CHASING THE HOURGLASS — Vojtěch Novák & Elena Pecenová

Despite appearances, it is not so often that contemporary artists openly subscribe to a certain, obviously short-lived trend. Especially since in the case of ornamental hermitism, it is a fashion that had a boom in England in the second half of the 18th century. The predominantly secularized Rousseauian hermits of the time embodied an ideal of solitary seclusion, typically situated in simple huts in the seclusion of the quasi-natural milieu of aristocratic parks. Within such a pastoral idyll, they could indulge in melancholic contemplation of the transience of things, not from their own will, though, but for the pleasure of their masters and their guests. Evidence of the practice of employing ornamental hermits is provided mainly by the few surviving advertisements looking for hiring these idle workers. However, surveying the available historical sources, it does not appear that many applicants flocked to the advertised positions. Nonetheless, the unavailability or possible instability of hermits was not a major obstacle. Hermitic attributes, including a skull, an hourglass, or a book or spectacles, were sometimes sufficient. Using such props, hermitages were made to look as if their inhabitants were just momentarily away and might return at any moment. At other times, human hermits were replaced by automatons, another popular fad of the time. These proto-robots could move and even speak, and in some ways surpassed their human counterparts in reliability. Such automation of hermitic performance exacerbated the tension between work and its denial that characterized ornamental hermitage. The apparent staging of the whole situation did not detract from the desired effect of stirring up emotions and contemplations.

The professional career escapism of the ornamental hermits did not involve just an ambivalent relationship to work, but also to the desired solitude. Ornamental hermitages were indeed places of seclusion, but this seclusion was again and again, and in a very ostentatious manner, put on display for a select society. Thus, the excommunication from society was always directed back to this society, to which it was supposed to give at least a semblance of a glimpse of itself from the outside. The core of this hermitism therefore lies mainly in the idea that somewhere there remains an outside, i.e. something original and unmediated. These “first peformers”, as Vojtěch Novák and Elena Pecenová put it, functioned as avatars, embodying hermitic aspirations on the basis of a commercial mandate, becoming projections of ways of life that their employers could not or would not fulfill. According to Gordon Campbell, a leading expert on ornamental hermeticism, the vacancy left by the retreat of the ornamental hermetic trend in the early 19th century was filled by garden gnomes. Currently though, there are other candidates for the position of heirs to the former hermits for hire. Indeed, within the urban gardens of ongoing development, art can function simultaneously as an ornament of advancing gentrification and as a memento that there are also other things.