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.