PHIL KING MILAN KUNC
Start with a drawing,
HORIZONS then dress it up in
OF CONTRA- colours, make it real
DICTION and meaningful – every
PHIL KING painter knows this, it’s
the same now as it’s
FOLLOWS always been.
#MILAN Milan Kunc
KUNCART
I remember being shocked when I
first came across Milan Kunc’s paintings,
in the small Edward Totah Gallery in
London, in 1989. I was excited, not just
by the work itself, but by the possibilities
it opened up. That encounter was my
way into a surprising body of work
that felt impossibly wide-ranging and
critical – as well as deeply funny – in its
ambitious seriousness. Along with the
emerging work of his New York East
Village studio mate George Condo, it
felt as if some zeitgeist shift was afoot in
these easel-sized paintings. Specific Kunc
paintings lodged in my mind. There
was something infectious about them.
Everything looked different and freshly
possible: a proposal for popular paintings
people might like and understand. For
me, Kunc’s handmade paintings had
all the critical energy of New York art
but combined with a sense of old-world
Milan Kunc
awkwardness, bundled together in an
Beyond Imagination accessible package.
2021
HYB4 Galerie, Kampus Hybernská Certainly, his New York show at
Prague
Pat Hearn Gallery in 1986 was reported
Courtesy of Martin Polak to have given the impression of a new
artistic paradigm in the Big Apple.
Rather than focus on recent work,
Opposite:
Venus Contemplates Apollo Launch Kunc showed a whole mixed bag, from
1982
Oil on canvas
a then-already rich back catalogue.
160 x 240 cm Instead of painting understood as part
Melancholic Autumn Watch of an inevitable historic progression,
1977
Oil on canvas this was painting embracing historical
140 x 200 cm contradiction in order to create uncanny
Courtesy of the artist energy that lit up history in a different
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way. Kunc had made early works
depicting German and Soviet soldiers
in kitschy romantic settings, to me these
paintings spoke of the unresolved old
war tensions that later erupted as the
new currency of ex-Yugoslav holiday
resorts in the 1990s, and they speak
again now as conflicts erupt anew in
the East. He appeared to figure both
East and West contradictions, even as
their coldly-conflictied status-quo began
to collapse into our paralysed over-all
capitalisms. Unlike that of his NY peers
(e.g. Jeff Koons), Kunc’s work felt far
from nihilistic and disassociated. It
was old-fashioned in a revolutionary
way – genuinely plugged into a weirdly
clear-sighted vision of ‘the whole world’
– rather than simply reflecting the
futuristic concerns of bourgeois American
progressive universalism and its sterile
shopping and investment habits. Instead
of anti-heroic artistic necrophilia, Kunc
wasn’t afraid to cast himself as an old-
style painter-hero from ‘ye olden days’. He
embraced a kind of perceptive surrealism,
grounded in a Czechoslovakian absurdist
sensibility – one that returned to the
subversive passivity of Czech writers
like Franz Kafka and Jaroslav Hašek –
deploying Hašek’s deadpan Good Soldier
Švejk, ‘put-on’ to its full Pop Art extent. It
seemed to connect with the ‘arrow through
the heart’ of romantic old modernism – to
the crucial, poetic, cubist-proto-surrealist
universe in cosmopolitan avant-garde
Paris – to the Czech painter Bohumil
Kubišta, who somehow managed to
integrate storytelling into the cubist
paradigm. This is to say that, in Kunc’s
paintings, modernist roaming seemed,
to me, to return anew: its sweeping
imaginary – its Henri Rousseau-
like clarity – beckoned as uncanny
advertising, calling up always-sunny
perspectives of desire. In this – my
own imaginary Kunc cosmos, – Arthur
Rimbaud is brightly circling; Fernand
Léger’s communist dreamscapes are
lurking, and all is at one with Salvador
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 PHIL KING MILAN KUNC

