed a new world and a new attitude towards it. Czech photography has continued this tradition of endowing the human body with symbolic meaning.

  This emphasis upon symbolism is also typical of the work of Michal Macku. He was born in 1963 in Bruntal and lives in Olomouc. His photographs belong amongst the work of the great Czech photographers: Jaromir Funke, Josef Kudelka, Jan Saudek. In his artwork Macku uses an almost forgotten technique of removing the gelatin from the film base. He has named this technique "gellage" which comes from combination of two words "gelatin" and "collage". Some parts of his images are torn and the thin emulsion is used as wet skin. Macku describes his process, "...First I cause the chemical separation of the gelatin from its base. Then I work with this wet gellike substance. Next the images are dipped into water which reminds me of the blurred chimeras...this part of the process has always enchanted me. Finally I transfer the image onto wet paper which grounds the image and allows it to become tangible…"

  In Macku’s work you can clearly see traces of surrealism, (in the technique of performance) and existentialism (in feelings, interpretation of symbols in the themes of the photographed). Many critics and scholars of Macku’s work call attention to his destructive elements. Destruction is also a key characteristic of surrealists like Gans Bellmer. Macku acts like a mirror reflecting the conflicts that arise when trying to transcend the known world while still being grounded in it. He work is a lot like what Gans Bellmer does with his dolls. The photographs of this Czech master are on the edge between dreams, mysticism, experience and subtle feeling. In his work we see the predetermination of life yet also the struggle to try to change or challenge this sealed circle of reality called ‘life’. His artwork is full of gestures. His model’s arms are raised or lowered with their palms turned towards the viewer as though offering an opportunity to read their life line. The head is often dropped back, smeared, or ripped off the model entirely. We do not see the face but we contemplate it’s image. We watch the ‘self’ disappearing.

  In a series of work by Macku called "Multiplies" he creates images by repeating body parts or entire bodies. In one piece he makes a grate from arms. In another piece he depicts a crowd so one part of a body blends into another body causing the individuals in the crowd loose their personal identity. The individuals in the crowd become an interwoven mass. You can feel the anxiety, protest, curiosity, magic, yearning and even discovery within his work. By viewing his work we agree to obey it’s the mystery and accept his protest against the natural way of life and human history. Macku has reached such a high level of tragedy that he has assumed the existentialist’s point of view for a person’s place in the world.

  Viewing his work is like being present at a holy act of initiation we start to serve the cult only to be consecrated. His work reveals glimpses of the mystery contained within our collective archetypes, dreams, subconscious- all the things that point towards a transcendent reality beyond our day to day lives.

• Jenseits der Realitat - Text: Marc Peschke, 2005 (Deutsch)

  Jenseits der Realität, Marc Peschke published in SCHWARZWEISS 46 - DAS MAGAZIN FÜR FOTOGRAFIE, 2005

  Jenseits der Realität Der tschechische Fotograf Michal Macku hat seine eigene fotografische Technik kreiert: Die Gellage. Durch einfallsreiche Manipulationen der feuchten Gelatineschicht des Films schafft er expressive Motive am Rande des Fotografischen. Das Überschreiten der Grenzen zwischen unterschiedlichen Kunstrichtungen macht seine Arbeiten einzigartig.

  Die Fotografie spielte in der Geschichte der tschechischen Kunst stets eine ganz besondere Rolle. Im frühen 20. Jahrhundert, vor allem nach dem Ende des ersten Weltkriegs waren es Avantgardisten wie Karel Teige oder Jindrich Styrsky, die den Körper zum Gegenstand der fotografischen Untersuchung machten. Fotografie und Film wurden Leitmedien der Künste – fragmentierte Körpercollagen entstanden als Ausdruck einer sich verändernden, furchteinflößenden Wirklichkeit.

  Das Bild des menschlichen Körpers bestimmt die tschechische Fotografie bis heute – und auch das Werk des 1963 in Bruntal geborenen, heute in Olomouc lebenden Michal Macku reiht sich ein in die lange Liste hervorragender tschechischer Fotokünstler wie Alfons Mucha, Jaromír Funke, Josef Koudelka, Jan Saudek oder Frantisek Drtikol. Stets hatte die tschechische Fotografie einen Hang zum Fotoexperiment – und auch Mackus Arbeiten machen da keine Ausnahme. Die experimentelle, medienübergreifende Bearbeitung, die perfekte Beherrschung des Handwerks, aber auch der Wille, tiefere psychische Schichten freizulegen spricht aus ihnen. "Gellagen", Collagen mit Gelatine, so nennt Michal Macku seine Bildfindungen, die seit Mitte der neunziger Jahre entstehen. Eine Technik, die dem Willen des Künstlers entspricht, die Grenzen der Medien hinter sich zu lassen, Intermedialität zu schaffen. Die ersten Gellagen zeigten vor allem "zerrissene Köpfe". "Erst nachträglich realisierte ich, dass es auch eine symbolische Öffnung meines Kopfes war, ein Bruch, ein Anfang einer neuen Etappe", erzählt Macku.

  Doch wie entstehen Mackus Gellagen? Nach der Belichtung meistens mehrerer Negative und der Fixierung löst Macku die oberen Gelatineschichten ab, um diese neu auf hochwertigem Künstlerpapier zu arrangieren. Die Besonderheit der fertigen Arbeit ist die feine, plastische Oberflächenstruktur. Es entstehen fotografische Unikate – Originale aus einem künstlerischen Grenzgebiet zwischen Fotografie und Collage.

  Macku erklärt das Verfahren: "Es handelt sich um eine chemische Trennung der Gelatine von der Unterlage. Man arbeitet damit im nassen Zustand, eigentlich im Gelzustand. Die im Wasser eingetauchten Gestalten gleichen verschwommenen Chimären – das hat mich immer bei der Arbeit fasziniert. Dann übertrage ich das Bild auf nasses Papier, das gibt mir die Möglichkeit, es in die gewünschte Form zu manipulieren. Nachdem die Komposition fertig ist, lasse ich sie eintrocknen. Bei den ersten Gellagen habe ich einen Hintergrund verwendet, auf welchen die Figuren appliziert worden sind. Dann entdeckte ich weitere Möglichkeiten, beispielsweise die Vervielfachung der Figuren aus einem Negativ oder die Verwendung und Kombinationen mehrerer Negative."

  In seinem Kurzfilm "Prozess" aus dem Jahr 1994, vor allem aber in immer neuen Fotoserien, zerstört Macku stets das Bildmotiv des eigenen Körpers – er lässt der künstlerischen Destruktion freien Lauf. Das Zerreißen von Körperteilen, die aufgekratzte Brust etwa, ist ein immer wiederkehrendes Motiv bei Macku – doch ist es auch eine Reminiszenz an die klassische Avantgardefotografie des Surrealismus. Die surrealistische Kunstrichtung und ihr Destruktionswille erfuhr in der tschechischen Fotografie immer eine ganz besondere Würdigung – und auch Mackus Werk steht inhaltlich in dieser Tradition.

