The Muted Sound of the Times

view to the exhibition No Art Today? – New Acquisitions from the Collections of Prague City Gallery, House of Photography, 2021. Photo by Tomáš Souček

The recording of Tomáš Ruller’s 1987 Pakulení performance stands out at the No Art Today? exhibition for several reasons. It is one of the few achievements in the moving image medium, and it is also the oldest one to have been created using video technology. It is also the only one for which a large projection area has been reserved at the exhibition. And, as I will attempt to demonstrate in the following text, this twelve-minute edited video of an event that took a rather long period of time is also extraordinary in its general approach to what is to be recorded in a performance and why.

In the opening shot, we watch Ruller enter a vast, people-filled foyer, carrying a heavy cardboard bag over his shoulder. Younger generations, especially, may not immediately understand that these are the premises of the Palace of Culture, today’s Congress Centre, in Prague’s Pankrác district. Considering the fact that cultural and political events were held there during socialism, including congresses of the ruling Communist Party, Ruller’s event in the very bowels of this building takes on the dimension of a kind of subversive penetration into the ideological-cultural epicentre of the regime. In any case, it took place under bizarre circumstances: during the second edition of the Rockfest music festival, which, in the phase of the cautious “restructuring” of late socialism, gave rise to hopes that a legitimate space for musical alternatives and associated subcultures was emerging in the cultural monolith of socialist Czechoslovakia. Punk (and not only punk) legally entered the imposing Palace of Culture at that time! The programme included an exhibition of contemporary art and Tomas Ruller was one of the participants.

However, the surprising thing about Ruller’s editing of the recording is how little he focuses on the action taking place in the exhibition space. In fact, the attention is mainly focused on those moments when he left the exhibition and walked freely among the people who attended the concerts. He moved among them, all in white, covered in plaster, first with two plastic buckets, later with Walkman headphones on his ears, and immediately afterwards with his sunglasses worn backwards. A charming moment came when his unusual appearance drew disbelieving looks (by the standards of the time) cast on him by similarly eccentric punk girls.

The performer’s walks through the crowd culminate in a debate with a group of corpulent men in suits, who lead him behind the glass door of the entrance reserved for the employees. In the video annotation on the AVU’s Research Institute website, we read of the events that were taking place being followed by “a heated debate with the Rockfest organizers who managed to prevail upon members of the police to allow Ruller to complete his performance, but only in the space allotted to him at the exhibition”. The final part of the recording therefore logically takes us back to the exhibition. Even there, however, Ruller does not mediate the entire event. Apparently some time must have elapsed since his return, so he is no longer covered in white dust, but wears a new layer of colourful paint. He sits down on the prepared stage and is slowly being painted and covered in dry plaster powder poured on him by two young people invited to do so. The fact that Ruller’s aim is to draw attention mainly to the passages where interactions with other people occur is ultimately underlined by the final scene of the edited recording. In it, a young woman insists that the seated performer answer her question: “What are you doing here?” Ruller doesn’t answer, and the conversation with the assistant, a young man, is also clearly unsatisfying. Her act, on the other hand, elicits laughter in the bystanders, and she eventually leaves angrily.

Ruller’s increased attention to the interactions at the exhibition, which has at its core new acquisitions of Czech and Slovak performance and body art of the 1960s-1980s, is matched only by the documentation of Milan Knížák’s happenings. However, these took place more than twenty years earlier, and in their courage to enter an unsecured social space through visual means, they remained unique for a long time. What No Art Today? says about performance art and, to a lesser extent, conceptual art of that time, is primarily a story about a world where even the “islands of positive deviance” were inhabited only by small communities and where the decision to engage in performance or conceptual art meant accepting that, at least in the domestic environment, these communities would not be recognized at all outside their bubbles, with rare exceptions. This non-acceptance and exclusion, reinforced by surveillance and harassment by the security forces, ultimately led to an escalation of (self-)isolation. Artists therefore performed their events in front of a minimum of invited guests, and sometimes even alone, only in the company of a documenting photographer.

The curatorial team of No Art Today? decided to go beyond the pragmatic horizons of an “exhibition of acquisitions” and to treat them as if they were putting together a thematic exhibition. The team could afford to take this somewhat bold move thanks to the years 2018-2020 that were above average in terms of creating the collection. During this period, the gallery managed to acquire respectable sets of work from most of the representatives of Czech action art (and, alongside them, several interesting works by Czech and Slovak conceptualists). It wouldn’t have been enough for a comprehensive presentation of the art of the given period but it was basically enough for an “associative game”, as the collective described its approach. It is a sophisticated game, and at times escapes the possibility of identifying the previously announced associative chains. Sometimes, it even leaves the given time frame, but never entirely without reason. But if there is something essential that permeates the whole of this game as its basic rule, it is a certain “fundamentalism”. The curatorial team, for example, never adds anything beyond what the artist himself has associated with the work. If the work was previously accompanied by a description, which was the custom especially in the case of photographically documented performances, it appears in that same wording at this exhibition. Conversely, if the artists previously chose not to add anything, the curators of No Art Today? remained faithful to that choice too. This is true even at a cost of absurd moments, such as the presentation of the small printed matter related to the groundbreaking event Happsoc I by Slovak artists Stano Filko and Alex Mlynárčik, from which it can in no way be clear that it is related to the unilateral declaration of Bratislava, its landmarks and inhabitants, including their pets and possessions, which were part of a week-long happening in 1965.

The approach to dating some of the artefacts is also almost “purist”. Knížák’s brilliant pictorial assemblages from the 1980s in which he accentuated photographs of older events by painting on them, by burning holes in them, or by the insertion of three-dimensional objects, can be found in the exhibition exclusively with the dates from the 1960s when the events happened. The same is true of the canonizing book collections documenting the events of the “holy trinity” of Czech performance art: Miler – Mlčoch – Štembera. Although these were not produced until 1997 for their “commemorative” exhibition at the GHMP, at No Art Today? they remain dated within the period of their original activity in the 1970s. The same is true of the large-scale reprints from Vladimír Ambroz’s performances.

Details such as these at No Art Today? seem to suggest that any sediment on an original, experienced event, on a work intended in a certain way, or even on the event’s first and most immediate mediation, necessarily detracts from the intensity of the original message. It does not really matter that this is how the artists themselves treated the aura of their works.

But there is another detail that might shift the peculiar impression of the perhaps unconscious inclination of the curators of No Art Today? to a different interpretation. And it concerns Ruller’s Pakulení, specifically its soundtrack, which is muted to the point of inaudibility at the exhibition. What are we to make of the fact that we’re not actually supposed to hear the noise produced by the crowd, the fragments of musical productions, and the excited speech of a woman who, judging by her attire, was probably (?) one of the event’s organizers? The introductory text to the exhibition does not, of course, contain an explanation of such a small detail. It does, however, open up space for speculation which stems both from the tendency to symbolically remove the layers added by the artists later, and from the general characteristics of the work in (self-)isolation of unaccepted and excluded artists during the period of state socialism. It could thus be said about No Art Today? that it presents the art of this era as art of the past but without any context and thus without history, and as art that figuratively existed in “silence” without the sounds of the times and so continued to deserve its silence. Even if this sound was sometimes part of it.

In the last thirty years at least, the art of action and concept has become an intensely researched historical phenomenon. It has moved from the periphery to the centre of the canon of Czech and Slovak art history. The No Art Today? exhibition seems to take its much-praised features to the extreme. As a side-effect, it raises the question of what we would learn about it if we reversed the principle and, aware of a certain hereticism, drove it out of its silent refuges as one of the reactions to the world in which it took place. And I don’t mean just the art world at all.

