On Missing Ján Mančuška

“Becoming aware of one’s own perspective is the best way to sideline oneself,” says filmmaker Štěpán Pech of his encounter with the work of Ján Mančuška (1972-2011), about whom he made a documentary entitled Chybění (in Czech, literally: Missing) with the official English title: You Will Never See It All. The text returns to the exhibition Thinking Through Film at the Stone Bell House which featured Mančuška’s works Notion in Progress and Reflection.

I started making the film You Will Never See It All because I missed Jano. Because I wasn’t able to accept his absence.

I worked for him as an assistant. At that time, between 2009 and 2011, Jano was already working as an internationally renowned artist represented by galleries in New York and Berlin. I became part of a wide circle of collaborators that the gallerist Lizz Mulholland called “these crazy Czech fabricators”. Thanks to them, Jano was able to pour out an incredible amount of art at a speed that would have been impossible overseas. He once told me that he only had time to invent new things in his sleep. Next to his bed was an exercise book in which he jotted down ideas. His days were filled with creating art to satiate the ever-increasing demand from art fairs, galleries and collectors around the world.

The more time we spent together, the more clearly the growing shadow of his illness loomed. I remember one meeting in the studio; Jano came straight from the hospital discharged against medical advice. It was then that I understood that the idiom “as white as sheet” need not be a metaphor. I found his dedication self-destructive.

Yet the strongest emotion I have associated with him is joy. I remember him sometimes laughing so hard that he would break at the knees and fall to the ground. I was always struck by the connection between this animalistic, malicious guy and the perfect precision of thought and form in his art. He remained a contradictory mystery for me, one that I needed to deal with in more depth.

We can encounter “missing” at every turn in Jano’s work. However, as a clearly articulated theme, it appears for the first time in 2007 in the text of the same name.

“If (…) an object is absent, it refers to its unrealised presence. That is, to the fact that it should be there. In this respect, the feeling of absence is an active awareness of content through its absence.” An example for him is the place on the wall where the target once used to hang. The bullets that missed the target “circumscribe the target with a precision that is almost startling”.

It was through missing that I hoped to describe a man whose distinctive features were fullness, variety and ambiguity. But as the number of interviews I filmed about Jano grew, the more impossible it seemed to get to a clear, consistent picture. The picture kept multiplying and expanding. Individual shots and scenes became bullets aimed at the searched for object in the hope that the exact shape would one day appear.

One could say that the film about Ján is a topography of missing.

When we started working on the film, the editor, Jan Daňhel, said that the result had to be radical and egoless. That seemed to me at the time like an unsolvable puzzle. I always thought that radicality had to be based on a clear position and point of view. Reconciling the two requirements became an ever-present ambition throughout the creation process, and the key to the solution was eventually provided by Jano himself. It was necessary to listen to him.

I selected a few key works for the film. Thanks to them, situations were created in which it was possible to meet Jano at present time. “Now” might be the shortest word to describe Jano‘s work.

We rehearsed the theatre play Reverse Play again, in part with the original protagonists, and excerpts of it interweave throughout the film. Its reverse dynamics is imprinted on the structure of the entire film, which is told from the present to the moment of birth.

As Ján himself writes: “if a character (…) appears in fragments, in separate layers, (…) their identity, or even more existentially their fate, is entirely in the hands of the spectator. Because only the spectator can put it together in their mind, pressed by the feeling of the absence of a traditional hero.” The film You Will Never See It All about missing Jano, was to remain as open as Jano’s works.

Two works by Ján Mančuška were exhibited in the exhibition Thinking Through Film: Notion in Progress (2010) and Reflection (2008). The former appears at the beginning of the film and was the first one filmed at the exhibition in Humpolec back in 2018. The latter appears towards the end, and as the film is told in reverse, it is somewhat paradoxically linked to Jano’s childhood.

If we had cut these scenes and looked only at them, one of the film’s underlying themes, that of continuity/discontinuity and transference in the father-son relationship, would have become more apparent.

When we filmed the text installation for Notion in Progress in the Osmička venue in Humpolec, our guide was Jano’s son Vojta. The moment Vojta walked through the installation, there was a flashback, a mutual mirroring of the work and a way of thinking that is genetically typical of all Mančuškas.

For viewers, Notion in Progress can be an epistemological and philosophical adventure. Only in the constellation of father and son does it also become so much more: a platform for an intimate encounter, a message, a lesson, or a contribution to understanding oneself through transgenerational transmission. An instruction on how to limit what is missing.

Reflection, the other work at the Thinking Through Film exhibition, was created for an exhibition at Ján Mančuška’s home gallery (Andrew Kreps Gallery) in New York. It is a video projection situated between two large wall systems that multiply the projected image through reflections on their shiny parts.

We see two figures having, as Jano writes in the text accompanying the work, “a dialogue that itself becomes a subject of conversation”.

Their attention is drawn to a mysterious room. Over time, we realise that it is a room full of second-hand furniture. Here again we encounter the alienation that is based on the loss of “the relationship with the beings who used to use the furniture”.

While working on the film, I began to realise why it was important that Jano as a subject was always radically absent from his works. Although his work is very often based on the most immediate, most intimate experience, it is eventually always free of purely personal connections. It opens up to the viewer’s individual experience and activity. The viewer himself thus becomes a co-creator of the meaning.

I think that this generosity of Jano’s is conditioned by his ability to retreat into the background, to allow himself to be absent. The space thus emptied can then be filled by someone else‘s experience. I see Jano’s works as an invitation to participation and creativity.

I went through many phases while working on the film. The first milestone was my ability to begin mourning. Eventually I began to realise the power of my own projection, triggered by the untimely loss of my own father. I allowed myself to step into the territory of the painful and the personal in order to search for a way to pass through this gateway to the capacity to become detached.

In the end, I came to the conclusion that only a clear awareness of one‘s own perspective is the best way to sideline oneself. And so perhaps to achieve the generality that can also be intimate.

That‘s one of the lessons I learned. That‘s how I worked my way to my own absence, thanks to Jano.

New Realisms in Non-space and Non-time

“Thus I remember how some people, otherwise quick at grasping, would not make allowance for the taking of the Paris sewerage canal, until those very same people finally arrived at understanding how expressive and almost symbolic such fragments of reality can become, where the guts of a huge city open up and the digestive juices of the metropolis are flushed out. The infernal content of a big city is thus magnified in small detail. By stopping here, the photographer has worked his magic like a magician.”

Franz Roh, Mechanismus und Ausdruck, Foto-Auge, Stuttgart 1929

Milada Marešová, At the Swimming Pool, after 1924, oil on canvas, 50×67.5 cm, COLLETT Prague Munich

Franz Roh, the German historian, art critic and photographer, summed up in a short quote the essence of modern realisms or rather New Realisms that we are trying to follow in the large-scale exhibition at the GHMP: the detail as a representation of the whole, urban life, authentic experience and the feeling that the mysterious, the miraculous exists in the seen and viewable world around us.

The idea of presenting modern realist approaches that existed in the broad period between the two world wars was conceived sometime between 2015 and 2016 but its roots are much more distant. The publication that has already come out and the exhibition which is in its final stages before being completed are the result of long-term systematic research, erudition and enormous personal commitment, especially on the part of Anna Habánová and Ivo Habán, who have devoted their professional lives to researching Czech-German culture as it was practically “taking place” in the first half of the 20th century. Both of them live and work in Liberec, which allows them, among other things, to experience and understand the reality of life outside the centre – with which (in our case, with the capital Prague, but also with Dresden, Berlin or Munich) they are in close contact while being aware of all the positive and negative aspects, which are essentially unchanged, whether concerning the present time or the period of the now idealised First Czechoslovak Republic.

This text was originally intended to be my personal commentary on the exhibition New Realisms. Modern Realist Approaches to the Czechoslovak Art Scene 1918-1945 at Prague City Gallery with some clear summary of what it is about and for whom. But it’s not that simple; the text becomes a kind of unstructured recollection of those few years with realisms. Returning to the aforementioned beginning of 2016, I am reminded of several years of extremely enriching discussions, the search for similarities and differences, the attempts to describe, understand, interconnect, rediscover authors, approaches and themes that used to play a defining role in society in their time, but which faded away in the following decade – due to changed opinions, importance, attitudes or everything else that the second half of the 20th century and its dramatic twists and turns brought. In the cultural sphere, we associate the 1920s and 1930s in particular with a link to the French art scene. However, the link to German-speaking countries was just as important, if not more so, for the real artistic activity of the time, also due to how many citizens of the then Czechoslovakia had German as their first language. The once completely natural and important “German element” and its interconnection with the “Czech one” need to be reintroduced in our history, including the history of art, which is one of the aims of this exhibition.