  Der eigene Körper – es sind vorwiegend Selbstporträts, die Macku durch Manipulationen der feuchten Gelatine weiterbearbeitet – wird zum Ort der Zerstörung und der Gewalt. Da gib es Reihungen von Torsi, Akte ohne Köpfe, die ihre Arme nach oben strecken, als würden sie um Hilfe flehen. Gesten sind Macku wichtig: Oft zeigt er Hände und Arme überproportional groß, wie in Darstellungen frühmittelalterlicher Buchmalerei. Nicht das Individuelle interessiert den Künstler, sondern die Geste.

  Eine andere Arbeit zeigt einen Brustkorb mit Armen, die sich zu einem ewigen Kreis schließen, wieder andere ganz sonderbare Formen: beispielsweise Arme, die Macku zu einem spindelförmigen Objekt "gellagiert" hat – oder viele Hände, sie sich gegenseitig umklammern. Vladimír Birgus beobachtete schon 1996, dass Angst ein prominentes Gefühl in den Bildern von Michal Macku ist. Es ist eine tiefsitzende Angst jenseits der Realität, vor allem eine Angst vor Einsamkeit, die aus ihnen zu sprechen scheint: Mackus surreale Körperdeformationen könnten Angstträumen entsprungen sein – auch wenn er selbst sagt, die immerwährende fotografische Destruktion des Körpers sei nur ein Mittel, einen Blick "hinter die Tür der Alltagsrealität" zu werfen.

  Zerrissene Köpfe und Verformungen des Körpers – meistens vor abstrakten, topografisch nicht zu bestimmenden grauen Hintergründen – waren erst der Anfang. Immer häufiger multiplizierte Macku bald die Körperteile seiner Protagonisten. Eine Arbeit zeigt etwa einen Wulst von Oberarmen – eine künstlerische Idee, die vor dem Hintergrund der Diskussion um die Forschung der Gentechnik in den vergangenen Jahren beängstigende Aktualität gewonnen hat. "Die Menge", so sagt der Absolvent des Prager Institute of Art Photography, "zeigt nicht das Verhalten vieler Einzelwesen, sondern das eines gefährlichen Einzelorganismus."

  Mackus Position ist in der aktuellen, stark von dokumentarischen oder journalistischen Tendenzen bestimmten Fotoszene einzigartig. Vor allem auch, weil der intermediale Prozess des Entstehens einerseits eine sehr genaue Beherrschung des Handwerks voraussetzt, sich andererseits als vollkommen offen gegenüber den Rändern des Fotografischen zeigt. Der Akt des Fotografierens ist für Macku eher eine Vorarbeit – vor der eigentlichen künstlerischen Arbeit, die er mit der Arbeit eines Plastikers vergleicht.

  Wie bei der Arbeit mit Ton wird das Bild Schicht für Schicht aufgetragen, das Endergebnis weist eine plastische, haptische Struktur auf. Macku "modelliert" Fotografien – reanimiert "tote", fotografische Motive durch die Neukombination wie ein Trickfilmer.

• The unknowable scheme of things - Text by Lancer Speer, 2002

  THE UNKNOWABLE SCHEME OF THINGS, TEXT BY LANCE SPEER

  FROM "21-ST", THE JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY, VOL.5: STRANGE GENIUS", 2002

  One after another, stunning oversized prints emerge from their storage box into the cool, crisp halogen light of a downtown Manhattan gallery. The rich grays and blacks of deftly handworked photographic emulsion reveal heads shattering with the chaos of the mind. Figures, both male and female, confront and penetrate each other, betraying the vulnerability of the naked, the tension between the genders. A body rips itself open under the influence of its own restless spirit. Heroic figures attain iconic poses that disassemble and then reconstruct the persistent canons of art history. Figures multiply, grotesquely stretched and contorted, in a repeating cycle of excruciating anonymity. Limbs intertwine, forming some Escheresque mandala, in contradictory complexity and simplicity. Bodies are rent apart by their owners, revealing the luminous peace of spiritual release. All of this is offered through the photographic alchemy of Michal Macku’s vibrantly original vision, one that combines extraordinarily proficient craftsmanship with the pleasures and horrors of the human condition.

  Macku was born in 1963 in the former Czechoslovakia. The homeland of his parents’ generation had endured the nightmare of Nazi occupation. His own childhood and early adult years were dominated by the concrete gray days of the Soviet era. His most active and creative period has corresponded with the renewal brought about by the ”Velvet Revolution” of November, 1989, which brought formerly imprisoned poet and playwright Vaclav Havel to power. The political revolutions of Eastern Europe, coupled with the attendant shift from communism to capitalism in many of the former Warsaw Pact nations, coincided with a similarly powerful and as yet unfinished revolution in digital technology.

  We are in an era of seamless digital photographs where hands-off manipulation is only a mouse-click away. To many of this new generation of artists the darkroom is nothing more than a quaint relic, as antique as a Daguerreian fuming box. One of the wonders of the new imaging technologies is their seemingly endless plasticity, which gives artists limitless opportunities to arrange and rearrange their photographic compositions. While recognized masters such as Jerry Uelsmann and Doug Prince have been in the darkroom creating complex photographic collages for decades, new technologies drastically simplify this process and make it available to anyone. Simultaneous with the introduction of these new technologies during the past dozen years has been the work of Michal Macku.

  Macku received his training at the Technical University of the Polytechnical Institute in Brno and then at the Institute of Creative Photography in Prague. He was trained as a graphic designer, and his current photographic work shares many of the elements of the digital revolution in terms of its freedom of manipulation, yet it is radically different in its production.

  Macku has developed a process he terms ”gellage.” The word itself is a contraction of gelatin (as in photographic emulsions) and collage. In this process the photographic gelatin emulsion is separated from its original support through a series of chemical processes. After each semi-transparent surface of emulsion is floated off its substrate, it is cut and torn to exacting shapes and forms and then collaged, one by one, onto fine artist’s paper. The result is a richly layered composition of infinite possibilities, all guided by the direct intercession of the photographer’s hand.

  The work Macku has produced in gellage since 1989 reflects a dramatic blending of form and content. Using himself as subject, his masterful works become much more than static, mirrored reflections. Through the manipulation of the self, a reforming of the body, Macku takes the surfaces of the corporeal and shows us ways to understand the depths of the psychological.

  His body forms, frozen in photographic emulsion, are literally skinned off. Sometimes cut with surgical precision, other times raggedly lacerated, these skins are reconstructed to create collaged images of tremendous visual and tactile complexity that plumb the depths of the psyche. Recording a kaleidoscopic range of deep emotions through their physical manifestations, Macku creates a vast inventory of moods and expressions. While serving as a form of individual self-discovery, his images show us the self as archetype.

