M30 Július Koller

Anti-Happening (Subjective Objectivity System) (1965)

The conceptual artist Július Koller (1939–2007) created his first ‘anti-happening’ in the Czechoslovakian city of Bratislava in 1965. The work was a small card stamped with green text that said ‘ANTIHAPPENING Systém Subjektivnej Objektivity Ceskoslovensko’. Later that year he produced a handwritten manifesto outlining his theory, which had its basis in the concept of the readymade. For Koller, anti-happenings were small, subtle actions that befell to the participant as part of the course of everyday life. They were not invasive or directive, they simply sought to expand the participant’s experience of the world around him or her. Playing ping-pong could be anti-happening, the letter ‘A’ stamped on the back of a card could be anti-happening, a question mark could be anti-happening.

Indeed, the question mark became the defining element of Koller’s work after the Soviet Union occupied Czechoslovakia in 1968 in order to bring an end to the liberal reforms of the Prague Spring. The symbol represented doubt and uncertainty and the need to ask questions and seek answers about social and collective relationships. As censorship in Czechoslovakia became tighter, and communication with the outside world harder, Koller critiqued this increasingly oppressive situation by looking to the cosmos and elaborating the concept of U.F.O. (the initials standing for different things at various times, including Universal Fantastic Operations), which became a metaphorical space for communication between humans and extraterrestrials as a way of slipping the bonds of state control.

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Subjective cultural activity creates a new cultural reality by a cultural demarcation in the entire spatio-temporal and psychophysical reality (the Duchampian principle of the ‘readymade’) and by a cultural anti-artistic treatment of objective reality. The programme of a cultural synthesis of art and life is a subjective-objective civilistic culture which moves from ways of implementing artistic actions (happening etc.) to a new cultural forming of subject, awareness, way of life, the natural environment, surrounding, and the real world. By means of text information (making known) the cultural demarcation becomes part of the cultural context.