Workstation [antikvár]

THE BACHELOR MACHINES OF AN UNCLASSIFIABLE ARTIST AmiBarak Antal Lakner has been an entrepreneurial artist since the end of the 1990s, when he launched the INERS series. He is sole proprietor of this artistic enterprise, which invests all its capital (natural, social and artistic) in the conception and fabrication of goods whose value is mainly poetic. With his undeniable conceptual talent, Lakner has created an emblematic series of post-pop artifacts that allude to consumerism without concession, even as they query with constancy and with the traditional question of work. These pieces, which Lakner has been producing abundantly for some time, resemble tools or machines, and are described by the artist himself as passive. They take the form of stationary apparatus with fixed resistance which, similar to leisure equipment and unlike work tools, transform the energy of human activity into no particular useful activity, that is to say a dematerialization of work which impedes the user from transforming nature in any violent manner. No one doubts the importance of work these days although its value and social implications are inversely proportional to its visibility. Both an individual and societal issue, work makes and unmakes destinies, as some people consider it their life, their identity, the gage of their freedom, rather than as just one aspect of the whole. Antal Lakner treats labor as a representation: he renders it perceptible, seizes it from the privacy of the mind and exposes it to discovery and interpretation. His art testify as much to the artist's vision about the worker as to the artist as worker. More importantly, he constantly stimulates the spectator, who plays his own role as animator of these machines even as he trains on them, to fully take advantage of their final objective. For, as an accomplished anti-Kantian, Lakner saves for his art a quite practical finality. By keeping this problematic in the field of contemporary art, he hopes to question in parallel numerous geopolitical, psychological and cultural resonances of work that exist in today's world. If during the course of history, the notion of work has rarely been discussed as it is today, we can say paradoxically that such a human practice has only moderately been prominent in the field of art. The theme of the worker and his tools has often evaded discussion because of the unstable aspects of the reality of work. Lakner is able to address it as a pole of interest in contemporary art. De facto one must assert the concrete intensity of work where all apparent reticence at furnishing a significant image has been annihilated. He considers work within a mutant social reality whose constant reconfiguration ambiguously allows him to arrest a formatted and consecrated vision of the situation. We should remember that traditionally an artistic vision of work is characterized by the recurrent, though contestable, exposition of a link between work and value. Work in the historical, pre-modern sense in Judeo-Christian society is the consequence of divine punishment, whereas in the classical world it was considered a contemptible occupation which distracted from the vita contemplativa, the only life worth living, as it is the only one which allows for contact with the divine. In this context, the artist represents the exception more easily