  Renaissance masters, particularly those from Northern Europe, often sought to deny the role of paint in their compositions, developing styles that hid their brushstrokes. Dûrer and van Eyck come to mind most readily. The same phenomenon characterizes contemporary digital imaging, where the seamless blending of forms, textures and spaces often seems a major goal of the artist. In Macku’s work, what is ”photographic” about photography is never denied. The original photograph’s birth as light on sensitized surfaces is evident in its unique ability to capture rich gradations of tone, space, form, mass, surface, and texture as is possible in no other medium. Gellage is definitely a hands-on process. It is wet, messy, and results in the creation of distinctly individual pieces, where each image in his standard edition of 12 necessarily exhibits slight variations in its construction. In some respects, Macku’s work has less in common with clean-room digital images than it does with the wet-plate era of photographic history. Back then, practitioners would pour sensitized collodion emulsion over glass plates, make their exposures, and develop the negative while the emulsion was still wet, finally allowing the finished glass plate negative to dry. Here Macku reverses the process – he starts out dry and gets wet as he removes, rather than applies, his emulsion. When considering the process, one can imagine that Macku would find himself much more at home in the dark tent of William Henry Jackson or Francis Frith than in the contemporary software labs at Adobe.

  In Macku’s work, the plasticity of photography takes on a more literal meaning. His images, incubated in fluids, grow layer by layer, completely dependent on the elasticity, transparency and photographic detail inherent in the medium. As photographic objects, the surface textures of Macku’s large 20” x 25” prints are enhanced by the subtle impasto of his fractured and folded emulsions. At once present and absent, his background grays are often created by applying a uniform layer of emulsion to serve as a stage for the dramas of his foreground figures. Exhibiting the visual texture of a fine aquatint, these backgrounds offer us both spatial perspective and a blank slate for the action of his figures.

  His images clearly reveal the hand of the creator in their intricate folds, cuts and tears. In some cases Macku rips pieces of emulsion apart to form rough mosaics, often of a subject’s head, where jagged and exploded bits of emulsion become individual tesserae, as in #71 (1994). Here each figure’s head, the center of reason and logic, passion and psyche, fragments under the stress of unseen forces. In a moment of shock and surprise, as suggested by the pose of the arms and hands, the figure’s body remains intact while his mind erupts. The physical residue of this explosion continues to orbit above the torso, but the content of the mind is released. This motif appears time and again in different contexts in the work of Michal Macku.

  In Edvard Munch’s The Scream we are witness to the internal anguish of a roiling mind resonating through a silent scream, one that forever echoes through the power of its simple yet dramatic composition. The hands grip the face in a gesture of fear, horribly amplifying the scream by framing the mind of its source. In #7 (1989), rather than exploding under the influence of some external force, Macku uses his own hands to tear at the fabric of his being. Rigidly clenched fingers claw at his face and torso, ripping away his physical flesh while scraping his fingernails across the chalkboard of his soul. In both works what is happening internally is the point of the image. Psychology transcends the physical. We share the self(d)effacing gesture of Macku’s portrait, a violent moment of angst, fear, self-loathing, and perhaps even the struggle to break free from the mortal vessel. The physicality of torn emulsion becomes a metaphor for the damage of the torn soul. There is a scream present here, and the very fact that it cannot emanate from the obliterated mouth makes it all the more intense. Greater in volume and tenor due specifically to its silence, Macku’s scream is not one of appeal to others. It is rather one of personal desperation, frustration, release. The physical tears scratch the surface, but it is the soul that carries the scars. Without a face this individual becomes the whole, the archetype.

  Another level of interpretation begins to take shape in the physical and mental disintegration of this individual. The tears open the skin to reveal a soft, luminous light. Rather than seeing the continuation of background textures and tones through these tears, as might be expected, we instead see a new space characterized by comfortable emptiness, devoid of anything other than pure light. What is this place? The ragged tears become portals through the veil of the physical into a new plane of existence. Limbo, nirvana, or a transitional zone between points of reincarnation, this incandescent space offers the viewer a glimpse of quiet in the midst of the extreme trauma that characterizes the rest of the image. Also fascinating is the fact that, in terms of its actual photographic composition, it is constructed of nothing more than plain white space. The irony here seems to reside in the fact that this luminous peace, as a state of being and of mind, is reached only through the most horrific of gestures.

  Macku’s #39 (1991) is unmistakably patterned directly from the Diskobolis (Discus Thrower). The Roman marble sculpture familiar to most students of art history is itself patterned after a no longer extant Greek bronze attributed to Myron (c.450 bc). Except for slight variations in overall pose, the iconographic pedigree of this image cannot be denied. Yet the self-assured determination of Myron’s original gives way here to a much more dramatic pathos. Macku’s athlete is castrated, not so much by the shadows that obscure his genitals, but by the loss of his throwing arm. However, he would remain impotent even if it were present, as evidenced by the wall against which the figure cocks himself. The Venus de Milo has, over the ages, lost her arms. This unplanned amputation, however, oddly serves to enhance and amplify her feminine characteristics, as the viewer focuses on her elegant contrapposto, the sensuous curves of her body, her breasts. In the Diskobolis the angle and thrust of the arms, legs and torso draw the viewer’s attention to the head. For all the physical perfection of the body the head remains the overall focal point, a study in quiet Olympian determination. In Macku’s work, the head is shriveled and flaccid, reinforcing the emasculation conveyed in the rest of the figure. This dark fear, suggested rather than described, subliminally haunts every man. Without a face to lend it a specific identity, anonymity makes the work universal.

  Variations on the themes of masculinity and emasculation take some unusual turns in the work of Macku. In image after image the most prominent element of ”maleness” is the muscular body. Often, even in his full frontal nudes, he omits the penis but depicts the testicles. This is important. In Western culture the signifier of masculinity is the penis, as physical presence and as storied metaphor. Certainly it is the locus of physical pleasure in the male and is one of the symbolic centers of the male persona. In Macku’s images where the penis is present it is often veiled in emulsion. It is also never erect. It takes on a secondary importance, subdued to the point of near non-existence. In some of Macku’s strongest images it is instead the testicles that dominate the genital zone, even when only partially revealed. Dark masses set against his signature backgrounds, the testicles hang in ways that unmistakably draw attention to their presence.

  These depictions imply a more highly refined sense of manhood. While the penis is the iconic signifier of the male, from Neolithic cave paintings to Michelangelo to crude scrawls on men’s room walls, it is the testicles that really run the show. They are the point of manufacture of sperm, the seed of future generations. As the well-springs of testosterone, the testicles influence much more than the physical appearance of the male. Volumes have been written on the importance of this chemical in the psychological drives inherent in men. These are subtle points, and they are continually raised by Macku by his frequent use of these organs. It perhaps may have been too heavy handed for Macku to place his emphasis on a more overt photographic rendering of the penis. By bringing the testicles to the fore he states his point of male identity, yet in a way that is more visually interesting and intellectually challenging.

  An example of Macku’s depiction of testicles is evident in #80 (1995). We witness a surrealistic scene, perhaps an imaginary pediment frieze from the Parthenon. Fragments of Herculean figures struggle in mortal combat, their straining bodies frozen in an eternal, shattering conflict. Here the rich surfaces and detailed musculature of Classical Period marble is replaced with a similarly exacting emulsion. The prominence of the testicles on the left hand figure is no accident. The gellage process is so infinitely flexible that it would have allowed Macku to remove or diminish these organs if he had so desired. Their presence can only mean that he intended their inclusion all along. In the context of this image, as well as of others of similar construction, the figures can be read as either two separate combatants or as one individual. In the former, these two bodies share an impossible existence. They are headlessly conjoined in a fantastic form of mindless (literally) hand-to-hand warfare that is powered, as such acts often are, by the potency of testosterone. An alternative reading of this image may view these bodies as a single creature. Two halves, as it were, of the whole individual, suggesting the schizophrenic conflict we share with our own personal doppelgangers.

