Stay Away from Comfort

Talking to Tono Stano^TS (1960) about work, beauty and time as captured in his photographs in a major retrospective exhibition at the GHMP.

Q. You often refer to your work as research and exploration. What do you research?

TS. The essential thing is to find out who I am and to identify with myself. Everything else follows from that. I have realised that life equals energy plus time. When I was sixteen, at a secondary school in Bratislava, I found it essential to make time to live for myself; to do everything I could, to be able to freely use and work with time, which was a challenge under socialism. When I look back, I can say I have succeeded in doing so, which I consider the greatest achievement of my life so far. This means I can focus on my research and the relationships that come with the research. It‘s a matter of not getting stuck in anything that could control my mind, of not being fooled by delusive sludge. By attempts to influence the masses, which is what we see in the media or religion. It‘s about breaking away from anything that would lead me in a false direction. I want to be close to the truest version of what is happening in the world. I feel that I haven‘t exhausted any of my research topics. On the contrary, I keep opening more doors.

Q. Is work an obsession for you?

TS. The term „work“ isn‘t quite apt for what I do. One of my obsessions is that I like to use the energy that is lying around that bears a certain content. I bring it back to life. Right now, I‘m in the process of making furniture for my exhibition at GHMP. I consider the space in the Municipal Library the best, far and wide, even compared to anywhere abroad, I don‘t know a better place for my things. The only thing I’ve always missed there is being able to sit down and look into the space of the room. For a long time, I have been collecting, buying, discovering objects (sometimes they are just torsos) in my style, and that inspire me for further use. I have a farmhouse in South Bohemia that I use as a depository. One of its sections contains used and damaged tubular furniture in the functionalist style. I have already created several new things in the form of a couch. For example, I found a discarded produced by from the famous Brno company Vichr, plus some other parts. I made two chairs, almost thrones, for one of the gallery rooms of the Municipal Library. The furniture in the gallery will be equipped with castors, so it will be possible to move them. They will be original objects in the space. There will also be big cushions, and armrests. Comfort as a bonus to the exhibition. I‘ve made drawings that show what the furniture should look like, and I found a skilled welder who can put it together. When you endow obsession with experience, curiosity, intelligence and intuition, there is the chance of a satisfying result although it‘s not guaranteed at the outset. Look, I have one of the castors which will be used for the furniture on my table, here. Initially, it was impossible to find suitable castors. I ordered them and they came in a colour that was presented as grey, but it is actually purple. I don‘t have a good relationship with purple. So, now I have to do something about it.

Q. What kind of photos are you going to display?

TS. I want to showcase things that are topical for me from different periods of time. I found it very useful if only because, after the exhibition, we are preparing a comprehensive monograph. For both the exhibition and the monograph, a summary of the work done so far is needed. A raster, or a mosaic has to be found so I can see what is possibly missing and what I could add. I am not interested in multiplying copies of my own work; each photograph should have its own reason. The photos for the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival will have a separate cubicle in the library’s gallery. As far as portraits are concerned, there will be a large portrait of the wild man František Vláčil, where the film director looks like a wolf, and a laughing Václav Havel, portrayed in an improvised studio at Hrádeček.

Q. How has your view of the photographed body changed?

TS. I‘ve never focused on looking for beautiful people. I have always been more interested in symmetrical, typical people. The kind of people we would like to send as a message to the universe about men and women, typical representatives of the human race with ideal measurements. That‘s what Leonardo da Vinci, Le Corbusier and I‘m sure many others were concerned with. At the same time, I don‘t believe in absolute beauty. For me, only the partially imperfect or even ugly is beautiful. I hope you can see from the photos, what I mean. When I think of life, it always comes out as cheerful. We‘re born without having done anything for it. We‘re basically born into paradise. The only ones who spoil it are ourselves. If we stay light and creative, we can create so much, it‘s unbelievable. It is necessary to situate one‘s life on the battlefield where one is striving for something.

Q. What is the gist of a victory?

TS. To discover where our uniqueness lies. Not to be afraid of obstacles. When I talk about the battlefield, it‘s probably not an accurate term, since it‘s about being able to connect the different strands. But I see in those who have situated their lives in comfort, that it is difficult and agonising for them to create anything. Anyway, it‘s good to stay away from comfort.

Q. How do you choose your models to shoot?

TS. It‘s not really about selection. Sometimes I want to grant a request for a portrait, but it doesn‘t work out. You can‘t work with everyone, not even the most beautiful models. There has to be a common tuning, a vibe between us, then it totally rings out as a sign that I should do something with this person. It‘s not impossible that this kind of synergy can happen when someone approaches me. But usually, the people I‘m not supposed to take pictures of will want pictures of themselves to be taken. The ones that are cool and good, without any exhibitionism, I have to find myself. So far, I haven‘t had a major rejection.

Q. You say you photograph people who are symmetrical and typical. Václav Havel and František Vláčil were not like that. What attracted you to them? Havel had years of imprisonment written all over his face, Vláčil had his passions…

TS. … and his demons! It‘s about the dramaturgy of my exhibition. It‘s good to include works that go against the exhibition’s prevailing direction. For example, I‘m putting in a large photograph of an extraordinary rag, but still of a rag. It’s ruined, decaying, at the same time it is noble in some way. There is nothing in the photo but the rag and, on top of that, it is a rag at the end of its ragged powers. Alongside all of the photos humming with a restlessness, we need to exhibit images that are calm, perhaps simply coloured, that don‘t make your head think so hard. At the same time, it is about not overloading the exhibition with topics. Not to show all that I have created, but rather to choose the right gradation so that the works are able to communicate.