Playlist Q 05

The author of the Playlist Q for this issue is Dominik Gajarský: a visual artist and teacher at UMPRUM, who also leaves his mark in music as Slowmotiondancer. His latest album Empathy was released on Shanghai’s Genome 6.66Mbp label. Dominik Gajasky’s playlist features Tirzah, Klein, Jonny Greenwood, Mica Levi & Relax Kevin, Dean Blunt and Aase Nielsen & boli group among others.

Madness is the Guardian of the Night

M P   Rainer Maria Rilke and Alma Mahler – two different and quite complicated destinies connected with Central European culture and society at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Moreover, the title of the exhibition Madness is the Guardian of the Night refers directly to one of Rilke’s poems. In your exhibition, you dedicate two rooms to these generationally related figures. Why to them?

E B They both belong to our cultural history, which was not only Czech, but also German and, of course, Austrian. My paths and theirs have been somehow crossing for a long time. I was focusing on the French sculptor Camille Claudel and on Sidonie Nádherná a few years ago, and Rilke figured in the lives of both of these women. In 1902, he travelled to Paris to write a paper on Auguste Rodin, whose muse was Claudel. He also became Rodin’s secretary, and in this – to me somewhat strange – position he also visited Sidonie’s place in Vrchotovy Janovice. Sidonie charmed Rilke and became his muse. Rilke introduced me to Alma Mahler, who composed songs based on his poems, and Rilke also met her future husband, Franz Werfel, during the war while they were working in the Vienna War Archives to avoid the battlefield. Rilke and Alma lived at the same time, but otherwise they were completely different (except that they had a very lively love life). Rilke was gentle and intelligent, but also a fragile and unbalanced man who was supported and nurtured by women. Alma was the femme fatale of the time – beautiful, desirable, but at the same time talented, which made men both love and fear her.
For the character of Alma, who is surrounded by the key men of her life in the installation, I was inspired by a story about one of them – Oskar Kokoschka. He loved Alma very much. When she left him, he had a life–size doll made for him in her likeness; he took it with him everywhere before it was reportedly destroyed by fire. That’s why I only carved the levitating Alma from the back – she’s only half real. I’ve made her partners a bit like toys: they’re carved out of rigid polyurethane foam, a brittle material that slowly turns yellow and which, over time, transforms into something like a sea sponge.

M P   The allusion to the sea sponge – which, by the way, is a marine animal, not a plant – is actually quite strange. Polyurethane foam as an insulator is synthetic but it is produced on an organic basis. Why have you been choosing materials for years that are quite non-sculptural, and also made chemically?

E B Right at the beginning I worked with polystyrene; I started with it about thirty years ago. The reason was actually quite prosaic. I wanted to carve large sculptures, but, with a studio on the sixth floor, it was impossible to do so using conventional sculptural materials. And polystyrene is light! For years, I’ve carved some kind of fragile monuments out of it, combining it with other materials and colouring it. Moreover, I could manipulate my pieces myself and was not dependent on the help of others. The surface of polystyrene sculptures can be preserved well, so they will definitely outlive us – in this respect they are similarly durable to those made of traditional materials. The same goes for polyurethane foam sculptures, they are strong but lightweight. At the same time, with PU, I enjoy not only the changing colours, but also the specific texture. It feels nice when you touch it and is warm.

M P   A significant segment of your exhibition at the Colloredo-Mansfeld Palace consists of self-portraits painted on paper. They were created at a time when you were suffering from partial loss of sight in one eye. You nevertheless used your – fortunately temporary – disability in a creative way. How do you perceive this experience in retrospect?

E B My eye ruptured when I was working on a sculpture of Alma Mahler. I never thought I would ever do self-portraits in my life, and with such compulsion to boot. When I suddenly saw everything through a brown blur, and straight lines and partly even colours disappeared out of the blue, like anyone else probably would, I panicked that I would never see again; with my healthy eye I read diagnoses on the Internet that were not favourable at all. In this distressing situation, I made it my daily task to look in the mirror to capture my appearance, which was necessarily distorted and blurred due to the loss of sight, and also depending on my current feelings. A kind of a diary entry was created. But I also saw it partly as therapy. I went from initial frustrating states to joyful moments of discovering new forms of myself. When I started to see again, the interest in my own face left me.

M P   Recently, you caused surprise not only by starting to paint again after many years, although you established yourself on the art scene mainly as a sculptor. Your move from humans to nature is also unexpected. What fascinates you about underwater flora and fauna?

E B It was actually a reaction to the loss of sight I mentioned before. When I suddenly saw the world again in all its colourfulness, I felt the need to capture all its beauty, which is of a completely different nature to beauty as human society perceives it. From my studio in the apartment building, apart from concrete, roofs and the “Pakul” [Congress Centre], there is no nature to be seen at all. On the one hand, nothing distracts me from my work, but on the other, I miss nature more and more. That’s why I started to draw the world of underwater plants, rich in colours, and to develop their forms a bit in my imagination.
Subsequently, marine invertebrates – tiny, sometimes even microscopic animals – were added. So the Plants and Water Creatures cycles are a little bit real and a little bit imaginary. I drew them mainly in oil pastel on a black surface, so that the colours and the bizarre shapes of the plants would stand out. I was fascinated by nature’s “aesthetics” but increasingly wanted to get beneath the surface of the forms and understand the workings of nature from a scientific point of view as well. That’s why I joined Sir David Attenborough’s fan club. It’s true that his work is very much focused on popularising, but I think it’s important. I also started to visit various scientific websites that provided – and still do – important information on freshwater and marine invertebrates, such as radiata, siphonophorae, cephalopods, cnidaria… I was inspired by jellyfish, blue bottle jellyfish, hydras. In addition, there are other species of these remarkable creatures being discovered that do not yet have names. Others, however, are sadly disappearing irretrievably, as are many other, larger and more “visible” species.

M P   Your concern undoubtedly has ecological overtones as well.

Yes, I am concerned about the devastation of our planet and my “natural history” cycles also respond to it. When our family relocated to the Šluknov Hook region during the Covid pandemic, I watched from my windows as trucks took away felled trees every day. Where there used to be dense forests, there are now bare hillsides. The sad feeling of irreplaceable loss gave rise to the longest drawings that I now exhibit at the GHMP. Spring 2020 is more than seven metres long. The destruction of nature and climate change is a scourge that affects us all.

Frozen Time

Under the title No Art Today? Prague City Gallery is presenting new works in its collections, acquisitions purchased in 2017–2020, in two exhibitions: one in the Municipal Library and one in the House of Photography. The works on display at the Municipal Library represent a wide range of artistic tendencies from the 1960s to the present day. They were created using all media currently in use, so there are paintings, sculptures, videos, installations, drawings, graphics and combinations thereof by the artists. The collection presented at the House of Photography is more compact than that at the Municipal Library. It is a representative selection of works from the collections of Czechoslovak conceptual, performative and action art (or rather its documentation): most of the photographs, documents and other works date from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

view to the exhibition No Art Today? – New Acquisitions from the Collections of Prague City Gallery, Municipal Library, 2nd floor, 2021. Photo by Tomáš Souček

Jiří Příhoda
Event I

Only one artefact at the exhibition of new works in the GHMP collections required a wall between two rooms to be broken down; for the distinctive installed object, Event I, there is no other way. Its author, Jiří Příhoda, comments: “I think Event I is my first serious thing. It was created in 1992 on the occasion of Josef Šíma’s exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Šíma’s work was accompanied by a selection of other Czech artists, and I represented the youngest generation.”

