Bratislava – Vienna: Asynchronous Neighbours

On Roman Ondak’s SK Parking intervention

By Wolfgang Kos

In 2001 Vienna was the perfect setting for an intriguing time-space intervention with cars serving as visual aids. Today SK Parking is considered one of the most precise works of art conveying the psycho-topographical sentiment between East and West. Twelve years after the “opening”, which was also euphorically embraced by the cultural scene, the Slovak conceptual artist Roman Ondak visited nearby Vienna, a city so close yet so far away. Even back then, his intervention had a melancholic feel because in 2001 it was already noticeable that, after a phase of short-lived curiosity, the enthusiasm of the so-called “Eastern artists” towards the West had been pigeonholed by the international art world as a merely peripheral phenomenon.

Ondak’s projects are characterised by their ability to create situations. In the words of curator and theorist Igor Zabel, they create a “constellation of things, people and spaces that basically deviates from what is expected and taken for granted”. “The story is already there” before he starts a project, the artist once said. He then has to illustrate it with formal and non-verbal means. When Ondak tests demarcation lines and transitions, as in SK Parking, he does not do so in an abstract no-man’s land but by carefully examining real and often paradoxical spatial relationships.

In SK Parking the distance covered was 80 kilometres on the map. “Only” 80 kilometres, one should add. After the relationship between Bratislava and Vienna had been blocked during the Cold War and the historical neighbouring cities had become alienated from each other, people were perplexed to discover when the Slovak state was founded in 1994 that nowhere else in Europe are two capitals located so close to each other. Still, they had a long way to go before developing reasonably pragmatic, though not profound, relations.

Roman Ondak and his friends drove five Škoda cars of an older model from Bratislava to the Vienna Secession in 2001. At their place of departure, they represented poor normality in the context of continuously growing consumer desires, while on the streets of Vienna, they were likely to be met with pitying looks. The lacklustre cars were parked in the car park behind the Secession, where they remained frozen as a barely perceptible curiosity for two months. “In a way, I am curious,” says Ondák about SK Parking, “about what forms and situations we can all still perceive as art. At the same time, I’m trying to open up this space to people who are not familiar with art and to learn from them.”

While some passers-by did not actually notice the small vehicles with Slovakian licence plates abandoned in Vienna, others suspected them to be foreign, perhaps even illegal intruders in the well-ordered consumer metropolis of Vienna. Why didn’t they drive back across the border in the evening like the shabby, often stinking buses that carried curious day visitors from Slovakia to Vienna in the 1990s? Who had authorised their permanent parking on valuable private property in the first place?

Roman Ondak was familiar with commuting across borders and between systems. After having been denied admission for years, the artist, born in 1966, finally began his studies in art in 1988, when Socialist Realism still dominated Slovak academies. He graduated in 1994, shortly after the Fall of the Iron Curtain and a liberating revolution that was celebrated with an outburst of spontaneous enthusiasm at the Bratislava Art Academy. Ondak belongs to the first post-communist generation of artists in his country for whom the neighbouring western city of Vienna no longer was an inaccessible outside world that many of their predecessors and teachers had fled in provincial self-restraint. With short visits to Vienna, where they eagerly went to shop for ideas and finally experienced works by world stars up close in commercial and public art spaces, they could bring their knowledge of contemporary art, which they had previously acquired through surreptitious detours, up to date.

Similar to the Škoda expedition, this went unnoticed: without a friendly welcome, without substantial dialogue with the Viennese art community, which in turn considered itself too good to take a look at Bratislava or Budapest. Specialised art scouts like the Knoll Gallery or the Kontakt Collection of Erste Group and ERSTE Foundation were exceptions. Contacts that persisted were all the more valuable. In the nineties, Vienna thus became a bridgehead, at least temporarily. For Ondak, who has been represented by the Viennese gallery Martin Janda since 1996, the neighbouring city became a gateway to an international career. Even before the 2001 intervention in Vienna, his works had been on display in several Central and Western European cities.

SK Parking was Roman Ondak’s very personal contribution to the group exhibition Ausgeträumt ... (End of a dream …), which was by no means limited to studying the East. The installation used a specific model case to underline the burgeoning scepticism that curator Kathrin Rhomberg diagnosed with regard to upheavals across systems. In her lead text, she wrote that “after years of hope and confidence, our social and political reality is currently largely perceived with disillusionment”.

Roman Ondak, SK Parking, 2001, installation view at Erste Campus, Vienna, 2021. Photo: Oliver Ottenschläger, © Kontakt Collection, Vienna

Roman Ondak, SK Parking, 2001, installation view, Secession Vienna, 2001. Photo: courtesy of the artist

Roman Ondak, SK Parking, 2001, installation view, Kunsthalle Bratislava, 2021. Photo: Archive KHB / Martin Marenčin

This was true not only for the artistic utopia of a fruitful exchange between East and West, but more generally for the dream of a comprehensive democratisation process and an opening society. It had long become apparent that the transformation of the post-socialist countries of East-Central Europe was more abrupt and anti-social than had been hoped and determined by unrestrained deregulation and suddenly enforced neo-liberalism, with grotesque side effects.

In SK Parking, Ondak’s conceptual methods perfectly engaged with each other. What had begun as a subversive, mobile performance without an audience changed its aggregate state to temporarily solidify into a sculpture in public space. Afterwards, the props, the borrowed cars, were returned to their owners and disappeared again into everyday Slovakian traffic. What remained was a series of documentary, strangely ghostlike photographs. The work was subsequently consigned to memory as a symbol of a very special window of time.

Twenty years passed until the initiative surprisingly materialised again. After an unexpected re-enactment in front of the Kunsthalle building in Bratislava, the ensemble of tinny short-term extras was once again transferred to Vienna, where it became a permanent art object tagged with an inventory number. The reason for this reinstallation was the Kontakt Collection’s acquisition of five old Škodas that correspond to those used in SK Parking, hence quoting them. While the vehicles are not the originals (after all, their individual stories were irrelevant even in 2001), the aim is to reanimate the ideas and spirit of a historically relevant event.

In the interim, the permanent presentation of the aged Slovakian automobiles from another era that today have the look and feel of lovable vintage cars, are lined up in the underground car park of the Erste Campus – a somehow exotic installation amid heavy customer cars and company vehicles in shiny black managerial dress style. What is reflected beyond times gone by is the image of social asynchronicity. Because in the 1990s, contrary to Ondak’s late-communist Škodas, Bratislava too saw an increasing number of heavy vehicles of the latest design on its streets – fat SUVs and overpowered lavish black limousines as prestige symbols of a rising, financially strong class. By then, the shabby Škodas were already threatened with extinction.

Wolfgang Kos (born in 1949) is a Vienna-based historian, radio journalist and exhibition curator. He was an editor at ORF radio broadcasting from 1969 to 2003 (“Musikbox”, “Diagonal”, among other programmes) and director of Wien Museum from 2003 to 2015. From 1995 to 2010 he was a member of the Arts Council of the EVN Collection. At present, he focuses on art in the landscape. Most recently, he published Der Semmering. Eine exzentrische Landschaft (2021, Residenz Verlag).