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Dalí’s mad masturbatory capitalist
reveries.
Visionary humour and poetry
are at the root of classic modernism’s
contradictory kick – at the root of its
liberating creative objectivity. In it,
realistic and (sort of) liveable natures
contrast with the blank-eyed saleroom
robotics of overly self-conscious anti-
humanist posturing. Kunc brings good
old Fauvism’s utopianism to a high finish
as he juggles generic desire, magically
combining pre- and post-Pop Art to a
classic end. In their mad combinations
of everything, his paintings are, quite
frankly, embarrassing.
Once a student of Joseph Beuys
– like so many of the best painters in
Germany of that era – the exile Kunc
also entered into the deadpan pop spirit
of another artist of Czechoslovakian
heritage – Andy Warhol – facing up
to the politics leading to the last days
of the Iron Curtain with performative
laughter and mocking processions;
displaying himself as a figure parading
combined McDonald’s Arches/Hammer
and Sickle emblems. Kunc even went
to Moscow, posing as an enthusiastic
provincial communist tourist. Unlike
many American artists on the 1980s art
scene, Kunc did more than simply reflect.
Initially participating in the scene’s
collaborative shows and performances,
he then wandered off into an awareness
that the museum art of the Old Masters
could be enjoyed and exploited as a way
of breaking through to an inspirational
ground of popular longing, one tied to
mind-blowing pictorial force.
Moving his ‘folk art’ from Prague
to Düsseldorf, to New York, to Miami
and Rome, and back to Prague (probably
via a range of other places), meant that
Kunc’s Volke were always nomadic,
manifold people rather than anything
grounded in nationalist thinking.
Weirdly, when I first experienced his
art, I intuited the demotic power of Van
Gogh animating it all.
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FEATURE PAGE 39/80
After seeing his show, I stumbled
away from Cork Street and its galleries,
hoping to find solace in the National
Gallery. Instead, I found Kunc infecting
everything there.
In a 1980s text on Kunc, the
psychoanalytically-minded Donald
Kuspit (who cut a particularly awkward
critical path through that decade) wrote
that:
“Both kitsch and utopia – and utopia is
a kitschy place and kitsch is a kind of utopia, as
Kunc implies – lack criticality, indeed, deny the
need for it, since in them everything is understood,
everyone’s wish is instantly granted, and life is
completely organized and sane-itized down to the
least detail.”
It was Clement Greenberg, in the
1930s, who drew the boundaries around
‘kitsch’ for ‘his’ very serious art world to
come, defining it as: popular, commercial art
and literature with their chromeotypes, magazine
covers, illustrations, ads, slick and pulp fiction,
comics, Tin Pan Alley music, tap dancing,
Hollywood movies etc. etc. etc...
Greenberg, with his penetratingly
exclusive historical-artistic narrative,
identified the Soviet art of his time as
‘Social Realist Kitsch’. Indeed, Kunc, who
had left the old Soviet Czechoslovakia
behind (though he is currently back;
now residing in the Czech Republic),
began to embrace aspects of Soviet
kitsch in the 1970s, and with a comic
painterly enthusiasm. Social Realism,
graphic illustration, and the already-
dated Surrealism – all common in
the Czechoslovakian art schools he’d
attended – became part of his stylistic
arsenal, deployed from the 1980s
onwards, in cheerfully transformative and
paradigm-attacking forms.
His approach probably grew out
of, and in response to, the provocations
of 1960s-70s counterculture. As an exile
in Düsseldorf after the Soviet crackdown
Opposite:
of the Prague Spring, it was the enforced MohnBlumen by Night
1998
utopian norm of Soviet modernity which Oil on canvas
he satirised with his arguably camp one- 140 x 70 cm
man East-Pop movement. Courtesy of the artist
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 PHIL KING MILAN KUNC
“Camp sees everything in quotation
marks. It’s not a lamp but “a lamp”, not a
woman but “a woman”. To perceive Camp in
objects and persons is to understand Being-As-
Playing-A-Role. It is the farthest extension, in
sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theatre.”
– Susan Sontag
Countercultural camp allowed
an escapist regression from serious
state capitalism: from the once-fluid
progressive sentiments that had become
rigid and banked in museums. Linking
the sensibility of a Rubens with that of
tattoo art, etc., Kunc’s work took off with
enormous – practically psychedelic –
inspirational energy. His camp, like that
of Beuys before him, turned life itself into
performance. An absurd theatre, it made
itself at home in different states. It is this
heterogeneous activity – setting itself up
in different kinds of times and places –
that now enables us to turn around and
see that, contemporary art as a rule,
has become a particularly territorially-
limiting and over-coordinated form
of kitsch: art that knows its place.
Ubiquitous social media platforms steer
self-conscious desires and productions
into all-consuming art fair and auction
house norms. Anything goes and yet
everything is organised.
Richard Hamilton Kitsch, using for raw material the debased
Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?
1956
and academicized simulacra of genuine culture,
Collage welcomes and cultivates this insensibility. It is
26 x 24.8 cm
the source of its profits. Kitsch is mechanical
Kunsthalle Tübingen, Tübingen
and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious
Jeff Koons
Ushering in Banality
experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes
1988 according to style, but remains always the same.
Polychromed wood
96.5 x 157.5 x 76 cm Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in
Edition no. 2/3
the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand
Private collection nothing of its customers except their money – not
Bohumil Kubišta even their time.
Saint Sebastian
1912 – Clement Greenberg
Oil on canvas
98 x 74.5 cm Kitsch was once the form of art
National Gallery Prague
favoured by authoritarian regimes, but
now (every instant) every kind of art
Vincent van Gogh
Sunflowers returns categorised – already implicitly
1889
Oil on canvas understood – an already appreciated, and
95 x 73 cm therefore fixed, simulacra. Abstract or
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam figurative, sloppy or neat, contemporary
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or conservative: everything flows by in
some backlit submissive procession. A
new kind of Kitsch rules.
As an artist already long-inhabiting
different kinds of Kitsch orders – pitting
them against each other in single works
– Milan Kunc (who has recently popped
up on Instagram), once again feels to me
like a kind of joyfully elegant spanner in
the works. Old utopias find a new home
as absorbed contradictions: irreconcilable
parts of our shared image-stream
habitats.
Clearly, the construction of absurdity, the
creation of a sense of madness – the method of
radical, unresolvable contradiction – is the bread
and butter of his art.
– Donald Kuspit
Our new ruling Kitsch, on the
other hand, in its coupling with new
technologies and their endless lightning-
fast filing systems, is nothing if not a
blindly logical drug – one that can seem
the opposite of regressive; can indeed feel
oppressively progressive (even as obtuse
far-right nerds party in its light and
drums). Its paradise is ubiquitous, and
constantly at hand. In a time when social
media consciousness ‘solves everything’,
and in which exemplary artistic lifestyles
insist, Kunc’s paintings return to reveal
how old contradictory utopian impulses
can grind slowly together with infectious
pathos; disrupting new technological
paradises in new ways.
What are the fundamentals of our
current drearily-beautiful technocratic
image-stream utopia? The fundamentals
are, in essence, uncannily self-evident
and transparent. A logocentric madness
in which nothing is hidden. The growth
of the Internet was arguably fuelled by
the porn industry and its accelerated
invention and exploitation of new
digital outlets. Perhaps our quest for
the next quintessential money image is
algorithmically exploited in the same
smoothed-out fleshless graphic way. Art
becomes perversely naked: stripped bare
down to clickbait currency. Continual
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On the Verge of Despair

