I Perceived Taylor Camp as a Small-Scale Model of Human Society

Photographer John Wehrheim was in the right place at the right time. In the 1970s, he managed to create a unique photographic documentation of the Taylor Camp community on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. The turn of the 1960s and 1970s was a socially turbulent time which fuelled the ideals that encouraged more radical-minded Americans and other Westerners to break from mainstream society. At a cursory glance, the account of the Taylor Camp experience has, perhaps, the superficial appeal of an exuberant life, exoticism, nudity, and psychotropic substances. A closer look, as well as a conversation with photographer, film-maker, and hydroelectric power plant builder John Wehrheim JW, reveals that it was the implementation of a distinctive model of society that continues to inspire and raise questions to this day.

Howard Taylor was the brother of Hollywood star Eilzabeth Taylor. In 1969, he owned a seven-acre plot on the north shore of Kauai – one of the main Hawaiian islands. He invited a group of young men, women and children who had recently been arrested for vagrancy, that is the thirteen original colonists, to set up a camp there. Although none of the original thirteen people remained at the site even one year, the new settlers established a place to live: they built tree houses and created a self-sustaining community through unwritten laws with a mayor, sheriff, food co-op, public water supply system, and many other facilities.
John Wehrheim was never a long-term resident of Taylor Camp but, in 1971, during a visit to the camp, he began taking photographs there. He returned several years later to complete an extensive collection of documentary photographs. Wehrheim recalls that when he first arrived with two cameras, a bag of lenses, and a tripod, everyone disappeared and the alley between the dwellings fell silent. The exception was two brave girls curious about the twenty-three-year-old young man: Debi Green and her sister Teri. When Wehrheim returned a week later, he brought with him, as a gift, beautifully reproduced prints of the sisters in a large format. Suddenly, everyone wanted to have their pictures taken.

Q What happened when the people at Taylor Camp started to trust you?
J W Within a few weeks, I was keeping a book of appointments, full of notes and invitations. The locals bribed me with dinner invitations, good-quality weed, amazing parties and offers of accommodation. I took portraits of all those who were interested, and then assumed the role of an unobtrusive observer. My subject was actually the residents, not the camp: young, beautiful people, healthy, in great shape, often naked; many excellent athletes and skilled surfers. When I felt that people weren’t relaxed and open enough while I was taking pictures, I wandered around until they forgot about my presence and became bored. The men and women, however, were often naturally in a relaxed state of mind while I was taking photos.
Q What was the difference between the homestead on Kauai and other segregated societies, often ones that gravitated toward a sect or cult?
J W I want to emphasize one thing. Taylor Camp was not a commune. It had no guru, no clearly defined leadership, and was never represented by a single voice. There were no written ordinances. It was not a democracy. It was much more than that: the community was imbued with a spirit that we might call order without rules.
Q Is your view of Taylor Camp too idealistic?
J W I’ve always tried not to romanticize Taylor Camp. Anyone who looks closely at the exhibition, reads the book or watches my film will find a story that includes addiction, disease, alcoholism, violence and sexual abuse. The same things one finds in any community. In this little model of society, you will realize that no society will be free of people with worse qualities, free of problems and some degree of suffering. That was another of the good lessons of Taylor Camp.
Q The camp was burned down in 1977, the government ordered a state reservation to be created there. While making the film, you reunited with the former settlers years later. What memories did they have of Taylor Camp?
J W When we found and interviewed many of the campers thirty years later, most (certainly not all) were nostalgic and recalled their time at the camp as the best days of their lives. Ironically, their attempt to break away from the majority society and its lifestyle says a lot about the American majority and the political climate of the time.
Q What is a good reason to keep the memory of Taylor Camp alive today? For some, it will be the memory of the adventure that came out of the hippie era. What is timeless about the testimony of Taylor Camp?
J W I think the most important feature of the story is the realization of the fact that a different way of life is possible. And that it’s doable. Very close to it, there was the most beautiful beach I’d ever seen: it’s just that the source of the harmony and fulfilment in the life there was more likely to come from within. The people of Taylor Camp were happy with the way they lived there at that time. I think many would simply say they were happy. I understand, it’s true that fifty years elapsed since then. But it was a reality, and documents like my photographs and my film prove that it happened. The book has been published in many countries around the world. When it was printed in China, my collaborators there – and especially the media people – couldn’t believe that it was a description of something real, They thought I was taking pictures during the filming of some fantastic movie. The manager of the printing house told me that he was amazed when he read the texts in the book and realized that it was not fiction.
Q Many people look at your images and ask themselves: Would it be possible to experience something like that today?
J W I don’t know. Back then on Kauai, a rare moment in time opened up in which something like that was possible. But that doesn’t mean that the values that Taylor Camp embodied can’t be realized in the future in another place. If some of the visitors were inspired in such a way by the exhibition, I’d be happy.

The Return of a Lost Friend

view to the Ivan Meštrović (1883–1962) / Sculptor and Citizen of the World exhibition, Municipal Library, 2nd floor, 2022. Photo by Tomáš Souček

In the first quarter of the 20th century, Ivan Meštrović stood alongside grand sculptors such as Auguste Rodin, Émile-Antoine Bourdelle, and Aristide Maillol. He first became known as a member of the Viennese Secession movement, but was soon able to extend his recognition further and develop his own distinctive artistic expression and stance. His contemporaries were moreover fascinated by his personal story – from an uneducated country boy shepherding sheep and goats in an inhospitable backwater in the Dalmatian hinterland, he became an exalted artist exhibiting in prominent galleries of Europe and America, thanks to his miraculous talent and to favorable circumstances. But there was yet another dimension to Meštrović’s story: in a world of “great art”, dominated by the cultural and political metropolises of the time, he represented the European periphery, where archaic feudal relations still survived at the turn of the 20th century, and where the rural population lived on the verge of starvation. To some, Meštrović was a revelation; he was proof that the underestimated Balkan Slavs were actually the bearers of a hitherto unrecognized cultural heritage that formed an integral part of European civilization.
The Czech public became familiar with Ivan Meštrović at the exhibition of the Mánes Association of Fine Artists in 1903, where he presented his works while still a student at the Vienna Academy. He established contacts and friendships with a number of Czech cultural figures and artistic colleagues, especially Bohumil Kafka. Through them, he participated in several Mánes exhibitions during the first decade of the 20th century, and he also exhibited in Prague as part of a presentation of Croatian art. His muse was the Czech Futurist painter living in Italy, Růžena Zátková, who he met during his stay in Rome. During the First World War, as a member of the exiled organization of South Slavs from the Habsburg monarchy, he worked closely with the leaders of the Czech exile, and thus became acquainted with Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk and Edvard Beneš.
Meštrović had soon become a celebrity in the broader public consciousness of Czech society; none of his fellow Czech sculptors achieved such international success. This fact, however, was no cause for envy. Meštrović the Croat and South Slav was perceived as somewhat “ours”. He proved that even an artist from a small Slavic nation could make it internationally and that the condition for his success was not to live permanently abroad but that he could work and communicate with the world from his home country. After the First World War, Meštrović settled in Zagreb, on the soil of the newly established Yugoslav state, helping to develop its national identity through artistic means, and – just as during the war – he promoted the state globally with his work. Meštrović’s 1933 exhibition in Prague was an extraordinary social and cultural event. It was visited by tens of thousands of people, and newspapers and magazines published hundreds of articles about it. However, the significance of the exhibition was more political than artistic, despite all the appreciation of the sculptor’s genius. Meštrović’s oeuvre represented the “brotherly” Yugoslavia with which Czechoslovakia was allied as part of the Little Entente. He was a friend of President Masaryk, whom he portrayed in 1923, and of the then-Yugoslav King Aleksandar I. His straddling the two countries thus epitomized this alliance, which expressed the period slogan of “loyalty for loyalty”. Czech tourist guides and Yugoslav travelogs did not fail to draw readers’ attention to the monuments by Meštrović that dominated the public spaces of Zagreb, Split, Belgrade, and other cities. In the eyes of the Czechs, his works characterized this friendly country as much as its sea, its natural beauty, and the Mediterranean or Oriental atmosphere of the local human settlements.
The affection for Meštrović as a primarily Yugoslav artist was also evident during his second solo exhibition held in both Olomouc and Prague in the autumn of 1970. During the period of incipient normalization, it was a reminder of the Prague Spring, as well as the Yugoslav support of the “revival process”, and its solidarity with Czechoslovakia after the Soviet occupation in August 1968.
Meštrović’s works are being presented collectively in Prague after 53 long years. In 2023, the 140th anniversary of the sculptor’s birth, it will also have been 120 years since Meštrović first exhibited in Prague with the Mánes Association and 90 years since his solo exhibition at the Belvedere Summer Palace in the spring of 1933.
Regretfully, we must admit that the name of Ivan Meštrović, who was one of the greatest Croatian artists, is somewhat forgotten today in the Czech Republic. However, the reason for remembering him now and drawing attention to his remarkable oeuvre is not merely out of sentiment for the First Republic. The authors of this publication and the collective exhibition at Prague City Gallery are convinced that Meštrović’s perspective and his work have retained their values and timelessness.
This is especially true of those aspects of his oeuvre that the Czech audience largely overlooked in the past century. Meštrović formed the ideology and iconography of his “national state”. But his goal far exceeded the national framework. However eagerly he advocated the artists’ need to realize and honor their roots, to him the true meaning of any artistic endeavor was to address general human issues. This humanist universalism and cosmopolitanism was also his life practice. Traces of his life, oeuvre, and artistic influences can be seen in many European and American cities where his works form part of museum collections and public spaces. Although he was a sculptor attached to his studio, his material, and his works that often were of monumental proportions, he was unusually well-traveled for his time. In his younger years, he frequently changed his place of residence. Even after the First World War, he did not withdraw from this nomadic lifestyle. After the invasion of Yugoslavia by the fascist powers, he went into exile and kept moving from one city to another, eventually emigrating to the United States after the war. For political reasons, he never returned home permanently.
In his artistic convictions and life path, Meštrović had always strived toward overcoming peripherality and provinciality. As he stated in an interview for the Czechoslovak daily newspaper Lidové noviny in 1933, “finally, an effort should be made to cultivate prolific connections between your art and our art, and also Polish art. So far, our country knows a little about your artistic production and your country about ours. Our countries are small. We could outgrow this smallness through regular contact and through becoming well-familiar with our respective cultural endeavors. You must admit how much our art would thrive if exhibitions were held more often and if artists maintained constant contact! There are local and personal groups and cliques everywhere. A South Slavic artist would be judged more objectively in Prague and your artists in our country. And the inspirational influences of one on the other would develop fruitfully.” One cannot but conclude that even after 90 years, Meštrović’s observation is still relevant.
The exhibition presents a selection of the main creative phases of Meštrović’s life covering the first half of the 20th century. These phases are expressed in the concept of the exhibition by the dominant places with which Meštrović was associated in different periods of his life: Vienna, Paris, Rome and London, where he lived during World War I, Split and Zagreb, where he stayed in the interwar period. Special space is also devoted to his successful Prague exhibition in 1933. Most of the works come from the collections of the Museums of Ivan Meštrović. However, also included are sculptures in the possession of the National Gallery Prague, including a bronze bust of Moses which was given to T. G. Masaryk by King Alexander of Yugoslavia as a gift in 1930 on the occasion of his 80th birthday. The National Museum in Belgrade also lent important works. Loans of works by Auguste Rodin from the Museé Rodin in Paris are also important.
In addition to Meštrović’s representative works, the exhibition shows period publications, catalogues, newspaper articles, correspondence and other objects, documenting the sculptor’s life and artistic career and his relationship to the Czech environment. Most of these documents are being exhibited for the very first time. Period film footage and audio recordings of dramatized letters Meštrović exchanged with his friends (Bohumil Kafka, Růžena Zátková) and his conversations with T. G. Masaryk are also presented in the exhibition.
The exhibition is accompanied by a publication of the same name which is the first independent book dedicated to Meštrović in fifty-two years. It contains studies by Czech and foreign authors who have recently explored various aspects of Meštrović’s work and life, and it also brings previously unknown or unused documents, such as reprints of articles on Meštrović written by the leading Czech art critics of the interwar era. From an artistic point of view, the photographs of Meštrović’s sculptures taken by Josef Sudek during the Prague exhibition in 1933 are extraordinary.

