Lectures

Slovak Modernity in Search of Identity. Between Folklore and Industrialization.

The interface between rural traditionalism and petty bourgeois conservatism is the most prominent territory on the map of artistic modernism in Slovakia. The formal, stylistic, and ideological development of the visual arts of the Slovak cultural area took place almost exclusively there. It is interesting to note that this territory can be defined not only geographically, but also in terms of meaning, by the coordinates Bratislava - Košice. This environment indicates specific socio-cultural parameters that also intensify the work of Janko Alexy. Like his contemporaries Martin Benka, Zoltán Palugyay, and Miloš Alexander Bazovský, Alexy cannot escape cultural provincialism and ethnographic monothematism. The absence of a significant and competitive cultural center in Slovakia contributed to programs that idealized the village and rural life in the countryside. Instead of these motifs becoming part of a more complex spectrum of cultural identity of the emerging state formation, the periphery in Slovakia became a value reference. What is the explanation for the almost obsessive reproduction of clogs, shirkas, drops, scarves, crosses and chapels, rakes, hay, fences, rolls and bows, wallahs and clogs? It is always a search for unique motifs, capable of visualizing alternative, „ideal“ worlds, unencumbered by the necessity of progress in time and space. In the environment of the Slovak countryside, this idealization includes another essential identifying component.