Jan Kojan, Portrait of Wife (Jelizaveta Kojanová), 1925, oil on canvas, 100×58 cm, Aleš South Bohemian Gallery

For Anna Habánová and Ivo Habán, the project, dedicated in its early days to the New Objectivity, and later to the more generally understood New Realisms, was and still is a logical continuation of a series of monographic or specifically-focused projects, for example, let me mention the groundbreaking Young Lions in a Cage, Art Groups of German-Speaking Artists from Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia in the Interwar Period, which, at the end of 2013, perhaps even symbolically closed the exhibition activities of the Regional Gallery in Liberec in the Liebieg Palace where the gallery had been located since its inception. Some time ago, I talked with the Habáns (as many of my colleagues call them for short) about their project of New Objectivity and, more as a provocation than with a definite goal in mind, I asked if they were also going to include photography and film, for which New Objectivity is an important chapter in their history. They hadn’t originally planned to do so, but our subsequent late-night discussion showed that a comprehensive view encompassing all the artistic media of the time could open up yet another, previously unknown or undescribed context, despite the fact that it would complicate an already difficult research process.

In the years that followed, we, that is the four principal investigators of a research project supported by the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic (Ivo Habán, Anna Habánová, Helena Musilová and Alena Pomajzlová), investigated various forms of modern realist approaches – very simplistically – on the Czechoslovak art scene and related phenomena, mainly in German, but also in Italian, Austrian or Dutch art or art in the United States, and their influence or connection with Czechoslovak art. Our aim was, as Ivo Habán summarized so succinctly at the beginning of the project: “To trace, above all, the closely related manifestations of visual art and photography, which are united by the quest for a new, penetrating and objective, i.e. factual, not simply descriptive, depiction of reality, as László Moholy-Nagy pointed out as early as 1925 in his theoretical book Malerei, Photographie, Film. One of the links between these works is also the attempt to capture the new reality of a rapidly changing modern society, traditionally associated mainly with urban and industrial environments.” The return to realistic depiction, to formal order, to themes from everyday life was also a reflection of the world’s general desire to find a firmer anchor after the years of madness of the First World War, despite the fact that the general perception of art of that period of time has been focused rather on the elitist avant-garde and the international surrealist movement.

On an ongoing basis, we have been trying to come to terms with a number of methodological difficulties. After all, they are familiar to anyone working on the history of Central or Eastern Europe: terms and dates from the “big”, Western history cannot be used mechanically; local does not automatically mean inferior or of poor quality; nor does the assumption that, within a single state or territorial unit, information was transmitted easily, even in a single language group, apply in full. For example, in the context of what was going on in the photographic scene, I had wrongly assumed that the influences of the primarily German photographic New Objectivity would be easily discernible in German amateur photography clubs in the borderlands. Added to the methodological problems is the necessity to define and constantly verify the area of our interest in geographical terms – throughout the twentieth century, the simplistic designation Czechoslovakia referred to a volatile state, that was in the process of establishing its borders only a few months after its being declared, only to emerge in a rather altered form after its restoration in 1945. This is doubly true of Slovakia as an “integral” part of Czechoslovakia. Similarly, it is almost impossible to talk about something like “Czechoslovak” art. This ambiguity, changeability and fluidity is also reflected in the title of the publication and exhibition. We tried for a long time to find a more simplistic name (which would perhaps be more visitor-friendly). Our PR department knows something about this. But eventually, we stuck to the most accurate name in terms of the content which, after all, corresponds to the nature of the works created within the framework of the New Realisms we have been investigating – the painting with cacti is called Cacti, the view of the lobby with the ticket offices The Railway Station and the sculpture of a man holding balloons is called Balloon Man. Objectivity, sobriety, and the pursuit of a concentrated message are among the common features of New Realisms in general, and we try to respect them as well.

František Gross, Telephones, 1942, oil, plywood, 61×56 cm, GASK – Gallery of the Central Bohemian Region

The New Realisms are not a single movement, they do not have a theoretician and a typical circle of artists who meet in a popular café, they are not accompanied by a manifesto and a radical entry onto the scene. Realism, in our case a “new” one, is understood as an approach, a certain way of depicting reality which used to appear repeatedly, or sometimes just once, to a greater or lesser extent in the work of the artists of the period under review. It was related to historical realism, to the search for “truth and beauty” of the second half of the 19th century, and it appears in a modified form in the most contemporary art, already knowing that the “realistic” image is the most perfect tool of manipulation. The New Realisms of 1918 to 1948 are connected, as Anna and Ivo Habán write in the introductory text to the exhibition: “a programmatic focus on modern life and its real problems (’as they really are’) and an attempt to capture reality in a penetrating, but not simply descriptive, manner”. Similarly, the use of the word “realism” to describe the key characteristic of a good photograph is important – it is about relating as directly as possible to the subject depicted, without the (conscious) interpretive stance of the artist.

In the course of the work on the project, more than 600 works of art and a number of photographs from all locations of the then Czechoslovakia were analysed and critically evaluated, including those that have not survived in physical form and that we know of only from period reproductions. The selection in the exhibition presents those works that do not slip into mere descriptiveness but which, on the contrary, look at the surrounding world in a new way, interpret reality and represent its essence. Art was supposed to get closer to people, but it was not supposed to pander to them. None of the artists in our milieu can be described as a “typical” representative; rather, it is their specific works that well illustrate the importance and breadth of the realistic mode of depiction on the art scene. The selection of individual works goes across traditional ethnic, group, gender and territorial divisions, with legends of Czech or Slovak modernism such as Jan Zrzavý, Josef Sudek or Mikuláš Galanda standing side by side with German-speaking artists whose work is gradually becoming more and more appreciated, such as Ilona Singer, Richard Schrötter or Paul Gebauer. Works from the field of photography and film have been combined with works from the non-commissioned arts; despite their many differences, they are united by a desire for direct, clear and non-elitist representation and a focus on people and modern life.

The structure of the exhibition corresponds to this – we pay great attention to placing New Realisms in a broader contemporary context (the timeline and map are in the entrance hall), the “circle” in the first hall represents, in two dozen works, possible realistic approaches and their position in relation to the imaginary core of the issue under investigation, which is represented by New Objectivity. Actors that follow are a world of portrait depictions of people and the individual things that surround them. The other two main halls of the Municipal Library contain depictions of the everyday world – in a “passive reality” focused on the environment, and in a “lived reality” focused on people’s lives. The cubicles present case studies, focusing on the themes of work, the reality of life outside the city or in the poorest parts of society, an interest in plants… A separate space was given to Čapek’s legendary dog, Dášeňka, which is almost a model example of New Objectivity in photography.

Realism has never disappeared from art, it has been modified in various ways – the period we are looking at ends with the end of one totalitarianism and the onset of another. Both then and now totalitarian regimes use “realistic” art as a tool to consolidate power and increase the prestige of their rulers; at the other end of the spectrum, dramatic depictions of, for example, war or terrorist attacks can provoke a radical reaction. Also with this exhibition, we want to show how differently reality around us can be viewed, shaped and depicted (not only in art) in any period of human existence.

The author is the chief curator of the GHMP.

Playlist Q12

The Get Up Kids: Don’t Hate Me
At the Drive-In: Napoleon Solo
Sense Field: Leia
Texas Is The Reason: Do You Know Who You Are?
Sunny Day Real Estate: In Circles
Grade: A Year in the Past, Forever in the Future
The Promise Ring: Make Me a Chevy
American Footbal: Honestly?
Braid: A Dozen Roses
Cap’n Jazz: Oh Messy Life
Jimmy Eat World: For Me This Is Heaven

When Celery Decides to Break Through the Glass Ceiling

The work of artist Jakub Jansa develops theories and observations about social
hierarchy through precarised vegetables and the privileged avocado. At the Thinking Through Film exhibition at the Stone Bell House, one entire floor will be devoted to Jansa’s work.

Jakub Jansa, Club of Opportunities, photo Jan Kolský

A visual artist, Jakub Jansa has been working on a rather unique art project for several years. Exactly according to the opening motto of his new book Club of Opportunities, he “settled into the comfort zone of his mind” and began to develop the fates of several fictional characters through his installations with the help of theorist Kamil Nábělek. At the very beginning there was allegedly a miniature budget for the new project, for which Jansa bought ten celery roots and called the theorist Kamil Nábělek to see if he knew how to use them creatively. The eccentric thinker Nábělek immediately began to develop a theory of celerist ontology and to
talk about the hierarchies of vegesociety. At the very bottom of this hierarchy is the unattractive and neglected celery root. The admired and praised avocado works as its complete opposite. These are the two poles of the social hierarchy between which this whole art project moves. Why celery root and avocado?

