Matjaž Geder is an art teacher, but teaching art is more than just a job to him. He considers it a vocation – literally a calling: work that he was called to perform by a variety of circumstances. As a remarkably keen observer of works of art and a perceptive reader of texts, Geder prepares himself carefully for all his lessons and art workshops. He invests a great deal of his free time in these preparations. The clear reason for this is so that he can prepare his students as convincingly and successfully as possible for their direct encounter with and individual discovery of the magic of art. Both as a man and as a teacher, Matjaž Geder is profoundly aware of the fact that if someone is introduced to a subject in a boring manner, the subject itself will inevitably seem boring. This creates such resistance towards the subject matter in the learner that a child will continue to give it a wide berth even when he or she has grown up, since all it awakens are dreary and monotonous memories.
Alongside his successful teaching work, Geder is also a very successful printmaker. Although his essential artistic purpose is clearly intimate – since he mainly creates these prints for himself, without any hint of aggressive or intrusive self-promotion – his work has almost coincidentally attracted the attention of various art critics and galleries, which has led to invitations to numerous solo and group exhibitions both in Slovenia and abroad.
The leitmotif of his artistic work is a theme that the artist encounters in his profession: the points of semantic intersection between teaching, creating and the childlike subjectivity on which Geder places the greatest emphasis. Geder interprets this subjectivity the way he himself sees and understands it – caught in the different, often conflicting points of intersection of the education system. His works are fragmentary moments of reflection on a world of anxiety and internal and external conflicts. As an attentive observer, the artist is best able to interpret these conflicts by means of a childlike artistic creativity, in other words through a language which is very direct but which, in the twenty-first century, has also become very enigmatic and, in an age in which youth communication is compressed into two-line utterances and substitute interjections such as “OMG”, “WTF” and “LOL”, something entirely unnecessary and boring, precisely because it is pregnant with meaning, the acceptance and understanding of which requires time, since both self-awareness and human relations are built through the category of time.
Each of us has been taught to expect our time to be something special, but in this way our desires and the teleology of our development have become something unremarkable, something uniform. The modern age forces us to ignore and race ahead of our own time, into a search for compulsory happiness, the constant rapture of wealth, standardised beauty and eternal youth, where all those who do not achieve these results, or simply do not care about them, are excluded. Those who try and find a path to an original way of living are sooner or later mockingly and belittlingly characterised as eccentrics and pushed to the margins of the advertising industry. In order for people to become reliable and loyal consumers, it is necessary to topple culture as the foundation of civilisation. The famous line “We don’t need no education” from the Pink Floyd song Another Brick in the Wall was originally meant sarcastically, but in the twenty-first century it has become a desideratum. People don’t need education and culture to achieve their Warholian fifteen minutes of fame: their absence is even preferred, since no one is so easily dominated as the person who disdains and despises culture. Culture is not in fact a field of total freedom but a field of order and dialogue within which the kind of public self-humiliation that we find in various reality shows can never occur. The Hungarian philosopher Béla Hamvas observes in his work Pathmos that the Chinese character for the world is the same as the character for rubbish. Through his monotypes Geder talks to us about this same adolescently morbid and anxious identification of the world as rubbish, and the search for a place in it that is genuinely one’s own. Evidence of the search for one’s own identity and proof of one’s presence in this world is also provided by graffiti or names scratched into desks: “Nino”, “Luka” and so on.
This is also the sense in which we can understand Geder’s impressions of school desks made using rubber stamps, which at first glance are reminiscent of floating vessels or sarcophagi, but which, when placed within broader culturological coordinates, remind us of the Noah’s Ark from Paolo Uccello’s fresco The Flood, reproduced many times over. The school desk becomes a metaphor – because in fact there is currently no more appropriate one – for a Noah’s Ark which the learner wishes to fill with everything that he or she wishes to save from the Flood. In this case, of course, the ark is not filled with pairs of animals. Instead, its cargo consists of all the precious, original and vulnerable thoughts that the adolescent wants to save from this world and set off with them in search of a suitable land where it is possible to start over. But these desks/arks multiply, with the result that they meet in some strange place, like a unique swarm of different and extremely personal desires and hopes.
Geder’s cycle Ain’t No Cure For Love takes its title from a Leonard Cohen song. In these prints we see a clumsy copy of Amor from Caravaggio’s painting Amor vincit omnia, which very eloquently shows us what the arks of hope are filled with, since neither heavenly love nor earthly love allows a human being to be alone. The world that these imaginary arks want to leave and abandon to the final flood is expressed very clearly by the ornamentally printed strips of pills bearing the legend Xanax, denoting pills used to treat anxiety, stress and panic attacks. It should be noted that in Geder’s prints the name of the pills appears as the maker’s logo rather than as the title of the work. When his works contain a portrait – an exceptional occurrence – it appears in such as a way as to be unfailingly reminiscent of The Scream by Edvard Munch. Paradoxically this scream is at the same time the only thing that is alive in Geder’s portrait, since the entire head is sunk in an artificial torpidity and even its round shape is suggestive of the form of a pill.
Geder frequently uses a famous scene from Peter Weir’s film Dead Poets Society as a background for his prints. This scene, which in the film denoted rebellion, becomes something entirely different in Geder’s interpretation. In his works, the school uniforms could easily be replaced by business suits, and the young rebels by young urban professionals. In Geder’s interpretation of the world, even rebellion against the institutions is controlled and manufactured, with the evident intention of turning rebels into consumers, and also into popular and successful wholesalers and retailers of unnecessary junk.
Matjaž Geder’s monotypes are small in size. In this way they are indicative of the special intimism of the relationship that the artist establishes with his works. Yet this intimism is hidden, in that we can also understand these small works in the sense of a wall or, more precisely, of the Archimedean circle which Geder draws around his life. The line of this circle is above all an ethical line within which there is no following or constructing of individual views. There are clearly two worlds. One of them is the world that we have to share, since there is no other way. This is the world that according to Béla Hamvas is identified with rubbish. The other world is exclusively the artist’s personal world. Here Geder is placed in a thankless, almost schizophrenic role. Neither of these two worlds can in fact exist entirely independently of the other without becoming either a utopia or a dystopia. That which is genuinely Geder’s in this imperfect division is simultaneously that which is most provocative. His works reveal no thirst for glory or similar destructive yearnings, which the artist understands as merely deceptive and deadly illusions. Likewise, there is no evidence in his works of a desire for something, but rather the fulfilment of that utterly ordinary, modest and unpretentious life which for him represents the highest form of human existence. After all, a perfectly ordinary life is precisely the reason why Homer’s Odysseus endured dangers and difficulties for ten long years. His journey is part of our collective memory, but not the period after his return. When Odysseus returns home at last, his journey, which is at the same time a universal journey, finally comes to an end. From this point on he begins to live the kind of personal existence that is not and cannot be the subject of macro-historical studies. An ordinary life begins, a life that is of no interest at all to the general public, and yet…
Robert Inhof