At that time, the twenty-six-year-old Jiří Příhoda was beginning to work with objects in a series he called Construction. From the beginning, Event I was conceived as a passage between two halls; originally, a door was also envisaged, which could not be closed due to the presence of the intersecting object, but this idea was eventually abandoned. “You can only see the whole shape if you also go into the other hall. From there, Event I takes you back to the first room. It’s an endless loop, a frozen moment in time.” It is typical of and essential for Příhoda that not one part of the apparent circle is the same: the parameters are constantly changing. “Years later, I am now trying to fathom out why I glued the parts together with a distinctive red glue. I don’t have a clear answer, but the pictorial structure of the soft, sensitive part of Event I reminds me today of Václav Boštík’s works…”

When Jiří Příhoda was working on Event I, he was still a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in the studio of Stanislav Kolíbal. “I think you can see how interested I was in the new British school at that time: Anish Kapoor, Richard Deacon, Tony Cragg… Did the beginning of the nineties somehow imprint itself on Event I? Sure! Look at the monumentality. You need two halls in order to realise it, relatively high, the scale corresponding to a time when anything seemed possible. Even the prices of materials were not so high – and one could live more modestly for a while back then to save up for the realisation of a work. The later real capitalism had not yet arrived then.”

Daniel Pitín
Summer in the City

Daniel Pitín’s work at the current exhibition of new GHMP acquisitions marks the presence of one of the most highly regarded contemporary Czech artists: a painter who has naturally placed himself in an international context and found lasting acceptance there. Not only through exhibitions and critical acclaim: Pitín is the only artist from the Czech Republic to have a monograph published – now sold out – by the prestigious London publisher Hatje Cantz.

The path to Pitín’s Summer in the City painting seems to lead through his works that are inspired by cinematography: Hitchcock’s The Birds, Herz’s The Cremator, Ozon’s Swimming Pool and Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. “Taxi Driver is not a direct quote from the film, nor does it want to evoke the sentiment of a memory,” says Pitín. It provokes the viewer’s memory in a more open, loose way: the image sets visual moments from the film in a transformed environment. And so, if we can tap into the cultural memory of the film, we perceive, standing in front of the picture, that something from the film has passed into it more directly, and something has been recoded through the author’s subjective imagination.

Summer in the City is loosely related to this principle. However, we are no longer breaking into film, but into the environment in which the artist lives, including the housing estate architecture that evokes so much. “I wanted to find an edge between the ‘representation of reality‘ and a modelling of the situation: something I could call a child’s model, a paper toy, a film set.” Indeed, in Summer in the City, the tower block twists like a heat-dried leaf, a stage set, a cheap screen: the scene goes masterfully beyond the space of the “possible”. It is a representative work demonstrating Pitín’s long-standing ambition to evoke the viewer’s real experience through the image of the unreal.

“For me, film images and Summer in the City refer to one thing,” says Daniel Pitín. “To the relationship between reality (which is communicated to us through the image) and fiction, which the representation always has in it. The contemporary world, which is built on communication through images, is constantly on the border between this fiction and reality. Only, unlike my paintings, it obscures this difference. It is important to be constantly aware that each of the images we are presented with daily is constructed. This construction may have socio-economic foundations, it may be based on memory and instincts. Through all this, images can be manipulative without us realising it.”

Daniel Pitín is not aiming at a critique of specific social events: instead, he tries to analyse our perception and the very construction of images.

Michal Kindernay
Calendarium Coeli

What category does Michal Kindernay’s Calendarium Coeli, a large-scale work consisting of thousands of video images, fall into? Curator Jitka Hlaváčková uses the term video painting. The viewer does not need any definitions: rather a guide to decipher what they are actually observing in Kindernay’s flowing and pulsating colour shades of the day and night sky.

“I’ve been interested in atmospheric processes for a long time,” says Michal Kindernay. Alongside video, sketches, prints and paintings are also the output of his interest. “I work with the calendar year; I am interested in how to process long periods of time. We humans perceive processes very much in terms of seasons, but how to contain a year or even more in the work? That’s why I work with twelve audio channels or twelve prints, structuring my work by months. Calendarium Coeli was one of those works whose material was collected after 365 days: before that, during the year, I didn’t even know what images I would end up working with. You have to wait for the paintings: this process is a kind of slow art.”

“What would a picture of the weather look like over a whole year? A picture of the natural drama that affects us so much?” We can track the answer to this question along with the interviewer. In Kindernay’s images of the sky, it is easy to see how the day shortens and lengthens: the dark frame of the day shrinks and then bites back into daytime again. One column in the vast “video painting” is dedicated to a single day. Michal’s calendarium is a Czech one: “I would like to do the same thing in Iceland one day – the climate would make the whole picture look completely different…” The Calendarium Coeli is loosely linked to Michal’s residency at the Czech Hydrometeorological Institute in Komořany as part of the CirculUM / Art in the City programme; an output on the theme of “weather in art” is currently in progress.

Petr Štembera
Štěpování

Štembera: I grafted a twig from a bush onto my arm in the way this is usually done in orcharding.
Chalupecký: “What he does not say is that blood poisoning followed.”

In documenting Peter Štembera’s demanding and physically risky actions from the 1970s, the viewer almost feels guilty for not exposing himself to similarly liminal situations as Štembera, who unhesitatingly made his body the unmediated material of his art. The path to his body art led through a stay in Paris where Štembera spent ten days without food: his encounter with fasting showed him the enriching possibilities of extreme bodily experiences and inner states.

Štembera began to organise private performances in Prague, during which a small circle of invited friends watched his clandestine actions. Grafting (1975) was one of the confrontations between man and nature, similar to Sleeping in a Tree, which took place the same year after three nights without sleep. An ascetic surrender to thirst, actions with an uncertain course, influenced by the involvement of fire and acid… Štembera’s performances were a free gesture in an unfree world: their existentialist tone also transcends the situation of normalised deprivation of life with which they were associated at the time of their creation.

What is attractive about Štembera’s actions even after all these years? Surely it is the fact that viewers (even a contemporary one, exposed to the action on the spot), despite all their keen observation, fail to see the essential component of the work: the transformation that the performed action leaves inside the performer. The performance seems to move forward as well as backward from the time in which it takes place: into the past, when its impetus originated, and into the future, when the experience of the bodily action reverberates within the actor and inscribes itself into the open structure of life. In the end, Petr Štembera, like his close colleague Jan Mlčoch, survived all his demanding actions, which is probably good news for this kind of art and for the audience.

The enigmatic quality of his work remained because he never commented on it much. Even in his extensive testimony for the Memory of the Nation public archive, he focuses more on facts than on “illuminating” the liminal acts that viewers still have to confront for themselves.

“A dancer and an actor, even a musician or a virtuoso during a concert, also make use of their own body as a vehicle for art. But they take on a role, they enter into it, they transform their body into an instrument of that role. (…) This is not possible in performances. The performer has to remain in his individual existence, but he has to leave only what is general about it to make it also an example of the life situation of others, and it is this very presence of his own through which he makes an impact”.
Jindřich Chalupecký: The Story of Petr Štembera and Jan Mlčoch (from the book On the Borders of Art)

Stano Filko, Alex Mlynárčik
HAPPSOC I.