Celery root is one of the most overlooked crops in Nábělka’s ontology. People often
consume it only as an obligatory component of meals. It is an ingredient that is necessary in most dishes, but aesthetically it is almost nonexistent for us. It doesn’t taste unique on its own, there is no special story built around it as an important superfood, and its appearance doesn’t promise anything fantastic either. We don’t usually think about the taste and aroma of celery root, even though its contribution to the final enjoyment of a meal is often irreplaceable. Its presentation in supermarket chains is very simple, and proper celery root is sold covered in layers of soil, which signifies its freshness but also clearly defines its place in the spatial hierarchy of the vegesociety.

Jansa’s long-term art project was created in 2017 and includes eight projects so far. The last episode of Opening Ceremony was part of the presentation of contemporary Czech art in Brussels during the Czech Presidency of the Council of the European Union. In November, for the first time, it will be possible to see all these episodes together in one place at the Thinking Through Film exhibition at the Prague Stone Bell House, where one entire floor will be dedicated to Jansa. The exhibition is planned to be a set of several video installations with performative elements, mixing an accomplished visual language with humour, contemporary leftist theory, and exploration of political strategies on social media, but also including comedy, absurdity, and playfulness. The installation will probably include Kamil Nábělek, who will casually explain to the audience what phase of the story they are in and what dynamics of the action they are observing.

Jansa’s artistic project basically follows, over a long period of time, two main characters whose fates he gradually develops in each instalment of the project. One of them is the Wisewoman, a kind-hearted and empathetic character who is going through an inner crisis and has paradoxically lost her ability to predict the future. For Jakub Jansa, this figure partly represents the crisis of liberalism and liberal democracy. The Wisewoman used to be someone who had a natural place in society and could guess, relatively effortlessly, what the near future would bring. But now she is struggling and feels that she no longer understands the contemporary world.

The second important character is the Celerist, half human, half celery root, and a bit of an outsider to the vegesociety. The Celerist is a human who starts at the very bottom and we follow his inner development which in many ways follows the important social debates of the last few years. In the third episode, 2018’s My Name is Red Herring, Celerist is suddenly an arrogant and somewhat comical alt-right influencer. In the video, which features aesthetics reminiscent of speeches by motivational coaches, Celerist advises the audience on how to crack down on leftist opponents. In this work, Jansa partly follows up his diploma thesis Spiritual Fitness, in which he worked on the phenomenon of motivational coaches and their rhetorical manipulations.

Celerist’s far-right anger stems mainly from his social status. As people become more interested in him, his aspirations change. Suddenly he craves admiration and fame. For the first time, he hesitantly begins to observe the higher, avocado class of beings in the vegesociety and wants to penetrate these higher levels. Back in 2018, in the fifth episode entitled Keeping in Line, Celerist confronts his own conscience. His conscience reminds him, subtly at first and then more insistently, that he is gradually losing his true identity and trying to be something he is definitely not. His interaction with his conscience is brisk, comic, and visually appealing, but at the same time contains a deeper message concerning issues of authenticity and social mobility.

For the wider public, the figure of Celerist became visible in 2021 when Jansa won the Jindřich Chalupecký Award. In the Pražák Palace of the Moravian Gallery in Brno, the story of Celerist became part of a collective exhibition of several prominent contemporary artists, thus indirectly communicating with the works of Robert Gabris, Valentýna Janů, Anna Ročňová, and the björnsonova art collective. The video installation clearly showed that, for the first time, the artists had the financial and institutional support making it possible to bring their vision to formal perfection. The seventh episode, Shame to Pride, marks the provisional
peak of the series and is the most accomplished visually and conceptually as well as in terms of acting, set design, design and camera, and lighting work.

At this exhibition, the audience encountered Celerist in his self-inquiring phase. Through hard work, he has finally managed to break into the upper echelons of society, but he feels out of place there. Pretentious avocados constantly let him know that he is not one of them, and he feels a whole range of social barriers that his celerist habitus is simply not up to. This episode perhaps most clearly picked up on some of the themes that are of key importance to contemporary art, namely questions of origin, social belonging, and the search for one’s own identity and authenticity in a world that, while craving the effect of authenticity, is also constantly increasing a gap between fact and fiction, self-design, and pure lies.

In the Celerist story, we find ourselves in a bizarre world where imagination permeates the well-known laws of contemporary society and where purely social issues intersect with the wilderness of vegetation. Jansa, assisted by Nábělek, sees the formation of hierarchies in the realm of fruit and vegetables, which in an absurd way copy the hierarchies we know from our social reality. He took a path radical in both aesthetic and thematic terms by deciding to anthropomorphize the issue. In many ways, this brilliant idea also brings with it very interesting aesthetic possibilities. Celerist, a celery root in human form, may fit in with the elite in the way he dresses and expresses himself, but his face shows the unpleasant roots that remind us of his being born from mud and dirt. Although he aspires to join the Club of the Highest Opportunities, his visual appearance immediately draws attention to the inappropriateness of these aspirations. In a grotesque and dramatically urgent way, he is reminiscent of the Italian writer Elena Ferrante’s exclamation that it is unimportant whether one goes up or down the social ladder. Class origin will always manifest itself in extreme situations, just as a person suddenly blushes.

In addition, Jansa’s opulent visual style also deals with the dilemmas facing today’s society. He stresses the importance of the search for sources of aggressive male energy, which mutates into increasingly radical political expressions and is driven forward by frustration and lack of appreciation. In the figure of the Wisewoman, he introduces into this game the wandering and groping of contemporary liberalism, which cannot confront these phenomena in any way and loses touch with reality and its own ideas about the future. He also reflects on how self stylization affects the formation of the identity of people today and observes how strongly the influence of social networks is imprinted on this process. Although his work appears to be an elaborate grotesquery about the rise and fall of a fictional character, it is in fact also a peculiar way of responding to disturbing tendencies in contemporary society. In each episode, he attempts to capture phenomena that escape other people’s observation and experience of reality while offering his own subtle comments and suggestions on how to relate to these disturbing phenomena. His work, however, effectively envelops these aspects in a visually opulent and witty form which leaves the viewer a great deal of room for imagination and reveals an experience of the elusiveness and openness towards reality that simply cannot be separated
from the experience of contemporary life.

Jan Bělíček is the editor-in-chief of the Alarm online daily

Koubová Walking Through Petříček

Philosopher Alice Koubová walked through the exhibition Thinking Through Images curated by Jitka Hlaváčková and philosopher Miroslav Petříček. The result is a travelogue.

View of exhibition Thinking through Images. The Visual Events of Miroslav Petříček, photo by Tomáš Souček

To get to the exhibition Thinking Through Images: Visual events by Miroslav Petříček, I go straight from a school where art is studied. I walk a distance of only two hundred metres, but to be able to trust the exhibition and its premise, namely that “art provokes a physical reaction which is the beginning of a process of thinking that depends on how much one opens oneself to the situation”, I actually have to try hard. I accept that this is a subjective starting point. I work at DAMU as a vice dean for science and research and one of my efforts is to nurture precisely this space of possible expansion of thinking through artistic experiences that are sensory, figurative, and often difficult to articulate or, on the contrary, more than clear. Artists are those who both create works of art and are exposed to works of art. One might thus assume that their own artistic work will be embodied in them as a physical thinking of otherness, empathy, self-transformation, and that also their teachers will be such thinkers par excellence.

In the field of art, an entire spectrum of ways to shape, share, and talk about singular models of the world has originated for this purpose: artistic research. Even Mirek Petříček describes artistic research as a suitable alternative to an overly logocentric science, because of its ability to build on the specific artistic experience and its way of exploring the world.

The second area that needs to be constantly thought about, reassessed, and addressed in an art school is the relational environment itself, the mechanism of power within the institution, the specific meaning of the phrase freedom of speech, the sense of otherness, sensitivity, openness, subversion, and the status quo.

In both areas, Petříček’s hopes that art will “make us think”, that it will “rid us of what we know” and help us “to adopt the point of view of someone else, to encounter another model of the world” get confronted with reality. Artistic research is alternately labelled as something we’ve been doing for decades and, moments later, as a Western invention that nobody understands and nobody needs to do anyway. Debates about relationships are dismissed as snowflake ideologies that don’t understand democracy. The mantra that “conceptual thinking is violent”, as the philosopher Petříček says, is a cover for anti-intellectualism, a conservative attitude that is sixty years old, the opinion of influential people without an argument. The sanctity of tacit knowledge leads to the branding of thinking as theory, theory as academicism, and with academicism being rejected for obvious reasons.

I’m a skin and it’s getting more and more empty inside. What kind of institutions do artists want? Or is it that they don’t want institutions, perhaps? Do they want lines of escape from the world, and then, abandoned by their own artistic experience, they negotiate the world and its political space with skills they could not take with them on the journey of aesthetic experience?