Sugar, Body, Identity

What place does sugar have in the post-colonial world? Can we even talk about post-colonialism? And what does Central and Eastern Europe have to do with it? Robert Gabris and Luboš Kotlár from the i pack* collective, who have prepared their installation for this year’s Matter of Art biennial at Šaloun Villa, talk about the decolonisation of the contemporary world and art institutions.

Robert Gabris originally came up with the idea of a collective work for the biennial during a meeting with Piotr Sikora, one of the main curators of the biennial. “We started talking about decolonisation discourses and I thought: How is it possible to decolonise Czech society without us, without the diverse bodies that are completely under-represented on the art scene,” says the Vienna-based Slovak artist. He then immediately teamed up with Luboš Kotlár to start preparing the installation with him. The pair had never worked together before, and each comes from a different background – while Luboš Kotlár works mainly with photography and lives in Bratislava, Robert Gabris started out with drawing and fine art. Nevertheless, they found a common way to approach their work for the biennial. “We were thinking about how we could create a collective of different disciplines and transcend our individual abilities. That’s how we arrived at the art of sculpture,” explains Robert Gabris. The resulting installation thus consists of sugar sculptures, casts of forearms with clenched fists.

T B How did the idea to create sugar sculptures come about? And how does sugar relate to decolonisation, which is the central theme of the installation?
L K We had many ideas; it was a process of experimenting with different possibilities and sugar was one of them. We knew from the beginning that we wanted to represent a body that is outside of the social norms and normalise it. Eventually, we decided to cast our own bodies in sugar and create an installation out of them. The great thing is that you can interpret sugar over and over again from new angles. It’s not just about Roma communities but about poverty in general. Everybody has access to sugar and people without resources use it all the time. Whereas it once used to be an honour to have your teeth rotten from sugar, today it’s the exact opposite. Privileged people try to avoid sugar as much as possible in order to be fit and good-looking, which brings us back to the question of the body and what society considers to be an acceptable and ideal body. The fist is a very aggressive symbol, but a sugar fist is sweet, even desirable. You don’t want to eat it because you don’t want to get fat but, at the same time, you crave it. We enjoy this ambivalence.
T B How does the reality of the post-colonial world translate into your work?
R G I’m very critical of post-colonial theories because they separate bodies from each other and try to prove why we are different from the rest of society. They divide us into minorities and majorities. The decolonisation discourse, suggesting that the process is not over yet, is much more accessible to us. In the settlement where I come from, sugar is used as legal tender and traded because people suffer from absolute poverty and hunger. So, we want to bring in this practical knowledge and show that the art world, full of academic theories, has a lot to learn from bodies that have never been invited into it. In doing so, we penetrate these institutions with our bodies and knowledge and create a new, until recently forbidden debate. Therein lies the decolonising character and explanation of our work. It is not just about artistic expression and performative media, but about having the resources and possibilities to make these facts visible. Times have changed, and new generations of Roma living in different bodies must get to work. If we don’t start doing it ourselves, no one will do it for us. Racism, exclusion, patriarchy and chauvinism have enormous power.
T B How do you feel about the openness and accessibility of contemporary art institutions? Because it might seem that art is more open to such debates than other fields.
R G That’s a lie and a cliché. We all know that institutions, not only in art, are very rigid and conservative. Art institutions are violent, they don’t allow different bodies to enter, and if they do, they often just abuse them for short-term purposes.
T B So how do you think the decolonisation process should take place within art institutions?
R G That question should be put to society, not us. The contemporary world was built by the hands of white men; we were excluded. But now we are working, we are active, and for once society needs to keep quiet, listen, and give us its resources within restitution, because our bodies are the personification of decolonisation. Let’s look at the management and structure of art institutions – the power and resources are held by a privileged few. But we need to distribute these among all of us. At the same time, it’s important to remember that we are here now, and we are putting our bodies on display by choice, even if it’s not easy. But we feel the need to speak up and contribute to building new structures. The question is whether society is ready for our entry into public space.
T B What does your decolonisation practice look like outside of the activities related to the biennial? In what ways can decolonisation be contributed to?
R G We experiment, we listen, we have many role models, we read, we talk together. We are trying to process all the anger, pain and happiness that go with it and overcome our patterns of thinking. There is no clear answer, but we are finding our own way because there are still a lot of unanswered questions.
L K We come from different backgrounds and have our own ways. I don’t have personal experience of communities, I don’t feel like a social worker, and I don’t want to pretend that I understand the problems of the people in settlements, so I support them financially.
R G Exactly. I also forward the funds of art institutions to the Roma settlement I come from. I use my privilege as a force to build a pathway to people who have no idea about art institutions. There are different ways and solutions.
T B You mentioned unanswered questions. What questions should we be asking but aren’t?
R G For me, the fundamental question is how our history can contain so many blank pages. History is reduced to knowledge that hurts. Every generation that studies history today is learning the wrong stories. It is a disgrace to society that we still do not know how many Roma people live in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, what groups exist, what happened during the Holocaust, the Second World War, and socialism. We have no statistics. Education is an absolute basic. What we have to learn at school is painful for many people because it does not allow them to discover their own history and discourages them from participating in society. To answer your question, I imagine a blank book and I wonder who should write this history? How can we be part of the reworking of our knowledge? I come from Slovakia and the society there and in the Czech Republic is apathetic. Nobody cares. Maybe we should build an institution built on caring to bring all this great knowledge into a space that we can share with others.
T B Do you see any hope for change?
R G I’m very sceptical but I find my scepticism productive. I like areas of conflict because there’s a lot of room to work in them. We are not the first or the last; generations before us have struggled and will struggle after us. For example, we can lead theatre or art classes and become role models for the next generation. We don’t have to think big to change. We can change things making small steps.

Prádelna Collective: Everyone has the right to go to a gallery

This year, the spaces of the GHMP again opened their doors to the Matter of Art biennial whose second edition focuses on the themes of identity, fragility, resilience, and neglected perspectives. Among the artists approached by the curators and the tranzit.cz initiative is the Prádelna (Laundry) Collective. The collective is made up of women with current or past experience of homelessness, which they decided to process for this year’s biennial, bringing street life closer to the art world.

Videos, t-shirt printing, refreshments, a place to relax and explore. The artistic performance of the Prádelna collective is not only to present their own work but also to create a space to meet and overcome the barriers that usually stand between visitors to art institutions and people without a stable home. During the biennial, the regular Tuesday meetings of the collective are therefore moved to the gallery space where Linda, Monika, Balú, Helena and Magda connect the two worlds and create an environment that welcomes everyone without distinction. For the rest of the week, the collective is represented by projected videos whose central theme is the prejudices and stereotypes that divide people from different backgrounds.
“We switched our roles in various ways; at one point, the girls were the artists with a good background, and I was the one getting the money. We tested how artists treat someone coming from the street and, vice versa, how people coming from the street see artists. What stereotypes people have towards those coming from the other side. We also made films about the behaviour of those who walk by, use foul insults, and have the nerve to walk straight up to someone’s face with a camera, filming them without permission,” says the Polish-Czech artist, Magdalena Kwiatkowska, who is the only one of the collective who has a stable home. “We always imagine a person in need as someone who is dependent on others. As if they were not independent and did not have the full legal capacity to act on their own behalf; as if they couldn’t speak for themselves. Which so often is the case
because we don’t allow them to. We devalue them where they are because we don’t give them a voice.”