What can be considered a work of art? The twentieth century has shown us that the will and vision of the artist can be decisive in this matter. The gesture of the Slovak neo-avant-gardists, Stan Filko and Alex Mlynárčík, who in 1965 declared the entire city of Bratislava a work of art, still has charm, originality and powerful questions.

The joint project of Alex Mlynárčík and Stan Filko, HAPPSOC I, is now considered a landmark not only in Czechoslovak art, but also in the avant-gardes of the countries east of the Iron Curtain. At the GHMP exhibition, we can see a contemporary documentary among the acquisitions: Mlynárčik and Filko enumerate all the things that belong to their work of art, which was to last between 2–8 May 1965 (that is, in between two bank holidays): in the statistical summary there are women, men, dogs, houses; later on in the list are water pipes, stoves, fridges, typewriters, radios, cinemas, chimneys, wine bars, trolleybuses, hospitals, cemeteries… The Danube is not left off the list; Bratislava itself, within itself, is also listed here, somewhat unsystematically.

The distributed invitations and the manifesto show that Filko and Mlynárčik wished, above all, to stir the consciousness of those who let “their artefact” come close to themselves: to open up the perception of everyday reality and offer anyone and anything from everyday life through a new prism: Let’s view everything as part of art. Mlynárčik later wrote in a letter to Jindřich Chalupecký: “Art (…) has created and should create even today a kind of shimmering over the fire (our ancestors would say; I will say a shimmering of air over a tarmac road), something that always escapes us.” It is as if it is against this eternal elusiveness that the young Mlynárčik and Filko wanted to “enclose” the entire capital city in an artistic object – and thus make it easier for their audience to put on glasses that see everything blessed with a touch of creativity, imbued with value, internally charged with the possibility of interpretation, endowed with an aesthetic, communicative, perhaps even magical function.

How many waves of updating have similar events, happenings and performances, which emerged from the specifics of the sixties or seventies, already experienced? The exhibition of new acquisitions allows us to ask this question again today.

Playlist Q 03

Praha 3.10.2020 Krajské a senátní volby Piráti Foto MAFRA Tomáš Krist

Playlist for Qartal 03 by Anežka Hošková, the artists, music curator and Creepy Teepee co-organizer.

Tracklist:
Patriarchy – I Don’t Want To Die – Geneva Jacuzzi Remix
smrtdeath – everything
Amigo the Devil – Hell and You (Grotto Sessions)
Perturbator – Dethroned Under A Funeral Haze
Spell – Psychic Death
Cartel Madras, Tyris White and Jide – Dream Girl Concept
Ruin Of Romantics – Self Control (RAF cover)
Twin Temple – I Am a Witch
Unto Others – Give Me To The Night
Guest User feat. Edúv syn — Nemôžem dýchať / Přinášim déšť
Emma Ruth Rundle & Thou – The Valley
Sněť – Kůň Kadaver (Single edit)
Drab Majesty- Oxytocin
Sally Dige – It’s You I’m Thinking Of
King Dude – Death Won’t Take Me
Uada – Cult of a Dying Sun
Dingo – Children
Bezeha – Smyrna

Jiří Thýn: I Try to Work with Photography as if I Were Painting

Thanks to the COVID era, curators and artists have got used to communicating online. During the preparation of the exhibition, they saw each other mostly on a screen for many months. This interview, which was conducted via email and WhatsApp, was no exception. Yet, it did not lose its warmth and does not lack surprising answers: This is probably due to the fact that Jiří Thýn and Sandra Baborovská have known each other for twelve years. And the current exhibition directly refers to the one they prepared together ten years ago.

Jiří Thýn, spatial morphology No. A_B0A6752, (origin: H. Wichterlová, Portrait of Vincenc Makovský, 1928), 2021, black and white photo, 100×140 cm

Jiří Thýn, spatial morphology No. A_B0A6754 (origin: H. Wichterlová, Portrait of Vincenc Makovský, 1928), 2021, color photograph, 100×140 cm

Jiří Thýn, spatial morphology No. A_B0A6763, (origin: H. Wichterlová, Portrait of Vincenc Makovský, 1928), 2021, color photograph, 100×140 cm

Jiří Thýn, spatial morphology No. A_B0A6880, (origin: H. Wichterlová, Portrait of Vincenc Makovský, 1928), 2021, black and white photo, 100×140 cm

Sandra Baborovská (*1982) works as a curator at the Prague City Gallery where she has prepared over twenty exhibitions, mostly of contemporary art. Shortly after she joined the gallery, she created the long-term After the Velvet exhibition. She also collaborated both on the concept of the Start-up series for emerging artists and on recent exhibitions for the (no longer existing) exhibition space on the 2nd floor of the Old Town Hall (Archetypes, Space, Abstraction). The focus of her professional interest is sculpture of the 19th and 20th centuries and contemporary art. In 2020, she curated the Light Underground project within the Art for the City programme, the continuation of which she is currently preparing. She graduated in art history from Charles University and the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague.

Q Hi, Jirka! How are you spending your spring days?

J T We’re with the kids, “Secluded, Near Woods”. In the orchard of our friend, the sculptor Honza Haubelt, we have an old circus-type of caravan; we converted it into a bungalow years ago and we spend a lot of time here. A small artistic community of friends established itself here and they visit regularly.

Q As you mentioned Jan Haubelt, let me ask: is the Ládví group, which you founded in 2005 with Adéla Svobodová and Tomáš Severa, still active?

J T The Ládví group is no longer active. We closed it down when we failed to push through the creation of a contemporary art centre in the Ládví housing estate. Now we are planning something like a comeback in the autumn to support a small independent gallery space that the collective around Alternativa II has managed to open in the former space of a grocery store. But we see it as a one-off event.

Q What did you want to be as a child?

J T A lot of things. I think every age brings with it some ideas of what you want to be. I got to photography by accident at secondary school. I also seriously considered art history and theology. Circumstances led me to photography.

Q We met in 2009, during the preparation of the long-term After the Velvet exhibition at the Golden Ring House. You exhibited photograms there which you still do even today. What interests you about the return to this “Man Ray-esque” principle?

J T In the case of photograms, it’s immediacy. I started to work with photograms at a time when I was experiencing scepticism about the devaluation of photographic images. At that time, I had neither the desire nor very many reasons to take photographs. I solved this by starting to build my relationship with photography from the very beginning. I looked for new ways of expression and began to experiment with photograms. I came up with a technique of working with the exposure of photographic paper; it allows me to use light as a pencil. So, it’s not like what Man Ray used to do in his time, which was putting things on paper and then exposing them using light. Photography is essential for me also for other reasons. What is essential for me is its symbolic subtext. The relationship between light and time, which should be in harmony, is essential for the creation of a photographic image. In some of my works from that period, I use a black-and-white gradient which is created by the gradual, continuous exposure of the photographic paper. For me, this is a strongly symbolic moment, referring precisely to the passage of time. I try to make sure that each step in the painting has its own meaning and is not just reduced to an aesthetic function.

Q You used this principle of the black-andwhite gradient, black-and-white photography combined with a photogram, in 2011, in our exhibition Archetypes, Space, Abstraction on the 2nd floor of the Old Town Hall. What attracts you about the archetypes of works by 20th century sculptors and how does the aforementioned exhibition differ from the one we are organizing at the GHMP this year?

J T I can’t say that I am programmatically inspired by the work of sculptors. In the case of the Archetypes, Space, Abstraction exhibition, I was interested in space and abstraction in the context of the photographic medium. This is where the idea of working with Cubism and Otto Gutfreund came from. My interest in abstract art then inspired me to formulate a manifesto for “non-narrative” photography. An analytical approach to photography and the image in relation to the theme is still present in my work today, but in a much more relaxed form. I try to work with photography as if I were painting.

