Performative Lecture by Boris Ondreička — AD HOC: THE SECOND CONTEMPORARY
Wednesday, 26 November at 7:00 PM
Koppel Villa
In the lecture AD HOC: THE SECOND CONTEMPORARY, Boris Ondreička expands his long-term research into the history of free contemporary art, exploring it as an expert in individualization from the early long 19th century to spatial installation. He takes a polemical stance toward swarm theory, reconstructing the mentioned history as a divergence of personal transgressive and subversive acts. These acts, alongside the ideas of Jacob Taubes, are considered by Ondreička as decisive factors distinguishing past from future. Following Gilles Deleuze, he approaches the concept of becoming someone (or anything) today from a dividualist perspective.
Ondreička engages with the phenomenon of contemporary art, its historical backgrounds, and consequences, addressing questions of how we arrived at the present moment and how to navigate a space without (critical) categories. In his proposed innovation of swarm theory—which he argues fails with higher organisms—he introduces the crucial role of subversive individual curiosity, will, and unpredictable, prototypical creativity: a kind of generative “bug” in the system expressing a defiant centrifugal force born from fatigue with previous (or even currently ongoing, hysterically shifting) contents, forms, and values. This force moves away from “-isms,” promoting self-eroding dynamics within them. When he speaks of an automatic centrifugal force as an integral part of the art evolution system, he also refers to the broader relations between the “I” (individuality, personality) within the “we” (collectivity, movement).