I’m not talking about all of them. And I’m not talking about the whole institution. Many create, teach and act so that life can flow again and others can fit in it. And indeed, yes, it is clear to me that aesthetic experience does not overlap with political reality. I’m not so naive as to think that artists are more politically refined than the rest of the population just because they experience art more often. Yes, the work of art has autonomy and thus exerts its own power separate from the artist. But now, actually, watch out. It has an autonomy and a power of its own that moves us. But where does it move us, and in what world? In an autonomous aesthetic experience? In a mindset of otherness that does not manifest itself in the physical body, in our life attitudes, in our everyday interactions, disconnected not only from the artist but from any actions in general? If art were of such an autonomous nature, it would be, as Blanchot says, so wonderfully free of the political as to be quite superfluous. How does art become a visual event that does not disconnect from our lives if we give up our belief in the causality of art and politics under the weight of experience? By what mechanism, by what catalyst, by what logic of the figurative, by what dynamics of the dreamlike does it move us?

The worst part is that the catalyst exists, it’s just obscure. My body walks the two hundred metres from DAMU to the Municipal Library by itself. Maybe it is walking on purpose, it is in a hurry to get some energy somewhere, and I say to it in approval: go ahead, I will try to catch up with you. At the moment my body runs using its legs, I still sit slumped at my desk, replaying today’s argumentative exchanges. Then I force myself to get up, I can’t let my body get far away, what would it look like at the exhibition if it were standing there without me?

To get close to a landscape in which speech is both intentional and unintentional, to forms of reflection that I have only indirectly associated with any artists. Taken out of the context, in bliss. A state where there are no relationships as a temporary liberation, at least until it starts to hurt even more than before.

The first and big theme of the exhibition is in the opening hall. A text by Paul Valéry: “The eye and the hand, following a curve commenced, look for the charm in its continuation, and try to continue on to where it would be pleasing to both of them.” People around, but me with Valéry, you don’t have to talk anymore, I’ll make do, yes, thank you, no, that’ll do, thank you. Valéry is not a person, he is a reflection that presents itself as a composition. It’s a chart showing the passage through the exhibition. There is a space between the mind and the body that is neither an embodied mind nor a thinking body; it is a space that does not unite but liberates. I accept a play laid out by the quote, and a quote from The Visible and the Invisible joins it, which comes to my mind spontaneously from my memory: “What consciousness does not see, it does not see for fundamental reasons; what it does not see, it does not see precisely because it is consciousness. What it does not see is precisely that which prepares in it the vision of the other.” A blind spot. It’s contentless. It’s not a context, nobody wants to say anything about it. Merleau-Ponty then adds: “What remains in the dream of the chiasm?”, of the intertwining of body and soul, of the embodied mind? What remains of the tension that constitutes both sides of the relationship? It seems to be basically nothing and at the same time the absolute basis –Stiftung.

Valéry underlined a few words in his fragment: “following”, “charm” and “pleasing to both of them”. I’ll follow the charm, as in a dream, the foundation that will be pleasing to both of us, body and mind put out of control of things.

Valéry is the last artist with a signature, after that the gallery is just full of challengers, cut from history, society, and their own biographies. Don’t ask me. The possibility to let the other just look and let me just look. To leave the self-projection face in order to face the other work and a human. Surprisingly, it is not in the dialectic of the same and the other, in any hermeneutics and consensus, but in this “just looking” that the charm is the strongest. When my gaze does not return but only stares, I leave the communication unnoticed. No more self-understanding and self-correction in favour of the world or the figurative. I take a different approach to the question of non-unity of the self. It’s a calm, a relaxation, I implicitly nod to the fact that I will always contain something unexplainable, however, this unexplainable does not invite me to strive for explanation. Something that is not mine, it doesn’t say anything about me, it doesn’t relate to me.

Skip Merleau-Ponty in the tunnel, just skip him. The idea as a light projection intangibly occupying the boundary between rooms, stopped by the resistance of the floor, made visible as a reflection in matter, a fragment sticking out, so as not to say that it occupies the space, that it perhaps, for God’s sake, interprets, that it thinks something. Okay. I understand: The ideas in this exhibition will be driven into the space of transitions, shifts, interstices, walls, places normally sensorially ignored, and in these extreme limits of visibility they will be able to attack by the sharp contours of paradoxes like fresh spikes of elusiveness. Why not just accept it?

Room one. A volcanic explosion glowing along its inner boundary. Life begins in a fissure. It’s pushing outward, what is alive is always primarily the edge, not what defines. The burning contour exists as an extinction, the extinction of what surrounds, it grows to the places where it burns out, let us watch it carefully. To endure burning at the edges of oneself is to exist. To exist in the sense of ceasing to exist in a power that cannot be questioned. When the fire runs out, a new joy begins from the middle. A thing is where its highest heat reaches.

And the tunnel again. Skip Maldiney. I can’t do it, I must pass through him, pass through his projected luminous thought, I loathe it extremely, it’s impossible not to pass through him, what the hell kind of freedom is this, but at least when I pass through, I interrupt his reflection, his message, and offer him to be reflected on my surface, which brutally deforms the thought to the point of absolute illegibility. Resistance to representation is possible as a persistence in its dynamics, a takeover and deformation. I leave the darkness, and from the ceiling of the over-lighted space the skins peeled off of colourful whales hang in front of me.

Second room. They’re not whales, but they are whales. I bear witness to their past surfaces by swimming among them, by putting them on (no one is looking), by becoming what I never was and never will be, who would ever think I was a whale, but perhaps now I am, through witnessing, through the clothing. A visitor, someone I don’t know, comes to me and says something to me, but right now I’m a fish, I gawk my existence onto him, he responds, I would never have thought of that in my life, and then he quickly leaves, is disappointed, I have no way how to agree with him.

Reincarnation. Reframing, a room within a room. A space of a rhythm that never repeats. There’s music but no chorus. No return, no past, no flexion, just a plot that is endless. A singularity of no return carried by the scaffolding of the outer square structure, a white and invisible guarantee that the unrepeatability will remain something that will not be lost to itself. Anyone who can’t stand it, please leave through the door, there are two options, entrance and exit, a completely conservative arrangement, anyone who doesn’t want to participate, please exit through the exit, here, it looks like a door and it is a door.

Whoever walks out the door on the left encounters something that is complete only if it is completed by himself, that is, by the one who has just come, by the one who is observing and at the same time will play in it in that moment. The void constituted by the three fullnesses yawns aggressively, waiting to be filled by the incoming visitor, so that the whole can be realized and there is something to look at. It’s an outrageous request, but I’m agreeing to it for our mutual enjoyment, I committed to it at the beginning of the game after all. The end of the fragment, harmony wins, I am part of what I observe and without me there would be no harmony, without me there would be no work, with me it is complete, do you see with your permission that I “follow” “charm”?

Third room and fourth room. What was on display in the second room is transferred to the fourth room. One can choose either to see or to mediate, one cannot do both at the same time, the medium is not the message, the medium is the medium and the message is the message, whoever wants both crosses over or returns, anyway, without effort and without frustration one cannot get around, hopefully what is here is pleasing at least to someone.

Third room between the second and the fourth. Two pictures which look like dark coloured squares, only start to express their own nature when I take their photo. I forbid myself to interpret, I prefer to look into their darkness a little longer. This picture is a sensory perception that, even if I wait for a long time, gives me nothing. Say it with a photo, I make a proposal to the picture. It insists on hiddenness, a photograph will make an encounter impossible and allow the experience of seeing.

A flat man. I sit by him, I stand by him, I comeback to him. One can’t help but feel something very vague, something like precision, this is how it is, it is exactly like this. But it is not clear what it is that is this accurate. The flat man is another act and pure sensory invective, if people weren’t walking around I’d lie down next to him and flatten myself. Flatten yourself in bed. Waiting with a layered head crawling on the wall, without a mouth, looking out from it at those who walk around in the gallery as if in low spirits, unlike us flat people, you wouldn’t believe how many layers we are stuffed with.

Fifth, sixth and seventh. Big leaps across many rooms, I lose concentration, I remember the flat guy, I don’t have the stamina to look at everything and I don’t want to, I come across penises filled with scented oils and crumpled plants, I don’t even want to guess what it’s supposed to mean, it’s not about meaning in this exhibition either, I can see how their lives are separated from each other by long distances, penises on principle don’t share their bodily fluids with each other, let alone solidarity, let alone anything like relationships, that much is known, but their contents are surprisingly the same and surprisingly they compete in this exhibition in how deeply one of them hangs down, who has ever seen it, they usually compete in something else.