A chance to try art

It was the opportunity to take the initiative and implement their own ideas that was crucial for the members of the collective. As they point out, life on the street does not give much space or time for creative work. The turning point came when Magdalena was awarded a three-month residency at INI Gallery at the turn of 2019 and 2020. Here, she decided to create a space for homeless women and to work together on art installations with the Jako Doma organisation. “Magdalena always brought us a paper with a topic and said: Let’s go, we should say or create something about ourselves on this topic. So, we filmed ourselves, we made up different things. For example, we showed how to wash clothes in the snow in the street in winter,” Linda recalls.
Most of the women included currently in the collective were close to art before. Monika writes poetry, Helena acts in the theatre, and Linda likes to sing and also has some experience of the theatre. However, it was only when their basic needs were secured, and they had the opportunity to devote themselves fully to art that the establishment of the current collective was possible. Although it has been two years since they worked and lived together at INI Gallery and some of its members still lack stable housing, the collective continues to work. The tranzit.cz initiative provides the facilities, a space where the artists discuss their work on a weekly basis. “It’s a process, we don’t know what it will look like at the end. We talk about it together,” is how Balú explains their creative methods. The only limitation is that Magda is the only one with a stable home and, unlike the others, she can also work on projects at home. “Each of us would like to help Magda, but we don’t have the opportunity. I try to help with grammar, Helena speaks four languages and can help with translation. But then we have to go to Magda’s place,” says Monika.

Feeling equal

The burden of struggling every day with where to find food and charge your phone, while avoiding conflicts, is a constant theme in the conversation. It might seem that art has no place in such a situation, but the collective is an opportunity for the members to take a break from such existential problems for a short while and feel equal. As Monika adds: “On the street, there’s always someone looking at you and watching you. Here, it’s an escape from reality, at least for a few hours. You don’t feel like a cigarette butt on the ground.”
The Prádelna Collective has long been drawing attention to the feeling of exclusion and inadequacy in public space, which should be, on principle, accessible to all. Monika, Balú, Helena and Linda agree that because of the constant unpleasant staring and judging, they would not even think of going to a museum, gallery or cinema themselves, even if they were interested. “I didn’t even try. I thought to myself , why should I go there if I’m not going to be accepted and they’re going to look at me in a bad way. So, I preferred not to go,” says Helena, and Monika supports what she says: “When Magda and I were at the Vltavská metro station, where the outdoor gallery is, before Prádelna was launched, it was obvious that we belonged to Magda and that’s probably why everyone smiled at us. Once I was further away and it wasn’t obvious, everyone looked at me strangely and disdainfully. And I don’t need that.”
The aim of participating in this year’s biennial is therefore to draw attention to these barriers and to make art institutions more open, perhaps by making practical changes to meet people in need. These start with more accessible texts that are understandable even to people without an artistic background and continue with friendly staff and the possibility of having your phone charged or keeping track of your belongings. “People in need are not as trusting as other visitors when it comes to handing over their bag and trusting that it will stay there, and no one will take it. They may only have newspapers or cups, but they depend on them because it’s their livelihood,” explains Balú. She gives the example of the suspension system on the ceiling of the INI gallery which allows anyone to hang up their backpack and keep an eye on it. “You want to do something to bring it closer to people who don’t have a choice. I’m a little fearful of it being a spectacle in the sense of: The gallery is trying to be accommodating towards the homeless. But we’re people, too. And I think we have a right to have an open door,” points out Monika.

A dialogue across groups

Despite ever-present prejudices and obstacles, the members of the collective see some chance for change. As Monika points out, the long-term work of Prádelna and Magdalena’s initiative is helping them to open up new possibilities, even in established institutions, and thus slowly change the attitude of the majority public. But there is still a long way to go before there is equality and openness.”If a gallery wants to change and become more accessible, it has to start with its staff. They need to understand why they are doing it,” Magda reminds us, suggesting, for example, employing people with experience of homelessness who have an understanding of the needs of people in need. She also stresses that everyone’s voice needs to be heard, which includes custodians, cloakroom managers, curators and people in leadership positions. “Continuity is important. It’s about galleries being open to everyone, not just targeting vulnerable people. So everyone can come and spend time there, have a chat.” The whole collective agrees on the need for a common dialogue across different groups and admits that sometimes more patience is needed. But they say it is important to remember that people in need have the same emotions as others, they just get up in the morning with different worries. “I keep thinking about the question of what institutions should do. It’s asked by almost everyone and I understand that. Butshouldn’t you be asking yourself instead of asking us?” asks Monika. “The most important thing, in the end, is to accept the person, whoever they are. And not to be indifferent. That’s a small thing, after all,” she concludes.

I Don’t Think There is a Clear Definition of Where the Boundaries of Photography Are

What can we learn about the potential, forms and impacts of photography in our postmedia era? What is its role since being adopted by the Internet and social networks Jitka Hlaváčková invited ten curators to participate in the Divination from a Night Sky Partially Obscured by Clouds exhibition. They brought artists and works to the exhibition. “Through responses from a dozen theorists, we offer a fragmentary probe into postmedia photographic and digital imagery that at least symbolically captures the hybrid and highly networked nature of our situation,” writes Jitka Hlaváčková. The specific nodal points in the network are presented in interviews with four of the participating artists: they are Alena Kotzmannová, Alexandra Vajd, Markéta Othová and Ivars Gravlejs.

Alena Kotzmannová
Apparatuses of Imagination

Q A series of your works from 2019 flies through the exhibition at the House of Photography like a meteorite. How was Oumuamua actually created back then?
A K I have long been interested in space research and space-related topics. I enjoy exploring something that transcends us and that we don’t fully understand. The news that a body entered the solar system that astronomers had never encountered before immediately intrigued me. Oumuamua means “messenger from the ancient past” in Hawaiian. It turns out that the object must have been travelling through space for some time before it entered the solar system. And once it was here, it disappeared again. There was no way of capturing it, photographing it, so subsequently various visualizations began to emerge that resembled an elongated, cigar-shaped stone. I’ve been interested in stones for a long time, fascinated by the fact that they have been here much longer than mankind. The messenger Oumuamua simply fitted into my thinking and I decided to create a fictional account of its visit to our solar system.
Q You chose the scanning technique. Why precisely this one?
A K Because I know its limitations. For example, I can never achieve a white background by scanning an object. That’s what I thought of when I thought of the night sky. In addition, I thought the dirt particles on the glass might well evoke stardust. Also, due to the passing light beam, the object doesn’t cast a single shadow, it’s not brightly lit from one side, so the whole space around it is kind of elusive. Related to this is the possibility to completely avoid an input of a human with a camera into the whole process. Me, a human being who would capture and document the phenomenon, is missing because that’s what’s never really happened in the case of Oumuamu either. Looking at the installation, the visitor is puzzled. Just like people think they understand photography, they also think they understand the universe quite well; but then an unknown body flies in and shifts the whole idea somewhere else.
Q So you enjoy pushing the boundaries of photographic representation?
A K I don’t think there is a clear definition of where the boundaries of photography are. For me, it’s always a combination of intuition, different types of thinking, and choice of camera. Any kind of camera. The evolution of photography has been rapid since its invention. I’m comfortable being open to whatever comes along. Even when I was studying, when I was still taking pictures using a film, I liked to experiment with the possibilities of the medium; and that was long before digital post-production was even considered, which adds more possibilities for creative approaches.
Q You will now be teaching the next generation of photographers at UMPRUM. How much will you guide them towards the technical roots of photography?
A K When students master the basic technical skills, they open the door to other creative layers. They don’t shoot from the hip. And I’m actually surprised at how open the current generation is to using analogue techniques, shooting while using rolls of film, adventuring with camera obscura and so on. It’s the same as with history in general, it’s always repeating itself in circles somehow, going back. I also use different kinds of cameras interchangeably and the fact that it can be blended suits me. For example, it’s common for me nowadays to have a kind of bizarre combination of scanned negatives that I print digitally. Why not? Anything is possible, but it only makes deeper sense to me if we don’t prioritize the technical nature of the cameras, and instead what remains primarily are theapparatuses of imagination.
Q This is actually what the exhibition at the GHMP shows.
A K In my opinion, the exhibition suggests that imagination is not just an abstraction of the pressing issues of the contemporary world, but instead can be a concrete way of naming aspects that are otherwise difficult to realize or acknowledge. Divination from a night sky partially obscured by clouds aptly speaks about the elusiveness of the medium’s boundaries. Similarly ungraspable as Oumuamua.

Aleksandra Vajd
In Relation with Paper

Q Your part of the joint installation with Markéta Othová turns to the technique of photograms. How did you arrive at it in your work?
A V The medium of photography has changed incredibly since the 1990s when I started to study at FAMU, and it keeps changing. And with it, the perception of reality in general is shifting because we see the world through images much more. After fifteen years of mainly conceptual work, I suddenly felt the need to shut myself in a darkroom. Dealing with material brings a completely different way of thinking and working. I feel that digitisation has distanced it a little from the artist. Going back to my roots thus made sense to me. Especially because we return to them with the knowledge of everything that has grown out of them over time.
Q Do you see this return as a general tendency in photography today?
A V It’s certainly not an isolated path. There’s a whole current called New Materiality which turns to the very basis of photography. It is through New Materiality that the material speaks to us again. Ancient techniques such as cyanotype, albumen print, the salt process or calotype are coming back. However, it is not a conservative return to traditions, we are still going backwards while going forwards at the same time, the medium does not have a fixed identity. The discourse of analogue versus digital is hardly even relevant anymore. It’s more about the fact that form can actually be the content of the work. I think this is also shown in the exhibition at the House of Photography.
Q What does it imply for you personally?
A V It’s a halt in the development of photography. For a moment, in this moment. A kind of inventory of the medium which an institution like the GHMP should do. But it doesn’t give answers, because there are no answers. Nowhere is it given what a photo should look like. It’s a multiplicity of ways of working, of materials, installations… Personally, I’m always most interested in the whole process that preceded the work, what ideas were invested in its creation. It is from the process that one learns, even if the final work may not be easy to read.
Q How do you think about your works? Do you know in advance exactly what they will look like, or is there room for improvisation in the last stage?
A V When you’ve been working in a medium for over twenty years, you think about it in quite a bit of detail. All of my works are preceded by sketches which I then put on paper in the darkroom. Every single picture is full of decisions, it’s totally complex. But at the same time, reading it is completely subjective, it can mean something completely different to me than it does to you. Still, I want us to understand each other on some meta-level, so that my interest reaches you as the recipient, so that you can think not through the situation depicted but through my thinking that is contained in it. What’s interesting about a photograph is that even if it’s abstract, you still approach it as a photograph that inevitably emphasizes something; we always perceive its content as real, which you can’t say about an abstract painting, for example.
Q In the House of Photography, your work meets Markéta Othová’s drawings. What did your creative dialogue look like?
A V I was attracted at the first stage precisely by that joint thinking, by that process. I knew Markéta’s other works. I like the fact that she combines graphic, careful work with photography in which she has her clearly defined visuality, her individual way of thinking which is not influenced by any transient fashion waves. When we met, different ideas started to emerge. In some of the things I was working on, we found out that they already worked the way they were, that Markéta’s input wouldn’t add anything to them. Then I showed her some more sketches and she was surprised to see that she had actually made exactly the same drawings. Suddenly, we hit a point of contact to take for a basis. Then the meeting with Vojta Märc was equally important. One Sunday, we met for three hours for a kind of associative talk. He provoked us with well-aimed questions, woke us up to the whole process and then wrote a text that is absolutely integral to the installation. But this particular connection of ours is unique; it wouldn’t have happened under any other circumstances. And it will probably never happen again.