1982
Oil on canvas
140 x 160 cm

Courtesy of the artist

Hessisches Landesmuseum
Darmstadt, Germany

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 PHIL KING MILAN KUNC

day, Soviet Communism vs. Beckoning

Consumerism was a competition for
ownership of ‘The Light’. Emotions and
thoughts became perpetually illuminated,
in the name of advertising on one side
of the fence, and narrow propaganda
on the other. Surveillance by imposed
rationality on one side of the curtain,
and pornographic solitude on the
other. Mass spying on each other on
one hand, embrace of voyeurism on
the other. Two, ostensibly opposite,
failing state systems both claiming to
have – through the rationalisations of
one side and the monetisation of desire
of the other – fulfilled and neutralised
all of the sufferings of humanity. Kunc’s
timely genius was to have combined these
head-butting contradictions in the same
paintings; smoothly picturing impossible
unities and, so, reinvigorating painting’s
old role as evangelical platform, and
recasting it as a new form of heavenly art,
but with embedded contradiction and
difficulty in its payload.
Terrible history is made into a
playful, colourful absolute. Ridiculously
sublime. Kunc’s rejection of lack of
finish nails down any way out as we can’t
engage with his paintings as a tactile
material becoming in its own right. As
solitary performance is compulsory. we can’t easily imagine ourselves into the
Within Instagram’s limelight, we must facticity of making them, this is not an art
all paint in our knickers or underwear; for painterly connoisseurship. There’s no
just another part of an infinite listing. pursing of one’s lips in pleasure at rough
Personal computer life, with its digitally- drips and gestural clues when faced with
Clockwise:
clocked dreamtime, removes facticity his particular kind of matter of fact, good
Beautiful Living and ambition, reducing art itself to just enough, technical precision. Instead,
1979
Oil on canvas another death-cult exchange. Perpetual these pictures insist on their mere
130 x 150 cm
artistic necrophilia in a voluntarily pictoriality; embracing and submitting to
Collection Bruno Bischofberger, adopted, inconsequential surveillance the nature of the graphic image – direct
Zurich
state. pictorial communication – leaving the
Sun City
1985 As with the dual utopias proposed lumpen stuff of painting smoothed out so
Oil on canvas
160 x 200 cm
on either side of Kunc’s carnivalesque that it seems that there is, as with Koons,
Collection of Sylvester Stallone, once-upon-a-time world – with its grim old some kind of rejection of dirty life. But
Santa Monica
Iron Curtain divisions – the fundamentals this assumption is implicitly wrong as
Milan Kunc Instagram:
Angel of Death of social media platforms work by being Kunc, the irrepressible painter, continues
1980
Acryl ic on canvas
completely obvious and clear. We to move paint around – continues to
200 x 160 cm willingly accept their terms in return creatively manipulate the stuff of it – even
Courtesy of the artist for their reward points. Back in the as he sublimates any mess of making