A shaky mirror. I resist illustrative interpretation. I notice the wound in the glass, the only one that isn’t shaking. Is it your point, please, that our disruptions are the only source of fixed identity we retain in our lives? You meant that when I look at myself, nothing is certain but the blow that someone has dealt me and I have no way of letting go of it, it has remained as a firm support, I can always go back to it, it will never fail me, the blow will never fail us at all.

Maybe room eight. A series of repeating panels, they appear to be metal, but even that is a mistake, the painting is a canvas, read the manifesto on the back about what the artist will never overcome, mired in a reproductive artistic space in which to be original is to repeat, in which to get visible means to collaborate with the system that enslaves, a piece of nice news, as long as the author doesn’t want to reveal his name, but it’s in room nine that I first meet Miroslav Petříček, I tell him the series in the next room is really great and Mirek says, yes yes, that Baladrán, it’s beautiful. Everything has gone wrong, non-identity has become a signature, anonymity has been given a specific personal unique name, so that Zbyněk Baladrán is the one who has demonstrated that he is not and cannot be, and thus is unique.

I’m going back to Valéry in a roundabout way. Where is Miroslav Petříček in this exhibition about an identity that is not? Not a single quote, not a single work is “his”. Petříček as an invisible element that manifests itself in the composition of the exhibition, in contradictory events connected by corridors or partitions, Petříček the ground plan, all of it, without being confirmed and recorded as a whole, Petříček as a liberated grammatical constituent with maximum valence potential, tying to itself different elements without being tied to anything. He outwitted even Baladrán, even though Baladrán did a lot to be there and not to be there, but Petříček inadvertently denounced him, saying his name; that happens too.

Freedom from the system as the only possible form of happy existence. Not happy in the sense of gifted, but happy in the sense of unencumbered, unsubdued. Among all those “things” that somehow “are”, it is crucial to perceive those that cannot or do not possess a conceivable and graspable identity. For the graspable ones make us graspable and inject us into the totality of the closed world. It is therefore self-preserving to perceive facts that do not confirm us. They exist unpredictably. For example in such a way that they appear as irregular bonds of a dynamic set of relationships, as components to be subtracted from a series, as reflections of something that was never original, as tangles without a centre, as burning peripheries advancing outwards to extinction, as ironic schemes of different references, as traces of what is absent, as what is visible only through a medium that has taken us to another room through its mediation, or perhaps as the flat man.

It is the happiness of the sovereign, the one who decides the exception.

Uniqueness.

The bitterness of this happiness is the impossibility of returning to the institution more prepared than how one left. Any return from the position of this freedom is just a return with a bigger dose of nostalgia. Escape line strategies allow singularity, they allow the getting out of the environment that deprives one of freedom. But they don’t think about how they themselves are potentially depriving freedom in this way, how they are leaving political relations at the mercy of those who do not seek lines of escape in any sense of the word. The self-preserving gesture that takes us out into a figurativeness that does not confirm us gives up the possibility of being a gesture for other people. This ambivalence persists and is equally strong throughout art history. Whoever lives the world of relations, whoever identifies violence in it, whoever calls it violence and not unthinkable, loses sovereignty. They are bound.

What impact does thinking along the lines of escape have on the power to bear a world where we must think even if we don’t want to think in its destructive form. To watch the world as it unfolds, in its monotony, in its futility, in its imprisonment, in its malignity, in the solidarity of those who bear it.

The author is a philosopher and vice-dean of DAMU

Playlist Q11

Simon a Garfunkel: The Boxer
Leonard Cohen: Lover, Lover, Lover
of Montreal: Gronlandic Edit
Eurythmics: Winter Wonderland
Prince: Purple Rain
Priessnitz: Jaro
Umakart: Vlci u dveří
Monika Načeva: Udržuj svou ledničku plnou
Leoš Janáček: Pilky (Lašské tance)
Zdeněk Liška: Spalovač mrtvol

Stop Exiting and Entering the Train, the Door is Closing

I run the tip of my index finger somewhat aimlessly across the screen of my iPhone, pausing only occasionally on a sentence or image from the gruelling stream of tweets, messages, ads, posts, wisecracks, photos, podcasts, promotional spots, short reels, occasionally sipping the beer special they have on tap at AI Bar Therapy this week, and deciding that if no one comes in fifteen, no, thirty minutes, I won’t have another, I’ll put my phone in my pocket and ask AI Světlana to call Uber. No kidding. I’ll finish my drink, grab an Uber and head home.

The world ain’t what it used to be. It’s getting worse and worse. More and more often, I’m the oldest at the table. And more often than not, there’s more free space around it. And more and more often, one of the people sitting around will call an Uber before it gets dark because they’re tired. And more and more often someone doesn’t come because they’ve died, so we’ll have a drink to his no-longer-health and then call our Ubers.

The watering hole itself ain’t what it used to be either. There’s only one rectangular table with benches for four guests on each side left, and otherwise there’s just square tables on a thick green stem all over the room (when the prepaid credit runs out, the stem turns yellow, when it runs out completely, it turns red), one very wide chair at each, almost an armchair, but anyway you can rock back and forth in it without the risk of falling over backwards. People are getting by with their mobile phones and connectivity; if you’ve got a good signal, half of your work is done. In the middle of the square table there is a display with counters and a fan of connectors, from the oldest to the most versatile one, so that everyone can choose, including lovers of vintage phones and vintage models, which I prefer because I’m a snob. Of course, it’s always just a fake with the “bestest” chip inside, currently the M4, because I’m a snob with a good pension and the owner of Tesla ČEZ shares.

I’ve also got “deafphones”, which I take everywhere with me, even to the AI Bar Therapy. I mean I’ve got AI earphones, the multi-functional version. I call them deafphones because I use the mute function a lot. A lot of crap can be heard around me, especially here in AI Bar Therapy, when someone comes in and starts talking, of course. And then you have three options. One: go out in front of the bar, smoke some good strain and come back in a better mood. The second: sink into AI silence, supposedly the same as 118 metres below the surface of the Bay of Bengal, where, according to Vikram, the company that produces the earphones, silence is at its best. I mean, I heard on a podcast that in the Greenland Sea the silence reaches even minus twenty decibels, supposedly an experience between bliss and pain. But AI Světlana checked it out and it’s probably commercial disinfo.

And there still is the third option: call Uber. Yeah, AI Světlana. Only, I’m also taking advantage of the original feature of my Vikrams to provide me with everything I’m downloading on my mobile at the same time in audio version. A couple of weeks ago, my grandson Kryštof gave me as a birthday present a new licence of YFV (your favourite voice) software, where I can choose the speaker – male, female, or non-binary. According to the popularity of voices in the Czech Republic, AI Karel Gott, AI Vladimír Kořen and AI Zdeněk Svěrák transformed into a woman alternate on the winner podium. Worldwide, AI Barack Obama has been in the lead since the first day of ranking.

Because I’m a snob, I have an original one: the voice from the subway. Her name is AI Světlana, and the live one has been announcing stations on the A-line since the day the A-line started its operation. When I first downloaded her on the Vikrams, I asked her, to make her happy, whether, when I’m not alive anymore, she might become the number one Czech voice, because unlike the three most popular AI voices, she will never become a zombie, the subway is an eternal certainty after all. She said she could tell me when I wouldn’t be here within a pretty small time error, but I should think twice whether I wanted to know. And also that voice number one will belong with a probability bordering on certainty to an entity with the working name AI52767528, non-binary, but she couldn’t reveal more because it’s a product in progress. I did not want to know when I would be gone, although the worm of curiosity was gnawing at me. And I couldn’t have cared less about the latter if I wasn’t going to be here. I apologised to her for the illogical question, and AI Světlana said that’s no problem. Just as divinely as her “Stop exiting and entering the train, the door is closing.”

And then there’s the third deafphones/ earphones feature. Hearing aid. They come in handy from a certain age, and, who knows, maybe Kryštof gave them to me just because of that. I ask the AI Světlana and she suppresses the noise and hum around me, amplifies her voice, and when I say “what” she repeats the last sentence perfectly clearly. The best for last: Kryštof has pinched software from somewhere that turns my hearing aid into a directional microphone so I can listen in on conversations fifty metres around. But it’s not polite, AI Světlana always warns me, and then, again as divinely as the door announcement, she fires off a warning about the Vikram company’s legal disclaimer concerning its non-liability for the consequences of my eavesdropping; she lists the crimes and opinions (in some countries) in terms of reporting requirements, and warns me that everything I hear, the network hears too, analyses it, and will intervene if necessary in my best interest. Understand: snitch on the speaker and have me called as a witness. And she says it with the highest degree of kindness that only neural network mouth can, unlike human vocal cords. You do know that divine voice of hers from the A-line, don’t you?

But what can I do now other than a little snooping since I’m sick of browsing on my cell phone and no one’s coming. There are two chairs at one of the square tables in the other corner of the room, and the guy sitting on the other one is just coming back from the toilet or has been out for a smoke.