Q. What do you think about the saying that beauty is in the eye of the beholder?

TS. Beauty is very important to me, I‘m not going to make concessions on that. I consider beauty to be an extremely beneficial and important value for life. Of course, there is a certain predilection for ugliness, the cliché that only suffering has meaning. That‘s beyond me, something I don’t understand. At the same time, the reverse is also true. People act on what they themselves find beautiful. My photos, once someone starts looking at them, don‘t quite belong to me anymore. A new situation arises, a fusion of my work with the viewer. The viewers incorporate their experiences into the picture, their knowledge of what they have experienced and what they remember. I don‘t make a claim on what happens between my photos and the viewers. The ideal work, in my opinion, has multiple layers. On the surface, it looks simple but it has a kind of blessing. A good example of such a photo is Sense (1992). It managed to appeal to a very wide range of people, regardless of education, cultural background, or age. Yet, it is a simple image; I suppose ninety percent of the picture is filled with the colour black.

Q. Do you feel part of a creative generation?

TS. Not at all. When I get in the company of my peers, they talk about their age, quite often they feel sorry for themselves and so on. In that sense, I’m in a lot easier situation. One should be born, study and know who one is, what one can contribute to this world. Find that out in the shortest possible time and deal with it. Life is not that long, so I don‘t even have time to think if I belong to some creative generation. My role model is a fruit tree; it also doesn‘t count how fast it grows and how many times it throws out new leaves. It just does what it has to do to produce fruit.

Q. What do you think about time?

TS. It‘s fantastic that you can capture the person you‘re portraying at the right time. There are countless opportunities all around us, and there is just the right time for some of them. The only question is whether we are willing to accept the opportunity. I was born in a village, studied in Bratislava, then I came to Prague to study at FAMU. Bratislava would have been too small for me, I needed a bigger city. I had the opportunity to go abroad, but I wanted to stay in the environment where I belonged. It doesn‘t matter if you work in a beautiful place, where there are many other artists. It doesn‘t matter if you have a studio in New York. What‘s important is to be in an environment, where you can show who you are and what you can do. After the exhibition, I‘d like to move away from the studio, and travel abroad, shooting outdoors. Turkey, Scandinavia, southern Italy, the Balkans and Romania are very appealing to me. I’ve noticed that I haven‘t been to so many places, so I want to indulge myself and see what happens. The time has come.

Q. You say you contribute to society through art. How exactly?

TS. Actually, it‘s already happening. I approached most of the assignments at FAMU as experiments, and I went beyond the instructions I was given. Sometimes I got into trouble, but I couldn‘t help it. It had the effect that very soon people noticed that my stuff was different, and soon after that, I also started to be noticed on the international scene. Selflessly, with no vision of making money, it seemed important to me to create. Eventually, there was an interesting effect. The energy and work, that I put in, started to come back in a pleasantly surprising way, in the form of opportunities, and eventually also money. So if you want to have an interesting life, you need to invest your energy properly. It will come back to you in a positive, if indirect way.

Tono Stano

Playlist Q16

I love 69 Popgejů is an audiovisual performer group from Ostrava. It was founded in 2001. The current members are Jakub Adamec and Pavel Pernický.

Sote: Motion In Morality
Giant Claw: Earther
Marius Konvoj & Tryša Terror: Člověk
Radical Dance Faction, Youth: Welcome to the Edge
REBEL MC, Little T: Rich Ah Getting Richer
James Ferraro: Weapon
Clannad: Together We
Peyote: I Will Fight No More Forever
Deena Abdelwahed: Pre Island
Sounds of Isha: Nirvana Shatakam
Machinedrum: Gunshotta
Melba: heaven
Scooter: One (Always Hardcore)
I Love 69 Popgejů: Vzhůru
Frederic Rzewski, Kai Schumacher: Coming Together

The Ostrava Scene: There and Then, Which Do not Apply

I was born and grew up in Ostrava. I left the city about ten years ago, right after graduating from my secondary school. Without feeling it too strongly at the time, the art scene was undergoing a change for which we do not yet have a stable name, but which can undoubtedly be framed by a partial inclination towards certain ideals of modern thinking. Faced with global crises, artists have decided to use the imaginative potential of their own practice to participate more actively than in recent decades in a search for solutions. Therefore, the chimera of the end of history and the arbitrary romp in a world without wars, suffering and totalitarianism has thus vanished in a part of the emerging generation.

The last ten years of my life (living in Prague) have been clearly marked by these trends, but this period paradoxically follows my childhood experience of seeing art in (Ostrava‘s) public space dressed in the garb of postmodern aesthetics at the turn of the millennium. This autobiographical line can also be considered a good metaphor for the state of the contemporary art scene. Although a part of the artistic activities today define themselves against the models of the nineties and the noughties, they (i.e., these models) are somehow causally contained in them not only due to a temporal succession. However, there are also art works, valid and successful from the point of view of the audience, that are overtly based on the previously dominant strategies. Be that as it may, postmodernism has become a living tradition which the contemporary artistic field must constantly grapple with.

In January 2024, I started working at Prague City Gallery and was put in charge of a project to present to a national audience, the art that was produced in the 1990s within the so-called ”Ostrava scene“. Together with the other curator of this exhibition, Tomáš Knoflíček, we faced a difficult question: to update or to historicise? Even though the latter was a tempting adventure, we were forced by the lack of methodological precedent, and above all by the lack of time to make the first decision and to update.

