František Hanousek↓

About the work

The Bonfire of the Vanities

This Is the World: Here You Go “Brandy on an empty stomach at noon. The devastated, finished remnants of something, the remnants of some former autonomy and authenticity, have been freshly dusted into a wasteland and are now self-assembling into a new form. No one knows anything about it, about this form, how much and in what way it will benefit from the unwanted inheritance of the original forms.

What I particularly advocate here is everything low, undifferentiated, ineffective, insignificant, worthless, and inferior. It is the waste and the putty and the essence of the world. It harbors nobility, differentiation, efficiency, meaning, value, order. The essence of the world, just as a candle is the essence of fire.

Terrible is the ambition of today’s city to clean up and, via purges, turn into barracks full of high-funny fun; into a paddock. Terrible is the belief that when you sweep the dregs of society out, the hard, self-supporting construction of successful and high-quality layers will remain, and if something falls out of it again, it will certainly be of poor quality and will be cleaned up again.

The point is that such a world will never work properly. The dirt will not disappear after the cleaning; it will only change.” (Jiří Sádlo: Praha a Brno) There first was the odd orchestration of a white cube via pointless plumbing and clogged boxes, presented at the Holešovice shaft exhibition “The Rabble Carnival: Fuzzy Destinies”. This summer, Hanousek continued in obsessive and undisciplined cooperation with Jakub Hájek (as in the previous exhibition and before, etc., c. 2017). It could be said that František’s artistic practice prior to encountering Jakub either did not exist or was intentionally forgotten. Today, he presents a new adjustment of objects, entitled The Bonfire of the Vanities, to celebrate all the graduate jets and opus magnums, and exhibits them at Marie’s gatehouse.