Markéta Othová
Pictures from the Exhibition

Q In the exhibition at the House of Photography, your works meet those of Aleksandra Vajd. How do you perceive this connection?
M O I have liked Aleksandra’s photograms for a long time, they are beautiful, clean, precise, and effective. When we were looking for a common path, I realised that I had a series of drawings that were basically the same as some of Aleksandra’s photograms. In other circumstances I wouldn’t have pulled out these tiny drawings of a rather awkward nature, but in the studio we suddenly saw that they really helped each other. Perfectly precise photograms are distorted by fundamentally imperfect drawing. The awkwardness I felt was fundamentally mitigated by Vojtěch Märc’s text. The power of the intellect was able to elevate a traced ashtray to the heavens. Thanks to him, our work together took on a beautiful meaning. My shame turned almost into pride.
Q The drawings were made in the 1990s. What led you to them then?
M O I had no intellectual intentions. I simply took the objects that surrounded me, traced them on paper and made abstract compositions out of them. Or just put them side by side. I perceived it as a therapeutic activity rather than an artistic one. For me it was a way to slow down and calm down in breaks between taking photographs.
Q With the advent of digital photography, photographic art became even faster.
M O Maybe that’s why many people today are going back to the darkroom. I think we miss the manual work. We have a need to get away from the digital world for a while and the darkroom is a wonderful place. Coincidentally, that’s where the photos are made but maybe you could just sit there.
Q So you don’t see the technological developments in such a positive light?
M O There are undoubtedly advantages and disadvantages. When the camera can do everything, you have to correct the output that much more in advance. There are plenty of photos everywhere, and they’re all too perfect. But once you start thinking that you don’t want them to be like that, it’s also problematic because then you’re thinking too much about form. There is a great difficulty in the plethora of images around us. Plus, we can see them all right away, they are just a click away, we don’t have to wait six months in libraries for someone to return a book to see a black and white reproduction of a colour image.
Q Thinking about form is one of the main lines of the exhibition at the GHMP. So how do you find it then?
M O It’s actually too aesthetic for me. I like it when a photo is made kind of unwittingly, whether digitally or in the darkroom. Here everything is too beautiful. That’s why I’ve eventually become glad that I’m participating in the installation with my drawings. I’ve been reluctant to participate in photography exhibitions all my life. Any grouping of photographers somehow doesn’t suit me and I always prefer a solo exhibition or one with sculptors or painters. There I enjoy the fact that you can just make a comment with an image. No big project, just a little note. I don’t really like it when my work is presented as a photograph, because as a photograph I find it insufficient. It usually makes me very self-conscious. Putting it in that context automatically makes people look at the thing differently, and I don’t actually want them to look at it that way.
Q You yourself combine these two worlds, being both a photographer and a graphic artist. How much do you “switch” between these two roles in your work?
M O I can’t really separate them too much. I approach each task separately. For a while, in the late 1990s, I painted abstract shapes directly onto photos, and I also once made a book of poems and photos which is a combination I wouldn’t undertake now. And recently I’ve put up photos of books I’ve made myself. But when I’m taking photos, I don’t usually think about the fact that sometimes I make books, and when I’m working on a book, I don’t think about taking photos. Right now we’re working on a book of close-ups of the interiors of Rothmayer’s villa, which Martin Polák is photographing, and I’m drawing for him what the shots should roughly look like. Then, when no one is looking, I’ll sneakily take my own non-professional picture. So it’s all connected by myself. It’s like if you made a dress, then went to an exhibition in it, or did an interview… It’s still you.

Ivars Gravlejs
Our Daily Kebab

After a period of less conspicuous activities, Ivars Gravlejs emerges with a strong contribution to the exhibition at the House of Photography. The Latvian artist, who has become as known on our scene as kebab has in Central Europe, talks about the roots of his work at the exhibition of post-media photography, which appears at the invitation of curator Palo Fabuš.

Q How did your series of kebab images end up at the Divination from a Night Sky Partially Obscured by Clouds exhibition?
I G I was surprised when curator Palo Fabuš approached me to take part in the exhibition at the House of Photography, I didn’t know he liked my work. I wanted Kebabs not to be exhibited in the same way as the first time at Nádraží Holešovice. There they had a natural place, which was the cylinders on which the train timetables were posted. The shape was parallel to that of kebab. At that time, the cylinders were no longer in use and I wanted for them to still have something to offer. Now, at the House of Photography, we have moved away from cylinders. I have long been interested in the subject of food, and the kebab – especially at the time when the pictures were taken – literally fascinated me.
Q Why? What was it about kebab that fascinated you?
I G Kebab has been something very common, everyday for some time now. At the same time, you don’t really understand it, you don’t know what’s inside. It’s the epitome of cheap fast food. It comes from a different culture: that also gives it a certain mystery, an unknowability. At the same time, it’s trash food: the fascination with trash certainly plays a role.
Q In Germany, kebab is more common and also more logical: it was domesticated there with the migration of the Turks.
I G That’s why the kebabs on display are also half German and half Czech: I photographed half of them in Berlin. I lived there for a while. I encountered the kebab theme repeatedly in various artists at the time: in the form of a giant sculpture or a rating map of Berlin kebab outlets where they were listed by their quality.
Q What do you think made them attractive to other artists?
I G Kebab is banal, ordinary: and yet it asks questions. Added to this is the visual fascination. Kebab is a subject that is quite easy to integrate into different contexts. By the way, one of my most exhibited works is the salami set. Like kebab, salami has a distinctive form and we don’t know much about its content. Food is a basic thing, its banality can be interpreted by people in the gallery differently than usual.
Q Did you speak with the kebab makers while taking the pictures?
I G Not really. It’s not that I wasn’t interested in them, but there was often a sense of stress, they suspected me of being someone like a sanitation inspector. I hoped to follow up the project with lectures and workshops, especially in Latvia, but I’ve never managed to do that. I wanted to create a performance where people-kebabs with big knives in their hands would walk through the space. We managed to make a version where children of different ages dressed up as small kebabs.
Q Do you eat kebab?
I G Not often, I maintain a different lifestyle. Perhaps when I unexpectedly need to satisfy my hunger in the city.

He can be argued with but at the same time he is up to date

Karina Kottová, the chairwoman of the Jindřich Chalupecký Society, is part of the curatorial team for The Worlds of Jindřich Chalupecký exhibition presenting the personality and ideas of the fundamental Czech art theorist and critic. How did he think? Is he a good patron for the award? What would he say about its transformations? Our spring interview can be seen as a short introduction to Chalupecký in today’s world.

Q: Three decades have passed since Václav Havel, Theodor Pištěk, and others got together with Chalupecký to initiate the creation of the prize for young artists. Is Jindřich Chalupecký, even after all these years, in the changes of time, an appropriate patron for the award granted to young artists?

KK: Certainly yes. If only because Chalupecký used to constantly update what he was interested in. That was a fascinating thing about him. A lot of curators and theorists have significant encounters with a certain generation, and they stay with that generation. In some way, they grow old with it: they usually perceive its ideas as still up to date. Chalupecký became associated with Group 42 in the 1940s: at that time, he formulated things that would continue to interest him throughout his life. Programmatically, he was still building on that but, at the same time, he simply did what I would like to be true immensely for myself and for my colleagues: at the age of eighty, he was still interested in the youngest and the most contemporary things going on. That’s why Chalupecký really strikes me as a suitable personality for the award.

Q: Is there any way, on the other hand, in which the award and Chalupecký as a personality are somehow at odds?

KK: For a long time, we all tried to find out whether or not he actually wanted the award to be established. Because when I came to the Jindřich Chalupecký Society, the official story was that he didn’t entirely like the idea. I think that the concept of comparing art in this straightforward way might not have been close to his heart. But when I later spoke to Theodor Pištěk, for example, he said that Chalupecký was excited about the idea at the time. It was at the very end of Chalupecký’s life, and his friends wanted to please him and recognise his life’s work in that way. Today, it’s just an obscure legend. For my part, I can imagine that the subject of evaluation would be interesting to him – but declaring what is the best is another matter. He perceived art through stories, through the authentic reality of the authors.

Q: Did Chalupecký participate in commissions and juries in his era?

KK: At the exhibition The Worlds of Jindřich Chalupecký, we have short documentary footage of Chalupecký appearing on television in connection with the Danuvius exhibition, the biennial of international art in Bratislava in 1968; he was a member of the commission there, for example. On the basis of the commission’s selection, the programme of the Václav Špála Gallery, where Chalupecký worked from 1965 to 1970, was also implemented at that time. He was then its “commissioner”, today we would use the word “curator” for the position he held. What he considered significant and worthy of attention, he promoted with his selection – he exhibited it, wrote about it, he was very good at that. But he didn’t compare, he didn’t create rankings.

Q: One of the larger rooms in the exhibition is filled with “Chalupecký’s artists” – the ones he exhibited, described, was interested in. Who did he follow towards the end of his life, across the longest generational distance?