  Epic struggles, whether physical or psychological, are not always the rule in Macku’s work. In some ways his most intriguing images are marked not by jarring visuals or by the silent sounds of shattering flesh. In #104 (1997), the artist depicts himself as a solitary figure. Multiple layers of gellage emulsion crack and fold across his body, yet much more subtly than in many of his other works. His hands are firmly positioned behind his back, almost as if they were tied, which, while hinting at a heightened sense of vulnerability, can also be seen as adding to the quiet peace of this composition.

  To continue the arbitrary associations to Greek art, he most closely resembles a kouros figure, one that blends the rigid stasis of the Archaic Period with the exacting, almost photographic clarity of the human form that emerged in the Classical Period. His eyes are closed, as if in a dream of death. He floats in the void, where the lack of earthly gravity negates the need for feet, which have dissolved into nothingness. Is this a self portrait of the artist as he sees himself after death – naked, peaceful, adrift. A second reading could reinterpret the gestalt of this pose, as he strangely takes on the characteristic form of a Greek amphora, a clay vessel used for the storage and transport of ancient wines and oils. In this reading the body is the vessel. Depending upon one’s point of view this body/vessel either once contained, still contains, or will someday contain again the spirit of life.

  Macku is interested in the tenets of Hinduism. This perhaps explains much of his work: the restless struggle of the spirit; the apparent soullessness of humanity; the perfection of the body recast in distorted emulsion; the anonymity of manufactured individuals; the endless reach for another plane of existence; the tensions and energies of life, frozen for the split second between this moment and the next. It may be easy to consider Macku in the light of other eras, styles and artists (Eikoh Hosoe meets Salvador Dali; M.C. Escher meets Laszlo Moholy-Nagy; Hieronymus Bosch meets Howard Schatz). Yet one of the most intriguing aspects of Macku’s work is its sheer originality. It is a seamless blend of form and content, with the artist’s idea perfectly corresponding to the process of its realization. We admire Machu’s work from the outside and are simultaneously invited to occupy the bodies and minds of his subject(s), most often himself, from the inside.

  Sensuous, challenging, beautiful, terrifying. His work has a presence that draws the viewer in, allowing for myriad interpretations where the individual becomes the universal. Macku’s nudes, unencumbered by the trappings of any one culture or the limits set forth by formal titles, resonate across a wide spectrum of moods and emotions. They serve as signposts, as good art always does, in our quest to seek ourselves in the context of our own lives and in the greater and unknowable scheme of things.

• Text by Vladimir Birgus, 1996

  Vladimír Birgus, Prague, February 1996

  Czech photography has a very good reputation in the world today, thanks not only to famous authors such as: František Drtikol, Josef Sudek, Jaromír Funke, Jaroslav Rossler, Josef Koudelka or Jan Saudek, but also to many photographers of a younger generation, whose works came out onto the international scene after the revolutionary changes in Central and Eastern Europe at the end of 1989. Among young Czech photographers with an ever-growing international reputation is undoubtedly Michal Macku, whose original photography aroused great attention at a series of both separate and group exhibitions in Europe and overseas, and they were also housed as collections in a few distinguished museums and galleries.

  Michal Macku took up photography by the time of his studies at grammar school and then at Technical University in Brno, when he was concerned, above all, with various static motifs. His first mature works created at the Institute of Creative Photography during the years 1986 - 88. At this time he started - after earlier attempts with a symbolically oriented smaller series of photographs with only lightly suggested multisignificance action - to use and personally develop technology of drawing-off the gelatine emulsion from negatives. He named the results of the procedure "gellages". This demanding technique fully satisfied his ever-growing interest in crossing traditional borders between separate arts and his strengthening struggle for a metaphorical reflection of various weighty themes which can rarely be expressed in words. Already his oldest gellages, which were the final work at the Institute of Creative Photography, took up the theme of the perfect symbiosis of content and form. Highly expressive motifs of human body destruction, symbolising themes of violence and cruelty, as well as mental depression were given an extraordinary impressive form which perfectly utilised the possibilities of subjective reality stylisation by a resourceful arrangement of moist gelatine including its breaking up, spatial distortions or elimination of disturbing details. Through this method were created sensually extraordinary cogent pictures, whose motifs contained warning messages and dramatic metaphors of anxiety and brutality. Many motifs emerged later in an existentially mooted short film "Process" (1994), which Michal Macku made in co-operation with a Czech TV studio in Brno. The film is an allegorical portrayal of human life using very impressive (not only unusual) animation possibilities of photography emulsion, but also original music by Irena and Vojtìch Havel.

  After a series of gellages with motifs of broken bodies, followed more exalted works and motifs of crying heads, in which Michal Macku first used the multiplication of the same motifs. Multiplication achieved the basic principle of the following set with repeated archetypal figures of men, whose raised hands evoked, not only feelings of defencelessness but also some mysterious signs from a magical exorcism. Scrimmages of identical figures create visions of crowds of lonely people, who are losing their individuality in a crowd, which according to the author's words "does not behave as a group of individualities but as a separate dangerous organism". Macku here resourcefully used an abstract background of a nearly compact grey area, which creates a sort of empty yawning scene out of concrete space and time, which still more clearly expresses the atmosphere of eradication and nothingness. There were also new changes of figure dimensions from the same negative, which were also used by the author in many other works.

  Michal Macku - with only a few exceptions - uses himself as a pattern for his figures because he knows intimately his own body and that is why he can express himself more precisely than by taking photographs of someone else´s body. It is understandable that this self-recognition and self-searching has a metaphorical impact on his pictorial themes. Out of which grows the author's interest in extrarational spheres of recognition, some aspects of Buddhism and other philosophical and religious systems, in a dualism of corporeality and spirituality.

  It can be very expressively shown on a free cycle of gellages with motifs of figures and their silhouettes, in which the silhouettes represent a sort of ideal, whose qualities real bodies do not reach. In spite of an undoubted resourcefulness and emotive impact of such works, it clearly emerged that there were considerable problems of the coherence of the author's and beholders mind. This problem got even deeper in a further picture series with motifs of communicating parts of the bodies or whole figures. Too much coded content had the result, that significant sections of beholders perceived, above all, the technically precise production and a small part of decorative conception, in which there was a considerably suppressed dramatic character and expressive extremity of preceding photographs, but they escaped deeper meaning of these works. More recently, the author - following an imaginary spiral - came back to the motifs and themes of his oldest gellages, with expressively deformed individual bodies, as well as more figures in which the problems of relations between people are often symbolically emphasised. At the same the author's interest in non-traditional forms of gellage presentation becomes apparent. This is also connected in some installations with music and three-dimensional objects, as well as his interest in other experiments in the area of film animation.