“Do you get it?” he says with a touch of suppressed anger, which, with my Vikrams, I can hear as if he’s spitting right in my face. “They’re moving me to the lab starting next quarter.”

“But they’ll let you keep the money, right?”

“Shit, it’s not about the money. It’s about respect. I’ll keep my salary, but they’re taking away my respect. You know what humiliation like that is like? Not being able to work with people? They might as well add that to my diploma: ‘only suitable to work with biological samples.’” He sips coffee from his cup. “They fucked me over.”

He was more likely to have been just peeing rather than smoking, I figured. Unless he had a really shitty strain. I just glance at them furtively, so they don’t realise I can hear them too. Branded from the shoes to the rims of their glasses, discreet tattoos, indeterminate middle age between their first and second divorce. When they sit she looks about half a head taller than him, but maybe she has short legs and he’s just slouching.

“Don’t take it that way,” she says. “You’ll be doing science then. That’s what you wanted when we were in medical school, right? And besides, you’ll have peace of mind, a steady regimen, no on-call service, no emergency cases…”

“It’s too late for science,” he snaps. “I’m old, I’m good enough to keep an eye on AI to see whether it keeps an eye correctly on the experiments of young hotshots…”

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” she says pompously. Then she bursts out laughing so she’s heard all over the entire AI Bar. “They’ve finally found him.”

“What?” I hiss into the Vikrams.

“But who will guard the guards themselves?” AI Světlana translates. “A Latin proverb, they’re both doctors, so Latin is almost a professional language for them. He means that –”

“Shut up or I’ll lose the thread,” I cut her short.

Fortunately, I’ve lost almost nothing.

“But what exactly did you do? There must have been a reason for them putting you in the lab.”

“Actually, nothing, nothing in particular, that is. No mistake, no negligence. It’s just that the last empathy test they did showed that I’d been below the hospital standard for the last six months. And then when they asked the patients in my rooms, they said that when AI was on duty, it was nicer to them and had more patience with them.”

“But that’s been known for a long time, that AI is better at empathy than humans.”

“But I’m the ideal middle-aged doctor. I’m certified, I’m experienced, I respect insurance company standards. I’ve got the good background, too. My wife’s fine, kids are fine, mortgage paid off. Maybe I’m a little worn down. I mean, it all cost me a lot. Hard work, nerves, patience. And the stupid AI ain’t got no worries, nothing to get worn down by, always fresh, always in a good mood. Fuck its empathy! It’s got only its networks.”

He swings his hand and almost knocks over the cup of flat white in front of him. “And you know what pisses me off the most? The paradox of eventually being sacked by a human. Some Cejnová person from the HR department. She’d never seen more of me than a name with a picture on her monitor, but I fell below the line, so that’s that. I bet if AI was to decide that, it would have turned out very differently.”

“I know which one she is. She used to be a prosecutor, but I guess she also burned out. And calm down, AI’s doing these things in the HR department, too. That Cejnová is just keeping an eye on things there.” She looked at her phone.

“I have to get out of here. I’m sorry about the lab.”

“So another guard who keeps an eye on guards. That’s a pretty shitty way of keeping an eye. I’m going back to the hospital too, to the lab, that is. The coffee’s already paid for.”

I watch them as they leave, oh yeah, he was just slouching, and I wonder if another guard might be needed to keep an eye on the guard who’s keeping an eye on the first guard but doing it badly. And who’s gonna keep an eye on that one? Us? AI? Who’s gonna decide that? What if the artificial monster doesn’t eventually exterminate us, as disinfo keeps claiming, but simply replaces us by putting itself in our shoes so thoroughly, by all its kindness, its helpfulness, its attentiveness, its empathy?

“Can I get you another special?” AI Světlana says from my Vikrams. “You haven’t finished it, that’s true, but it’s already three degrees warmer and has lost ninety-five percent of its aromatic qualities.”

It’s as if Světlana’s original announcement flashed in my head. Stop exiting and entering the train, the door is closing. No, this is AI’s message: You exit, I enter, so the door closes behind you. What if this is not just godly but really God’s? I could ask her what she thinks.

“Thanks, I’ll pass,” I say instead, and then, as empathically as human vocal cords can manage, I ask her: “And call me Uber, please.”

Second-hand Bookshops: Second-hand Souls

They liken the pages of books to the leaves of trees – and they mourn their demise in the same way. Second-hand bookshop owners are ahead of the times in their ecological thinking about books. But to say that you can come to their shop to choose a book would not be entirely accurate.

Prague’s Maniny district was famous for workers’ spartakiads (mass gymnastic displays) during the Czechoslovak First Republic, which is perhaps why the long avenue to the Vltava River, which turns northwest here, is still called Dělnická – Workers’Avenue. Next to the futuristic Parallel Polis, where you can use bitcoin to pay for a cappuccino with oat milk, towards the Libeň Bridge, you can have a perhaps even more surprising encounter with another parallel world, perhaps even universe. There are stacks of yellowed books piled in the dusty windows of a former household goods shop, as if someone were moving; it most likely looks similar inside. It’s hard to say because with the exception of Jiří Novák, a slight man in his sixties in a black T-shirt, who has been running the second-hand bookshop for some twenty-five years, no one else can fit into the book-filled establishment. The owner named the shop, whose shabby goods in the windows resemble a flea market, Morbido. Contrary to its funereal name, however, the place and its owner seem to be flourishing.

The quirky character of the dealer in old books and his business began to catch the attention of first the local and then the national media. There’s even an online fundraising event to help the place where time stops (which is also why the locals often stop here for a chat), to contribute to the rent. “My son was intrigued by the trains, the Steam on the Rails book you have in the shop window. And you had two more on the same subject there yesterday. Are they gone yet?” asks a dad with two kids on foot to floor ride on toys. The owner, standing as usual outside the entrance next to more boxes of books, nods. He has already sold the books, but encourages the father with the kids to stop on their way home for something similar. The situation repeats itself several more times; the desired book may be there, it just can’t be given to the customer so easily. “I have a photographic memory, but if someone moves a book to a different stack, it doesn’t help,” says Mr. Novák explaining his storage system, which doesn’t require a computer or an Excel spreadsheet. The stacks are organised by author, title, and genre. “If you tell me you want Remarque or Karolína Světlá, I know where to look,” he assures us. The payment process is similarly original. “People don’t have cash on them, they mostly pay for everything by card these days. To avoid delaying them, I usually shove a book in their hand, saying they can pay me when they next pass by. It works, but of course I don’t have the brain capacity to keep track of debtors. One time a lady came in with three hundred and sixty crowns. I asked her when the debt dated from. From Christmas, she said. But the one before last. I am a deterrent example of entrepreneurship,” laughs Novák, a former police officer who subsidises his second-hand bookshop “business” with night shifts as a receptionist. In the course of our conversation, a few more passers-by stop for a chat. Novák’s second-hand bookshop is unlikely to be an example of business efficiency, but it can be taken as a reminder that books are not just a silent fetish in collectors’ libraries but rather part of the human environment and human relationships. “It’s like a discussion group here, all the pensioners drop in, I’ll give the dogs a biscuit. Last time there was a lady here complaining she couldn’t find a partner. But that’s well on the boil now,” smiles Novák.

He often buys books from estate sales or when people are moving. “But because people don’t read much, I take books to charities, old people’s homes, long-term bedridden patients… I talk with them about what they want to read.” He has been following the changing interest in books and disagrees with the observation of reading specialists that reading is seen as a kind of unproductive daydreaming, a dawdling and a relaxation, which is why it’s mostly women who read books. “It’s not true that women read more. Men read too, but in general, instead of leisure reading, there is an interest in books that help one develop,” Novák explains. “Personal development, esotericism, any kind of craft guide, blacksmithing, carpentry, roofing, a lot of people do business and lack the relevant literature. There’s also interest in manuals for old vehicles. But guys are also looking for books to help them escape the stress they suffer from at work. Freud and Jung are sold almost immediately,” he says. In addition to gender stereotypes, the digital world has also had an impact on sales. “No one cares about university textbooks anymore, for example. My shop window is full of dictionaries and not a single one has been sold in a year,” says Novák.

Luboš Samek is another similarly noticeable figure in his neighbourhood. His second-hand bookshop is located in Dejvice, a quarter of an hour by tram from Novák’s. This is not shabby Dělnická, but a rather posher district. In the case of Mr. Samek, a peer of Mr. Novák’s and a qualified natural scientist, it is clear that when the blinds are drawn, not even the owner himself can fit into the shop on Jaselská Street. The stock of goods he is supposed to trade in has even spilled over into a nearby café, which has thus acquired an interesting library.