In my introductory text, of course, I have offered a slightly different and generally more acceptable interpretation, but in retrospect now I can clearly see how much my personal story has seeped into the character of the exhibition. For me, returning to the Ostrava terrain means returning to the values that influenced the first twenty years of my life, and that therefore have shaped my present. In doing so, I am not only returning to the idea of postmodernism’s continuity, which we have tried to establish in several intergenerational dialogues at the Municipal Library gallery, but also to a reassessment of the territoriality of artistic production.

By choosing this frame, we are not only trying to suggest that every ”now“ contains something of the ”then“, but we also problematise the relationship between the labels ”there“ and ”here“. Unlike the curators of the 1990s, we are therefore not primarily concerned with the fact that there is a distinct artistic production in the Northeast that needs to be presented in Prague, but rather with the overlaps that the ”Ostrava scene“ has always contained. Its original and hermetically sealed form has therefore crumbled in our hands, and much more than a solid formation, it has become, in our perspective, a collection of personalities and art works of the last thirty years, that can be associated with the postindustrial regional metropolis.

While this mode of reading describes spatio-temporal arcs that are very familiar to me, I am not alone in this. In addition to young artists for whom staying in Ostrava is rather exceptional, this bridging can also be found in personalities such as Pavel Šmíd,Petr Pastrňák and Petr Lysáček, who were in a sense indispensable to the cultural life there, but who also migrated across the country as well as between continents at different points in their lives. Considering the ”Ostrava scene“ from today‘s position is therefore, it seems, as convoluted a task as framing and examining postmodernism – the living tradition with which its emergence is integrally connected. Those who do so have no possibility of an analytical distance. ”There“ and ”then“ do not apply to them; there is only the ”here“ and ”now“.

The author is a curator at the GHMP

Repeated Survey: Ostrava

Playlist Q15

Marie Lukáčová is an artist, director and rapper, finalist of the Jindřich Chalupecký Award and the co-founder of the feminist group Čtvrtá vlna.

Young leosia ft. Zabson: Jungle Girl
Rosalia: Despechá
Doja Cat: Moo
Żabson feat. Dziarma: Ucieknij ze mną
Megan Thee Stallion: Thot Shit
Cardi B: Up
bambi, Young Leosia, PG$: BFF
Lil Nas X: Old Town Road
Ballady i Romanse: Byla Serdca Bicem
Luisa: Viac

Shirtless men, Icons, Jazz and Dogs

He has influenced the spheres of art, showbusiness, the fashion industry and the corporate world, challenging traditional ideas of beauty and masculinity. The Prague City Gallery exhibits the photographs by Bruce Weber.

Photography, film, fashion and lifestyle inherently operate in a dynamic turbulence of influences, mutually enriching and shaping one another. This almost symbiotic relationship elementally changes boundaries and lifestyles, and breaks down stereotypes of social and societal forms and norms. Despite the acceleration of development in all directions, the analogue trace of photography and photojournalism remains an important, powerful and vivid image of society in the second half of the twentieth century. In the depth of its understanding of particular social issues, it provides unique material for research into social, cultural, artistic, and political changes in the perception of visual history and the history of society as a whole.

An example is the American photographer and filmmaker Bruce Weber (29 March 1946, Pennsylvania) with his distinctive style of black and white photography in commercial advertising. Bruce Weber‘s photographs are a celebration of the nature of the human body, light, time and space. He has profoundly influenced the realms of art, show business, the fashion industry and corporate entities with his sensitive artistic creativity. Weber‘s classic analogue photography continues to command respect. He has the ability to make the most of the intimate space of the objectification of the human body. Behind the captivating nature of Weber‘s images lie naturalness, minimalist aesthetics, authenticity and a hint of informality. Weber‘s ability to capture the essence of his subjects and understand brand purpose has significantly pushed the qualitative boundaries of the fashion photography genre. His photographs literally redefined fashion advertising and cemented Weber‘s position as the world‘s leading photographer of fashion and consumer culture.

In the 1980s, Bruce Weber became famous for his advertising photographs and campaigns for the Calvin Klein brand. Bruce Weber worked with Calvin Klein from 1979 to 1991. A brief look at the history of fashion photography shows that the images typical of the early days of fashion, when models posed stiffly in photographic studios, have long gone. The legitimate art form of fashion photography was directed by pioneers such as Edward Steichen (1879-1973) and Cecil Beaton (1904-1980) who began to use artificial lighting and elaborate set design. In the mid-twentieth century, fashion photography began to build on dynamism and experimentation through movement, bold compositions and powerful narratives, as seen, for example, in the work of Richard Avedon (1923-2004) and Helmut Newton (1920-2004).

Bruce Weber‘s influence on fashion photography is undeniable. His photographic know-how lies in his ability to visually capture the essence and substance of brands such as Versace, Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren and others. Fashion photography is purposefully emotional in nature. It is thus a purely value-based business strategy for fashion brand owners, embodying originality, uniqueness, power and influence. This is also reflected in the choice of the artist, which visually shapes certain semantic strategies of the brand. This points to exchange and market factors and constructs an imaginary economy of society, lifestyles, or relationships across a wide range of social issues.

Rob and Little Bear, Bear Pond, Adirondack Park, NY, 1990 (c) Bruce Weber

Bruce Weber‘s photographs exemplarily construct an aesthetics of the perception of photographs that are primarily used for promotion and advertising. Bruce Weber studied photography and film at the New School for Social Research in New York with Lisette Model. Her contribution was primarily in debating the meaning of photography, the lived situations, conditions and phenomena that are worthy of photographic record. During further studies at New York University, he began his professional photographic career by working with the editorial offices of the prestigious magazines Soho Weekly News, Vogue, and Vanity Fair, as well as the underground magazine Detail. He had already published in GQ magazine in the late 1970s, and in 1985, he was a guest editor of the Italian Per Lui magazine. This magazine for young men covers a wide range of topics, from architecture and art to entertainment and business. His lifelong focus on shooting for magazines and brands was the logical outcome.