Jiří Thýn, spatial morphology No. A_B0A6822, (origin: H. Wichterlová, Portrait of Vincenc Makovský, 1928), 2021, black and white photo, 100×140 cm

Q Your current exhibition is called Silence, Torso, the Present. Can you talk us through this title and your thinking in preparing the exhibition?

J T In recent years, my work has focused on the analysis of the birth of a work of art. It’s rather a subjective self-questioning. But I am interested in consciousness as such and how it functions within the creative process. I first thematised this in my series Consciousness as a Basic Assumption. In Silence, Torso, the Present, I am looking for forms of new representation, albeit through traditional photographic processes. Unlike painting, for example, in photography the immediacy and possibility of using the energy of gesture is very limited. I try to work in such a way that it is present in the image.

Q What appeals to you most about Hana Wichterlová’s work and how did you first encounter it? Is there anything specific about “female” sculpture in your opinion? I’m thinking about the inspiration from the work of Alina Szapocznikow or the spatial sculpture of Katarzyna Kobro.

J T It’s based on a feeling. I subconsciously perceive certain aspects of their work that are close to me. But I can’t explain why that is. In the case of Kobro and Szapocznikow, it was through photographic reproductions in a professional publication. I only encountered Hana Wichterlová’s work at an exhibition devoted to Josef Sudek’s photographic reproductions. It was a powerful experience for me. At first I had no idea that the authors of these works were women. When I first encounter a work, I don’t consider it important who created it. I don’t see authorship as essential to the meaning of the work. In the larger context, however, I am obviously interested in the author. If I were to be more specific, what captivated me about Wichterlová’s sculptures is their internal integrity and how they are anchored and focused. From her work, which is not very extensive, I sense a kind of singular vision that is timeless in many ways.

Q In the future, you would like to contribute an artistic intervention to Hana Wichterlová’s studio; what would it look like? Would it be similar to the installation at the House of Photography? Can you please describe your plan? You are also interfering with the exhibition panels as an artist…

J T I think of the spatial intervention in the House of Photography more as being autonomous objects whose dimensions I adapted to the gallery space. Similarly to photograms or exhibited photographs, the installations are created by layering individual images taken from different angles. I transfer shapes based on Hanna Wichterlová’s sculptures onto plasterboard walls. I then cut them up and layer them on top of each other. This creates an autonomous sculpture, but it carries “Wichterlová’s DNA”, a kind of original information from the shapes of the sculptor’s works. Perhaps in the future, a spatial installation based on an analogous principle will be created in Hana Wichterlová’s studio.

Q Do you enjoy your work as a teacher? At what institutions have you taught? And how do you remember the photographer Pavel Štecha?

J T I only have positive memories of him. Pavel Štecha was an open type of person and a teacher, a kind of role model. During my studies, I started to move towards non-commissioned art quite early on. That was a bit outside the context of the studio at that time; it profiled itself more as being utilitarian. Personally, I see teaching primarily as a commitment and a great responsibility. Of course, today’s generation of students is different in many ways. After my experience of teaching at the Scholastika art college and at FAMU, where I headed the studio of post-conceptual photography for several years, I now run the studio of applied photography at the University of Ústí nad Labem together with Václav Kopecký. It’s a great new experience that allows us to pursue a new vision and lead students to greater flexibility and interdisciplinary collaboration. But that would be a topic for a separate conversation.

Jiří Thýn (* 1977) graduated from the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design (Studio of Photography, prof. Pavel Štecha) and also had an internship at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (Studio of Painting II / school of Vladimír Skrepl). He took part in several scholarship programmes abroad, for example, a residency in the Photography Studio at TAIK University in Helsinki, PROGR in Bern and FONCA in Mexico City. He often combines his photographic work with installations, paintings, texts and videos. He deals with the medium of photography itself and its overlaps, as well as with other themes, such as space
and composition, and combines traditional photographic techniques with a contemporary post-conceptual approach. He also thematises and explores various photographic techniques, such as photograms. He worked as the head of the Studio of Post-Conceptual Photography at FAMU in Prague and now teaches at Scholastika college and at the Faculty of Art and Design of Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem. He is represented by the hunt kastner gallery. He reached the finals of the Jindřich Chalupecký Award in 2011 and 2012.

The International Council of Museums ICOM as an Authority on Museum Ethics

The first issue of Qartal published an extensive text by Marek Pokorný in the Topic Q section entitled The Long Path to a Code of Ethics, and subtitled Do Czech Museums and Galleries Take Their Social Responsibility Seriously? After three reactions to the text from major Czech galleries in the second issue, we are now continuing the theme with another contribution. Martina Lehmannová, Executive Director of the Czech ICOM Committee, has fourteen years of experience working for ICOM, the International Council of Museums. It is from this perspective that she offers her views on the topic of the code of ethics and the future of museum institutions. The ICOM’s general conference will take place in Prague in 2022.

The Moral Imperative

Is there any choice left for museum workers today but to set an example? To uphold ethical and moral principles, to approach what we do with integrity and honour? It is not just a question of how many exhibitions we prepare, catalogues we write, works from our collections we restore, and whether we perform a thousand other activities. What matters is how we approach our work. The work of a museum worker is demanding, but also prestigious. Museums are one of the important media that shape our view of the past and present as well as our view of the future. Compared to newspapers, television and the Internet, museums have a great advantage in the three-dimensionality of the objects they collect, curate, interpret and present to the public. Museum workers have a huge influence on society. With this power comes responsibility. Due to various circumstances, especially poor funding, we question some actions and are forced to make various compromises. But moral integrity must be paramount for us.

The ICOM Code of Ethics

The discussion about the need to create a code of ethics for museum workers started in the 1970s, when the Czechoslovakian museologist, Jan Jelínek, was the head of the global organization ICOM. The Code of Ethics was adopted in 1986, as an official ICOM document. It is a reference tool for museums and their staff, setting out minimum standards of behaviour and professional conduct. By becoming a member of ICOM, each member commits to abide by this Code. The Code of Ethics has a well-developed structure and serves very well as a basic document. It is not, and never will be, a manual of conduct. It is not a binding document and its principles are not legally enforceable. It is up to us and our internal approach to the matter.

The Czech Situation

Museum and gallery staff in the Czech Republic perceive the debate on the ethics of museum work as important and the intensity of this debate has recently increased. In 2013, the Czech ICOM Committee was the first of the national committees to have the ICOM Code of Ethics for Natural History Museums translated into Czech. In 2014, it published a special edition of three codes of ethics: the ICOM Code of Ethics, the ICOM Code of Ethics for Natural History Museums and the Document on the Profession of Conservator-Restorer, which was drafted in 2011, on the initiative of Czech museum workers and conservator-restorers at the Association of Museums and Galleries of the Czech Republic. The publication of the three documents on ethics was accompanied by theoretical texts written by national and international authorities of the time: Martin Schärer, Chair of the ICOM ETHCOM, the Standing Committee on Museum Ethics, Eric Dorfman, Chair of the ICOM NATHIST, the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Natural History, and the author of this text, Martina Lehmannová, Chair of the Czech ICOM Committee, Ivo Štěpánek, Chair of the Commission of Conservator-Restorers of the Association of Museums and Galleries of the Czech Republic and former member of the Czech ICOM Committee, and Pavel Hlubuček, Director of the Department of Museums and Galleries of the Ministry of Culture. In November 2019, a museological seminar, Museum and Ethics, was organised by the Masaryk Museum in Hodonín in cooperation with the Association of Museums and Galleries of the Czech Republic. There is also a lively debate on the ethics of museum work among young museum professionals, especially on the Artalk.cz website, which reflects current global issues.