KK: In one of the few survey books that Chalupecký wrote and compiled, New Art in Bohemia (which is perhaps a kind of canon of his, the way he compiled the book created for us an imaginary skeleton for this section of the exhibition), the last illustration is dedicated to Jiří David. Isn’t it both interesting and fascinating? David’s generation and the Hardheads group began to appear among the award winners after Chalupecký’s death – as if Chalupecký were anticipating what would be considered essential and defining in a few years. As if he was able to see into the future, after the date of his passing.
But it is not only the art of the youngest artists of those years that is still exhibited and enjoys the interest of the general public. Chalupecký was also interested in artists who could be considered outsiders in their time or who were forgotten in time. In addition to including canonical works from the period of the 1940s to the 1980s, we also wanted to commemorate lesser-known artists whose work is great and very relevant in a contemporary context – for example, Petra Oriešková and Milan Ressel. Oriešková is represented in the exhibition by a hyper-realistic painting which is also surrealistic since it features the shape of an animal combined with a human being. This is something that is being addressed a lot nowadays – the dehierarchization between humans and other beings, questions of interspecies symbiosis and solidarity. Or Ressel’s dystopias, science fiction in giant drawings. Chalupecký wrote about them, saying it’s already a post-human world and that humanity today has the opportunity to quickly exterminate itself – it just has to decide.

Q: It seems that every theorist or critic sometimes has a fondness for phenomena that don’t ultimately come to fruition, that remain on the margins. Chalupecký was clearly interested in those who were outsiders at the time.

KK: Yes, for example, he supported also Jiří Kolář at the beginning, so that Kolář would perceive that what he was doing was art. But I don’t want to look at it completely uncritically. Chalupecký thought in a way that was quite pragocentric: an artist from Brno or, heaven forbid, Bratislava, was a great exotic for him (laughs).

Q: The exposition, which “exposes the personality” of Chalupecký, can be perceived psychogeographically – as a materialization of the ideas and convictions of the great critic and theoretician. What did you wish to expose of his views and focus?

KK: The exhibition The Worlds of Jindřich Chalupecký does not have the plural worlds in its title by chance. The architect of the exhibition, Richard Loskot, has embodied the multiplicity of Chalupecký’s interests — which could sometimes contradict each other — in a series of sub-spaces, some kind of artistic environments. In their plurality, we are trying to address in various ways Chalupecký’s long-standing theme: that art is nothing detached from life. “Reality is not at the beginning of a work of art … it is at its end”, these words can be found in the text The World We Live In, and later Chalupecký holds fast to their meaning. According to him, a work of art co-creates reality in some way, art is an activity that intervenes in reality. This is connected to an idea from one of his more political texts: A society that would have all the art of the past stored in museums, but that would not have contemporary art, is dead. For him, art is what is happening, something that one experiences, something one confronts. He associates it very much with freedom, with a duty, with the great concepts of the time. Nowadays it’s handled a little differently, but the essence is still valid, I think. The fact that art is not supposed to be just a kind of detached reality, a pleasure for the eye locked behind the gallery walls, is still relevant today. It is being addressed on many fronts. For example, the artist Tania Bruguera has initiated a return to the notion of “Arte Útil”, asking to what extent art should be useful and socially engaged.

The Worlds of Jindřich Chalupecký. Photo Peter Fabo.

Q: Vidíte nějakou diferenci, která se rozevírá mezi naší a Chalupeckého dobou – a tedy i Chalupeckého uvažováním, něčím, co při vší úctě nejde udržet nebo vypovídá o rozdílu?

KK: Je jich celá řada. Protože působil v politicky úplně jiné době – mezi válkou, normalizací, chvilkou svobody, kdy mohl něco publikovat a tvořit. Teď jsem si znovu připomněla text Všechnu moc dělnickým radám, kde Chalupecký v podstatě míří k obhajobě přímé demokracie a co největší angažovanosti. Vztahuje to především k pracující třídě. Podle něj je přes neúspěch počátečního étosu sovětské revoluce potřeba to zkusit znovu a opravdu to naplnit. Mluví hodně v třídních pojmech: o distinkci intelektuální třídy, umělců a dělníků, kteří mají nesmyslně rozdělenou práci a volný čas; jestli ho pak naplňují kulturou, tak spíše ve smyslu trochu bezzubé kratochvíle. Zamýšlí se nad tím, jestli a jak může být moderní umění dostupné „masám“. Dnes možná mluvíme v trochu jiných pojmech a souvislostech, ale otázky třídních rozdílů, kritika západního kapitalismu a touha najít jiný, přímější a solidárnější společensko-politický systém se stále vrací. Se spoustou jeho úvah by šlo polemizovat, ale zároveň jsou aktuální.

Q: Výstava připomíná jedním ze svých oddílů, že i téma žen-umělkyň je u něj rozporuplné.

KK: K tomu jsme se museli dostat, že? On psal o umělkyních hodně, jako jeden z mála v té době je podporoval. Vedle známých jmen, jako jsou Eva Kmentová a Adriana Šimotová, sledoval řadu dalších: Naděžda Plíšková, Petra Oriešková, Vlasta Prachatická, Jana Želibská… Věnoval jim velkou pozornost – a zároveň je dost vyděloval. O mužích se u něj nemuselo říkat, že to jsou mužští umělci, ženské umělkyně byly vždycky zmiňované s tím přívlastkem. Řešil jejich specifičnost, třeba mluvil o tom, že hodně pracují se sochou, plastikou nebo grafikou, protože v nich je přítomna tělesnost, hmota: psal, že ženy vycházejí ze své tělesnosti. Což je určitě pravda, ale zároveň tím tak trošku říkal, že intelektuální umění není doménou žen.

Paradoxně nechtěl české umělecké prostředí v žádném případě spojovat s feminismem. Chalupecký je schopen formulovat věci, které dnes vnímáme rozporuplně. Řekne – bohužel se jich moc neprosadilo, protože jejich život je plný domácích prací a rození dětí, rodinné povinnosti je odkláněly od tvorby. Ale vlastně nepotřebují feminismus jako program, protože jsou dost svobodné samy o sobě. V textu Duše androgyna je zajímavá myšlenka: neoficialita a underground podle něj spojovaly ženské a mužské umělce společnou nesvobodou. Nepotřebovali se – podle Chalupeckého – programově vymezit feministicky, ale spíše vůči oficiálnímu umění nebo vůči tehdejší politické situaci. Mluví se o tom, jak měl rád krásné umělkyně, a nevím, jestli by psal o nějaké, která by krásná nebyla (smích). Ale to znám jenom z článků a vyprávění, takže o tom nemůžu podat vlastní svědectví.

Q: V posledních ročnících finalisté Ceny Jindřicha Chalupeckého odcházejí od principu soutěžení. Co by na to řekl Chalupecký?

KK: K tomu se hodí krátké ohlédnutí. Ze začátku nebyla cena soutěží: v devadesátkách se setkala porota, nebyli žádní finalisté, někomu udělili ocenění. Postupně se to měnilo, přibyly čestné ceny a potom finalisté, pak zase jeden ročník nebyli. Postupně se vyvinul model, který fungoval donedávna: pět umělkyň a umělců soutěží o hlavní cenu, později dokonce s novou prací připravenou přímo na výstavu, která je naší Společností podporována a financována. Já to ráda přirovnávám k jiným oborům, kde se udělují ceny. Kdybyste dali pěti lidem sto tisíc, aby napsali knížku a pak soutěžili, která je nejlepší, tak si budou připadat divně.

Q: Takže soutěž se postupně vyvinula směrem dost nezávislým na tom, jak vnímal podporu umění sám Chalupecký.

KK: „Soutěžení” se stalo paradoxem, který se nám organizátorům tak úplně nezamlouval – a spoustě umělkyň a umělců také ne. Proto jsme se teď přichýlili k tomu, že každý rok oceníme pět laureátek a laureátů. Není to ústup od samotného ocenění: tak jako byl v devadesátkách oceněn jeden, nyní jich oceňujeme pět. Už proto, že současná umělecká scéna je výrazem velké plurality a pětici cen tak distribuujeme jakoby do pomyslných kategorií. Většinou tam je někdo, kdo dělá klasičtější malbu či sochu, někdo, kdo vytváří prostředí, někdo zjevně politický, někdo, kdo dělá něco víc intuitivně estetického. Vlastně doufám, že taková pluralita by se Chalupeckému mohla líbit. Zároveň je to něco, co se pořád vyvíjí, nepovažuju současnou podobu ocenění za nijak definitivní. To si beru z Chalupeckého: musíme pořád přezkoumávat, jestli je projekt, na kterém pracujeme, stále funkční. A nebát se aktualizace a proměny.

When Time Exploded in the Czech Republic

It’s 1994. The still fresh Czech Republic is reeling under a flood of information and ideas coming from the West, the cities are alive with neon lights… At the end of the year, an exhibition opens at the Stone Bell House, which is in many ways revolutionary. BELL ’94, or the First Biennial of Young Artists, provides insight into the work and perceptions of the emerging generation of artists. Almost thirty years on, the same generation now returns to the scene with the Heroin Crystal exhibition.

In those nearly thirty years, most of them have achieved major successes at home and abroad, and have become respected fixtures on the art scene. The Heroin Crystal exhibition, however, fills the spaces of the Stone Bell House with what the artists represented at the exhibition were doing in immediate response to the 1990s. Alongside the now iconic works, it will also present lesser-known projects from the GHMP’s collections, sketching a picture of the artistic direction of the time. Everything was new and everything was possible.

The opening of the Czech Republic to democracy at the end of the Cold War did not only mark a turning point in social terms; it also marked a significant break in the development of art. Compared to previous generations, the emerging generation turned away from traditional means of expression towards working with objects, installations, video, photography and a fusion of all of these. The curators of the GHMP perceived this and opened the door wide to new approaches.

One of the curators at the time was Olga Malá, who is now returning to the venue with “her” artists. Under her supervision, the historic spaces of the Stone Bell House will once again encounter the works of Veronika Bromová, Jiří Černický, Federico Díaz, Milena Dopitová, Pavel Humhal, Lukáš Jasanský and Martin Polák, the Kamera Skura group, Krištof Kintera, Markéta Othová, Michal Pěchouček, Jiří Příhoda, Petr Svárovský, Štěpánka Šimlová, Michaela Thelenová and Kateřina Vincourová.

Although many of this long line of artists differ from each other or even define themselves in opposition to one another, they have almost the most important thing in common – the period in which they entered the world of art. Moreover, when it is a period as initiatory as the 1990s, it is perhaps impossible for their work not to be defined by it. So, we went into studios, classrooms and homes to ask some of the exhibitors what was really going on for them in those post-revolutionary years, how it affected them and where our world, and they along with it, have moved since then.

