Jan Mancuska

How does a story tell time? In his text-based installations Jan Mancuska takes this question as his starting-point, unpacking stories and separating them into their constituents of narrative and duration. His project shares many of the concerns of artists working in film – a relationship that Mancuska, whose parents were film directors in the Czech Republic, makes explicit. He often interweaves cinematic elements into his work – at times literally, as in the re-creation of a film cell in enamel and Perspex (‘The Painting’ series, 2003–5) or in his recurrent material use of projectors, screens and monitors. In The First Minute of the Rest of a Movie (2005), a work produced with Jonas Dahlberg at the Kunstverein in Bonn, text describing the opening of a film was projected across the gallery space.

These references are slightly misleading as signposts: in many ways Mancuska’s project is directly opposed to the way film functions. Rather than stories that unfold with frame-by-frame linearity, Mancuska attempts to render narrative visible in its entirety, all at once and all together. While The First Minute took film’s remit literally – it projected a narrative onto a wall opposite – it turned cinematic temporality on its head. The entire scene was made available to the viewer at a glance; the minute’s temporal duration on film was traded for the episode’s visual immediacy in the gallery space.

In other works different narrative perspectives are rendered as physical text. The installation True Story (2005) shows three accounts of the same episode – a racially charged encounter between a woman, her boyfriend and a black man she was afraid would attack her. The letters and words are strung onto wires that lace through the gallery at chest-height, crossing at the precise moments when each account intersects. Forsaking parallel editing and leaving temporal consistency behind, the installation preserves each distinct version of the episode intact.

Mancuska’s practice owes much to certain strains of Conceptual art, particularly in its use of text to create formally self-reflexive and philosophically engaged works. For his first show at Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York, Mancuska erected a fake partition wall from which he excised a textual description of the work that lay behind it (‘The space behind the wall on the left side is about three metres deep […] in front of the wall there stands a two meters [sic] high cabinet …’). For the viewer, bulbous letters such as ‘O’ and ‘B’ acted as convenient peepholes, allowing glimpses of what lay beyond: a space about three metres deep, and within it the open, empty cabinets that had been described by the text. Light passing through the letters projected the text over the whole otherwise darkened interior, forcing a contrast between the text’s linguistic description of the scene and its visual enactment. The subject, both depicted and performed, of The Space behind the Wall (2004) was emptiness: the literal emptiness of the cabinets and the physical insubstantiality of the text.

As with other young artists working today, Mancuska’s Conceptualism appears romantic. A language that once excluded all other frames of reference and later widened to take on political critique, Conceptualism now resonates with a sentimentality that may seem alien to its original intentions. Such notes were present in the 1960s – for example, in Douglas Huebler and Bas Jan Ader – but as time moves on, the hubris of these Conceptualism’s various calls for objective forms, purely analytical propositions and self-contained systems comes to the fore. The shorthand that now calls art of the late 1960s to mind – minimal gallery installations, site-specific text, deliberately purposeless endeavours – is often paired with works that speak of impossible and failed aspirations. It has become a language steeped in lost opportunity and adaptable to the expression of human futility and pathos.

Exemplary of this tendency, Mancuska’s installations often movingly describe loneliness, heartache and the difficulties of being in the world. His work for the 4th Berlin Biennial was a projected text piece that described his mother’s grief after she learnt her father was dying (20 Minutes After, 2006). Another interlaced text piece, titled A Fragment of Asynchronous History: Jana’s Story (2005), relates the story of Mancuska’s school friend Jana, who was raped on a train on her way to Prague. Mancuska was told the story second-hand and, in order to honour it – Jana never went to the police herself or made the crime public – made its evocation the subject of his work. The ‘asynchronous’ nature of history suggested by the title is effected formally by the fracturing of time into three separate accounts – in this case the storylines corresponding to Jana, her confidant and Mancuska himself, who heard about it years later. The term ‘asynchronous’ also speaks to the traumatic nature of the episode for Jana, who sought to exclude it from her life as though it had never happened. In such a piece and others, Mancuska’s works reconfigure narrative, separate out duration, render words material, splinter perspective and engulf the viewer, but leave language’s ultimate responsibility intact – commemoration and redemption.