In a sense, Samek fulfils the idea of a second-hand bookseller being someone who knows it all. In conversation, his thoughts branch and develop in fractals, countless digressions and endless associations. Time seems to slow down around his shop. The answer to an ordinary question can therefore take the form of an arc that extends for an hour. “Do you know who Dobroslav Líbal was? Do you know Alexander Goldschneider?” he asks right at the outset, drawing on his vast reserves of encyclopaedic erudition. Nor does Mr. Samek consider a book to be a mere article made of paper. In fact, he claims that a book will call to the person it wants to be with. He has developed his own method of screening shoppers to see if their interest is serious. Naturally, if second-hand books are looking for new readers, it is the secondhand bookseller’s duty to prevent the book from falling into the wrong hands. “I stand up for books that nobody wants. We should protect every printed page, just as we should protect the leaf of a tree. We do not know how to behave as a civilisation. We want things immediately and, if possible, for free,” he replies. The speech takes a circuitous route, turning for a moment to Mr. Samek himself, then to ecology and the curses of the digital age. He considers it an evil when books that no one reads are removed from public library collections. “The invisible hand of the censor used to rule in the past, today the visible hand of the market rules,” is the metaphor he offers for the present day.

The two gentlemen are too different to draw any general conclusions or deeper lessons about the ecology of the book market on the pavement outside their second-hand bookshops. Perhaps the one offered by Jiří Novák will do, when he momentarily flies away in a dream and forgets about the next rent payment. “Books are not ordinary goods,” he glances at the dusty shop windows, “they have a soul. They can invite you into another world.”

Ecology Is Still Disparaged in the Czech Republic

When you say “publish books in an environmentally responsible way”, most publishers immediately start brandishing plasticfree publications and paper tape for packaging shipments. However, the topic of ecology within the publishing practice encompasses multiple variables, such as the longevity of books, fair remuneration for authors, material availability, or the sustainability of the publishing practice itself. Moreover, all these aspects need to be seen through the perspective of the country in which the book is produced. The position of the Czech Republic is privileged in this respect if only because we are located in the richer Global North.

Books move in an ecosystem made up of creators, publishers, distribution, shops, libraries, and then readers. Values such as ethics, fair cooperation, solidarity – and not least ecology – are therefore important for the sustainability of such a book ecosystem. These are often overlooked by all involved – often for economic reasons. The pressure to keep the final price of books as low as possible tempts publishers to print in China, on low-quality paper, to produce huge print runs, and eventually to colonise culturally and aesthetically the countries to which the overproduction of books is then diverted. In addition to this, of course, readers want to own the books they desire to read and demand discounts which do nothing more than force book production to behave in an unecological way, disrupting the fragile book ecosystem by not paying someone fairly, all because of the reduced price of the publication. Then we wonder why another independent bookshop closed because it was the only one that didn’t have the funds to provide discounts. Readers came to touch the book, take a picture of it, and then buy it online at the coffee bar around the corner for a cheaper price – at the expense of the bookshop’s margin. The ones who often go unpaid are the content creators. The Status of the Artist could help to dignify their working conditions, among other things, by offering people in the cultural sector a minimum unconditional income, for one example, which would take into account the values they have passed on to society so far. Public libraries could be in a much stronger position in the book ecosystem if they were able to increase the availability of books which could then be produced in smaller quantities. Reduced book production would then, of course, mean less environmental impact on the distribution side. Everything is interconnected in the book ecosystem.

My perspective on the topic of ecology in the practice of publishing was fundamentally changed by a publishing conference in Pamplona, Spain, hosted by the International Alliance of Independent Publishers in the winter of 2021, where I had the opportunity to hear the viewpoints of my publishing colleagues from different parts of the world. It made me realise what a privileged country we live in in terms of the publishing practice – we have countless local printing companies to choose from. We have ecological paper available, and in the case of small publishing houses, we can easily distribute books to shops by tram. We can participate in the many local events available and sell books directly. Not only to end customers, but also to libraries which in the Czech Republic represent one of the densest networks globally. We are growing economically as a country, so in addition to books we can also buy reading devices and audiobooks. On the one hand, this privilege helps to disseminate content in a barrier-free way, but on the other hand, e-books pose a greater environmental burden than paper books.

Unfortunately, there are still many excuses and evasions in the Czech debate on the topic of environmentally friendly book publishing. As a publisher who tries to minimize the impact of her publishing on the planet, I sometimes face hateful comments from readers who do not consider investing in more environmentally friendly book production relevant. In fact, anything ecological is still ridiculed, relativized, and belittled in the Czech Republic. We put each individual satisfaction of needs above our responsibility towards the planet and future generations.

There are two main ways to change our behaviour in the book ecosystem. One is education – that is, informing people about the consequences of our behaviour. The other is critique of the grant policy in culture and its re-setting. The Ministry of Culture should try to take into account the fragility of the book ecosystem and deliberately strengthen, especially, the weakest segments in it. For example, through higher appreciation of the pro-environmental behaviour of individual actors, which strengthens the whole system. The structures of the state have the tools to encourage the different components of the book ecosystem to be more considerate towards the planet. It just requires more flexibility on their part.

Certain regions and institutions can set an example for us in their approaches to ecofriendly book publishing. When I gave a talk at the LiteralPRO festival in Barcelona this May, I asked Laia Figueras Tortras, director of the Catalan ecological book publishing organisation Institut de l’Ecoedició, about publishing ecology.

Q Why is it so important to know the wider context of ecological book publishing?
L F T The Institut de l’Ecoedició, which I represent, has calculated that the carbon footprint of books published in Catalonia in 2019 was approximately 61,000 tonnes of CO2. This amount is more or less equivalent to the carbon footprint of just 19 seconds that all the citizens of Catalonia would spend at once searching on Google. Compared to other industries, this is a rather small environmental impact. Nevertheless, for culture, especially book publishing, environmental impact considerations should become an obligation. Culture is the sum of knowledge, experience, opinions, values, attitudes, and meanings; it is a way of life and communication. A cultural message will lack credibility if we do not care about how we communicate it.
Q When discussing eco-publishing, what participants in the book business do we tend to forget about?
L F T Eco-publishing of books is not possible without the consensus and cooperation of all the sub-actors in the book market. Whether it is book designers, as there are a whole range of decisions that have a significant environmental impact when designing books, such as the use of sequins, gilding, embossing, etc.; printers, as they know the material options at the level of paper and ink; bookbinders, with their experience with adhesives and their detailed knowledge of different bindings; distribution, bookshops, shipping companies – and last but not least, publishers.
Q What is the support for this topic in Catalonia?
L F T In Catalonia, there have been several initiatives from publishers exploring ecofriendly book publishing and promoting local production as a way of looking after the local publishing industry and its environmental impact. Private sector proposals are very important, but eco-publishing can only be popularised with the support of the public administration. In this respect, we are very lucky in Catalonia, because our government understands its responsibility and has proposed a unique and quite ambitious plan to support the cultural sector. It makes it possible, through a series of grants and specialised training, to reduce the environmental impact of those involved. However, eco-publishing is above all a revolution, and it needs strength and faith. It would help if we understood the urgency of sustainable cultural production as well as consumption. In this sense, our readers are not only ready for change, but even demand it. The results of several surveys prove this. The younger the readers are, the more demanding they are when it comes to environmental protection, when it comes to brands and the products they consume.
Q How can people be convinced that they should be interested in the environmental aspect of books?
L F T Readers have a right to know the environmental impact of book production – and publishers have a duty to provide information about it. When we present our publishing philosophy and the purpose for which we publish our books to our readers, we must also inform them about the strategic decisions related to our environmental commitments. This is in order to contribute to a more conscious and sustainable way of consuming culture. With books, we try to minimise our environmental impact not just so we don’t perish, but because such behaviour contributes to a happier way of life. Carbon literacy is another way to effect change. If I talked about the carbon footprint in Catalonia without making comparisons to other things, the number itself would probably have no relevance. The same goes for readers – if we tell them that a book in their hands represents 1,453 grams of CO2, but thanks to the principles of eco-publishing we have saved 235 grams of CO2, it may not be understandable. But when we compare the savings per each copy to, say, the amount of CO2 we produce by keeping twenty-four emails, their perspective and understanding may change. Perhaps in the same way as when we tell them that if we print the same book for the Catalan market in Asia, we might as well multiply its carbon footprint by seven.
Q What are all the things you are able to calculate today?
L F T Our Institute has developed a special calculator (BookDAPer) to measure the environmental impact of books printed both digitally and using offset printing. The impacts that the calculator evaluates are the carbon footprint, the waste generated, as well as the consumption of water, energy, and material. The calculator also shows the environmental savings when compared to the production of books that do not follow ecological principles. The data collected is important not only to be able to communicate the environmental impact of book production. Just knowing the data allows us to reduce them, i.e., to incorporate individual sustainable principles into our decision-making about design, production, distribution of books, etc. Just as an example, the carbon footprint of a 13 × 20 centimetre book with 188 pages, printed locally in Catalonia in a run of 1,100 copies, is equivalent to 948 grams of CO2. By simply changing the size of the book to 10 × 13 cm, the CO2 emissions can be reduced to 491 grams. Whether we eventually do so is only up to us.