Jiří Černický
As if a Flower Begins to Bloom

KF Heroin Crystal is your work from 1995. What does this still life of junkie paraphernalia rendered in cut glass say about the time of its creation?

JČ I think the aesthetics of this work is, in many ways, indicative of the 1990s which is probably why the whole exhibition is called that. It would take a whole day’s symposium to comprehensibly describe this period, but I will try to formulate it at least provisionally. After the revolution there was an explosion of provocative and expressive things, everything that had been suppressed before suddenly exploded. As if a flower begins to bloom. But in the flood of all kinds of aesthetics and excitement about the possibilities, a kind of darkness was immediately visible, a dark side that relativized the enthusiasm. It was this darkness associated with commerce that I tried to name at the time. Heroin Crystal is about the longing for a fairytale world, for hope, for a parallel world that is, nevertheless, artificial. Psychedelia meets the tradition of Czech glassmaking. These contradictions and black and white vision are, I would say, significant for the 1990s.

KF How big a role did the unstoppable flow of all kinds of information play in your work?

JČ Of course, it was absolutely crucial. Thanks to the Internet, one suddenly had a chance to work with a much greater variety of expressive means, aesthetics, and philosophies. Suddenly, we could really compare ourselves with the West. Many people found that they had formed completely wrong ideas about the West, because until then it was common to rely on low-quality texts and photographs. That this is sometimes a benefit is shown by the example of a photograph of Jackson Pollock working, as published in the Life magazine seen in Japan in the 1960s. But there was no relevant information, so the imperfect message for them was that someone was spraying paint. So they started experimenting and going wild with dripping, far more than Pollock himself. The Gutai group was born, and they were actually ahead of their time and ahead of America because they moved the limits a little bit further. In general, though, it’s definitely better to have information available than any censorship, I think that’s clear.

KF At the time of the censorship you started to study at the Faculty of Education in Ústí. What led you there first?

JČ I couldn’t study in Prague under socialism because my father signed the Two Thousand Words manifesto. I didn’t even believe that I would get to any school at all, so I was glad that I was accepted to study art education in Ústí. Eventually, the Faculty of Education turned out to be a complete revelation. A lot of teachers who couldn’t exhibit in Prague took refuge there: Jaroslav Prášil, Jiří Bartůněk… When I moved to Prague after the takeover three years later, I found it, on the contrary, conservative and terribly academic. We had some arguments about it with people like Milan Knížák. But again, it was beautifully raw, wild and turbulent.

KF Now you are the head of the painting studio at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. How do today’s emerging artists differ from your generation?

JČ Although we don’t have distance yet and it’s definitely individual, it seems to me that they are more sensitive in some ways. I think we had a different kind of sensitivity. We were more risk takers and fighters, we hurled ourselves into a lot of things and didn’t give a damn what was going to happen. At the same time, we had to make an effort to find information; for today’s students, information is showering them from all sides. But like everything, even this is ultimately double-edged. It’s like having breakfast in a hotel – you come to the buffet and find such mountains of food there that you’re confused. You don’t know what to eat and, eventually, you lose your appetite. So you take a biscuit, a tea, and you walk away. Whether that’s good or bad, I don’t know yet. But as far as talent is concerned, every generation is the same. And every generation is also necessarily linked with the time in which they create.

KF Do you feel connected to your colleagues from the exhibition?

JČ I had a lot in common with some of them, no doubt. With Katka Vincourová, it was a distinct aesthetics of capitalism caught up in commerce, which we, in a way, perceived as unpleasant. Krištof Kintera, on the other hand, made those shiny appliances… We had a feeling that there was a kind of stupidity coming out of it all that needed to be commented on. But precisely because it wasn’t black and white, there were long debates, philosophies, and all kinds of teasing associated with the creation of art. Everybody was in opposition to someone. But the wildness, the speed and the intensity brought us together.

view of the exhibition Heroin Crystal, Stone Bell House, 2022. Photo by Tomáš Souček

Michal Pěchouček
Back then I had it pre-cooked, today I have it instant

KF You spent the 1990s almost exclusively at school. What was it like to become a student so early after the revolution?

MP For me, it meant clearly that the whole art world was coming to me filtered through the Academy. I entered it in a year when students still accepted things seriously and without any problems, for example the custom that one shouldn’t exhibit while studying. And also that real art is made by people who are probably impossible to meet in person. I perceived even many of those people, who will now be exhibiting at the GHMP, as divine. These were the names that were being talked about, and when I met them at a party, I fainted on the spot. I was completely unaware that they were only a few years older because they were several levels more successful. So I quickly started hitting the parties to unlearn the fainting.

KF Such respect for your colleagues! What about the teachers?

MP Well, we certainly mustn’t forget the great symbol of the 1990s, and that was Milan Knížák. It wasn’t a complete reform but rather a logical revolutionary change. At that time, Havel even asked the students if they really wanted Knížák as the chancellor. It was probably a rhetorical question, but it was asked. However, a whole new group of artists then entered the Academy with a clean slate, so to speak, and creative freedom was absolutely unquestionable.

KF What did you do with it? What was your theme then?

MP I think my situation was a bit precooked thanks to my father, who was an aspiring amateur photographer and filmmaker. So growing up in a creative atmosphere with an inspirational figure, I couldn’t avoid it. Because of this, I had a lot of material that I was surrounded by and needed to process it somehow. I guess I also told myself that I was following up on someone else’s work. I was able of a creative superstructure that my father wasn’t capable of. I don’t blame him, on the contrary. I just knew that I could do it, that I could take it somewhere higher, with his permission. That was my beginning. That’s how a lot of artists start, it helps them find a starting point, to take a private conflict, a family mess, as a basis… With a good will to change something or to understand why it’s like that, then they throw themselves into it.

KF You started with a mess but where did you get from there?

MP Things were pre-cooked in the ’90s, now it’s instant in fact. Because I’m now working in a duo with Rudi Koval, I can let myself be carried along if I want to. For now, I simply do not pedal, the other guy does. And I think we’re getting to more topics thanks to that. At the moment, we have a tribute to Ukraine underway, or rather a tribute to what is going on at the border and in the camps. I think that’s something that everybody has to deal with in some way. For us, it is natural to be creative.

KF The present offers a lot of edgy topics. So is it important to look back thirty years at all?

MP Reflection on the nineties is therapeutic and absolutely inevitable. I think this applies especially to the very youngest generation, that is, people born after 2000. That time is very important for them. Just think about what was happening in the area of films, for example. Only now we can see how different it is – original, deranged, maybe unacceptable or beautiful… In any case, it will never be made like that again. Ten years ago, we still hadn’t realised that; we have to come to that. It’s a bit of a march towards sentimentality.

KF Are you expecting a rush of sentimentality at the Heroin Crystal exhibition?

MP I have this personal problem – it doesn’t make me feel good to look at my works years later. It’s kind of hurtful to me. I see a lot of mistakes every time, but that’s not an exaggerated self-criticism, everybody is sure to see them! And there’s nothing you can do about it. Although sometime in the noughties I tried to fix it in some way, editing the older videos in various ways, trying to get them into a more acceptable, more ambitious form. I was a little relieved at the time, but now in hindsight, I can see that it was a completely futile struggle. I myself can’t tell the difference between the original and the new editing anymore. So it’s probably not going to be about sentimentality.

Veronika Bromová
The silence of passing trams

KF You started studying at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design (UMPRUM) in the late 1980s. Did you feel then that you needed to say something with your work that you couldn’t say otherwise?

VB There were things that I created just for myself, at home, but I don’t think I felt it was too much of a tragedy or anything. I just filtered it a little bit and didn’t bring all my work to school. I think perhaps we all did that, anyway. At that time the teaching was quite rigidly focused on scientific illustration, we were taught to draw in a hyper-realistic way. Our professor at the time was an old fart commie in a sweaty jacket who kept giving us perfectly uninteresting monologues. We called it “the silence of the passing trams” because all we could perceive was the creaking of the trams outside the windows at Palach Square.

KF And then the revolution came into the silence of the trams…

VB This was somewhere between the second and third year of my studies, so I was still pretty much a young girl. I remember that before and during the Velvet Revolution, our older schoolmates were a huge inspiration to us. We saw all the prominent figures around the Ballet Unit Křeč every day, the Caban brothers, Aleš Najbrt… they had much more experience and courage.

KF But you must have quickly become experienced with the advent of capitalism, too. What changed the most for you?

VB I think that our imagination was set in motion – wild and in all directions. For me personally it was mainly the environment – the communist grey, and actually quite romantic, Prague suddenly came alive with an incredible amount of advertisements and new colourful facades. Colourful posters began to appear in the streets, billboards flanked the streets and motorways, everything lit up, a flood of kitsch… Wild capitalism with all that advertising aesthetics completely took over the city and its surroundings.

KF Advertising agencies were a popular outlet for young artists…

VB Yes, the ad agencies began to skyrocket and their pressure on creative people grew. My friend started working for one of them and invited me to join, but soon enough we both realised that we weren’t really ideal for it, that we were kind of from a different world. I was only interested in the advertising world insofar as it accommodated my topics. One of them has always been physicality, and the subject of the abuse of the female body in advertising began to appeal to me. But not in a straightforward way, I wanted to talk about humanity, which is the very foundation of whatever is happening around us.

KF So, simply said, you’re looking for themes somewhere within, rather than in external circumstances?

VB For sure. I don’t think I can be an engaged artist in a very straightforward way. Right now, I’ve sketched two drawings on Instagram of me using crutches to shoot down Putin but I see that more as a by-product, hyperbole and a need to relax. In my regular work, I definitely turn more to philosophical, deeper themes, the inner ones. I guess it’s also because I’ve always been in a creative environment. My parents were artists, and they inflated a bubble around me in which there was always freedom. Perhaps that’s why I perceived everything more moderately than others.

KF So do you hold on to your inner freedom even today, when times have moved on a little bit again?