In addition to Weber‘s photographs for the fashion world, his photographs and film footage of several musical genres, especially jazz, are also worth noting. Jazz, characterised by its improvisational nature and rich emotional depth, undoubtedly shares a strong synergy with photography and film. For Bruce Weber, it thus represents a strong subject, into which he imprints his unique aesthetic, intimacy and evocative atmosphere. Weber‘s shots of Chet Baker, Wynton Marsalis and Dizzy Gillespie, among others, are worth highlighting. Weber excels at depicting intimate portraits, emphasising the personality, emotionality and narrative interaction of individuals / musicians with their instruments. He adeptly portrays the backstage atmosphere of the music world, enriched by the very often unplanned and unrepeatable sessions of the artists.

Magazines, album covers, posters, brand names, advertisements and now also social networks have drawn our attention to an unprecedented era of people-watching. Photography consequently plays a much more dominant role in confronting desires and feelings than ever before. The digital revolution has completely changed our concept of not only fashion photography. New editing software offers a plethora of possibilities for experimenting with images, opening up diversity not only in the approach to visual culture, but also in a wide range of new topics open for debate. These include depictions of masculinity, intimacy and human vulnerability, as well as polemics about the objectivity and idealisation of both objects and subjects.

Bruce Weber has undoubtedly contributed to challenging traditional ideas of beauty and masculinity with his photographs. Through his photographs for commercial purposes, on the other hand, he has supported arts organisations, positive changes in society, tolerance, and quality relationships and living conditions for humans and animals. Photographic and fashion images, along with their memory, have become an inescapable link to society through their depiction of the world of human society, gestures, behaviour and relationships. They interact with each other as a discursive system of information exchange, as an open platform of memory operating with the past in a critical discourse of questioning its original meaning and function. Fashion photography will undoubtedly remain a fashion phenomenon. But local traditions and cultures will certainly rise in importance again, which could lead to a more varied and diverse fashion landscape. If we look at Bruce Weber‘s photographs from the perspective of an associative approach to the memory of photography, they represent an inescapable link to society in the way in which they describe the complex world of human society through gestures, behaviour and relationships. The photographic image works with time, influence and power, and undoubtedly disrupts the status of the once „immutable truth“ of the photographic image. Long-term value is affirmed above all by the meanings of the photographs, which may also hold the promise of new interpretations. High-quality images will withstand this scrutiny.

The author is a curator of photography and film at the Department of Modern Czech History of the Historical Museum section of the National Museum

Playlist Q14

Painter and professor at the Prague AVU, in the years 1984–1997 the singer of the Brno band E with Vladimír Václavek and Josef Ostřanský, in his free time Vladimír Kokolia composts and practices tai chi.

What does it mean to listen to music? It stuck in my memory that one of the classics of Marxism-Leninism, probably Engels, complained that listening to music completely exhausted him. I agreed with that, having music as a background is about as horrible as having a picture as a background.

Drawing and Construction or How Film Learned to Build

In Czech and world cinematography, the period 1918-1945 is a very rich and very long one, as it involves fundamental changes in style and narrative as well as in technique and technology. These are all communicating vessels. In order to understand these changes today, it is useful to imagine how audiences, their experiences and their expectations were changing over three decades.

The mirror facet frames the portraits of Jiřina Šejbalová and Magda Maděrová in From Saturday to Sunday (dir. Gustav Machatý, 1931)

The same can be said of theatre audiences or visitors to art exhibitions but I think that the developments in the field of cinematography was particularly revolutionary. It is not just the breakthrough in terms of sound, which occurred in our country around the middle of the above-mentioned period but perhaps even more fundamental were the social and aesthetic changes. Karel Teige and his generational contemporaries were strongly critical of contemporary mediocre films and admired the beauty and authenticity of early turn-of-thecentury films and the poetics and adventure of American slapsticks and western movies. The avant-garde did not despise the realistic mode of representation but rather the stereotypical affirmation of conservative bourgeois values.

The concept of realism had very fluid contours in film discourse since the invention of the cinematograph. The ambition of filmmakers was first to tell a dramatic and emotionally stirring story, often based on literary texts. Gradually, film makers learned to portray the natures of film characters, and a major role in this process was played by technical advances in the recording and reproduction of sound synchronous with the image. When silent films in the cinema were accompanied by music or other sounds to complement the action on the screen, there was no shortage of emotion. However, this was mostly for illustration, at best an extension of the narrative field of the story. Once the characters began to speak on the screen, their psychological potential intensified, their motivations seemed more convincing.

Does this mean that sound films were more realistic than silent ones? No, they were just more similar to the way living people communicate, while at the same time stripping that communication of the magic of compression and uncertainty that films used to have before the advent of sound. Film was now able to portray the environment, characters, and conflicts more faithfully to what audiences were used to from lived experience.

