Pocket Variations in AVU POP-UP Gallery

The exhibition was initially to be called “Beautiful Serge.” During the almost a year that has passed from its design to its realization, all the participants became mentally disconnected from the original name and thus, partly consciously and partly subject to the seductions of a dangerous chance event, chose a new title, “Pocket Variations.” It partially obliterates the reference to the beautiful and the quite interesting link to the French New Wave. At least for those who will not read this accompanying text and will be content with seeing the exhibition and its title. The following few paragraphs are an update of an essay that formed part of the exhibition proposal.

The inspiration for the exhibition title was one of the first French New Wave films, Beautiful Serge, directed by Claude Chabrol in 1958. The hero returns to his native village and tries to see it as in his memories. This effort encounters a double transformation ‒ of the protagonist and the village environment. The object of recollection is thus denied to the protagonist; it is unattainable and becomes an object of nostalgia.

The exhibition will employ the motif of return, its factual impossibility, and nostalgia on several levels. The exhibitors work with a return to the iconoclastic foundations of modern art. They are straightforward, raw, childlike, and playful. Perhaps one could quote the question: “Is modernity our Antiquity?” by Roger M. Buergel and Ruth Noack. The history of art has reflected this return to an imaginary beginning many times. After all, Neue Wilde and the Zombie Formalists have also been returning. And after all, this operation of symbolic return is a way of continuing in the tradition of modernism and, simultaneously, separating from it. The emphasis on nostalgia is also a counter-reaction to the wild technological and communicative transformation pervading our current lives. It is a kind of non-proclamatory defiance of the surveillance of Internet networks with their trading in attention; it is a way of avoiding the temptation to relentless updating. It is a skeptical relativization of the Woke Generation’s mentoring activism and claims on the individual in the face of global existential challenges and generalizing cultural judgments.

On the one hand, the reference to the New Wave cinema is an intuitive and somewhat random choice. But at the same time, it bears its specific meaning of embracing certain practices; certain stylistic means. And of interpreting the social atmosphere when it is possible to say with a certain exaggeration that climate change is the new Cold War. Most young artists have to cope with small budgets, both for exhibitions and individual works, which forces them, if they are inventive, to seek new stylistic means, revitalize the tired aesthetics, improvise, bravely face fortuities, and appropriate exhibition conventions. The “breathless” feeling seems to be a good starting point for unexpected artistic gains. Coarse means of expression, a certain degree of clumsiness, carelessness, and emphasis on neglected or peripheral subjects are often interpreted as contempt for viewers, but in reality, they respect them.

The term ‘nostalgia’ was first used by the German physician Johannes Hofer in 1688 to diagnose the ailments of Swiss mercenaries after returning from years of service abroad. By analogy, most exhibitors have encountered each other when away from home, and they have either short or long both study and work stays abroad behind, from which they return to the domestic troubles, the contradictions between the imagined and constantly failing reality of home with its sticky tendrils of memories of their own failures and moments of happiness.

The title of the exhibition is hence “Pocket Variations.” After all, we all reach into pockets ‒ mostly our own or the more daring or hardened ones into someone else’s. The shape of a pocket is felt but usually not seen. The number of objects customarily carried in pockets may be fairly well circumscribed by our experience, but what about those of the Big Others? The scent of mystery and danger wafts from the pockets of strangers. Pockets emptied and empty, pockets