VB I think so. Where my work is going is again rather a question of my life than of social circumstances. I’m leaning more and more towards nature themes and mythology, which is a parallel history of humanity. I try to create with natural materials, although perhaps my lightboxes and advertising magic are not disappearing either. But I’ve lived in the country for almost fifteen years now and I love working with what’s around me. I’m also trying to think about art a bit more in the context of the current environmental situation…

KF …which is a big social issue.

VB That’s right. I see an incredible sensitivity to nature and the planet in today’s young generation of artists. I’d say they’re more sensitive than we were. We’re living in a very creative time right now, there’s a huge influx of information and inspiration everywhere, everyone is creating something. They are in a tougher situation than we were in that there are more of them. But those are just my impressions from today. People tend to create myths about every era in hindsight anyway. The 1990s have this layer of mythicization too.

KF So what can be said about them today?

VB For example, that it was a strong and quite interesting era. A huge boom of everything, even of mistakes and bad things. But it was also a breath of freedom, pure euphoria. Suddenly, we could give everything complete freedom and formulate and exhibit what we really wanted. The curators Karel Srp and Olga Malá had huge merits in that, they were some of the key figures for our generation, they had a vision, they noticed us and gave us space. Hopefully, all this will be felt a little bit in the exhibition. I couldn’t ask for anything more from it.

Milena Dopitová
On the Border Between Public and Intimate

KF In 1989, you co-founded the Monday Art Group. In what atmosphere was it at the time?

MD In communist Czechoslovakia, there were only three schools focused on non-commissioned art – two in Prague, one in Bratislava. Thus, the interest of applicants exceeded the supply multiple times, and priority was given to those with the “correct” political background. Many of us applied repeatedly, and thus, in my year of studies, there were people who did not let themselves get discouraged because they wanted nothing more but to be accepted. During the first year, we became familiar with the school environment and got involved in all the activities that were already gathering pace in the pre-revolutionary era. It was in that period that we founded the Monday Group. We spent a lot of time together looking for ways how and reasons why to make art. In retrospect, I realize with some nostalgia that it was a happy time of beginnings as a student living under totalitarian conditions. Because these conditions had a share in the formation of the group and, consequently, in everything that started this encounter.

KF But then came the revolution.

MD All these events caught us on the move and we took them for granted to some extent. Unlike our parents, who experienced the occupation in 1968, we felt that things could not have turned out any other way. Today, I see it as a great good fortune that I was able to be there and experience it. Anyone who lived and worked during that time finds it increasingly difficult, as time passes, to find words to describe it without looking like some kind of a dreamer. It was an amazing euphoria; in addition to other reasons also due to the fact that we could change history also on behalf of our parents.

KF What did the first free years, the beginning of the 1990s, mean to you?

MD I guess it was mainly the open space for work, the possibility to travel and to feel freedom not only in myself but also in my surroundings. The revolution started the interest in Czech art, important figures were coming here and involved us in international projects. It was a fast time of many exhibitions, one work following another and we did not realize that it did not have to be like that forever. Suddenly, I could represent our country at biennales in Sydney, São Paulo, Aperto, Gwangju, exhibit in New York, London and Berlin. Often while I was still a student. So for me the 1990s were mainly work, work, work, but so joyful!

KF You talk about abroad, but what were the exhibition opportunities like here in the Czech Republic?

MD Alongside state institutions, the private galleries such as MXM began to emerge. MXM quickly became, among other things, a centre of current discussions that shaped contemporary art, a meeting place for artists, theoreticians, philosophers… Above all, its curators Jana and Jiří Ševčík were really responsible for the implementation of many exhibition projects and theoretical publications in both the Czech and the international context. As far as public institutions are concerned, it was primarily the GHMP, led by curators Olga Malá and Karel Srp, who opened the doors of larger galleries to contemporary art in the 1990s.

KF Thanks to this, spaces like the Stone Bell House opened up to you…

MD The work of the 1990s was very much related to space: that’s just because many of us turned to installations, to objects, it was a new challenge. In 1997, I responded to a space in Baden Baden with the Not for Sale object – a lying figure eight symbolizing infinity. The abstract notion of volume, of quantity, was given shape, size and colour, i.e., a real form. At the same time, it was a large, three-metre long braided figure eight. At that time, we didn’t think at all about the practical questions of how to disassemble it or store it after the exhibition, we simply made objects for monumental spaces. Because we could! Because anything was possible – to combine media, to combine anything with anything else and to break any boundaries. As long as there was enough money for the project, nothing prevented the realization of any ideas.

KF And the themes?

MD For me, they have always been inextricably linked to life and atmosphere. The beginnings of the search followed the agenda of the Monday Group, whose credo was “Don’t neglect the little things and compulsory exercises”. Our relationship to the mundane, the ordinary and the everyday, was related to this. The social overlap was then translated by each of the members in their own way. One of our first exhibitions was called New Intimacy, and it was the movement on the border between the public and the intimate that was crucial for me for a long time. A lot was said about it in texts and articles about my work at the time, so I see it now as a bit of a marker of the 1990s. Today, I’m responding to a completely different period of time, with a completely different atmosphere. However, many of my works continue to have this level of meaning.

Milena Dopitová, Sixtysomething, 2003, photographs, 165×134 cm

Krištof Kintera
I like to think through the process

KF You were sixteen years old in 1989. What role did the creation of art play in your life then?

KK I probably can’t speak of art creation that I would consider important in retrospect but I was obsessed with it even before I went to the Academy, that’s true. You can’t make art without obsession. I felt sort of infected by it and I was very eager to get into the Academy after the secondary school. Plus, it was a time when you either went to a university or to do the obligatory military service, so it seemed kind of dead important. But I might have ended up doing an alternative civilian service somewhere, so what the hell. It was more about the opportunity to find myself in school and formulate my own path, that’s what I longed for.

KF That path led through the early ’90s. How much did that era influence your work?

KK I naturally reacted to what was around me, that’s automatic. The post-revolutionary change was very clear, capitalism came and the new visuality associated with it. It was suddenly necessary to exist in a commercialized society. In response, I made all sorts of nonsensical appliances and displayed them in shops around Prague. Then, while still at school, Plumbař was created – a fictional character in a lead suit and a dwelling that was supposed to shield the signal overload. Overload! Back then, when the Internet was absolutely in its infancy and most of us didn’t have it at home. In short, in any era, one relates to just what surrounds one, even if it takes a bit different turn again later.

KF Today it turns to very specific global crises. How do you relate to them?

KK It’s not that I’m directly forbidding it to myself, it’s more like I kind of naturally don’t want to react to the current social climate and issues like the Coronavirus or the war in Ukraine. Then it’s too political and social art. I actually quite enjoy not knowing exactly what I’m doing. It may sound a bit strange, but the artist doesn’t always have to have the whole structure of their work thought out in advance. I’m trying more and more to think through the material. I’m simply a studio artist, I like to think through the process. A lot of artists have a different approach, they are conceptual, so they think it all through perfectly and then make it happen somewhere or have it made.

KF You also have some teaching experience. Do you feel like today’s young generation is going more in the other direction?

KK I really don’t like to generalise and it’s been almost ten years since I taught at UMPRUM. However, I am in contact with young artists because I am interested in how they perceive it. If I were to generalise after all, I feel that nowadays there is rather talk about what not to do and how not to do it, that ethics and politics are getting too much involved in the artistic work. And of course ecology, which is probably natural, although I see a bit of a dead end there. If we’re honest with ourselves, art won’t save the planet. If we want to tackle environmental issues, I don’t think it should be through the platform of art.

KF Yet your work can sometimes be set in an environmental context…

KK It often happens to me that people kind of suggest that, yes. I guess I could very easily hide under such a tendentious label and declare it as the core of my work. When you make a sculpture out of old washing machines or a post-naturalia installation out of stuff from a recycling centre, it seems obvious. But I’m very aware that it’s not that easy. Such a work is inherently non-environmentally friendly because we use glues, chemicals, epoxies, polyesters… And, in addition, it’s so huge that it has to be trucked to the exhibition. So I can’t say I’m saving the planet by making art out of garbage. But it’s true that sometime in the 90s I was among the first to protest in front of a newly opened McDonald’s, so maybe it has more to do with age and an increasing feeling of futility.

KF So now you’re about to be confronted with your younger self at the Stone Bell. What do you think it says about your generation of artists?

KK I don’t know. In retrospect, I see us as a group of many individualities. Although there are some formal similarities. For example, specifically with Jirka Černický, although we don’t see each other in any way, we don’t go out for a beer together. I guess we simply react similarly to things around us, which is positive, it doesn’t make me nervous in any way. And in the end, we’ll each do it our own way anyway. But I think the diversity of all of us will really prevail.

Autorka je kulturní publicistkou a dramaturgyní
stanice Českého rozhlasu Vltava.

Moscow Diary 1972/2021

“The Jindřich Chalupecký Society sends a small delegation of Czech scholars and artists to Moscow. Their aim is to visit the surviving witnesses of Jindřich Chalupecký’s Moscow activities…” A diary of the current Russian visit “in the footsteps of J. Ch.” is written by curator Tomáš Pospiszyl as a prologue to an extensive exhibition dedicated to the personality of Jindřich Chalupecký.

Moscow Diary? It is one of the most important articles by critic Jindřich Chalupecký. However, it does not concern Czech art and was not intended for a Czech audience. Fifty years have passed since its publication and it shows the remarkably international dimension of Chalupecký’s personality. Moscow Diary was published in the British Studio International magazine in 1973. It has the readable form of a reportage, and its readers were introduced – the vast majority for the first time – to the world of unofficial artists in the Soviet Union. Almost all of them went on in the decades that followed to become Russia’s most celebrated artists: Ilya Kabakov, Erik Bulatov, Vladimir Yankilevsky, Viktor Pivovarov, and many others. In order to remember them better, Chalupecký invented a name for them at the time, The Sretensky Boulevard School, although in reality they did not form a homogeneous group. In Chalupecký’s article, we find the first step of the successful careers of these artists: It was not political attitudes or imitation of foreign trends that started their careers, but instead Chalupecký’s fascination with the distinctive yet internationally comprehensible nature of their work. For him, their work represented a positive alternative to what was happening in art in Western Europe and the USA.