The New Realisms exhibition does not confront realist perspectives directly with other ones but there is at least a virtual presence of both the view of the Devětsil avant-garde and, for example, state-forming representation in art and culture. In terms of style, the confrontation in the field of film and cinematography would need a large space for visitors and viewers to appreciate the differences in time and meaning of each work. For example, Otakar Vávra, represented in the exhibition by his experimental debut The Light Penetrates the Dark (together with František Pilát), developed his talent in the period under discussion by imitating various styles, ranging from civilian dramas to historical epic feature films, always with the intention of representing the political
context of the time, including the style typical of Karel Čapek. Alexander Hackenschmied, on the other hand, was able to use the medium of film as a tool of mobilisaton in a moment of danger, when he made his documentary The Crisis in 1938 which dealt with the cultivated coexistence of democratically oriented Czechs and Germans and contrasted it with the manipulated German citizens of the Sudetenland.

The windshield of the automobile provides both a frame and a relatively safe screen behind which the traffic bustles in Prague‘s Na Příkopě Street (The Highway Sings, dir. Elmar Klos, 1937)

Films that construct reality rather than portray it

But back to the films in the exhibition: what unites them is their ability to construct a new reality, that is, to use the immanent expressive means of the cinematograph apparatus to break down the descriptive framework. Of course, it could be argued that descriptive realism is also a type of construction, i.e. the attempt to make the world on the screen resemble lived life, to mirror it faithfully. But what does construction mean in relation to „portrayal“ in creative practice? Neither the attention of the artists nor that of the audience is limited to judging the fidelity or infidelity in the representation of reality as it appears to the camera lens or the person who controls it; instead, attention is demanded by unexpected visual attractions, such as close-ups that call for a revelation of meaning, angles of view not usually available to the human eye, proportions that surprise. Such attractions only gain significance through confrontation, through unexpected
compositional arrangements that require a new type of activity from the audience: the identification and interpretation of meanings. Such a construction of a new reality is not the prerogative of avant-garde determination but a symptom of the open modernist cultivation that not only Czech and Czechoslovak culture underwent between the end of WWI and the end of WWII. This is why we also witness the penetration of avant-garde stylistic practices into the mainstream, commercially oriented production in our cinematography in the interwar period. The fusion of the experimental and the mainstream, which then occurred many times during the twentieth century, was the basis for the construction of a specific reality of this medium in the sphere
of film, a reality that cannot be captured and expressed by any other means than the dynamics of audiovisual tools.

The Highway Sings is an advertisement for Bata tyres. It combines effective means of propaganda with original avant-garde techniques

How to exhibit films

It is one of the good traditions of the GHMP that it tries to integrate different kinds of art in its exhibitions. When Helena Musilová approached us to participate in New Realisms, only a few weeks remained until the opening of the exhibition. There was no time for a new solution to the problem of „how to exhibit film“, so we took the usual route. The exhibition features one film on a separate monitor, one short film in its own cubicle, and five short films, representing both the diversity of contemporary approaches and the diversity of the film portion of the Národní filmový archiv, Prague entire collection, screened in a black box. I find Alexander Hackenschmied‘s eightminute Aimless Walk to be an extraordinarily intense work that in itself represents both the poetic and social-realist perspective of its time. Across Prague in the Spring of 1934 exemplifies a socially critical perspective that seeks to analyse visually and, most importantly, in terms of composition.

For the aforementioned The Light Penetrates the Dark, it would have been ideal if a reconstruction of Pešánek‘s lightkinetic sculpture, created on a smaller scale by Federico Diaz for Pešánek‘s monographic exhibition at the National Gallery in 1997, had been on view somewhere near. Pešánek‘s original work was a direct inspiration to Vávra, and its luminous effect is at least partially captured in the film.

The other two films represent the theme of technology, commerce and advertising as social facts of their time. How We Make Posters, which was shot under amateur conditions, relates not only to production technology but also to the importance of the poster as a communication medium in its time. The Highway Sings was made as an advertisement for Bata tyres and is traditionally presented in the context of avant-garde tendencies in our film. This is due to the refined visual and compositional quality, again with Alexander Hackenschmied playing a major role.

The Hands on Tuesday, a short experimental film by Čeňek Zahradníček, is on view as a stand-alone work in the part of the exhibition where the theme of human hands dominates. The inclusion of this film may have been a little premature, as the Národní filmový archiv, Prague is only now embarking on its reconstruction and restoration thanks to the discovery of other versions of this work, but it
still plays a significant role in terms of thematic connection in a particular context, which may perhaps bring some surprises to the visitors.

New Realisms is in many ways a groundbreaking exhibition. Personally, I am extremely pleased not only with the conceptual innovation of the „Czechness“ of the artists and their works on display and their return to the public sphere, but also with the natural integration of media other than painting and sculpture. Without photography, printed periodicals and films, the account of the cultural activity in Czechoslovakia at the time would not be as convincing. It would certainly be possible to expand the scope of the exhibition to include radio and other social or cultural phenomena, but that would be another exhibition.

The trailer for Gustav Machatý‘s film From Saturday to Sunday was created by Jan Bušta and his collaborators. This opportunity came about thanks to the digital restoration of the film that we undertook in 2016. Jan Bušta is one of the artists who are approached by the creators and producers of contemporary films to create trailers and other teasers for them. With his trailer, Bušta not only serves Gustav Machatý‘s work, but updates, reframes and interprets it in terms of image, sound and composition. His trailer is an audiovisual work of its own – which is why its presence in the
exhibition was Helena Musilová’s explicit wish.