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into his paintings’ licked surfaces. He
rigorously finishes off modernism, but
in so doing, he moulds it anew into an
incongruously generic and populist
Old Masterdom. The tactile stuff of
painting, and indeed, the earthen clay
of his ceramic objects, may ultimately
be glazed and smoothly polished, but
they remain immanent and insistent.
These are first and foremost crafted
paintings that are not produced (and
hence do not live), in a vacuum. They
remain embedded in life – in a painter’s
life – and in that life’s specific touch. This
body of work feels unavoidably human; a
‘despite everything’ form of civilization.
Surprisingly, for such image-filled
pictures, how they are made or how they
work intrigues me as much as what they
represent. I don’t feel any compulsion
to describe or list all the many juggled
objects and horizons. Despite their
deployment of familiar-looking clichés,
nothing feels the same in them. Kunc
makes everything self-evident and
available and – as with all great painting
that engages me – it is the machinery
as a whole that enthrals. These are
paintings that have taken their own
time, and each one comes with a sense
of specific painterly solutions pushed to
a high finish. The surprising nature of
that greatest of modernist inventions –
collage – is finessed into the creation of
Kunc’s inclusive continuums. Despite
everything – despite all that obvious light
– a ridiculous mystery is at work.
Influencer Kunc’s paintings come
online with their disjunctive syntheses
masked as smoothly glowing status-quo
illustrations. They fit seamlessly into our
world but as in the world of that long time
Cold War ago, they also don’t. It was once
said somewhere in some old art magazine
that Kunc’s pictures were intended as
viruses; meant to jam up the gears of
normative longing. Now, in this time of
rampant killer viruses, maybe we can end
up wondering if that is how his pictures
still work.
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Antonin Artaud spoke of the power
of plagues to destroy from within, and
Kunc paints the worms at the heart of the
apple. A virus is a dead protein structure
that is not necessarily alive. It needs to
lock on and hijack life to replicate and
thrive from within living organisms. In
the escapist play of Kitsch imageries and
their paradises, Kunc, with his hand-
finish, reintroduces smooth death. He Phil King
imagines completion as if we still live in The Silent Sea
2021
the religiously-guaranteed days of the Oil on canvas
60 x 80 cm
Old Masters even while current daily life
is a continual social catastrophe. His is Courtesy of the artist
a realist art, but even better than that, it
embodies a sense of animation that takes
off into visionary realms. It imagines
outlandish worlds that aren’t here yet
– paradises on Earth – and looking at
their wide horizons we often crack up
in recognition. When his dark drolleries
pop up online they contaminate the ever-
unsurprising streams of kitsch, and infect
that most contemporary form of virtual
currency: the liking of everything. In the
bright romantic light of his pictures, he
includes the dark ecological consequences
of deadly economic stupidities. To
my mind – thirty-plus years after first
experiencing it – his work remains a
warning. He’s never afraid of the deadly
obvious, and his work enters it through
the gateway of Kitsch as some kind of
deranged fairground ghost-train ride that
carries on to the end of the track. In his
well-painted lively grotesque sideshow,
“...as in the plague, there is a kind of References:
strange sun, a light of abnormal intensity by Clement Greenberg
which it seems that the difficult and even the Avant Garde and Kitsch
1939
impossible suddenly become our normal element. The Partisan Review
– Antonin Artaud Susan Sontag
As I noted in a sketchbook back in Notes on “Camp”
1964
the long-ago pre-digital 1980s, “Kunc’s The Partisan Review
paintings jam dialectical analysis. They use and Donald Kuspit
Milan Kunc’s Fool’s Paradise
celebrate irreconcilable contradictions as a kind of 2007
ambiguous affectivity whose illuminated horizons Milan Kunc
KANT Publishers
comfort with bright artificial unity, but whose
Antonin Artaud
ambiguities put the comfort of those unities in The Theater and the Plague
1938
question.” Le Théâtre et son Double
Éditions Gallimard
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