  Michal Macku has an extraordinary and sole position in the current branch of stage and intermediate photography in the Czech Republic. Above all post-modern oriented younger representatives, as their contemporaries from a number of painters and sculptors during the eighties, ostentatiously diverted from the expressive treatment of tragic themes, which can be found in works by Jiøí Sozanský, Jiøí Anderle, Olbram Zoubek, Karel Pauzer and many other representatives of the previous art generation and created works full of facility, humour and free of conflicts. Macku admittedly accepted from postmodernism an opposition to long decades of stressed cleanness of the photographic medium, as well as an effort for the fusion of various art branches, but (similarly as for example Ivan Pinkava, group Bratrstrvo or Michaela Brachtová) seeing the conception of art as a non-binding game. His philosophically deep, formally revealing as well as technically precise works are enriching current Czech photography.

• An interview - Jindrich Streit, Ladislav Danek and Michal Macku - Sovinec 13.1.1996

  An interview - Jindrich Streit, Ladislav Danek and Michal Macku, Sovinec 13.1.1996

  JŠ - Michal, I remember how you used to come to see me and bring me your photographs - that was a lot earlier, wasn't it?

  MM - Yeah, of course, that was during Gymnasium, sometime around 1980.

  JŠ - I remember that already then there were photographs which didn't require too much commentary. Their form was always perfect and I feel it stayed with you. But back then you didn't take pictures of people.

  MM - You see, it's interesting to hear this. The photographs from that period (which are somewhere deep in my drawers) don´t mean anything to me anymore. I feel I did them like everyone else, simply a kind of search of an adolescent person. But my visites to you and your opinions then were very important for me.

  LD - At the time you were also a member of the photography group at the Folk School of Art in Olomouc. I remember one of your group exhibition in the Gallery "Pod podloubím". What role did this play?

  MM - The Folk School of Art had more of a practical significance. That's where I got to know Dr. Stibor, an old practitioner, an excellent person and a great companion. He showed us that one can make a living with photography. All of a sudden there was a regular guy and not an artist with a capital A. I saw that art is a normal thing which can be done practically. That was very useful. On top of it I met people from Olomouc, where I was then starting out.

  JŠ - And the things you do now, you started after the Institute?

  MM - No, I already started that there. My final work consisted of gellages. I actually didn't know for quite a long time what I would do for my graduate work. And then suddenly a friend of mine came to tell me, that in some old handbook he found a mention about the possibility to remove gelatine from sheets of glass. We tried it and it worked. Then I actually created the first trio of gellages, the torn up heads. Not until a few years later did I realise, that in effect it was also a symbolic opening of the head, a turning point, the beginning of a new stage.

  JŠ - Did you use sheet films and transfer the exposed gelatine from them onto paper with the help of heat reticulation?

  MM - In fact gelatine is separated from the base chemically and you work with it while it's wet, in effect in the form of a gel. The changing, unstable forms the figures have in the water always fascinated me during my work. Then I transfer the image to the soaked paper and that's what enables me to manipulate it precisely into the form I want. And when the composition is finished, I simply let it dry up and stick together. Also when you look at the first photographs you see that it's only one layer. Step by step I was discovering the technique and adding other elements. For instance, with the first gellages of crowds I used a background to which the figures are applied. So that the resulting image is compact. I also began to discover other possibilities, for example, amplification of the figure from one negative. And then I was adding more negatives and their combinations etc. etc. Simply the themes as they emerge little by little. They also go hand in hand with the development and discovery of the technique.

  LD - And how did the term "gellage" come about?

  MM - I got the idea while working. In essence, it's a ligature of the words gel as in gelatine and collage

  LD - How much time do you have, approximately, for one photograph? I mean the actual manipulation with the loose gelatine before it dries up.

  MM - Naturally I keep soaking it constantly while working. Of course, there are some technical limitations, for example, if it's warm in the room and I've been working for several hours, the gelatine begins to dissolve or tear or the like. At the beginning, before I got the hang of it, I destroyed more material than I made use of. You cannot do gellage in stages like, for example, a painting. But I can play with it all day if I need to.

  JŠ - When I listen to you it occurs to me that it's closely connected with film.

  MM - Exactly. That was one of the first things that came to mind when I saw the loose emulsion in water: animated film. You see, to make animated film was always one of my dreams. Unfortunately it's quite laborious for one person without experience but, with the help of this technique, I managed to make a short film in the Czech television Brno and I would definitely like to return to it.

  JŠ - It seems to me that it's important to you that you use your body as a model for your photographs.

  MM - Yes. That comes from my earlier work when I used to photograph still life and various details. I withdrew somewhere into the woods or some old house and there I explored, undisturbed. I almost never took pictures of people and when I tried, it often ended in a fiasco. I didn't know how to communicate with them, it disturbed me. And, similarly, I now take pictures of myself. It enables me to do focused work, in effect discovering the self, the physical manifestation of one's being. And when I photograph someone else, it's again a particular person who means something to me and to whom I have a certain affinity. And that's then reflected in the photograph.

  LD - Did you ever think about the fact that, for the most part, the viewer of your photographs doesn't know it's your body and, therefore, he/she sees above all male nudes as such? Does your way of presenting your own body perhaps have some deeper level, some further connections?

  MM - I've already met with such questions several times. Why do I photograph men and not women? When I take a photo of a women the aesthetic charge is much more present. So to express some kind of a spiritual struggle, it suits me much better to photograph the male nude. I've already met with a lack of understanding in this matter. I simply feel the male and female principle differently, Yin and Yang, sentimentality and expansions, and with it also the female and male body. Simply, I perceive it this way and that's why I´m also a man, that's why I take pictures of myself and so it's all interrelated.

  JŠ - In your work, what relationship is there between the technique and the subject? I mean you need to subject the technique to the theme, expression and form.

  MM - I actually like the fact that I don´t need to subject myself too much, especially if I consciously stay within the bounds of black and white photography and accept its limitations. On the contrary, the gellage technique gives me a much greater field of activity than the classical photograph would.

  JŠ - And what's your intention while taking a picture? Do you photograph haphazardly or do you already have some idea or plan in mind?

  MM - That varies. Sometimes I spend a week taking photos and making piles of negatives from which I then choose and compose. In that case I go more by formal ideas, for example, I place the lights differently and then I watch what effect it will have. But very often I already have a composition in my head which I then try to realise. For instance, after one deep experience I have an idea to which I then laboriously try to give form for a long time. In a case like that I work on a particular problem to which I subject the technique and everything else.

  JŠ - You began on a certain existential level in your first gellages and then you switched over towards the multiplication of the figure. You began to make the crowd photos and with respect to form, I´d say even decorative ones.

  MM - On the contrary, when I made the first pieces, the open head and the destruction of the actual face, I found them too attractive, almost truckling. At the time, I admired artists like Sozanský - piles of broken pieces, blood and so. That's why I was trying to find a technique of how to do it, otherwise more drastically and that's how the gellages of crowds came about. I wanted the final image to have the maximum expression. Even formally I did things in a less attractive way because I placed the picture on a single grey backing sheet and that way, diminished the lights.

  JŠ - I think that the political situation of the time is reflected a lot in those photographs.

  MM - Surely it is, although not directly. It was an eventful time. You have to realise that I grew up in the seventies. The state which existed in the Republic at the time was normal to me. Therefore, the end of the eighties when a lot of things were beginning to loosen up brought me a lot of stimulation.