Machatý‘s film itself remarkably pushes forward the traditional sentimental narrative of a chaste girl who almost gets hurt but, after the misunderstanding is cleared up, all ends well. As in Erotikon and Ecstasy, Machatý interprets the essentially banal plot, borrowed from pulp literature, with a bold, innovative language that places him in the circle of New Objectivity or New Realism. That is why we screened this film in April at the Ponrepo cinema, where we followed it up with three more evenings: the socially critical drama Such Is Life directed by Carl Junghans was followed by a selection from the non-feature-film part of our collection (three documentaries and one news film) and finally Otakar Vávra‘s Virginity. We consider the screenings at Ponrepo to be an integral part
of the exhibition, and we hope that visitors will continue to find their way to the nearby Ponrepo cinema in Bartolomějská Street, which offers a unique programme of classic films of
all types, genres and provenances, and is thus a kind of permanent, but renewed exhibition of Czech and world cinematography.

Jiřina Šejbalová‘s knee and shin in the film From Saturday to Sunday (dir. Gustav Machatý, 1931)

Tarantula is Missing in the Exhibition

The selection of films from the collection of the Národní filmový archiv, Prague for the New Realisms exhibition could have been much broader. It could include not only newsreels or other documentaries but also animated films that in the 1930s struggled with the requirement of faithful representation of the human figure and characters. (Although that would probably get us literally to the portraying I mentioned above in a figurative sense.) Personally, I miss Tarantula in the exhibition – a short documentary with a period-specific educational or awareness-raising ambition. However, another monitor did not physically fit into the part of the exhibition that treats the subject of native plants, especially cacti. The visitors can view Tarantula by clicking on the link bellow, at least on the Národní filmový archiv, Prague YouTube channel.

Michal Bregant is the CEO of the Národní filmový archiv, Prague and President of ACE – Association des Cinémathèques Européennes; his professional interest is history/ies of cinema and culture

Tarantula

Bank notes as (fake) evidence in the romantic plot of From Saturday to Sunday

We No Longer Want to Know Why

With artists David Böhm and Jiří Franta about their exhibition Fabulist at the House of Photography, quantum physics, couples therapy and artistic self-confidence

Q Who or what is a Fabulist?
DB An unreliable narrator, i.e. anyone, like the two of us.
Q Why did you choose the House of Photography for your exhibition from the available options?
DB The space of that gallery became the key for us in terms of how to think about the exhibition. It‘s two identical floors. We thought we could do everything twice and install it on both floors in the same way.
JF We also work in tandem. We‘ve taken advantage of that in performances and actions. The works for the exhibition, however, were not created in such a way that we did one first and then the other, rather they were created both at the same time.
DB Moreover, you don‘t see them side by side in the exhibition. Like in quantum physics, the same action is happening in two places at the same time. It‘s not about some kind of comparison, it‘s about blurring, a handcraft doubling, the exhibition maybe takes place in the moment of that deja vu that occurs in the viewer‘s head somewhere on the stairs between the first and second floor of the gallery.
JF If I perceive any danger in this approach, it is in the sense that it encourages visitors to “find ten differences“ between Franta and Böhm. But that‘s not the point, of course; I‘m more interested in what can happen in the process of making when you constantly have the possibility of creating two versions of one picture.
DB We are not bothered about comparing and explaining who makes what. Of course, each of us has his own tendencies, obsessions and fascinations, so that could be analysed, but that‘s not the point.
JF We‘re always being asked: who drew this? And how do you agree on things? It‘s just that that‘s not how it works between the two of us.
Q So how does it work between you?
DB We met at school, when studying with Vladimír Skrepl at the Academy of Fine Arts almost twenty years ago. We did one exhibition together and after a while we found out that we were only approached as a duo. I would say that there are more advantages than disadvantages. The intensity and the adventure, that often we just don‘t know how it‘s going to turn out, keeps us interested and excited.
JF Working on my own, I would often overwork my paintings or drawings. I tend to immerse myself in them, not to see or hear anything else. With David, lightness enters my work. Suddenly, the dialogue works, so I couldn‘t do without it. For me, it‘s also a nice grinding off of my ego.
Q You sound like relationship therapists.
JF That was one of the ideas for this exhibition, that we‘d go to couples therapy and then we‘d come up with something based on that but then we thought we‘d rather paint in the studio. But seriously, there‘s one other thing that‘s new to us, which is paint. Up until now, we‘ve never worked with paint on such large formats that we‘d be passing to each other.
DB We‘re trying to change approaches and strategies in all kinds of ways to make something happen. We don‘t have just one proven method. The doubling principle in this exhibition is an opportunity for us to come up with something new, to be able to say one thing twice, it‘s a double game with an uncertain outcome.
Q Do you think it‘s unusual that in the visual arts we see authorship as strongly individual, whereas it‘s quite common for it to be collective in other fields?
DB Yes, the visual arts in general are probably more individualistic than other fields, but there are a lot of those pairs too. Six years ago, there was an exhibition called Two Heads, Four Hands at 8smička art zone in Humpolec which was about that, and there are quite a lot of those fine art duos. But I don‘t think we‘ll see more of them in other areas, whether it‘s actors, musicians or businessmen.
Q Of course, Bodie and Doyle, Lennon and McCartney, Suchý and Šlitr, Lasica and Satinský…
JF Speaking of those pairs, I‘d be more the Lasica type.
DB I see us more like the two detectives in the Sabotage clip, and you‘re the one with the moustache. You want somebody next to you who‘s got your back, who passes the ball, who keeps the beat. Our things are created in two ways – either as a fulfilment of an intention or as a by-product of time spent together in the studio, which is the case with the exhibition at the House of Photography. And that‘s the interesting part of working in tandem, that we don‘t know what the result will be, which way it‘s going to go. In a sense, it‘s like a jam session.
Q What is the main advantage of working in pair?
DB I wouldn‘t say it‘s the advantage of the pair in any pragmatic way, like it‘s more beneficial to share the studio rent. It‘s something more rare – in fact, I think most artists would like to work with someone else, they just haven‘t found the other one. I‘m exaggerating, but it‘s like a band. You can play solo but how long can a person enjoy touring alone? You have a person next to you on the same wavelength and the energy multiplies rather than adds up.
JF It‘s about some mutual support, of course we‘re both floundering, but we have our positions from which we enter into working together. We once said to each other that in the 19th century David would have been a portrait painter and I would have been a landscape painter. But it‘s not that easy, and many times unexpected results happen in that collaboration. We enjoy playing and having fun. Of course, we want to be 21st century artists, we bring contemporary themes into our pictures. It‘s often a transcription of the endless dialogues we have with each other.
Q Is one of you more talkative and the other listens more?
DB I probably talk more. But we often talk to each other in the same way that we draw, we don‘t tell each other specific stories, but rather layer different observations over each other. If someone is next to us, they wonder what we keep rambling about all the time. Sometimes something comes out of these Dadaist conversations and we sense that it is exactly that. That‘s exactly how we came up with the idea for the exhibition at the House of Photography. We had another space to choose from, but with this one we knew immediately how we wanted to work with it.
JF Mutual conversation really seeps into our drawings, actually it’s language and speech in general. David has been drawing a head and a sentence fragment to go with it every day in an A3 sketchbook for about thirteen years. And sometimes he‘ll use that in a collaborative drawing. Sometimes it helps me when drawing as an alienating moment. I actually draw continuously and, like David, I scribble my themes in my sketchbook every day without knowing exactly why they are coming and what they mean.