Thursday, 18 June 1972

After five years, I have returned to Moscow again. I had hesitated about making a decision for a long time; if it hadn’t been for the insistence of my Moscow friends, I would not have gone there. In the past, I had always been there as a delegate of the official Czechoslovak art organization and had been received by the sister Soviet organization with all Russian ceremony and attention. But now, I am happily a private person again and nobody can send me anywhere. Old friends wait for me at the airport and I will share their simple civic life with them for a few days. We drive across the whole of Moscow; the vast white modern districts that have sprung up in recent years and continue to grow are full of greenery and flowering trees, and I immediately feel comfortable here.

Sunday, 5 December 2021

The Jindřich Chalupecký Society sends a small delegation of Czech scholars and artists to Moscow. Their aim is to visit the surviving witnesses of Jindřich Chalupecký’s Moscow activities but also to inform the younger generation of the Moscow art community about these activities. The key figure of the expedition is Tomáš Glanc, a Russian studies scholar who has been studying Jindřich Chalupecký’s relationship with Soviet art for several decades. Over the past twenty years, he has spoken to perhaps everyone with whom Chalupecký was in contact in the former Soviet Union. Some of them attended his presentation at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. Glanc outlines the main areas of Chalupecký’s activities: Trips to Moscow and visits to the studios of unofficial artists during his membership in the Union of Czechoslovak Artists, as well as his later visits as a private individual. Intensive contacts through correspondence – he exchanged hundreds of letters with artists from the East – and also a bold programme of visits to Czechoslovakia by Russian artists, unsupported by any institution. A review of half a century of activities inspires the surviving witnesses to present spontaneous, not always verifiable memories. This is understandable. Chalupecký was not just one of the visitors but a real friend, a part of their lives. The afternoon meeting ends with a performance by the Stony Tellers artistic duo.

Wednesday, 24 June 1972

I first met Francesco Infante on a street in Moscow; he was almost completely unknown and utterly poor at the time – I remember him buying a bag of cheap gingerbread for lunch, munching it on the way.

Sunday, 5 December 2021

A Russian artist (with Spanish roots), Francesco Infante invites us to his home after the presentation at the Garage, a quarter of an hour’s walk through a snowy park. His apartment is both a warehouse and an exhibition of his work. We admire a spinning kinetic sculpture from the 1960s. “It’s a replica”, he says. ”The original was purchased by the Centre Pompidou in Paris”. No gingerbread is served but boiled potatoes, meat in aspic and marinated fish. Infante is an internationally renowned figure in Russian art, moving somewhere between neoconstructivism, kineticism, and land art. This is confirmed by the large number of thick catalogues of his work. ”It was difficult to learn about contemporary art in the world in the 1960s. Visits from Czechoslovakia played a key role then. Even before Chalupecký, it was Dušan Konečný.” It is clear from Infante’s account that Chalupecký was an initiatory person initiating personality for him.” He was an oddly serious geezer. He was getting on in years by then – he belonged to a completely different generation than I did – but we were interested in similar issues.” Today, we can’t even imagine how important sharing information was back then.

Friday, 19 June 1972

In the evening, I meet with a number of old painter friends. I know that information about contemporary art is still scarce in Moscow, so I brought my slides and tried to give an overview of what’s going on, from abstraction and pop art to photorealism and conceptual art. I also mention that art is going beyond art today, into a hard-to-define area that is close to the realm of the sacred: and at that moment everyone suddenly starts to really listen.

Monday, 6 December 2021

These days, Moscow is more than well-informed about contemporary art. The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art manages to combine audience-pleasing exhibitions of big names in the art world, academic research, and a popular meeting place. During the days of our visit, the GES-2 centre, a former power station near the Kremlin transformed into a similarly generous centre for contemporary art, is being opened. Here, Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson reenacts scenes from the Russian TV series Santa Barbara from the time of transformation, and he does so live, in original sets and with the original actors. The collection of post-war Russian art is housed by the already-established Moscow Museum of Modern Art (MMOMA). The exhibition on Jindřich Chalupecký at the Municipal Library will also include at least a small portion of this art. But we also visit an exhibition in a real garage, prepared by Natalya Serkova and Vitaly Bezpalov. They are better known as the Tzvetnik collective, whose carefully selected Instagram coverage of the art world is followed by 37,000 people. According to Vitaly, the path to global success was actually simple: ”Of course we don’t publish everything people send us. But we reply to everyone.”

Sunday, 21 June 1972

Eduard Steinberg shows me one picture after another in the furnished room of his small apartment; but I wish I could see them hanging around in an empty space into which they could pour their white light freely – they would make the whole space abstract. It shouldn’t even be an exhibition, but probably some kind of sacred architecture. I remind Steinberg of Rothko’s ecumenical chapel, a picture of which I also showed on Friday, and Steinberg vividly agrees: it caught his eye the most, out of all the documents I showed.

Tuesday, 7 December 2021

Spirituality interested both Chalupecký and Steinberg in different ways. Chalupecký believed that in modern secular society, it was art that could replace religion. It could become a unifying element of society and allow individuals to experience transcendence, to go beyond the ordinary. Eduard Steinberg died in 2012. However, his widow Galina Manevich lives in Moscow and we visit her in her apartment, furnished in an antique manner. Everybody has to wash their hands right away, because we are about to be served refreshments. ”It’s coming up to Christmas, so forgive me if there’s no meat,” the petite woman explains why we’re having fish balls, fresh vegetables and potatoes. ”I don’t drink alone, but please have a glass of vodka with me, in memory. This one was still bought by Edik.” Jindřich Chalupecký stayed with the Steinbergs during his visit in 1974. He had indigestion problems then. He mostly recovered on the folding bed at the Steinbergs, but then had to end his trip earlier than planned.

Wednesday, 24 June 1972

Those who come to Moscow must realize that Russia is not Europe; and it is not Asia either. It is a large and complex country, a subcontinent rather than a mere state, and it must create its art out of its own great tradition and its own present reality.

Tuesday, 6 December 2021

We conduct a video interview with Anatoly Zhigalov in the snow-covered village of Pogorelovo, 500 kilometres away. The house lacks electricity; we rely on his invisible gasoline generator. Zhigalov and his partner, Natalia Abalakova, were among the Russian artists for whom Chalupecký organised a visit to Czechoslovakia. For many of them it was the first ever trip outside the Soviet Union. Immediately after their arrival, Zhigalov and Abalakova performed their tribute to Prague in the attic above the apartment of Milan Kozelka, the enfant terrible of the Czech scene at the time. Zhigalov recalls how, according to a pre-arranged plan, they visited three to four studios a day, and also went to Brno and Bratislava. Chalupecký was said to have checked whether they had really seen everything. Their guide and chauffeur was the graphic designer Jan Sekal; they are still friends to this day. He also vividly remembers a visit to, and a debate in, Václav Boštík’s studio: ”Czech artists were able to distinguish tanks from ideas. Despite the anti-Russian sentiment after 1968, I was perceived primarily as an artist. At that time, I myself rejected the socialist regime completely, I admired the West uncritically. Chalupecký tried to convince me that not everything in the West was ideal. I only approved of what he said later, when I myself emigrated to the West.” Chalupecký’s interest in Soviet art in the early 1970s, just a few years after the occupation by Warsaw Pact troops, was as incomprehensible to some of his Czech friends as his defence of the conditions under which artists worked under socialism.

Wednesday, 24 June 1972

A decade ago, a well-known critic advised sending these artists to cultivate “virgin lands” in the steppe, but today many of them have good studios and make a decent living as illustrators, graphic designers, etc., and they even no longer suffer serious difficulties due to the fact that their work is consistently published abroad. However, they do not exhibit. Thus, two arts exist side by side in the Soviet Union today, hermetically separated by the fact that one is public and the other remains private.

Wednesday, 8 December 2021

The disjunction between public and private art was, in Chalupecký’s opinion, an adequate price to pay for the fact that the artist was relieved of the pressure of the art market and the corrupting art world. Was he right? We are leaving a city full of snow and brightly lit buildings in the morning. We should come back here soon, we say to ourselves, just as Jindřich Chalupecký said in his article from 1972.

The quotations from Chalupecký’s Moscow Diary are taken from a publication called Cestou necestou by Jindřich Chalupecký, H&H publishers, Jinočany 1999.

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A chance to try art

Feeling equal

A dialogue across groups

I Don’t Think There is a Clear Definition of Where the Boundaries of Photography Are

Alena Kotzmannová
Apparatuses of Imagination

Aleksandra Vajd
In Relation with Paper

Markéta Othová
Pictures from the Exhibition

Ivars Gravlejs
Our Daily Kebab

Playlist Q07

Playlist Q 06

He can be argued with but at the same time he is up to date

When Time Exploded in the Czech Republic

Jiří Černický
As if a Flower Begins to Bloom

Michal Pěchouček
Back then I had it pre-cooked, today I have it instant

Veronika Bromová
The silence of passing trams

Milena Dopitová
On the Border Between Public and Intimate

Krištof Kintera
I like to think through the process

Moscow Diary 1972/2021

I Perceived Taylor Camp as a Small-Scale Model of Human Society

The Return of a Lost Friend

Sugar, Body, Identity

Prádelna Collective: Everyone has the right to go to a gallery

A chance to try art

Feeling equal

A dialogue across groups

I Don’t Think There is a Clear Definition of Where the Boundaries of Photography Are

Alena Kotzmannová Apparatuses of Imagination

Aleksandra Vajd In Relation with Paper

Markéta Othová Pictures from the Exhibition

Ivars Gravlejs Our Daily Kebab

Playlist Q07

Playlist Q 06

He can be argued with but at the same time he is up to date

When Time Exploded in the Czech Republic

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Michal Pěchouček Back then I had it pre-cooked, today I have it instant

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Moscow Diary 1972/2021

Alena Kotzmannová
Apparatuses of Imagination

Aleksandra Vajd
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Markéta Othová
Pictures from the Exhibition

Ivars Gravlejs
Our Daily Kebab

Jiří Černický
As if a Flower Begins to Bloom

Michal Pěchouček
Back then I had it pre-cooked, today I have it instant

Veronika Bromová
The silence of passing trams

Milena Dopitová
On the Border Between Public and Intimate

Krištof Kintera
I like to think through the process