  LD - Hands are a very common and expressive motive in your gellages.

  MM - That's also related to the fact that I photograph myself. We normally see ourselves only as hands. That's what's in our operating field, so to say, what we see the most: the world around us and our hands. And, I at least, also take hands as a symbolic expression of the interconnectedness of the spiritual and material worlds; with hands the spirit influences the surrounding, material world. That's for instance where the intertwined hands motive came from. There, the basic or fundamental function of the hands is turned upside down; the grasping of material becomes a limitation and forms a barrier; bars which don´t let us into the open space behind, beyond the form.

  LD - What role does space or working with space play in your work?

  MM - Definitely an essential one. I've also changed its use. Initially, I used it in a negative demarcation. Those were the closed spaces that surround the figure and confine it. Later it's followed with emphasised perspective, third dimension, volume. And in the most recent photographs I´m trying to get light into the picture as another, transcendental dimension.

  LD - I see another problem in the concept of the picture as a photograph and the picture as a painting. I have a feeling that for a photographer the painting-picture photograph is something like a composed piece of reality transposed to a different reality. The function of the background as a carrier to which the painting/image is connected is rather secondary. However, for a painter the background plays a very significant role, because the actual painting is in a certain way the content of how the painter moves on the surface

  MM - This digression from classical photography towards painting interests me more from the technical side. Gellage has something extra compared to classical photograph and that´s structure. Real, physical structure which you can perceive by touch. And one other thing that is very important to me is the history of the origin of each picture; the fact that I enter the process of its making with my hands and that the final form (or shape) comes into being with me standing there, manipulating and thereby creating the picture. And all the photographic work prior to that, was primarily just preparation; essential but preparation nevertheless. And the actual „act of creation" is similar to a piece of clay which you use for sculpting. And that´s the primary difference between photography and gellage, that´s the collage in the word „gellage".

  JŠ - I think your work is closer to painting or graphic art rather than photography. I perceive the modelling of the shape. The figures are deformed in various ways in the way of paintings.

  MM - Yes, but I would say watch out here. The photograph history of the origin of gellage is as it were formal with respect to the final picture. But at the same time it's very important to me in that it enables me to have contact with the physical reality. By pressing the button on the camera I catch and freeze one moment from the continual time which I then transpose and bring to life again. By soaking it and removing it from the base, for a short moment, I enable it to continue in time again. It's as if I branched out reality into some self-existing world which lives at least for a short while in the process of the birth of a gellage (before it dries up and dies again). This way I can combine shots from different time periods and put them into a new context in a new common time. For example, these groups here; they're three individual shots of a figure, three moments in time and I put them together here into a new space, new time and new circumstances. I free them from all previous relations and give them a new life. And everything, the whole history has meaning for me. In this respect photography is present much more than formally.

  LD - From what you just said it seems that for you the form which refers the viewer mainly towards photography is only some sort of technological necessity. Perhaps that's because you haven't found another form for you message (for what you want to communicate).

  MM - It's hard to define it or to delimitate it in this manner. In addition, the photographic connection with reality interests me on another level. You can say that with paintings there is a connection with reality through the painter. Yes, but on a photograph you can catch even that which you aren't aware of not only consciously but also subconsciously. You take a picture of a landscape, come home, develop the film and only on the photograph you find something you weren't aware of before. So in a certain sense, you observe by record a situation or a relationship with which you then work and which you then investigate. The fact that I am the actual object is much more interesting to me. It's, in essence, a road to self-discovery, to growth (and development). In fact, I see art as the road to self-knowledge and I think that's common.

  JŠ - I´m convinced that without it you cannot create. One can see it in your work in the curve that goes from the first, open head all the way to the actual head which appears in your latest pieces. We always create from what we're experiencing and we try to move it towards some sort of perfection both in form and content. In your most recent work I see much more feeling than at the beginning. And I think it's also a reflection of what you're going through.

  MM - Certainly. And that confirms my conviction that art is a road to self-discovery. For me a work of art, be it a photograph or anything else is an expression of some deeper, subconscious or beyond-consciousness spheres of being to which we don´t have access otherwise. And only through a manifestation in the physical sphere in the form of a painting, a poem etc. we can grasp these with the help of our senses and through the senses with our consciousness. Therefore, I create something so that I like it, so that it corresponds to my emotions, that is to my subconsciousness and only then can I explore it. And it really works that way for me; with things that I did earlier, I only understood what they actually meant after a certain while. First time I recognited it clearly on the first triplet of the gellages of torn heads. When I made them I took them as a formal trifle. Only after three years, after one strong experience in a changed state of mind,did I see their meaning. I grasped that this are in fact three aspects of the one turning point: emotional, rational and tough.

  JŠ - I would come back to the last works which I feel, that in comparison with earlier works are much more intimate,i.e. deep and inner, that the form is not in the first plan any more. Feeling is rather emerging. And I think, that important role plays in the background which you made more simple and quiet and so you rather get into the inner world. You are probably again experienced something, or you have moved somewhere because at no other photo does light play so important role as the latest.

• Rozhovor - Jindrich Streit, Ladislav Danek a Michal Macku - Sovinec 13.1.1996 (cesky)

  Rozhovor - Jindřich Štreit, Ladislav Daněk a Michal Macků - Sovinec, 13.1.1996

  JŠ - ...Já si Michale vzpomínám, jak jsi sem za mnou jezdíval a vozil jsi mi svoje fotografie - to bylo hodně dřív, ne?

  MM - No jistě, to bylo na gymnáziu, někdy kolem roku 1980.

  JŠ - Ovšem myslím, že už tenkrát to byly fotky, ke kterým se toho opravdu nedalo mnoho říct. Jejich forma byla vždycky dokonalá, a mám pocit, že to ti zůstalo. Ale tehdy jsi nefotil lidi.

  MM - Vidíš, to je zajímavé slyšet. Mně fotky z téhle doby (které mám někde hluboko v šuplíku) už vůbec nic neříkají a mám pocit, že jsem je dělal stejně jako všichni ostatní, prostě takové to hledání dospívajícího člověka. Ale návštěvy u tebe a tvoje názory měly pro mě tehdy opravdu velký význam.

  LD - Ty jsi v té době byl také členem fotografické skupiny na Lidové škole umění v Olomouci. Já si pamatuji na jednu vaši společnou výstavu v Galerii pod podloubím. Jakou roli to hrálo?

  MM - LŠU měla spíš praktický význam. Tam jsem poznal pana doktora Stibora, starého praktika, výborného člověka a skvělého společníka. Ten nám ukázal, že se člověk může fotografií i živit. Najednou to byl živý člověk a ne umělec s velkým U. Viděl jsem, že umění se dá dělat i prakticky. To bylo velice užitečné. A navíc jsem se seznámil s lidmi z Olomouce, kde jsem tehdy začínal.

  JŠ - A to, co děláš teď, jsi začal až po Institutu?