Q For example?
JF For example, at one time I repeatedly drew things and people supporting each other. It didn‘t make sense to me. Images of people supporting and holding something, when at first glance it was clear that the structure was going to collapse. It was only gradually that I realised that what was behind the image was a theme of fear, or rather insecurity. The art world is fragile in its own way. If you say you‘re an artist in a pub, anyone will knock the world down for you and tells you that it‘s complete bullshit. Actually, I also kind of know that it‘s a fragile subject and contains secrets. That‘s the role of the artist. To society you‘re a bit of a buffoon and you‘re expected to be, but the buffoon who means it. And it‘s terribly difficult to get out of that box. So even in the drawings on display in our exhibition at the GHMP, there are a lot of connecting rods and wobbly props.
DB I think what often irritates people about art is that they don‘t understand it. They want to decode it in a way that works for them in other areas of their lives. They feel like maybe their kids could draw it too, and they don‘t know what to admire about it when it doesn‘t have that academic virtuosity. So it makes them nervous when they feel that they‘re missing something. I‘m oversimplifying, but it‘s a signal to a lot of people that maybe what we do is good when they know that we exhibit somewhere, that we‘ve won some awards and that someone is buying our works. But they approach it like a puzzle to be decoded and they can‘t. It‘s just that these things speak on a different frequency, but I don‘t want to sound like a wiseacre. Art, as much as I think the term is actually a bit problematic itself, is just a different kind of language and needs a different kind of thinking and looking at. You simply look differently when you‘re driving a car, when you have to make a decision about something and when you‘re looking at a painting. It‘s a different way of describing reality, and ideally it makes both the artist and the viewer more sensitive.
Q Only then it would be true that people who are involved in art excel in empathy and sensitivity. Is that your impression?
DB We often talk about this. I take it as a failure when one engages in art and it doesn‘t make them a more sensitive creature. For me, creation is a relevant response to our existence. I don‘t know why I‘m here, I don‘t know why I‘m trying to do something. And I think creation is an adequate way to grasp what is difficult to translate into words. If I could say it, I wouldn‘t have to draw it. It‘s also about the time you spend with it, either as an artist or as a viewer. It‘s like a band you‘ve been a fan of for a long time, you‘ve listened to it many times and know their music well and then you play a sample to someone and they don‘t get it, it‘s not easy to explain what you think is good about it because they‘re missing the sensitivity you‘ve picked up over the years. This irritates those who want to understand it right away. Art is not an air freshener that makes you feel better.
JF We have a lot of stimuli around us that, on the contrary, we do need to understand. The messages get simplified and accelerated in order to be understandable. I like the fact that art is complex. I figured out sometime in my freshman year that I didn‘t have to understand it or else get angry and leave the gallery. And it happened to me that I didn‘t understand a video whose meaning in some context didn‘t become apparent to me until ten years later.
DB Yet another source for this exhibition was old encyclopedias. We both grew up on books like Už vím proč (Already Know Why). Plus, we‘re both into books. We thought we were becoming more and more interested in illustrations for something that can‘t be explained. The original idea for the title of the exhibition was I NO LONGER WANT TO KNOW WHY, but that sounds unnecessarily negative unless people are familiar with the book. But part of the sources for this exhibition are just various charts and explanations from encyclopedias. Without context and numbers, they‘re just aestheticisation of information we don‘t have access to. Like coming to the middle of a narrative without catching the beginning. Maybe it has to do with our age, I still want to understand things, but the older I get, the more and more I realise how many things I don‘t understand. And I guess the way I try to understand things has changed too, maybe less rationally.
Q What, on the other hand, hasn‘t changed for you?
JF I think we already annoy a lot of people around us with our enthusiasm for art. My wife Klára tells me to go and talk about it in the studio. Art never ceases to fascinate me, I look forward to what tomorrow will bring. When we drive to Vienna, we look forward to what energy we will bring home from the exhibitions. David and I often tell each other what we dreamt. Sometimes I dream the same subject twice, like failing an exam at school. But the dream is never the same twice. I‘d like our exhibition to have the same effect. Kind of a dreamlike effect.
DB And I‘ll then tell you what I dreamt today.