The Encounter with an Image Is Incalculable

“What we need is not the hermeneutics of art, but the eroticism of art,” proclaims the text accompanying the GHMP exhibition entitled Thinking with Images based on the book of the same name by Miroslav Petříček (MP). The exhibition was prepared by curator Jitka Hlaváčková (JH) along with the philosopher Petříček, who maintains in his book that images, in effect, think instead of us and yet for us. What does it mean to encounter art erotically?

Q How do you want to exhibit thinking?
M P It’s not about exhibiting thinking. It’s about making the person who comes to the exhibition think. It’s a matter of strategy, of how to organise the exhibition so that it doesn’t just serve the purpose of people coming in, viewing it and leaving, but perhaps instead the purpose of people beginning to think about why some things are called pictures. Especially nowadays when the things that hang on the wall in galleries are not as numerous as those that are installed there, not to mention the different technologies.
J H Mirek (MP) came up with the motto based on the philosopher Merleau-Ponty that the encounter with art provokes a physical reaction which is the beginning of a process of thinking that depends on how much one opens oneself to the situation. Mirek once quoted the philosopher Michel Serres concerning how our basic position in the world can be defined, for example, by the prepositions in a sentence. I therefore perceive a work of art as a model of the world. It shows situations and ways of relating to the world.
M P In our Western culture, we are taught that we are asked questions and we answer them. We implicitly assume that when we go somewhere, we answer the question that the institution is asking. But it’s a tautology; every question actually assumes what the possible answers are, we know that from school or from tests. The point is to put the viewers in a situation where they realise that it’s not their answers that are stupid, but that they are asking stupid questions. “What is art?” This is pointless, we can go for answers to Wikipedia, where there is a basket full of answers, and even thoroughly elaborated. I would even see it as an achievement if the viewer was able to say “I like it” without being ashamed. Just like that, nothing more, not saying why and wherefore. As absolutely incomprehensible as Kant is, he has a wonderful definition that “art is purposive without a purpose”. Fascination with a work of art implies an absolute openness that points towards some sense, and I am very much aware that by any meaning, I move the sense away from me, but at the same time I hold on to the meaning and have to come up with more and more meanings. That’s why I like pictures. If a philosopher develops a distrust of the word philosophy, he or she begins to realise that the term has some sense after all. That the sense is in admitting that I don’t know the solution to some issues, that I can’t answer some questions but that I am able to benefit from such a situation. It is a situation in which something opens up. To some extent, art has a huge advantage in that compared to charades with terms.
Q How does that advantage translate into an exposition?
M P The viewers should, right from the very beginning, get rid of what they know. They shouldn’t walk around saying this is conceptualism and that is minimalism. They should understand, as Jitka says, that every work, or let’s say picture, is a manifestation of the artist’s point of view. And I have to adopt the artist’s point of view, to see the way they do. It means that I have to enter into a completely different relationship to the picture than just to recognise what is in it. I need to adopt the artist’s perspective. And another thing: we usually understand thinking as something that happens in texts. That’s fine, but images are a completely different medium. The moment I start reading an image and converting it into text, I lose what is inherent in images. Images provide a different way of modelling the world. That’s why it’s important to have as many possibilities as possible for what an image can be. To make things complete, an equally specific medium is the gallery itself. It too should become a picture in this sense.
J H Right at the beginning of the exhibition, still on the staircase, there should be a symbolic introduction. Along with the artist Pavel Mrkus, we are installing a kind of magical portal through which one enters the gallery while experiencing a strong visual sensation. It creates a feeling of a different space in which the usual information layers and interpretations do not work.
M P I very much appreciate what Jitka is doing as a curator because I am learning a lot from it. A long time ago, the French philosopher Jean François Lyotard organised an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou that had a crazy budget and took up an entire floor. It was called Les Immatériaux, a French neologism meaning the immaterials. It was his reaction to our time, when materiality means something else. But the interesting thing about the exhibition is that it was terribly pedagogical. The viewers were always being told what they were seeing, there was a huge flood of explanatory texts. Even though I was initially fascinated that a philosopher could do an exhibition, years later I developed a terrible distrust of it. Something so pedagogical is rarely seen. Everyone, including the architect, worked to make sure that the viewers came out of the exhibition completely educated. This is actually negative inspiration.
Q How can the lesson learned from Lyotard be formulated positively?
M P The important thing is to turn the gallery into a place where one can encounter and experience something. Not because it’s a gallery space, but because something has happened in it. The viewer should think about why pictures that are seemingly unrelated are next to each other, and look for connections. The encounter with a picture cannot be calculated. In a gallery, the viewer and the work complete each other. Why am I interested in this in fact? What is in me that I didn’t know was there and that the picture brought to my attention? For me, preparing the exhibition was a special opportunity to realise that conceptual thinking is fine, but it misses something. And that something is on the side of art. It follows that we can’t identify thinking only with concepts and texts. Problems arise – on the one hand the image, on the other the text. The exhibition should show the possibilities of how one almost flows into the other; it should show that they are not opposites. Moreover, if one looks to the books of famous philosophers that came out after World War II, most of them suddenly started talking about art. We cannot identify thought only with concepts and texts; art is not here just to be looked at and enjoyed.

Zbyněk Baladrán, Jarmark umění / Art Fair, 2023

Q How has the situation changed in terms of art being seen as a personal preference, an aesthetic predilection of the more educated classes or a collector’s object for the rich?
M P The situation is not so simple; there is street art, performance art and things like that. They also influence what we call painting or visual art. We would like to suggest that. A picture actually represents traces of the artist’s performance. We don’t have to talk primarily about Jackson Pollock, it’s true for Peter Paul Rubens too, for example. His hand is somehow present in the painting. And it doesn’t have to be the way Lucio Fontana does it, someone who immediately cuts the canvas. Such things are too obvious. In fact, the viewer may be struck by the fact that the painter has carelessly left a brushstroke on the painting. Why doesn’t the painter mask it? Isn’t it unattractive?! In this respect, our understanding of art must be appropriate to the 21st century. Similarly – speaking of materiality – we live in a digital world and bits are not material, yet they can become the material of artistic creation.
Q How did you select the works for the exhibition?
J H I would estimate that half of them are “Petříček’s circles”, i.e. artists with whom Mirek has worked in the past, for whom he has written texts and who may also have influenced his thinking. We are gradually adding others who somehow fit into these circles.
M P Or they crowd out mine. Which is fine.
Q What is the nature of your dialogue in the preparation of the exhibition?
M P I am fundamentally silent in this dialogue; I look and marvel. I think this is the most useful form of dialogue, one shouldn’t always be blathering and commenting on everything. When I get home, it all gets together in my head and then I edit the text, which is the source of the quote at the beginning and which should be in the exhibition catalogue.
J H But that was preceded by a three- or four-year period of my listening to what you were saying and from that I made a draft structure for the concept of the exhibition, which is based on your theory that thinking proceeds from basic perception through the emergence of shapes and concepts to complex ideas. We built the exhibition concept based on that journey. Movement and walking are important aspects here.
M P So that the person who goes through it realises that even the basic, elementary perception at the beginning was nothing simple. I’m not even able to describe it most of the time. I can see a shade that appeals to me, but I don’t know what to do with it. Which is more difficult than when something comprehensible appears somewhere at the end, God forbid, like the Platonic idea of a solid or something like that. In our scheme, the visitor does not progress from simple to complex. On the contrary, complexity is presented at different levels or in different media, to the extent that we talk about perception, for example, as if we were trying to suggest that it doesn’t just mean that I see something. Without suspecting it, it’s also in play that you can touch the picture; when there’s a rhythm, it’s already somehow related to hearing. We always sort of neatly compartmentalise perception itself like that: this is visual, this is auditory, and this is tactile. Well, yeah, but when I’m in front of a really good picture, that doesn’t apply. And as far as the journey goes, each viewer finds their own way there. They see a picture which doesn’t speak to them, but another one catches their eye. The viewer finds and attempts their own journey. I think that in a gallery one doesn’t have to feel like one is going from point A to point B, that’s one of the functions of a gallery. At the same time, we try not to impose an interpretation on the works, and even less on the artists, within our own concept. We have to listen and respond; the exhibition should be our response to what they say. In a sense, the exhibition is a record of our dialogue with the artists. Arrogantly, I would say it helps both sides.