  MM - Ne, s tím jsem začal už na Institutu. Mojí závěrečnou prací byly už geláže. Dost dlouho jsem vlastně nevěděl, co budu dělat jako absolventskou práci. A pak najednou, jakoby odněkud odjinud, se vynořil tenhle podnět. Přišel za mnou kamarád, že v nějaké staré příručce našel zmínku o možnosti snímat želatinu ze skleněných desek. Zkoušeli jsme to a ono to šlo. Tehdy jsem vlastně vytvořil první trojici geláží, ty roztržené hlavy. A až zpětně, po několika letech mi došlo, že to vlastně bylo i symbolické otevření hlavy, zlom, začátek nové etapy.

  JŠ - Používal jsi planfilmy a z nich jsi přenášel exponovanou. želatinu na papír pomocí tepelné retikulace?

  MM - Ona se vlastně ne tepelně, ale chemicky oddělí želatina od podložky a pracuje se s ní za mokra, vlastně ve formě gelu. Postavy ve vodě vypadají jako nějaké splývavé chiméry - to mě vždycky při práci fascinovalo. A pak obraz nanáším na rozmočený papír a to mi právě umožňuje s ním manipulovat přesně do té formy, do jaké chci. Když je kompozice hotová, nechám ji prostě přischnout. A taky při pohledu na první práce vidíš, že mají jenom jednu vrstvu. Postupně jsem tu techniku objevoval a přidával další prvky. Například už u prvních geláží davů jsem použil pozadí, na kterém jsou aplikované figury. Takže výsledný obraz je kompaktní. Taky jsem začal objevovat další možnosti, třeba zmnožení figury z jednoho negativu. A pak jsem přidával více negativů a jejich kombinace a tak dále. Prostě témata, jak se postupně objevují, jdou taky ruku v ruce s rozvíjením a objevováním techniky.

  LD - A název "geláž" vznikl jak?

  MM - To mě napadlo při práci. Je to vlastně spojení slov gel jako želatina a koláž.

  LD - Kolik asi máš na jednu fotografii času? Mám na mysli vlastní manipulaci s uvolněnou želatinou než zaschne.

  MM - Já to při práci samozřejmě stále namáčím. Jistě, že tam jsou různá technická omezení, třeba když je v místnosti teplo a pracuji už několik hodin, želatina se začne rozpouštět nebo trhat a podobně. Také ze začátku, než jsem se to naučil, jsem mnohem více materiálu zničil než využil. Geláž se nedá dělat na etapy, třeba jako rozmalovaný obraz. Ale mohu si s ní hrát celý den, když potřebuji.

  JŠ - Když tě poslouchám, tak mě napadá, že to má hodně blízko k filmu.

  MM - Přesně tak. To byla jedna z prvních věcí, které mě napadly, když jsem uviděl uvolněnou emulzi ve vodě: animovaný film. Dělat animovaný film byl totiž vždycky jeden z mých snů. Bohužel je to strašně pracné pro jednoho člověka bez zkušeností, ale podařilo se mi pomocí této techniky natočit v České televizi v Brně krátký film „Proces". Byla to taková úvaha o lidském bytí a jeho proměnách. K práci s filmem bych se chtěl určitě vrátit.

  JŠ - Mně se zdá, že pro tebe je důležité, že jako modelu při fotografování používáš vlastní tělo.

  MM - Ano. To vychází z mé dřívější práce, kdy jsem fotil zátiší a různé detaily. Zalezl jsem někam do lesa nebo starého domu a tam jsem si nerušeně zkoumal. A skoro nikdy jsem nefotografoval lidi, a když jsem to zkoušel, často to dopadlo fiaskem. Neuměl jsem s nimi komunikovat, rušilo mě to. A podobně nyní fotím sám sebe. To mi umožňuje soustředěnou práci, vlastně objevování sama sebe, toho hmotného projevu svého bytí. A když fotografuji někoho jiného, jde zase o konkrétní osobu, která má pro mě význam a ke které mám určitý vztah. To se pak promítne i do fotografie.

  LD - Přemýšlel jsi někdy o tom, že divák většinou neví, že jde o tvoje tělo a vidí tedy především mužské akty jako takové? Má tvůj způsob prezentace vlastního těla snad ještě nějakou hlubší rovinu, nějaké další souvislosti?

  MM - S takovými otázkami jsem se už několikrát setkal. Proč zobrazuji muže a ne ženy. Když vyfotografuji ženu, je tam silně přítomen estetizující náboj. A tak k vyjádření jakéhosi duševního zápasu mi mnohem lépe vyhovuje mužský akt. Už jsem se v téhle věci setkal s nepochopením, ale jde mi jenom o to, že cítím rozdílně ženský a mužský princip, Jin a Jang, citovost a expanzi a s tím taky ženské a mužské tělo. Prostě vnímám to takto, proto jsem taky muž a proto fotografuji sebe a tak to všechno souvisí se vším.

  JŠ - Jaký je u tebe vztah mezi technikou a námětem? Myslím tím, do jaké míry musíš techniku podřídit námětu, výrazu, formě.

  MM - Mně se právě líbí, že se nemusím moc podřizovat, zvláště pokud zůstávám vědomě v oblasti černobílé fotografie a přijmu její obecná omezení. Naopak, technika geláže mi umožňuje mnohem větší pole působnosti než klasická fotografie.

  JŠ - A jaký záměr máš při snímání? Fotografuješ nahodile nebo už s nějakou myšlenkou či plánem?

  MM - To je různé. Někdy týden fotím a nadělám spousty negativů a z toho potom vybírám a komponuji. V takovém případě se řídím spíše formálními nápady, třeba umístím jinak světla a pak sleduji, co to bude dělat. Ale dost často mám kompozici už v hlavě a tu se pak snažím realizovat. Třeba po jednom hlubokém zážitku mi v hlavě vytanul nápad, kterému jsem potom dost dlouho a těžce dával formu. A to pak pracuji na konkrétním problému, kterému podřídím techniku a všechno kolem.

  JŠ - Ty jsi začal s určitou existenciální rovinou ve svých prvních gelážích a pak jsi přešel k násobení figury. Začal jsi dělat „davové" fotografie, co do formy, řekl bych, až dekorativní.

  MM - Právě naopak, když jsem udělal první věci, tu otevřenou hlavu a destrukce vlastního obličeje, připadaly mi příliš líbivé, až skoro podbízivé. Já jsem tehdy obdivoval umělce typu Sozanského - hromady střepů, krve a tak. Proto jsem hledal techniku, jak to udělat jinak, drsněji, a z toho vzešly geláže davů. Chtěl jsem, aby výsledný výraz byl maximálně expresivní. I formálně jsem postupoval jakoby méně líbivě, protože jsem obraz umístil na jednolitou šedou podložku a potlačil tak světla.

  JŠ - Já si myslím, že se v tvých starších pracích hodně odráží tehdejší politická situace.

  MM - Určitě ano, i když nepřímo. Uvědom si, že jsem vyrůstal v sedmdesátých letech. Stav, který tehdy v republice panoval, byl pro mě normální. A tak konec osmdesátých let, kdy se začalo mnohé uvolňovat, mi přinášel hodně podnětů.

  LD - Velmi častým a výrazným motivem jsou na tvých gelážích ruce.