Responsibility

An important value that runs throughout the entire text of the ICOM Code of Ethics like a golden thread is responsibility. Few institutions in the world have to learn to cope with such a huge degree of responsibility as museums. Museums have a responsibility towards natural and cultural heritage, both tangible and intangible. Social responsibility towards visitors is of utmost importance, but also towards those who may not set foot in a museum in their lifetime. Museums document society as a whole, regardless of their actual clients, sponsors, and founders. This puts a lot of pressure on public institutions in particular, which are best placed to be aware of what the public interest is and to not cross the line into biased support of private or political interests. It is clearly unethical for a state-established institution to provide space for the presentation of an entity that may be popular but is also notorious because of its problematic relationship with the payment of taxes to public budgets. A supreme example of impropriety in this regard was the Louvre + Airbnb 2019 event whereby the Louvre provided the winner of the Airbnb lottery with the opportunity to spend a night in the Louvre, including dinner in front of the Mona Lisa and a bed under the Pyramid. Museums simply have to consider the sources of their money. In addition to companies that plunder public budgets, there may be companies that plunder natural heritage. From ICOM’s point of view, it is totally unacceptable for museums to be involved in any way in the trade of cultural and natural heritage. The staff of auction houses cannot become members of ICOM. It is absolutely unacceptable for museum staff to be involved in shaping the art market, whether legal or, heaven forbid, illegal. The fact that some museum staff can resort to selling off collections on the black market is an example of the total failure of the system. The issues of illegal trade in objects of cultural value, illegal archaeological excavations, and the devastation of objects of cultural value represent a significant part of the ICOM ETHCOM agenda.

Museums also have a responsibility towards the inside of their institutions – towards their staff, their colleagues. They have to provide them, as much as possible, with quality facilities for their work. On the other hand, the employees also owe a duty of loyalty to their institution and its management.

In an era of information wars Museums are also responsible for passing on information and knowledge about the collections in their care. They are responsible for the intellectual development of society, they contribute to knowledge and understanding. They are the most democratic educational institutions in the world – open to all without distinction and accessible on the basis of the will and free choice of each individual. They are platforms for critical debate and should be able to moderate it. The role of museums is to put things into context and explain. They must also be able to be critical of their own collections or representatives. What was considered exemplary in the past may no longer seem so today. But every object in the collection has been accepted into it not only to document but also to explain. We must be aware of this whenever we discuss problematic topics from our past, whether we are talking about Napoleon, World War II, slavery or colonialism. It is not possible for museums to turn a blind eye to certain topics. If museums understand the position that they have, they will become an indispensable part of the struggle in the information war that has crept into our society and infiltrated absolutely everything. Museums
can contribute to balancing the flood of misinformation, hoaxes and trolling on the Internet. They are best placed to do so; they can rely on the narrative value of collection objects, their factual authenticity, and they also have a long track record of communicating with the public, who regard them as trustworthy institutions, able to offer a critical perspective on our past and present. However, they can only achieve such a position if they maintain their moral and ethical integrity.

An Uncertain Season: Finding Stability by Looking Inward

The events of the last year, and the associated change in the pace of life, have made a large part of society look at things from a distance, in a new light. The curators of the GHMP have therefore decided to look into the gallery’s collections of contemporary Czech sculpture and rediscover works in which the themes of uncertainty or anxiety take on new meanings. The resulting selection shows how differently feelings of instability or threat can take on different forms and how – as the following artists’ statements illustrate – they can even be enriching.

Stanislav Kolíbal, Shaky Position, 1968, metal, 119×115×10 cm

Karel Malich, Flowing Energy in Audible Space, 1984, pastel on paper, 100.2×73.5 cm

Karel Nepraš, The Ambush of a Rabbit Hutch, 1968–70, combined technique, 180×248×70 cm

Matěj Smetana, Instructions 4: Sunset, 2009, video, length 7: 30 min

Karel Malich, At the Table, 1985, pastel on paper, 100.3×73.5 cm

Tereza Butková is a journalist. She has contributed to the cultural and critical supplement Salon of the Právo daily since 2018. She is one of the creators of the Vysílač podcast thatis part of the Žižkov Night festival in Prague. She also works for the server of the Czech public-service radio, iROZHLAS.cz.

Although life is gradually getting back to normal as summer approaches, plans for the future remain unclear, especially for culture. An Uncertain Season is thus not only a reflection of feelings shared across society, but also an illustration of the state of the Czech art scene. In a time that does not provide a solid base for the creation of new work, the way to find certainty seems to be to reflect on what has been done so far. Fortunately, gallery collections provide such inspiration. The exhibition at the Troja Château offers works by Karel Malich, Stanislav Kolíbal and Hana Wichterlová, and does not overlook artists of the younger generation, such as Matěj Smetana or Pavla Sceranková. The interpretation of the theme is as diverse as the representation of Czech artists is wide – while for some, a robust industrial building may simultaneously symbolise both threat and stability, others seek peace and grounding in natural phenomena and laws. Four of the artists talk in more detail about what the works on display mean to them and, ultimately, what role uncertainty plays in their work: Jitka Svobodová, Jaroslav Róna, Pavla Sceranková and Petr Lysáček.

The Elusiveness of Phenomena
Jitka Svobodová

Natural phenomena fascinate me. Fire is stunning, but artistically very complicated. I couldn’t find a form for it in drawing; it always remained conventional. An object made of wire, on the other hand, gave me an amazing opportunity: you walk around it and the broken wires draw, mutually interconnect, and give the fire its own dynamics. But I’m not looking for any symbol in it. I’m working with tangible matter and trying to bring it to a different level than the real, to the edge of visual and rethought abstraction. At the moment, I’m working with pastels and I’m totally immersed in the shades of colour. Wire, on the other hand, is a drawing. You can look for a shape and dynamics with it; it won’t allow you anything else. These techniques are absolutely different, but working with one of them gives me a break from the other one. What captivates me about natural phenomena is their ephemerality, their elusiveness. I used to be very fond of smoke. I devoted myself to it for a long time, but I didn’t really get anywhere with drawing it. If I were to make smoke or sunlight even more abstract, they would be unrecognisable. I’m constantly focused on a phenomenon being a phenomenon, but in a new light.
I feel challenged to depict basic natural elements such as fire and water. Even though I know it’s very difficult. But each thing opens up a bit of the future, of course. There’s a lesson in it, an experience. You don’t have to consciously apply it, and yet the work slowly goes somewhere. When I started studying restoration, I didn’t have time for anything else and thought I was done with making art. But everything came back. In the evenings, I had the desire to create, and started with small records of everyday things. This is how, eventually, my drawings came about. They emerged automatically. An artist needs to have an energy inside that forces them to work. But they should also be insecure. Making art means change; you can’t just produce art mechanically. But a certain uncertainty makes you think about things all the time.