Playlist 13

Ian Mikyska is a part of the Prague Quiet Music Collective. He composes music for installations, texts, sound walks, for theatre, radio and video. He studied composition at London’s Guildhall School of Music & Drama and direction of alternative and puppet theater at the AMU in Prague.

Jakub Šulík: 04/duben
Céline Rudolph & Lionel Loueke: C’est un Love Song
Arve Henriksen & Trio Mediæval: Om ödet skulle skicka mig
Kory Reeder: Snow
Koma Saxo: Watten Koma
TokDat: Dišputát
Maria W Horn & Vilhelm Bromander: Earthward Arcs
Pudlax: Disco Exercise
James Weeks: Mala punica
Kristofer Svensson: av hav

Walk slow. Listen and watch

Stand still until the music dies away and you will become part of something more complex. Hearing and sight will create an interwoven tangle of lines of force hovering over a canvas or object illuminated by light shining through score paper or perhaps another set of musical instructions and diagrams. Visual art intertwined with music on the basis of inner bonds and principles returns to Prague City Gallery for the third time.

The Uncertain Situations exhibition is a followup on Five Uncertain Situations from 2022 and Two Uncertain Situations from last year, which, the same as this year, were prepared by the composer, performer and multi-artist, Ian Mikyska, and curator, Jitka Hlaváčková. Some of the works of art exhibited during the previous seven “Uncertain Situations” will be presented again in April but new works, as well as installations, will be added that will attract visitors to the Troja Château. This year, however, the exhibition space will not be limited to the former stables and chapel but will also include the open air areas and catch the attention of those who may be there only by chance.

At first glance, it might resemble a soundwalk. It is, in fact, the most accessible artistic discipline that can be successfully pursued by anyone who goes outside, looks around and listens carefully at the same time. The harmony of a street, a forest or a park with the sounds that belong to them is seemingly quite mundane and obvious – but there are more surprises to be discovered. The acoustic object then adds something new to the outdoor environment – perhaps contrasting only a little, yet strange and unexpected. A kind of audiovisual hat in the bushes, where it is not clear at first glance who threw it there and why. Passers-by are directly forced to stand still, and perhaps even stop thinking at that moment.

The contrast between technology and the outdoor space is created not only by the work of sound artist Jiří Suchánek – the creator of sound installations and objects, but also of Atom Tone sonification software, which creates sounds from different data sources. Using his software, one can listen to the gravitational waves of space objects, which is not necessarily any more adventurous than being lured through an outdoor object to enter the interior of Troja Château whose baroque architecture recalls an era in which art for all the senses was created.

But Mikyska’s and Hlaváčková’s concept offers much more than a sound walk. Especially with Mikyska, it has long been clear that he is not only interested in music and visual art as separate worlds. Nor is visual art-inspired music, as it is usually perceived by concert audiences raised on Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, too important to him. For Mikyska, the fundamental role is played by structures and plots, which do not need to be described or defined in terms of time precisely, but it is rather their context, and thus their mutual meaning, that should be captured and the whole subordinated to it.

In doing so, he refers to traditional Chinese culture, in which, according to him, “one of the most distinctive features is the significant degree of interconnection between the different fields of interest: poetry means calligraphy, calligraphy means painting, and all these fields are linked by a spiritual background with a basis in Mahayana (primarily Chan/Zen) Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism”. For the composer, then, it is only natural to add sound to the mix.

The Prague Quiet Music Collective, which Mikyska founded in 2021, espouses music that seeks silence, peace and concentration, in which time intervals lose their precise length. It is music that reveals structures that cannot be precisely recorded in writing or sketched, but it is both absolutely necessary and beautiful to experience. This has been confirmed in the two previous runs of the Uncertain Situations event which will be partially recalled even this year.

Among other previous projects, it will be the piece Variabily with which composer Michal Wróblewski responded to Radoslav Kratina’s Frame with Form /L/, that will be presented. Its obvious variability in motion is reflected in the score in microintervals and glissandos. The alternation of “not in unison” / “in unison” instructions which indicate the movement of individual segments that should not, or instead must, fit together at a particular moment. The kinetic sculpture Collision of the Galaxies II by Pavla Sceranková will also return. This inspired Michaela Antalová’s composition of almost the same name, whose segments sometimes behave towards each other like cues in a theatre play: one provokes the other, and in turn must wait for the other’s cue. Some phases are repeated over and over again until the melodic voice fades out. Ian Mikyska’s and Jack Langdon’s Two Uncertain Situations will also be shown again.

For this year’s event at the Troja Château, Marie Nečasová is creating a new piece that will respond to drawings by Václav Boštík and Stanislav Kolíbal, as well as to the object Lying by Jindřich Zeithammel. Kory Reeder, an American composer and performer, will interact with a combination of an object and a drawing, which its creator, Kristina Láníková, called Evening Drawings while Removing the Make-up. The Slovak composer, Matej Sloboda, will contribute his new composition, and a sound installation is being prepared by Slavomír Hořínka.

The Overlapping Transformations composition by the composer Sylvia Lim will also be reprised from the year before last – but this time without The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations series of photograms by Aleksandra Vajd, who was present at their creation. The old transformations will be set in a newly created environment independent of the original inspiration.

Exhibition Uncertain Situations will be held from 21 May to 10 November 2024 at the Troja Château. In addition to new works, it includes objects from the GHMP collections, artworks working directly with sound, meetings with musicians, concerts in the Château’s main hall, music workshops and more.

The author is a music journalist.