  MM - To určitě také souvisí hlavně s tím, že fotím sebe. Ze svého těla vidí člověk většinou jenom ruce. A já chápu ruce také jako symbolické vyjádření propojení duchovního a hmotného světa; rukama duch ovlivňuje okolní, materiální svět. Z toho jsem vycházel třeba u motivu propletených rukou. Tam je základní funkce ruky postavena na hlavu, uchopení hmoty se stává vlastně omezením a vytváří bariéru, mříž, která nás nepustí do volného prostoru vzadu, za hmotou.

  LD - A jakou roli ve tvých pracích hraje prostor nebo práce s prostorem?

  MM - Prostor a objem je pro mě velmi důležitý. A také jsem měnil jeho použití. Poprvé jsem ho použil vlastně v negativním vymezení. To byly ty uzavřené prostory, které obklopují postavu a omezují ji. Pak dál na to navazuje zdůrazněná perspektiva, třetí rozměr, objem. A v posledních fotkách se snažím dostat do obrazu světlo jako další, transcendentní rozměr.

  LD - Zajímá mě ještě jedna otázka: Funkce podkladu, jako nosiče, na který je obraz vázán, bývá ve fotografii podružná. Ale pro malíře hraje podklad velmi podstatnou roli, protože vlastní malba je do značné míry výsledkem toho, jak se na ploše malíř pohybuje, jak ji chápe.

  MM - Tohle vybočení od klasické fotografie směrem k malbě je pro mě zajímavé spíše z technické stránky. Geláž má právě něco navíc oproti klasické fotografii, a to strukturu. Skutečnou, fyzickou strukturu, kterou můžeš vnímat hmatem. A ještě něco je pro mě podstatné; a to je historie vzniku každého obrazu. Že totiž do procesu jeho vzniku vstupuji rukama, že jeho definitivní podoba vzniká tak, že manipuluji s obrazem a vlastně tím ho vytvářím. A všechna fotografická práce předtím, to byla v první řadě jenom příprava. Podstatná sice, ale příprava. Vlastní "akt tvoření" je podobný jako s kusem hlíny, ze kterého se modeluje. A to je ten hlavní rozdíl mezi fotografií a geláží, to je ta koláž ve slově "geláž".

  JŠ - Já si myslím, že tvá práce má blíž k malířství nebo ke grafice, než k fotografii. Vnímám totiž to modelování tvaru. Figury jsou různě destruované a deformované. A to je způsob malířský.

  MM - Ano, ale tady bych řekl pozor. Fotografická historie vzniku geláže je jakoby formální z hlediska výsledného obrazu, ale zároveň je pro mě velmi důležitá v tom, že zprostředkovává kontakt s hmotnou realitou. Zmáčknutím spouště vlastně zachytím, umrtvím jeden okamžik z kontinuálního času a ten si potom přenesu a znovu ho oživím. Tím, že fotografický záznam rozmočím a sundám z podložky, umožním mu zase na chvíli pokračovat v čase. Jako bych rozvětvil skutečnou realitu do nějakého svébytného světa, který žije alespoň nějaký čas v procesu vzniku geláže (předtím, než zase uschne a zmrtví). Tímto způsobem mohu dokonce kombinovat záběry z různých časových okamžiků a dávat je tak do nové souvislosti v novém, společném čase. Třeba tady u těch skupin; jde o tři záběry postavy, sebe sama, tři záběry čili tři časové okamžiky a já je postavím dohromady, do nového prostoru, do nového času a do nových souvislostí a oprostím je od všech původních vztahů, dám jim nový život. A všechno, celá ta historie, má pro mě význam. V tomhle je tam fotografie přítomná rozhodně více než jenom formálně.

  LD - Z toho, co jsi řekl, lze vyvodit, že pro tebe je forma, která diváka odkazuje převážně k fotografii, spíše jenom jakási technologická nutnost, protože jsi třeba nenašel jinou formu pro své sdělení.

  MM - Je těžké to takhle definovat nebo vymezovat. Navíc, u fotografie mě zajímá spojení s reálem ještě na jedné rovině. Můžeš říct, že malba je také spojena se skutečností, a to přes malíře. Ano, ale při fotografickém procesu může být zachyceno i to, o čem nevíš, vědomě, ale dokonce ani podvědomě. Ty vyfotografuješ krajinu, přijdeš domů, vyvoláš film a teprve na fotografii najdeš něco, o čem jsi dřív nevěděl. Takže v určitém smyslu objektivně zaznamenáš situaci nebo vztah, s kterým pak pracuješ, zkoumáš ho. A to, že tím objektem jsem já sám, je pro mě ještě zajímavější. Je to vlastně cesta k poznání sebe sama, k rozvoji. Já vlastně vůbec vidím v umění cestu k sebepoznání, a myslím si, že to je obecné.

  JŠ - Já jsem přesvědčen, že bez toho se nedá tvořit. U tebe je to vidět v oblouku, který vede od první geláže otevřené hlavy až ke konkrétní hlavě, která se zjevuje na pracích z poslední doby. Vždycky tvoříme z toho, co prožíváme a snažíme se to posunout k jakési dokonalosti jak ve formě, tak v obsahu. V posledních pracích vidím mnohem více vztahovosti a citu než na začátku. A myslím, že je to taky odraz toho, co prožíváš.

  MM - Určitě. A právě to mě utvrzuje v přesvědčení, že umění je vlastně cestou sebeobjevování. Umělecké dílo, ať fotka nebo cokoliv jiného, je pro mě vyjádřením nějakých hlubších, nevědomých nebo mimovědomých sfér bytosti, ke kterým máme v běžném životě velmi omezený přístup. A jejich projevením ve hmotné sféře, ve formě obrazu, básně a podobně, je lze uchopit pomocí smyslů a přes smysly vědomím. Takže já něco vytvořím tak, aby se mi to líbilo, aby to odpovídalo mým pocitům vycházejícím z podvědomí a teprve potom nad tím mohu bádat. A ono mi to tak skutečně funguje; u věcí, které jsem udělal dříve, mi až po určité době došlo, co vlastně znamenají. Poprvé jsem si to jasně uvědomil na té vůbec první trojici, na gelážích roztržených hlav. Když jsem je dělal, byly to pro mě formální hříčky. Teprve po třech letech, po jednom silném zážitku ve změněném stavu vědomí, jsem uviděl jejich význam. Pochopil jsem, že to jsou vlastně tři aspekty jediného přelomu; citový, rozumový a silový, akční.

  JŠ - Já bych se ještě vrátil k těm posledním pracím. Mám pocit, že proti předcházejícím jsou daleko intimnější a hlubší a jakoby vnitřnější, že forma už není v prvním plánu. Vystupuje tady spíše pocit. A myslím si, že velkou roli hraje taky pozadí, které jsi zjednodušil a uklidnil a dostáváš se spíš do vnitřního světa. Asi jsi zase něco prožil, nebo ses někam posunul, protože na žádné jiné fotce nehraje světlo tak důležitou roli, jako tady na těch posledních.

Audio

• Michal Macku - Interview with Karel Oujezdský, ČR Vltava, 2007

PDF

• Michal Macku - The 3D Photography

• Mail to Michal Macku

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