Deterrent Fortification
Jaroslav Róna

The Church is a sculpture that looks somewhat absurd, like a fantasy building, but its shape is based on history. Many monasteries and churches functioned simultaneously as fortresses or fortified residences, protecting the inhabitants and monks against invaders, especially in the period after the fall of the Roman Empire. The combination of spiritual ministry and military deterrence appeals to me. There is a water tank on the roof and the perimeter of the church is flanked by narrow horizontal embrasures. The basic shape of the building I completed is based on a found object that came to me in a complicated way and originally served as an element in the production of light aircraft.
Cities, especially their industrial districts, have always been a source of danger and a target for enemy attacks. I grew up relatively close to the end of the World War II, and later, during the Cold War, I strongly felt the threat of bombs and missiles. Perhaps that’s why I use fortresses, bomb depots, missiles and
the like as subjects for my sculptures. My artistic intuition led me to return to these war motifs. I also visit fortresses and fortress towns frequently when travelling – for example Masada and Akkon in Israel, Valletta in Malta, Rhodes in Greece and Syracuse in Sicily.
On the one hand, artistic work is a way of personal realisation that brings joy, on the other, it represents a response to the everchanging reality in which the artist lives. The impulse to create art can thus be both the joy of life and a sense of threat and instability. But uncertainty can never be contained. Of course, I do not live paralysed by fear of World War III, but I do not underestimate the current threats, for example, from Russia. I see a symbol of stability in a militarily strong grouping of democratic states that can deter potential aggressors. However, I think that the period in which I spent most of my life was
much more uncertain than the present time.

Colliding without Touching
Pavla Sceranková

Up! originated as a reflection on my experience of the final round of the Jindřich Chalupecký Award. The competition can be seen as an opportunity to climb up. But in itself, it doesn’t take you anywhere, it just lets you carry on. When I completed Up!, I was relieved. I think that’s how we need to relate to a competition – not as something that changes our lives, but as a journey that affects us.
I use the body as a source of energy in my work. I want things to be in motion, to be alive. The thing – work of art takes place in the video space. Sometimes, I’m the source of energy because it can’t be done in any other way. Other times, it’s the viewer, a person passing by. Their touch brings the thing to life. The person and the thing encounter each other. And art is always built on encounters – you either encounter the work or it passes you by. It’s a normal process. In my dissertation, I explored the ways in which images are constructed in our minds, and my aim was to refute again the entrenched understanding of visual perception as a photographic snapshot.
In my thesis, I tried to study and experience step by step the processes in our head, to become aware of the spatio-temporal reality of perception. And finally, to clarify for myself the role of a sculpture as a spatio-temporal event.
In my opinion, physics and the universe, which I often work with, are not at all as exact as we imagine. On the contrary, they have a magic that we encounter in everyday life. For example, the number of neural connections is comparable only to numbers in the universe, such as the number of stars in our galaxy. Gradually, I realised that the words that describe cosmic phenomena perfectly describe our earthly situations. When two galaxies collide, no physical bodies ever meet, only the constellation changes. And, for example, a family Sunday lunch is also a no-touch collision. Once I materialise the immense, disconcerting things in this way and place them in front of me, they cease to paralyse me. All of my works are actually the result of a personal dramatic event, the energy of which I reflect in my artistic work, and by doing so, I gain distance and some control.

Letting the Thoughts Flow
Petr Lysáček

A Crossroads captures a certain moment of uncertainty, of having to make a decision. A pragmatic person will think that the situation of the diverging rails cannot be resolved, while the person sitting in the seat has no problem with it. But it’s not just artists who are able to step outside the rails, the ability to maintain this type of thinking is common to us all. It’s not a difficult thing to do. One can practice it in any area – in art, mathematics, research, and even just in normal walking around town. It is a world that is emotionally fulfilling, that is not afraid to realise itself and that feels completely normal. Mostly, though, it’s about a certain attitude of openness and creativity. As most people mature, this relaxed, inventive thinking fades away and is replaced by a practical, life-oriented mindset. Letting your thoughts flow freely is a wonderful feeling. It maintains personal freedom and gives one the strength not to succumb to the normative dictates of the outside world. External purposefulness is overwhelming. That is why I often put mystification into my works, which throws people off the track of the established model. Even A Crossroads has a certain imaginative part to it. Irony and absurdity are important, their radicality is purifying.
When we have to enter an uncertain situation, it is always intimidating. We anticipate risks without trying things out, and so we back off. But uncertainty provides an opportunity to define the unknown. Working with uncertainty is very satisfying; filling the void is actually a great freedom. No one tells me what anything should look like; I even have the opportunity to define it. That’s absolutely great! Art is an exciting process, I enjoy never knowing what will come out of it. Because the thrill of creation fades with certainty. I put the unknown in front of me, surround myself with it, and walk around before I set it in motion to achieve a solution. And that’s that. The uncertain season really lasts for the whole of life.

Playlist Q 02

Playlist for Q 02 by Anymade Studio (Petr Cabalka & Filip Nerad).

Tracklist:

Frits Wentink & Erik Madigan Heck “The Half Collected Soul”
Dijit “We’re The Death (feat. Ali Talibab & SD)”
Sockethead “Devotion”
Smerz “The Favourite”
Smerz “I Don’t Talk About That Much”
Haroon Mirza & Jack Jelfs “Datura On A Crescent Monn (feat. Gaika)”
Upsammy “Worm”
Vilod “Mosaic”
Beatrice Dillon & Kuljit Bhamra “Square Fifths”
тпсб “Don’t Call Me I’ll Call You”
Amandra “Kapsalon”
Lord Of The Isles “Skylark (Linkwood Remix)”
Roman Flügel “All The Right Noises”
Dorisburg “Votiv”
Andras “River Red (Madalyn Merkey Remix)”
Bell Towers “Privacy (Dj Python Remix)”
Ange Halliwell & Petra Hermanová “Summer Interlude”
Ville Valoton “En Kuollukaa Nuorena”
Shit & Shine “57youyoi–Drinkin”
Steve Pepe “Vivere In Diagonale”
33emybw “Seeds Of The Future”
Laksa “Ardhall”
Hoshina Anniversary “Michinoku”
Houschyar “Melanzani”
Zamia Lehmanni “Invocation To Secular Heresies”

Bio Troja and Encountering a Fox

The question has come up again and again since last March: are culture and contemporary art indispensable in our lives and in our society? Maybe it won’t hurt us to do without them? Or in other words: in what form will culture change during a (hopefully temporary) deprivation of social contact?

Fooling around Troja Château: Ondřej Smeykal, Petr Nikl, 2020

Miloš Vojtěchovský works as a curator, art historian, audiovisual artist, critic, teacher and publisher in the area of electronic media and experimental music. He has founded and led a number of platforms that expanded the possibilities in the area of new media. He used to lead the Hermit Foundation and its residential stays in the Plasy monastery, he worked in the Jelení Gallery and in the Školská 28 Gallery. He participated in the foundation of the Internet audio archive Sounds of Prague. He established the FAMU’s CAS (Centre for Audiovisual Studies) and was at the origin of The Institute of Intermedia (IIM) Prague, a platform of the Czech Technical University and the Academy of Fine Arts. He is one of the initiators of the Frontiers of Solitude concept and program. He participates in the leadership of the aforementioned project Bio Troja: A Place for Composting Culture.

Have culture and art really become homeless because their establishments remain closed and culture and art have moved from protected and secure institutions such as museums, galleries, theatres, concert halls, cinemas, libraries and churches to privacy, electronic networks and the pages of books?

Cultural habits and pleasures we associate with the consumption of cultural goods have been included in the list of hygienically risky activities. Mass watching of pictures, films, music and theatre potentially threatens the survival of at least part of the community. Unlike shopping in supermarkets and other shops, going to a gallery or theatre is not “vitally important”. Pandemics put culture and art under threat, and this logically evokes the uncomfortable feeling that everything we have been accustomed to so far, what we “liked”, what we “are entitled to” suddenly turns out to be temporary, like ephemeral illusions of cultural satiety and prosperity. We can hardly compensate for the hibernation of contact cultural institutions by watching films on Netflix all day, listening to virtual music via Spotify, attending online concerts via Zoom or chatting with artists via Facebook. Could the tragic encounter with an unpredictable mutating virus possibly become an opportunity to revise more passive, comfortable, and consumer ideas about what art is? Will the pandemic bring efforts to interconnect culture more firmly to our lives to make it more sustainable and less fragile? Not over-dependent on technologies, money supply and institutional support?

The Wilderness in the Cities

During 2020, hundreds of photographs and videos of wild animals began to appear in the media. They were wandering the suddenly deserted streets of European, American and Asian cities. Whereas, in the pre-corona period, either machines or humans used to dominate physically, visually and acoustically on a 24/7 basis, along with the animals, an image of the world of which we have only been a small part for millennia appeared on the horizon. A world that we assumed flickered mainly on computer monitors or in zoological gardens or far away in the nature reserves of exotic colonised countries. This relentless expulsion, the eradication of nature from the city (and the city is, metaphorically speaking, today, the dominant factor of most of the planet’s surface) has been pointed out for more than a century by urbanists, environmentalists, philosophers, natural scientists and sociologists. And sometimes also environmental activists and artists.

Alan Sonfist’s visionary Time Landscape project originated in 1968, as popular institutional criticism of the public monument genre. Sonfist managed to complete the project only ten years later: on a small plot of land he was provided with on the corner of Manhattan’s LaGuardia Place and Houston Street, he planted the original flora and trees that grew there before the European colonisation of the continent. The fenced-off green monument is still growing today, even though this area represents vast financial capital. While most monuments in the form of statues in cities are a symbolic celebration of often rather dark historical personalities, Time Landscape in Midtown Manhattan is an oasis of a microbotanical garden and refers to a time when it was still a space of animals, plants, mushrooms and people, which was liberated by Europeans in favour of stone, pipes, concrete and cars.

In 1972, Gordon Matta-Clark decided to buy small parcels of land in the slum area of Queens from the city and from private individuals. It was an area that was of no use for investors and therefore uninteresting. Prices ranged from USD 25 to USD 50. These were symbolic interventions into a class-ridden empire, we follow a lonely beast watched by the portraits of dozens of representatives of the colonial superpower. It may occur to viewers that for centuries in Britain, a source of joy for those of the social status of most of those portrayed has been the ritual and cruel hunting of foxes.

Bio in Troja

The Troja Chateau complex offers an almost ideal context for the establishment of a new project focused on the overlap, parallels and interconnection between contemporary art and ecology. The landscape context is formed by the neighbouring Zoological and Botanical Gardens, as well as the “Wild Vltava” natural reserve. The Troja Basin is one of the largest and most valuable natural areas in the capital. And it is on the premises of the Troja Chateau that we have decided to implement a new GHMP project called Bio Troja.

It offers the possibility of an organizational and social platform for cooperation with other organizations and individuals, with artists, experts in the fields of ecology, natural sciences and other naturally related disciplines, as well as with non-experts. In 2021, the programme for the multifunctional space will be launched: the relatively modest space combines the functions of an information centre, gallery, study room, lecture hall and laboratory. The centre provides a setting for discussions of theoretical as well as practical visions and solutions that resonate in broader social and cultural contexts. Bio Troja offers an opportunity to reflect on how contemporary art can contribute to solutions for the current environmental crisis.

Bio Troja: A course for beginning beekeepers, Troja Château Gardens

Nature’s Lament and the Constitution of the Earth

In his book The Cry of Nature – Art and the Making of Animal Rights, art historian Stephen F. Eisenman summarises dozens of examples of visual artists who, since the beginning of modernity, have pointed to the non-obviousness, unsustainability and moral dubiousness of “humanism”. Humanism has become a symptom of the human sense of superiority over others, an expression of domination not only over non-European nations but also over animal and, more generally, natural entities which we became used to calling, in a Cartesian manner, things and objects. It is also worth recalling that we do not hear similar ideas only from the left or activist wing as an attack on the noble traditions of capitalism, liberalism, the free market and other “democratic” values. One of the more serious voices of contemporary Czech philosophy, Josef Šmajs, the author of the paper A Constitution for the Earth, describes our situation as probably the last chance to revise the anti-nature, predatory ideologies of gross domestic product, growth, colonisation and looting of the environment. In his book Pes je zakopán v ontologii (The Dog is Buried in Ontology, Coprint, 2020), Professor Šmajs writes: “The cardinal issue is that man as a species is homogeneous only within the natural order. Therein lies the danger and hope: culture is an artificial structure built from matter and energy alienated from the Earth, but it is foreign to man and the biosphere. The current cultural order could get closer to nature and, with an informed human will, could be transformed biophilically. But time is fighting against us. We have almost conquered and occupied the planet.”

Maybe the unpleasant, chilling feeling caused by the threat to our visions of a peaceful, bucolic future will finally force us to react. We may have to push through changes that are far from being located only in personal responsibility, temperance, composting and disciplined sorting of household waste. We will have to arrive at a painful transformation of the overall set-up of society and the community, both locally and globally. Changes must start with thinking about education, production, mobility, consumption, ideology, economics and religion. Of course, they also concern culture, art and entertainment. We will probably not bestir ourselves to such a fundamental change voluntarily but will be – as they say – “forced to it by circumstances”.

A celebrity of the western art world, the director of the Serpentine Gallery in London and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, issued a public statement last February saying that ecology will now play a central role in his curatorial programme and that he was radically reducing his favourite activity, flying around the world. The federal cultural foundation, Kulturstiftung des Bundes, supports the new pilot project Klimabilanzen in Kulturinstitutionen: Auf dem Weg zur Klimaneutralität im Kulturbereich thanks to which German museums, galleries, theatres, concert halls and monuments are committed to making their carbon footprint and waste management more important in their production than before. These include for example Deutsches Nationaltheatre Weimar, Gedenkstätte Sachsenhausen, Kunsthalle Rostock and Zentrum für Kunst und Medien in Karlsruhe. In the last of the above institutions, it is clear that the carbon footprint of ZKM must be gigantic and that, even though it is a museum opened only in 1995, it is a relic from a bygone era.

In the last ten years, a number of “environmentally conscious” exhibitions and art projects emerged as a strategic response to grant criteria. However, it is probable that the reality is already slowly diverging from such an approach. Part of the Bio Troja project is a series of discussions on these somewhat unpopular issues in which other organisations from Prague and abroad will participate.

The Policy of a Return to Nature

Sometimes it seems that the chances for a sustainable future are really being worked on. On 15 October 2020, the Senate of the Czech Republic approved a resolution in support of the EU strategy in the field of biological diversity until 2030, the so-called Bringing Nature Back into our Lives. The European Commission’s strategy paper means a real elaboration of the European Green Deal. Among its basic objectives are:

legally protect at least 30% of the EU’s land area and 30% of its sea area

strictly protect at least 30% of the EU’s protected areas

reverse the decline in pollinators

reduce the risk and use of chemical pesticides by 50% manage at least 25% of agricultural land in the EU

restore at least 25,000 km of free-flowing rivers

maintain fishery resources and protect marine ecosystems